Teaching Strategies
Text Talk
Students will take leadership in discussing the texts for the unit around the essential questions. Text talk can be difficult to facilitate if not structured (or scaffolded) appropriately. Text rendering and annotation may facilitate meaningful text talk as students will have already surveyed the text and may have done the additional work to do the necessary “elbow grease” to fill in the gaps of understanding. As always, the teacher is the model for appropriate text talk and helps set the tone for effective discussion. If after modeling, text rendering, and pre-writing the instructor recognizes ineffective, it would be suggested that the instructor sets community guidelines for classroom engagement.
Developing Background Knowledge and Cultural Awareness
The presented readings are not exhaustive of the StudySync curriculum, they are just targeted readings that center around Black literacy and/or social constructions of intelligence. Students should get a timeline of African Enslavement in the Americas, with special attention to the Antebellum Era and Reconstruction. Students may benefit from primary source documents of enslaved African-Americans through means of diary entries and narratives. Students should also take responsibility of developing background knowledge through means of personal researching and web-questing.
Peer Review and Reflect
Although there are overlapping similarities between Text Talk and Peer Review, there are evident differences between whole class and small group instruction. Peer review will be necessary when students are engaging in close reading activities or when they are proof-reading each other’s’ work. While “pair and share” and “check for understanding” go hand in hand as summative assessment in many classrooms, in order to have a classroom culture where students are committed to each other’s’ literacy goals, one goal that I have for this unit is to increase students’ sense of mutual accountability. In terms of the literacy lens, peer review and reflect is aligned with the social and human lens, which understands that learning is a social event. For peer review, students are to support each other’s strengths and to help strengthen each other’s weaknesses. In order to support this culture, an instructor may choose to do a direct lesson on group work expectations or they may recognize pre-existing groups that work together well and have them reflect on how they share power within their group.
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