Last week for class I demoed ten minutes of the first lesson plan in a series of two that we will write up for our key assessment. For this demonstration we were just supposed to pick a comprehension strategy and model it for our fellow classmates using material we would teach in our respective content areas.
I am a future English teacher so I chose a strategy that would work with ninth graders. The comprehension strategy I chose was developing images. I chose this strategy because in an English classroom it is very important that students understand what they read and one way to help them get a better understanding of what they read is through visualization. Furthermore, if I fit this strategy into the two lesson plans for our key assessment I would act like my unit was on descriptive language as I hope many of us experienced in ninth grade. I remember an entire two months spent on grammar. This strategy is particularly useful for struggling readers who can use the visuals they create to help them get an understanding of the text. The strategy is simple: read a passage from a text and pick out the descriptive language in order to create a picture. I tweaked it for my class and had them pick out any sensory details – not just the visual ones.
So this reflection is aimed for looking at what went well, what we would change if we could present this lesson again, and what the future of this strategy would look like in my class.
I think the modeling of this strategy went very well. I spent a lot of time scaffolding this part of my lesson so that it was a gradual release of responsibility and followed the typical I do, we do, you do format. The passage I selected was a few paragraphs from the first chapter of Suicide Notes by Michael Thomas Ford (a young adult novel full of descriptive language and just a non-academic text for some fun exploration). I did the first paragraph on my own, modeling what language I would pick out and what I would visualize from this language. Then the class and I did the second paragraph together. I read it and asked them what they would pick out, giving hints along the way. Finally, the students did two paragraphs on their own and when they were done they paired up and shared what they found in those two paragraphs. I only had ten minutes so I couldn’t scaffold to complete independence, but I think the initial scaffolding went well.
If I could change something about this lesson I might change my materials and give them the copies of the passages with my modeling already on the page so they could see what I did. I think that visual would help them rather than just trying to follow what I say – they would hear it and see it. I might also preface the text more and explain why I chose that particular text more because I got some crazy looks from my classmates when I said where these paragraphs were from.
I really liked using this strategy and I think it could be manipulated many different ways. I could have the students pick out the descriptive language and then actually draw what they see, create comic strips, etc. I could make it into a more hands on and artsy project for the students. I could have the students act out what they are seeing in the passage and get them moving around. I could scaffold all the way to independence and have them scan entire chapters to get as many examples of descriptive language as possible. I think there are many different ways to use this strategy and I could make it really fun and engaging for my students.
Literacy for Language Lovers 