Introduction

The Class

• Description
• Syllabus
• Assignment
• Survey Responses

The Context

• Students
• Program
• Institution

Focusing on Students

The Unit: Preparing for Student-Centered Discussions

Introduction to fall:
The fall quarter of Curriculum and Instruction is devoted to the teaching of literature. Before we address the teaching of literature, we begin by asking our students to revisit the nature of literary reading.  In particular, we ask students to focus on the kinds of strategies skilled readers use to make sense of complex literary text. Building on the work of the Dennie Palmer Wolf (1988), the Strategic Literacy group at WestEd (Schoenbach, Greenleaf, Cziko, & Hurwitz, 1999) and others, we ask students to attend carefully to how students puzzle through text, the strategies they draw on, and the specific challenges they face, both in comprehension and interpretation.  We then return to the principles of instructional scaffolding to explore how teachers can support students as they develop strategies for reading literature.  As part of this unit, they conduct a clinical interview with one of their students, illuminating the strategies the student uses to read a text, and then design a lesson to teach that student a strategy for reading literature that would help them with some of the challenges they face (See Assignment #1).

In introducing discussions, we begin by talking about how to prepare students for a text-based discussion, focusing particularly on asking students to annotate texts.   To illustrate this strategy, we show a clip from Yvonne’s website, in which she teaches her students to annotate the text “Worry”  in preparation for a discussion. The clip is located on this page of Yvonne's website, and is "Video #3". We start the clip in minute 9 of the 47 minute excerpt.

In addition, we ask the prospective teachers to think of other strategies for preparing students for discussion, including having them write beforehand or prepare questions about the text.  We introduce students to several frameworks for teaching students how to generate textual questions including a framework that includes 3 levels of questions (see Yvonne's approach to this here):

• Level 1: Literal/right there questions
• Level 2: Interpretive/Think and search/filling the gap
• Level 3:  Going beyond the text

As part of a sequence of activities, we then ask the prospective teachers to develop a set of questions around several texts, including “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilmore.  We then use a fishbowl activity in which several students are designated as leaders of the discussion of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” others engage as participants, and another group sits outside of the circle and observes the discussion.  The observers are given a specific set of prompts, including:

• Observe for participation patterns (who participates most, who participates least, what patterns do you notice in terms of how people get to talk);
• Observe for how people do or do not build on each others' ideas and what helps or hinders this from happening;
• Observe the extent to which the discussion focuses on the text and has people looking for textual evidence to support their ideas;
• Observe the kinds of questions being asked, and how these questions open up, or close down, the discussion.

Following the discussion, we engage in a debrief. 

CLIPS of discussion and debrief  (from 11-4-03)

 

Schoenbach, Greenleaf, Cziko, & Hurwitz.  (1999).  Reading for Understanding. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass.