ELA 8 Questioning

While reading the story Random Sample students were asked to generate their own questions when they were confused about something they had read.  This was pretty easy for them because the story is quite confusing.  As a class we eliminated any questions that we could explicitly answer using the text.  Next students were asked to get into groups and try to answer the implicit questions.  This was much more difficult for them.  They had to reason with evidence and build explanations from the story to justify their answers.  They also had to make connections to the real world and activate prior knowledge in order to answer their questions and understand the text.  Towards the end of the hour we came back together as a group and worked through the story and questions together.

Overall I would use this activity again when reading this story.  In the past I have explained the story as we read it together.  However, allowing students to formulate questions and answers on their own created a much more engaging atmosphere, and it allowed various perspectives on the story come to the forefront.  I thought they understood the story on a deeper level and were able to think critically about its implications in the real world.

Back in October I introduced our Kettlebells using a COMPASS POINTS CoT.  It was pretty simple.  I used Excel to create a worksheet.  It looked something like this:




NAME________________________SUBJECT__________________DATE____________


                                                                NEED TO KNOW



WORRIES ABOUT THIS                                                                   EXCITES YOU



                                                                 STANCE (OPINION)

The students filled the worksheet out and we went from there.  We use the Kettlebells once a week.  At the end of the Semester, I want to have the students fill out the worksheets again to see what kind of feedback I get.

Any suggestions to improve this would be appreciated. If anyone wants a copy of the worksheet I can send it to you.

Rykse - Challenge 2 Reflecting

What makes a line a "best fit"?

In our current statistics unit, we have been playing with making scatter plots out of data and looking to see if there is a pattern to the data. We then would try to model the pattern with a line when possible. We were doing this informally and didn't have any "rules" about how you should draw the line. As we played a little more, student comments started to include statements like "your line looks better then my line".

At this point we stopped. Students took a couple of minutes on their own to write down what characteristics made a line a better fit than other lines. Students then took turns in a group of 4 sharing their characteristics. The group came up with a list of common characteristics they had. Groups then shared their lists and we made a class list.  Our class list became our guide to what a line of best fit should be and was just as good as any textbook definition.

It turned out that a common characteristic they talked about informally was the idea of getting as many points as close as possible to the line. I decided to introduce the idea of residuals which was just the formal concept of what they were describing. It then became a game of who could create the best fit line in the class.

Pausing to let students reflect on how they were perceiving a best fit line allowed them to take ownership of the idea and seemed to lead to more engagement.

ESL ELA and Honors 9

The ESL ELA class has been working on an essay called, "This I Believe," they spent weeks finding their purpose, finding their voice and finding the courage to let their story explode from the place where it came from…their hearts.  Their stories were published, they shared them with each other, I noticed that when they shared their stories, walls came down, relationships were continuing to build and confidence was growing. The next day they walked into my class and I had on our daily schedule:  Everyone has a story to tell, today is your day to tell it. I told them to follow me, that today their voices would be heard, so we marched on down to Jessica Cleland's Honors 9 ELA class. Jessica and her class welcomed my 8th and 9th graders into their classroom. My class huddled in the corner of her class, literally they stood in a united huddle in the front corner of her classroom. I explained to Jessica's class that the ESL class has been working on their believe essays and that today they wanted to share their stories with them. The ESL students stepped up one by one (not all the students shared, to be honest only my 8th graders were comfortable sharing), they stepped up and they read their stories in the front of the class. A brief overview of the topics of these stories: hardships, devastation, hope, change…. After each story was read, the Honors 9 students offered a praise and a question to relate with each student's story. Let me say that again…they praised their writing. They questioned their writing. This day the ESL ELA and the Honors 9ers taught me the lesson, that there is value in sharing our stories and that sometimes students need to be heard and sometimes they just need to listen, to each other. I used to think…collect the essay, conference with the student, pass back the essay. Now I think differently. The whole experience of this assignment was a reflective piece, from thinking, to writing to sharing. After our moment in the Honors 9 class, we came back to our class and the students wrote a reflection on their experience. I didn't set any expectations, I just told them to write a reflection on the experience. The key here was for me to tell them to reflect on the experience, not the writing. They took it in any direction that they wanted and it was insightful. The students were then asked to write one strong word that captured their experience and display it on our wall.

