Category Archives: Workshop in Other Content Areas

Simple Annotation Strategies to Help Students Comprehend Informational Text

Mini-lessons, Readers Workshop, Strategies to Add Some Zip, Workshop in Other Content Areas February 19, 2020 Leave a comment

Students across all levels and in all content areas are expected to read and comprehend difficult informational texts. As an instructional coach, I work with our English teachers and other content area teachers to give students simple strategies to help them break down difficult texts and make them more manageable to read and understand.

Step One: Give students a purpose for reading the text. Students need to know WHY they’re doing the reading in the first place and what they’re going to do with the reading AFTER they’re done.

Step Two: Teach students how to preview the text and use to predict what they think the text will be about. Strategies that I have found easy for students to use:

  • Look at headnotes, abstracts, graphics, etc.
  • Check author’s credentials.  Is he/she credible?
  • Look at the type of text (news article, textbook, research abstract, etc)
  • Pay attention to the layout of the text (subtopics, sections, chunks of text, etc)

Step Three: Teach students how to chunk the text into smaller parts to help them break up the information. Sometimes there are subheadings to make it easier and sometimes they will have to do this on their own.

  • From Reading Nonfiction by Kylene Beers and Robert Probst

Step Four: Model and practice annotation strategies. The ones I have found most helpful for students to improve comprehension are:

  • Respond to the three “big” questions from Reading Nonfiction (Beers & Probst) in the margins:
    • “What surprised me in this text?”
    • “What did the author think I already knew?
    • “What challenged, changed, or confirmed what I already knew?”
  • Circle repeated words and phrases in each chunk and look for common ideas.
  • Star* ideas that clarify, explain, describe, and illustrate the main idea (examples, quoted words, reasons, numbers and statistics, etc.) and ask themselves if these support the main idea or are just minor details.
  • Note of the techniques/”moves” the author makes in the margins. Write down why they think the author used that in the text?
  • Annotate the 5Ws and use those to figure out the main ideas.
  • Underline the author’s claim and subclaims. Note the evidence he/she uses to support those claims.
  • Look at your annotations.  Summarize after each chunk.
    • What is this chunk about?
    • Write a one-sentence summary.
  • Example of repeated words/ideas, chunking, and noting the author’s techniques

My one bit of advice is to pick and choose which annotation strategies will work best for your students. I teach my students different strategies depending on my purpose and the text they are reading. Don’t give them all of these at once – I have learned this the hard way. Start with one strategy at a time and as they get confident, add additional ones as needed.

Step Five: Have students revisit the purpose for reading and respond to the text using their annotations. Students can:

  • Summarize the article.
  • Respond to a prompt, using evidence from the text
  • Use evidence from the article in a class discussion.
  • Synthesize evidence from multiple documents to answer an essential question.

When my students are active readers, critically thinking about the words and their meaning, their understanding of the text improves. What are the strategies you have used with your students to improve comprehension of nonfiction texts?

Melissa Sethna is co-teaching a freshman English class this year in addition to her full time job as an instructional coach at Mundelein High School in Mundelein, IL. Her favorite part of coaching teachers is sharing strategies with colleagues and then watching the light bulbs go on in the students’ minds as they see how helpful the strategies are in their learning.

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I’ve Been Thinking…About Our Town (Or What I’ve Learned About Workshopping the Canon With Thornton Wilder…)–Guest Post by Elizabeth Oosterheert

Readers Writers Workshop, Workshop in Other Content Areas July 18, 2019 Comments: 2

OurTowntheatertroupe

8th Grade Cast Members of Our Town by Thornton Wilder

Recently, I reread Amy Rasmussen’s post about defining what we mean by readers’ and writers’ workshop. I loved that Amy described workshop as  students doing the work of readers and writers, “engaged in intensive discussion and activity on a particular subject” — specifically related to growing as readers and writers. This work happens because teachers open spaces in their classrooms which allow for it.”

I confess. Our Town, Thornton Wilder’s 1938 Pulitzer Prize winner, is my favorite play. I read it obsessively. I find relevance in its pages time and again. Wilder said that he wrote the play to illustrate the value beyond price in every moment of our daily lives.

After spending more than twenty years with middle school students, and experiencing moments of deep joy and sadness, as well as tasting  my own mortality, the play resonates with me more now than it ever has…BUT, how do I workshop a canonical piece like Our Town? How do I make the pages sing for my students as they do for me?

Here are four ways that I changed my approach to the play this year to leave more space for student voice and choice.

Less is More: In Our Town, this meant placing students in small groups to reflect on specific scenes from the play. Rather than slogging through an entire act, and then replying to teacher generated questions, I asked students to journal with their groups and express their own thoughts, questions, and epiphanies after reading a few pages aloud and then viewing that scene. Thanks to @MarisaEThompson and @cultofpedagogy for encouraging me to try the TQE method.

