Teaching Strategies
Accountable Talk
In Othello and There, There, mature subject themes are unavoidable in the text. Students may not know how to have discussions around topics such as domestic violence, drug use, and intramural community violence. Many teachers assume that because many students are exposed to terrible social issues, they will have the language to describe their feelings and hold space for dialogue among other learners in the classroom environment. But these language skills need to be nurtured. Accountable talk starts with the teacher first. Accountable talk creates the space where students and teachers are held responsible to each other as mutual learners in a classroom environment that supports their growth. Accountable talk tolerates disorientation and navigation but does not tolerate ignorance. The best way to create accountable talk is to co-create classroom principles with your students as well as consequences for not aligning with classroom principles. As I teach in a high school classroom setting, consequences are not supposed to be especially punitive but a measure of self-awareness and acknowledgement of breaking the classroom rules is important for creating a classroom culture. While accountable talk often sounds like “social emotional jargon”, it is critical for student success to understand the relationship between what is said in the classroom is a reflection of themselves. It is also important to uphold the principle of accountable talk when conferencing with students interpersonally. The relationship between public and private speak are parallel and mutually inclusive as far as the teaching strategy of accountable talk is concerned.
Activating Prior Knowledge
Activating prior knowledge is going to be essential to ensuring success for reaching content objectives for this unit. One of the best ways to activate prior knowledge for my students is by doing an anticipation guide of dogmatic statements and having students pick if they agree with the statement or not and then follow through with a rationale why. The dogmatic statements are often aligned with major themes present in the novel (or play). After they complete their anticipation guide, students are directed to go to the left or to the right side of the classroom based on the response to the question. Students are then given the opportunity to explain their stance to other students and other students are allowed to respond. This gives students two different modalities to express their learning while allowing them to receive ideas in a safe learning environment. Due to the politically charged nature of the reading, lessons are often filled with parallel examples of current events or past historical events in Africana social movements to help activate prior knowledge. Activating prior knowledge happens every class but it happens at a higher intensity during the beginning of an instructional unit.
Integration of Content Areas
During the play and the novel, students will be engaging in primary and secondary sources in order to help support their understanding of the literature presented. During the beginning of each of the instructional units, students will be challenged to understand the early history of Venice and of Oakland, California. Students will be charged to think like a historian in order to make sound inferences about the sources that they will be responsible for understanding. Furthermore, by engaging with the art pieces presented as primary sources, they will be able to understand the techniques that the artist used in order to create theme and narrative in an art piece. Through the three-headed snake of English, Art and History, students will be able to have quality instruction in the humanities that they may have not had before.
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