Teaching Strategies
Visual Analysis
Visual analysis is a strategy of observation and interaction with a map or image that promotes inquiry and thought. Visuals are highly effective in the MLL classroom, as they are communicative and evocative; more importantly, they offer concrete spaces on which to affix language. Students with limited English proficiency can experience success in making observations by simply describing color, symbols, titles, and dates. These observations offer myriad opportunities on which to build more complex language and ideas that simultaneously lead to grade-level understanding as their English language development advances at an appropriate pace.
Observing a map and its requisite parts is a key piece of map analysis and evidence-gathering to form claims. Students in this unit will use evidence from maps to form claims about the map's purpose in the context of historical events. Therefore, the strategy of visual analysis as a first step in map analysis will incrementally scaffold lower-stakes language and content knowledge to higher-order critical thinking and language use.
Map Archives as Text Sets
Like any complex text, a map user must engage with a map multiple times to identify and interpret its features to ultimately reveal its meaning and purpose. To explicitly teach students map literacy skills and provide them with multiple opportunities to observe, inquire, and analyze, I will use a map archive that exposes students to different types of maps that require close analysis. A map archive is simply a collection of maps that have a unifying theme or relationship that is revealed by careful analysis and comparison.
By providing students with multiple maps in a map archive, they will have the opportunity to return to previously studied and annotated maps to make rich comparisons of the maps over time. A map archive is especially useful when analyzing historical maps because it provides a visual historiography with geographic reference points that can help students understand long-term social, political, and economic changes.
Collaborative Writing
Collaborative writing is a highly-scaffolded approach to teaching writing that ensures students have multiple experiences to engage with writing at varying levels of cognitive demand. The first scaffold in a collaborative writing sequence begins when the teacher models the writing process in front of the class. For example, if students must write an evidence-based claim supported by reasoning, it is essential to model how to gather evidence from observations, form a claim, and show reasoning connecting the evidence to the claim. This provides students with an example of the metacognitive thinking, application, and revision skills that occur during the writing process.
In the next part of the collaborative writing sequence, students will work collaboratively to produce a writing product that is similar to the class example. Students will work together to negotiate meaning, apply appropriate vocabulary and grammar, and revise sentences, in much the same manner that the teacher modeled for the class. In the final step of this strategy, students will produce writing independently. They will have two experiences with the type of writing they are expected to produce, as well as two examples that they can use to format their independent writing. This strategy is especially effective with newcomer MLLs, who are emerging writers in English, and need multiple interactions with grammar and writing forms before they are able to produce written texts that meet the requirements of the writing prompt.
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