Podcasts Rock!  is the most performed play in the United States, and that distinction 8thgradetheatermeans– a lot has been said about it! Students were invited to choose a podcast featuring an interview with a respected director, and then discuss observations from the podcast with their small group and share how those podcasts changed or enhanced their understanding of the text.

Music Matters: One of the fascinating things about Our Town is that Wilder designated a hymn, “Blessed Be the Tie That Binds,” to be played in each of the three acts. He was also very specific about the music that should be sung during the choir practice in Act I, and played for the wedding scene in Act II.  Music is a bridge from life to death, and beyond. Working with their small groups, students composed soundtracks for the play incorporating music from many different genres. They could also choose to write about Wilder’s musical selections and what difference his choices made.

Performance Deepens Understanding:  By the end of our study, my students recognized that George & Emily, the two main characters in the play, were allegorical. They could have been anyone, at any time, in any small town. We all grow up, most of us know what it is to love truly, and we all die. That is our story, and Our Town shows and tells it. My students did as well, performing some of their favorite scenes and exploring character motivations and emotions more deeply even than we did during our small group study times. Performing the scenes gave them a new appreciation for the nuances and poetry on page after page.

Our Town. Glorious in its simplicity, and relatable after more than eighty years, if students have the space to think and explore as readers, writers and speakers.

 

Elizabeth Oosterheert is a middle school language arts teacher and theatre troupe director at Pella Christian Grade School in Pella, Iowa. She loves writing, and sharing the stage with seventh and eighth graders. Her favorite stories are Peter Pan, The Outsiders, & Our Town. You can find her on Twitter @oosterheerte.

 

 

 

 

Readers & Writers Workshop–Beyond English and Into Journalism

Workshop in Other Content Areas October 1, 2015 Leave a comment

dotCJR-blog480Are any of us really just English teachers?

It has been rare in my teaching tenure to only teach English–and in my current position, my schedule is no different.  I teach Yearbook and Newspaper, in addition to four English classes.

Learning the content of those new-to-me courses has been one of the biggest (and most fruitful) challenges of my teaching career.  While writing instruction is naturally paramount in journalism courses, teaching photography, design, AP style, and the interview process were foreign concepts to me prior to starting this job.

So, when I discovered that I’d be teaching journalism, I did what any good teacher does–I began to research.  This article describing the four properties of powerful teaching–presence, personality, passion, and preparation–reminded me that I had the first three qualities when it came to teaching journalism.  I just had to do the work of preparation.

After a long summer of workshops and self-teaching, I felt well-versed in lens aperture and the inverted pyramid, but I wasn’t sure how I wanted to structure my journalism courses.  When I boiled down the values I wanted my young journalists to prize, though, they came down to doing good writing, good research, and good thinking–all values that are foundational parts of the readers and writers workshop.

So, each day in Newspaper and Yearbook, we begin with ten minutes of reading.  I confer with students and we discuss how to read like writers.  We analyze how a writer sets a scene, much like how a photographer composes a picture.  We note the author’s style, filing away their craft moves for use in our own copy writing.  We speculate about the writer’s inspiration for the story, trying to find our own topics to write about.

After two booktalks (often nonfiction), we then move into a quickwrite, thinking in writing for ten minutes about a variety of subjects–sometimes responding to simple questions, sometimes practicing journalistic writing skills, and sometimes brainstorming ideas for articles, photo stories, or coverage.

A ten- to fifteen-minute mini-lesson follows, taught either by me or the editor-in-chief of the day’s publication.  These mini-lessons are based on trends the editors and I notice as students submit their work.  Yesterday we worked on strengthening our headlines; today we’ll focus on brushing up on the conventions of AP style in our copy.

We leave ourselves with a sixty-minute writers’ workshop every day, which is packed full of collaboration, conferring, and chaos.  That last hour is productive until the bell rings, with every student journalist working toward a unique deadline or assignment, receiving guidance from any and every other person in the room.

Watching and participating in the organized, creative chaos of a journalistic writers’ workshop is probably my favorite time of day.

I asked two students how they felt that the workshop enhanced their journalistic learning.  Ryan feels the quickwrites are most valuable:  “Your notebook allows you to open up and be yourself when you write,” he says.  “You learn to still have a voice in journalism, which is usually just really formulaic.”

“I really like that you learn while you write,” he emphasizes, repeating that twice in our brief conference.

Gabi agrees.  “You’re learning as you do the writing–learning from your mistakes–rather than having concepts spoonfed to you,” she says.  “I think everyone likes to learn hands-on, by actually writing, instead of just reading other people’s articles.”

In what electives or non-English classes do you employ the workshop model?

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