Schema Activation...and a little luck

We had CLIMBS day 4 on Thursday of this week, and it's all about schema activation in order to get the students to better connect with the content. There are three components to schema activation: developing vocabulary, building background, and linking concepts to prior learning. We hit the afternoon after a lot of conversation in the morning, and I put a slide up asking participants in the workshop to discuss ways to activate a student's schema related to the topic of probability in math class.

People talked in their table groups, and we came back together and came up with a healthy list of vocabulary that the students might need in order to be able to access this content. The problem, though, was that we hadn't come up with any activities that might help them to connect. I asked about that again, and crickets filled the room. Well, no, the sound of crickets filled the room. Well, maybe the sound of crickets chirping just filled my head. But the table conversations had all revolved around the vocabulary, it seems, but not around linking to prior learning or building background.

I suggested that we might consider the fact that different cultures view the concept of "luck" differently, and that might be a good jumping off place for activities. But I didn't really have a well-developed plan for responding to my own question, and that's a no-no in presenting. Sorry, friends.

So, of course, I've been stewing about it all weekend. I came up with these activities that I might use to start a unit on probability in math class:

1. Anticipatory Guide: put together a series of statements that students have to agree or disagree with related to luck and probability. Have them make choices and discuss with a partner before coming back to a classroom discussion to share out as a group.

2. Writing round robin: Have students write for three minutes on a time that they felt that they were lucky or unlucky and why they think that the luck/lack thereof occurred. Students can all share in a group of four, and then the instructor can ask each group to share out one story from their table.

3. Previewing video: Put together a video where a  hand is drawing colored marbles out of a bag. Stop the video. Ask students to work with a partner to make predictions about what color they think will come out of the bag next and why. Ask students to narrate the video without sound for their partner. Then, come together as a class and talk about the predictability of the next marble.

4. Have students read this article from Wikipedia. Make it a jigsaw so that each person has to report back to their group on the part of the article that they have read.

The idea is to have a four-skills activity that requires students to NOT work solo, to make connections to the content before having to wrestle with it, and to give the class a common language base from which to work. I'd like to give one of these a whirl, but I feel like probability is a ways off in the class I'm teaching this year. Any takers out there?

What worked today...what didn't.

"Mrs. Bowman, you are my people!" That's what one of my students said to me today when I tried to redirect him to question the people in his group instead of me by saying, "I don't know, buddy. I'm not in your group. Ask your people." There comes a really cool point in every school year when the language of many of my students has developed to the point that they can be intentionally funny. Love it. The other day, I asked someone to do something, and another student chimed in, "Me, too!", and a third chimed in, "Me, three!" And the whole class laughed. How cool is that?

After having read Walqui's book, I have started to think more about how to develop group interaction in the tasks I design for the class and how to mix in content instruction with language accuracy and language fluency. I also want to do my best to draw on all four skills during every class day in a very intentional way.

Some things that worked really well today:

Reinforcement of the content vocabulary: Students started studying the content vocabulary words (precipitation, evaporation, condensation, etc.) yesterday. I was surprised when even my strongest students weren't able to pronounce the vocabulary in any recognizable way. Hmmmm. So what worked? I found a song on the water cycle on a video, and I printed out the lyrics for the tune with the exception of the content words. I left those as blanks in the work, and the students listened on their individual computers.  The fact that it was a song made it easy for the students to sing along, and by the end of the activity, I had nearly perfect pronunciation of all the vocabulary words. Not so original, but it worked today.

Here's the water cycle song. It's not on youtube. That would go in the list of things that didn't work well today. YouTube wasn't working at school this morning, so I needed to find the video elsewhere. Slight panic.

Reinforcement of pronunciation: Found this app, Songify on Daniel Bemiss' blog. After the kids did the listening exercise (and singing exercise, really...wish I could have caught the off-key singing. Nothing is better than off-key singing in a room full of kids wearing headphones), they hopped on the iPads. This app allows users to read up to sixty seconds of text, and it converts it to a rap/r&b/"I'm so not cool that I don't even know the style of music" song. So the students got to listen to themselves reading the first stanza of the song from the video into their iPads. Pretty darn cool. (Free app, too!)

Production of academic language: In our afternoon task, I put the key vocabulary from the unit on the boards around the room. In their small groups, students were directed to write three sentences on the board that were related to the content vocabulary. They were supposed to produce something original. Then we rotated through and each group had to work on the next board. Below is a picture of what the three groups produced on one board:

Cool stuff about this activity? No notes. So the kids did all the negotiating in oral English to produce these sentences. No teacher intervention. There's some serious content vocabulary happening here! My favorite thing is the thinking beyond the class-delivered definitions. Gotta love the sentence about the bicycle!

One thing that didn't work well today:

Grouping: It's important to be intentional in grouping, and the groups I put together for the afternoon didn't work as I wanted them to. One had a funky boy/girl dynamic going on. And another had a girl who seemed to have the marker in my hand every time I turned around. Must remember to front-load activities with a little bit of a caveat to ensure everyone writes.

Next up: CLIMBS day 4 tomorrow. Version 3.0. Every time we run this workshop, we run it differently. Same content, different methods. I'm kind of fired up about tomorrow.

Language & Literacy website

Have you seen www.jeffzwiers.com?

If not, you should. Click on his "Resources" page, and you'll find an unbelievable number of resources for teaching all learners. He has a lot there on scaffolding academic language for ELLs. And he has a lot on sentence frames.

If teachers could get a little bit of training in how to use this information, it would help all learners in their classes.

Sentence frames + text to table

My class has had a science focus for the week: plants. Our language focuses (or foci for you Latin geeks out there) in addition to the vocabulary of plants (photosynthesis, germination, pollination) has been the language of comparison. I also wanted the kids to learn these "academic" words and be able to use them in conversation: diagram, label, match, title.  So we've asked students to understand what we called "both" sentences and "but" sentences when talking about plants. Yep, it was Venn diagram week in class.

The point, though, is to share here two things. First, sentence frames are a really, really, really useful tool for ELLs. And there seems to be some confusion about what sentence frames are. So here's what they are not: fill-in-the-blank sentences. A FITB sentence has one response. _______ is the President of the United States is a FITB. We only have one president, and you can only put one name in that blank for it to be correct. A sentence frame provides the language structure for an ELL to use. And while it might be context-specific, there should be multiple uses for that frame. A good example from a recent geography lesson in my class: _____________ is to the ____________ of __________. So students would fill in the first and last blank with place names and the middle blank with a directional word. "Kentucky is to the north of Tennessee." It has multiple uses for the kids, and the "glue" words don't change. "Mrs. B's class is to the left of Mr. White's class." "My locker is to the right of Aung Sung's."

Second, I wrote earlier about the text to table to text lesson, and I want to share the progression of that here. So here are a series of pictures from this week:

Working on some germination action here.

The lesson I'm showing pictures from is somewhere near the middle of the unit. The students had already studied a lot about the parts of a a plant and what each part does for the plant. We had also started comparing various plants (to practice using those plant parts) among other things. 

I wanted the students to be able to work with a more complex text by the end of the week, but we started with a sentence-level reading. Students had a blank Venn diagram, and I went through a text and pulled out sentences like, "Apples and peaches grow on trees." or "An apple has many seeds. A peach has one big seed." I then took those individual sentences and put them onto paper where I underlined the key text for them--the text that they would need to transfer to their Venn diagram paper. 

Above, you can see two of my students working on one of those sentence papers. They had to find the appropriate phrase and decide where it belonged on the paper--in the outer circles that indicated that the fruits are "different" or in the inner circle that indicates that they are the "same." 

After students had collected the phrases from the individual sentences in the back of the room, they had to turn those phrases back into comparison sentences using these sentence frames:

Both ___________ and _______________ _________________.

____________ _______________, but ____________ ____________.

Both apples and peaches grow on trees.

Apples have many seeds, but peaches have one big seed. 

Yes, this is close to what they had seen on the papers in the back of the room, but remember that they had only put the phrases on their paper--not the complete sentences. And the sentences were not always worded so closely to the sentence frames. So this was requiring them to re-think the information that they had seen in the back of the room. 

