As students enter the classroom on Day Three, they would find a discussion prompt on the whiteboard:
What were you thinking yesterday while we read? Be honest and share it with your neighbor.
After five minutes, I would open the floor so students could share their discussion. In my classroom, I would like to encourage students to be honest and forthright about their thoughts and develop metacognitive strategies that, in the end, will tell them much about their learning styles, interests, and thought processes. Therefore, I think this discussion question would be a good one. I would allow for about 10 minutes of group talk.
I suspect we would hear answers such as:
I was bored and thinking about the party this weekend.
I was thinking that these characters are flat (or stupid, in for a lot of trouble soon, sad, etc.)
I was wondering what was going to happen next and feeling bad for the characters.
I could not follow what was happening and ended up zoning out.
I thought Steinbeck did a good job integrating character description with the story.
I could see certain characters, but not others.
After the discussion, in which we could offer one another advice or try to address any challenges, we would again read for about fifteen minutes and try to come up with questions. I’ll live blog my questions after I finish reading like I did last time.
Finally, they would have homework, which would include reading to a certain page in the book on their own and generating two questions to discuss the next day.
We just learned about this site in a MOOC that I am taking on the Foundations of Teaching. It’s very interesting and I hope others will find it interesting as well.
Again, this will be a short post, but I do hope that it will inform others of my thoughts on the subject of teaching the novel and teaching / modeling reading habits and skills. In the end, the objective of the lesson is to reinvigorate the students’ natural curiosity about the written word, as well as the links between the written word and reality. I hope to show that fiction has purpose, but that purpose should be embedded in a moving experience. I don’t know yet if I will get there, but I am on my way. I hope you’ll join me.
The Gallery Walk (Ten Minutes)
I love the technique called the Gallery Walk. I believe it gives the students the chance to get out of their seats, speak with their peers, and evaluate something that is creative. In this case, the students will do a gallery walk through the results of the debrief sessions from their class and the others I would be teaching. I would have the easel papers posted throughout the room and ask them to take a tour in groups through the gallery (the classroom). I would had one person in the group Post-It® flags (hopefully I would be able to get each class its own color) and ask them to put a flag on whatever item most caught their attention.
This exercise would help me and others to understand the mindset of the students as we start to read the novel.
Here’s an example of an easel paper that might have resulted from the debrief:
Easel Paper Sample
Reading
We would read for fifteen minutes. There is a comprehensive introduction in my copy of the book, but I would skip it for now. I want the students to connect what they know with what they will learn. Honestly, I often skip introductions like this because I feel that they ruin the book. Therefore, let’s begin.
[liveblog]
Discussion
I’d like to end the class with at least ten minutes of discussion. As I write this, I have not read for fifteen minutes yet. In my next post, I will let you know the questions that came to mind as I read for fifteen minutes.
This is going to be a quick post. There has been a lot going on at work and home, but I wanted to post something to keep this idea going.
Here’s an outline of what I would do on day one of teaching the novel.
Debrief
I would only be able to do this exercise if I was sure that their history / social studies teacher had already reviewed the material pertaining to life in the German-occupied territories during World War II. Assuming I verified that, then, I would start the session with the bell ringer and then do a debrief. I would ask for any volunteers that wanted to share their writing with the rest of the class and write notes on an easel pad. I would do this for each class I had that day, then post the easel paper on the wall or a bulletin board, so that everyone could see what the classes came up with.
Analysis and Assumptions
Then, I would show them the novel’s cover. I’d ask them to consider what the cover tells them about the story. I would ask them to write their observations as a group on one sheet of paper and collect those sheets. From the results, I would like to create a Wordle I could share with them. Why? Why not?
Final Question of the Class: What Draws Us to Certain Books?
I’d ask the question, “What draws us to certain books?” and after the students answer, I would give my responses, particularly about why I chose this book to read. By that time, I think class would be over.
Teachers: Have you ever tried to teach a novel without reading it first? Well, I’m going to try to, but since I’m not teaching at the moment, I will have to pretend. Visualization exercises are always good for lesson planning, right?
Cover via Amazon
The Novel
The novel I have chosen is The Moon is Down by John Steinbeck. I heard about this novel as I was listening to the audio version of the biography of Winston Churchill called The Last Lion (Manchester & Reid, 2012). Apparently, Churchill was quite pleased with the novel and found it inspirational. I have this quote that is similar to what Manchester and Reid said about the book in their work.
While some American critics faulted the novel for its sympathetic portrayals of Nazi soldiers, the book was widely popular in Europe. The Moon is Down was reprinted in French and distributed by the resistance fighters of the Maquis. These were books printed under the very noses of the Gestapo. It was also banned in Italy, where the penalty for reading the book was death.
