Marking Meaning

I came away from my visit to Annie Wright impressed with the usefulness of making organization explicit. I saw four classes that day. All of them in one way or another took advantage of themes, summaries and lists to organize and reinforce learning.

In terms of lists, three of four teachers explicitly specified their goals for the class. Three had a "Plan for Today" posted on the board. Two reinforced this with an announcement at the beginning of class. These simple gestures reinforced what the teacher was trying to accomplish.

In watching a class on the Book of Genesis, I got a sense of how much themes help students find meaning in material. As a student, it is easy to wade into a reading assignment and not know what is important. Providing students with themes helps them to organize and make sense of what they are reading.

The History Department at Annie Wright has 7 Themes that they work with when exploring historical material:

1. Patterns of Population (numbers and migrations)


2. Economic Networks of Exchange


3. Uses/Abuses of Power
   


4. Haves/Have Nots


5. Expressing Identity


6. Environment/Technology/Science


7. Spiritual Codes/Ethics

It was clear that the class had established these themes early in the year...so no explicit definitions were offered the day I was there. However, I saw that having categories helps students find their way in unfamiliar material: the students went through the text (a fairly short reading assignment: Genesis 1: 27-30) in small groups and identified passages that reflected or referred to these themes in some way.

Then at the end of class, the teacher and students summarized what the class had discovered. This too reinforced what they had learned. The teacher reminded them to continue to think in terms of the 7 themes while reading over the weekend. In this way, the students are acquiring a habit of thinking about these ideas when reading historical material and are learning to consistently look for this kind of information, to ask: what does this text show about the way X thought about ethical behavior? About the way power was shared (or not shared) in this society? About the way they related to their environment and used technology?

Most of the core Humanities classes have a set of questions at each grade level: i.e, "Who should rule?" in 10th grade and "What is the relationship of the individual to the state?" at 11. These questions/themes are a Good Idea and we should be sure to keep them in play.