Later in the week, they read this two-page text:

Longman Science

And the kids put together this Venn diagram with minimal support from me (yes, the handwriting is mine--they told me what to write):

And then they took the information from the diagram and turned that into a paragraph comparing animals and plants.

One final use for sentence frames in the unit wrap-up for the week is shown below. I gave the students a list of options for the first blank because I wasn't sure they would know how to say what all we had done over the course of the week, and then I left the second blank open for them to fill in. All the students were able to produce responses that were strong and even used some of the academic language that we had studied this week. 

Scaffolding the Academic Success of Adolescent English Language Learners by Walqui and van Lier

The first chapter of this book is called, "A Pedagogy of Promise" followed by the subheading, "Helping Students Become What They Are Not Yet", and the text delivers both theories and methods based on this sense of optimistic pedagogy. While the focus of the title of the text is on English Language Learners, teachers of all students should consider implementing the instructional design outlined by the authors.

Vygotsky fans will get excited about this book because his theories are the root for the practice. The density of the first chapter made me want to read it twice and furiously take notes in the margin (although I had borrowed the copy, so I couldn't!). I'm a geek for theory. If you aren't a geek for theory, though, the first three chapters should be enough to convince you that the "sage on the stage" mentality of old-school teaching is not the most effective way to reach students.

The last three chapters of the book are dedicated to the actual practice of what they call "QTEL" or Quality Teaching for English Learners. These practices are rooted in these five principles quoted from p. 81 of the text (my computer is not letting me put quotes where I want them):

• Sustain academic rigor in teaching English learners
• Hold high expectations in teaching English learners
• Engage English learners in quality teacher and student interactions
• Sustain a language focus in teaching English learners
• Develop a quality curriculum for teaching English learners

 For me, personally, there were several lightbulb moments in the text. I need to spend more time in my class on the quality of my student interactions. I always struggle in that aspect. I want the kids to work together on tasks, but that is often reduced to one student doing the work and other students then copying from that one student. This book suggests several task-designs that would support more positive student participation.

I need to focus on giving students multiple opportunities to focus on both accuracy and fluency in the language. I use sentence frames a lot in my class, but that often limits what the students produce. And then there is a "right" or a "wrong" moment that doesn't support them thinking on their own. So I need to move beyond my focus on accuracy to giving them multiple opportunities for expression.

I also need to up my game in terms of academic rigor for the students. If I can get the first two pieces above in order, then I can certainly increase the rigor for the students. The expectations are high in my class. Often, the academic rigor is high, as well. But I think I can be doing more in terms of using the students' background to improve their opportunities to interact with higher-level thinking activities and to solicit the language needed to work through those activities.

There is a very clear, three-step design to units of study. The first step is to prepare the learners, the second is the scaffolding of their interaction with a text, and the third is in extending the ideas of the text. (That's the part that I personally loved!) Lessons are objective based. There are plenty of examples of "real-life" teachers using these methods, and teachers should walk away with some ideas that they can use in their classroom immediately.

iPod Dictations--a twist on an old favorite

Whenever I've done dictations with classes in the past, I've always had to say a hundred times, "I'm only going to say the sentence twice. Two times. I promise, I'll repeat it. And I'll say all the sentences again at the end. I promise. No, I won't go back and do number two. Just stay with me. Please." Yes, a hundred times. And that's for a four-sentence dictation. Tedious.

But I've figured out a way to use the iPods to give dictation a new twist.

First, I write a dictation that is ten sentences in length. Those ten sentences have two key components to them: the content vocabulary that we are studying in class and sentence structure that is familiar to the students. So the connecting vocabulary or verb tenses need to make sense and be familiar based on what we have been studying. At the end of a recent unit on the structure of the United States government, I had a dictation for the students that had sentences like, "The President is in the Executive branch at the National level," and we had studied the key words president, executive, and national. The frame, then, was:

The ___________ is in the ____________ branch at the ____________ level.

There were some other frames mixed in that we had used and studied along with content vocabulary from the unit.

Next, I record myself reading the dictation to the students using iMovie/iSight on my laptop computer. I repeat each numbered sentence twice. I publish the dictation out to iTunes, and it shows up ready to be loaded on the student iPods.

The students take the iPods and listen to my dictation and write down the numbered sentences. For some students, a word bank is a helpful tool for the content vocabulary. I try not to scaffold any of the sight words for them because the goal is for them to have absorbed the sentence frames at this point. After the students have written down the sentences, I have them turn in their written copy to me. This gives me a chance to assess both listening and writing/spelling issues.

For the reading/speaking portion, the students then switch on the camera on the iPod and read the dictation back to me. I give them a typed copy of the dictation to read to me so that if they made any errors in their writing, they don't transfer those errors over into the reading/speaking exercise. I ask the kids to read each sentence twice, and I listen for the best example from each piece. For assessment on this piece, I listen to the students' recordings and draw a line under any of the words that I consider to be major errors--errors that impede understanding. And I circle any specific issues that we are working on in class (right now, my students' focus is on hitting the word endings as they tend to truncate them.) In terms of scoring, I take a point off for every two major errors and 1 point off for every four issues circled.

While I haven't always been a fan of dictation in the past, there's something about adding the iPod into the mix that makes this seem pretty great. First, it allows students to self-pace. They can listen to the sentence as many times as they'd like to train their ear. Second, they can use the recorded dictation to help them practice for their reading. And again, they can hit on it as many times as they'd like. Finally, they can record themselves as many times as they'd like until they are satisfied with their own recording. This assessment is about accuracy, and it's great for the kids to pay attention to detail in their speaking periodically. And really finally (I already used finally), it's easy to give feedback because you have a recording. The kids can re-listen to their recording with your comments in hand and learn from the assessment.

From text to table to text

It's funny when I start doing something in my class that I think is really working, and I get really excited about it, and I want to write about it, and then I realize that someone else already has. The cool thing is that the people who did, Levine and McCloskey say that what I'm doing is a best practice. The not as cool thing is that if I'd just finished reading their book that I've been toting around with me forever, I would have figured this out a lot sooner and been doing it in my classes.

So here's the thing that's been working in classes for us in the last couple of weeks (that I now know is a Best Practice (I like labeling that with capital letters because it makes it seem much more official). I'll try to post some pictures of student work if I remember to pull out the camera when I get back to work on Tuesday.

I call it "from text to table to text." And here's the thing. I have to preface this by saying that I hate graphic organizers. I don't hate them as a teaching tool, but I hate them for my own personal use. I skip over graphs and diagrams in books that I'm reading. I can't remember the last time I willfully pulled out a paper with a bunch of funny boxes on it to help organize my thinking (and I'm wondering how many of you do?) or my understanding of a reading. Yet, they seem to work with my kids. Sigh.

The text: I choose a text related to the topic we are studying and at the appropriate language level for the students. Two examples this week were a text on symbols of the United States government and the branches of the United States government.

The table: I design a graphic organizer that will correlate with the information in the text but that also requires the students to add their own thoughts into the mix. This is important. I want the kids to not only regurgitate the information from a text that they have read, but I want them to make a personal connection with it. For both of the above examples, the students had to find information in the text to fill out the chart. For the branches of government text, they had to tell me who is in the branch, what the branch does, how many people are in the branch, and where the branch is (which building). For the student part of the mix, I asked them to think about something that we had done in class that was like the duties of that branch, and I gave them a sentence starter so that they could show me they understood the connection. So, for example, we had in our table, "The Legislative Branch makes laws." I gave them the sentence starter, "In our class, we were like the legislative branch when we ____________." and had the kids fill in the rest from an activity that we had done that week.

The text again: Once the kids have filled in their table from the text, we then use a paragraph form to turn their table back into writing. For the branches of government activity, I modeled the first paragraph for them using the information from my chart on the executive branch. Then, I had the students walk me through the second branch together using that form. Then, the students had to take the information from their chart and the paragraph form to independently practice creating their own paragraph.

So it's a Best Practice. Good for me. Better for our students, though, that we are finding a way to get them to do extended academic writing despite the fact that they are level 1/2 writers.