Yet its message resonated. The plot device of the Mayor’s request for explosives to be air dropped so that the townsfolk can wreck the mine and the railroad — a sabotage campaign that he understands in advance will lead to his death — was noticed by Winston Churchill himself. After reading The Moon Is Down, Churchill ordered the Special Operations Executive to explore this idea and it became the basis of Operation Braddock, a British sabotage and propaganda campaign. Not bad for a mere work of fiction, turned out by a man who had never lived through the events he described (Dutchman6, 2009).
Because it inspired Churchill, I think this novel is a great complement to any studies of World War II in history classes. I would (if I were teaching) coordinate the teaching of the novel with the time in which the students are studying WWII. I would not read it beforehand, however. I’ve been chomping at the bit, as they say, since I first got the book, but wanted to read it as I write these posts so that my lesson is more authentic.
Why Do This?
I believe that a big part of teaching is modeling the behavior and practices that we think will best serve our students as they embark on adult life. Therefore, I would like to model what I do when I read a novel for the first time. For instance, I’d like to be able to authentically state why I think this novel is going to be good (I almost wrote “killer”) and what prompted me to order it. Then, I would like to explore this novel with the class without the benefit of reading it first, so we can discover its beauty together. I think the conversations that come out of that reading would be terrific. Sure, I would make mistakes, make bad predictions, all that kind of stuff. But isn’t that all part of reading and learning to read well?
So, in the next post, I will put a lesson plan into place that introduces the novel and its context. I hope you enjoy these posts as much as I think I will enjoy writing them.
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. – Chinese Proverb
The other day, during an internal training session, the question arose, “How can we ensure that students are learning all they are supposed to know when there is not enough time in the school year to teach them everything?” Then, someone asked, “Should school be year-round?” My response to that is one you might hear from many teachers: “No.” In this post, I will share why I think that it is not necessary to lengthen the school year.
In high school, we had the mandatory Social Studies classes that included American and World history. Invariably, we would never cover more than three-quarters of the content. Somehow, our country’s history ended with World War I or II. I do not recall learning about the Korean conflict, Vietnam, the 60s, etc. World history would end way before that. We spent so much time on Egypt, Mesopotamia, etc., that it was hard for the teacher to get to contemporary world history. We memorized dates, facts, and figures for a test and then we forgot them. We did not talk about how to “do history.”
What I mean is that we never learned how to view events through a historian’s lens. How do historians find all this information? How do they uncover the secrets people didn’t set out to keep, but buried anyway? How do anthropologists, sociologists, and historians work together to interpret their findings? How do they learn how to fish?
Yes, fish. If I were a history teacher (which had been my dream from the age of 14 till the age of 21), I think I would start with the historian’s perspective. I would make learning the content the context in which the students learned those skills. I would flip the classroom, something that is easy to do today, to ask students to learn content at home and interrogate the content in class. I would spend more time teaching kids how to find information than lecturing kids about information. I would spend more time teaching kids how to construct knowledge independently and in groups.
If the focus is off of content coverage and onto skill development, it is my opinion that the school year can stay the length it is. Perhaps more kids would become interested in history with this method and study history on their own. Who knows?
The same is true with English, which is the subject in which I am certified. Instead of spending weeks on a novel, perhaps it is better to start by examining a writer’s process and a critic’s process. How do critics arrive at their conclusion about the novel’s content, theme, structure, character development, etc.? What are the criteria by which they judge a written work? Put that within the context of a great piece of literature. Let the students choose from a short list of novels and teach them to interrogate the text. Truly, what are they going to remember more: the content of the novel or the skills they practiced to understand the work, the author’s intent, and the theme? Why passively read the novel aloud when you could spend class time learning those skills in context? Which will get them further in life: the content or the skills? I say the skills. And if we focus on the skills, wrap them in content, and work on those in class, every day, I believe we do not have to lengthen the school year.
Waiting for class to begin, Lucas tried putting another lure on based on what Douglas taught him the night before. He did it all by himself.
Cloud computing and mobile technology are the top technologies to watch in education, according to this year’s K-12 Horizon Report, an annual publication from the New Media Consortium that highlights developing trends in ed tech.
Heather MacCorkle Edick‘s insight:
From the article:
Education paradigms are shifting to include online learning, hybrid learning, and collaborative models;Social media is changing the way people interact, present ideas and information, and communicate;Openness–concepts like open content, open data, and open resources, along with notions of transparency and easy access to data and information–is becoming a value;As the cost of technology drops and districts revise and open up their access policies, BYOD is becoming more common; andThe abundance of resources on the internet is challenging educators to revisit their own roles.
It gives me a bit to think about… does it give you something to think about?
heather edick 