Speed Dating

I thought I'd end with a fun activity that I saw at Tyee last week.

The teacher stood at the white board with an overhead projector and revealed, one by one, a series of questions based on The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which the class had just finished reading. The list included a variety of questions: some interpretive, some strictly factual and some very open-ended.

Describe the narrator.
Who is Penelope?
What is at stake during the basketball game?
What genre is this work?
What did you get out of reading this book?

The students were seated in two rows of eight or nine chairs facing each other. The teacher would read out a question and allow the students a few minutes--not too long--to discuss it. After a pretty short interval, the instructor would call out, "Switch!" and one of the rows would shift over a seat, creating a new set of pairs. The process would repeat, punctuated by crisp, non-negotiable cues to "Switch!"

This was a small-ish class, with a significant number of students who spoke English but whose first languages were Spanish, Amharic or Vietnamese. The overhead enabled everyone to verify they'd understood the question. The unveiling of the question also contributed a certain element of suspense.

At the end of the list, the teacher reviewed the questions with the whole class, calling on students to share the answers they'd just developed in pairs. It was a requirement that each student paraphrase the last response before answering the next question. This kept the students responsible for listening to each other and for putting other people's ideas into words.

The teacher ended the activity by naming positive behavior he'd noticed while the students were working in pairs: "Santiago, I heard you pronounce the word 'denoument' perfectly." "Ali, I heard you encouraging your partner to speak." "Maria, you seemed really comfortable with literary terms when you were describing Junior's fight with Rowdy." I was struck by this matter-of-fact coaching. The teacher let each of these kids know they'd been seen without heaping on a whole lot of "praise."

Tyee Visit

Last week Melody and I visited the Tyee Educational Complex, which is a cluster of three small high schools housed on a campus in the Highline school district. We both came away impressed with the the professionalism, dynamism and strong chops of the teachers we saw there--and also a bit sobered by the challenges that these teachers take on.

In the classes I saw, the students appeared engaged and productive and often quite communicative with the strange lady visiting their classroom. This was pretty impressive just weeks before the end of the school year. It is perhaps more impressive if you consider that between 65-75% of the students qualify for Free or Reduced Price lunches. One of the students I met had had to leave school in October, moved back a few weeks ago and is ineligible to receive credit for this academic year. He comes to school because he likes it. Global has informally agreed to this arrangement, as has the teacher who corrects his papers and works with him.

In order to serve a broad variety of students, both ACE and Global have adopted a workshop model, which builds in a lot of room for student choice. Instead of having a "class novel" which serves as the point of departure for organizing the class, students work towards a "learning outcome" for each unit: for example, Use Academic Discourse to Articulate, Revise and Defend My Thinking about a Book--or Use Outside Sources of Information to Help Me Understand a Current Event. The teachers I spoke to acknowledged that assembling a library for this model requires an initial investment of time. Though you don't have to read all the texts concurrently with the students, you have to be familiar with the material--and it works best if the material is organized according to some sort of unifying principle: e.g., Love Stories or Identity or Social Justice. You then create small groups to discuss and write about the texts they have chosen. (This model also works just fine with using a single class text.)

The main virtue of this system, of course, is how nicely it can accommodate differentiation--working with a broad range of learning profiles in the same classroom. In a mini-lesson (10-15 minutes), all of the students are introduced to the same purpose--Understand Dramatic Structure--and given a task to help them achieve this purpose: apply Freytag's model to a text. You then allow them time for independent work, which can be organized in whatever way best meets the students' needs: students working on their own, working in pairs, working in small groups or signing up for conference time with the teacher. The period ends with a Share Out of some kind, which makes the students responsible for a result and gives them experience presenting and defending an idea.

Obviously, the workshop model requires a double period to work with. It is a bit of a radical model in that significantly prioritizes skills over content and minimizes teacher-centered time.