After completing a Barbie Bungee line of fit lab, Bennink and I had students reflect on the process.  The reflections were mostly to draw attention to math dispositions (standards of practice) and how the lab provided the opportunity for students to engage in positive math habits.  I'm going to try to attach a few of the responses as images, but who knows if I can figure that out!  I think reflecting was a positive experience for students and know that I should be bringing their attention to how they regularly use standards of practice more frequently.

Professional Challenge #1 World Language Chalk Talk Questions

In Spanish 2, I did a Chalk Talk around the room on chart paper with the following questions.

1. What is the easiest category (reading, writing, speaking, vocabulary/grammar, listening) of learning Spanish? Why?
2. What is the hardest category (reading, writing, speaking, vocabulary/grammar, listening) of learning Spanish? Why?
3. What did you learn about the culture in the last unit?
4. What did you take away from the last unit?
5. How are you helping the classroom environment/community?
6. What have I done to help you learn Spanish better?
7. What could I have done to help you learn Spanish better?
8. What did you do on your own to learn Spanish in the last unit?

My goal was to get students to reflect on their own thinking process. The thinking that was evident was considering different viewpoints and making connections.  I wanted students to see what areas their peers were struggling and excelling in.  I also wanted them to see what other students took away from the unit. Lastly, I wanted to make a connection with the students and see what types of classroom activities were helpful and which ones were not.  After the students completed the questions, we discussed them as a class and I can review them in the future if necessary.

Challenge #2

One of my classes just recently began a new unit. As an introduction, the students explored a brand new pattern and then reflected on this new pattern and how it related to patterns that we have already learned about in class. In addition, I had the students share some things that they were curious about with this new pattern. This brought about a lot of good math conversations about where we have been and where we are going with this new unit.

Bad PowerPoint

One of my favorite exercises in Software Applications is to have kids make the worst PowerPoint that they can.  You can almost see the wheels turning as the kids try to out-do each other with bad content, clumsy transitions and animations, and font and color schemes that you can barely see.  It leads to wonderful discussion on "If this is bad.... does the opposite make it good?"

Cultivating Deeper Thinking with Struggling Thinkers

Language Arts offers many opportunities to cultivate deeper thinking. However, my typical co-taught bunch of students often lack the skills to do so, or the desire.

This year has been refreshing in that most of my ELA students are truly enjoying our "Romeo & Juliet" unit. With this major obstacle out of the way, we've been able to have some pretty engaging conversations about characters and their probable motives. One major skill we've been working on is making character claims using sound evidence from the text.

When you think about it, this is a pretty high-level skill for someone who is a reluctant reader. Therefore, instead of presenting students with the task of making a claim about a character, I flipped the script and provided the character claim. Their task was to then find sound evidence which could support the claim.

I was very pleased with the results. I'm hoping that later in the school year the students can demonstrate more autonomy without sacrificing proficiency, but I also understand that many students might not be capable of that this school year.

Baillie/LaMay Co-Taught Algebra

The focus of this month's culture of thinking is questioning.  This year in co-taught algebra I, we are focusing on constantly asking our students "why?" or "what makes you say that?". We don't want our students to just memorize steps and procedures, but we want them to understand WHY are they doing it.  Consistently asking students "what makes you say that?", gives us a better way of understanding student thinking and learning, as well as their misconceptions,  In addition, the students have become accustomed to the questioning, and it has increased their ability to reason mathematically and has greatly improved their communication skills when working in groups with peers. Using questioning that cultivates mathematical reasoning allows students  to translate the mathematics into words, make connections to the real world and show much deeper thinking. It also allows us an avenue to help scaffold problems for students when their are having difficulty initiating a task. Overall, we have seen a tremendous improvement in student learning and engagement by focusing on the questions that we ask the students and use to guide classroom conversations.

Challenge #1

We've been doing a lot of writing lately- using persuasive essays to make a claim and to prove/support a claim.  I wanted to try something a little different (and less difficult to grade).  So, Monday I had my kids collect information about the election of 1932 from their book in a graphic organizer.  They had to find and provide examples of ideologies and actions, and then evaluate the prospective president from a 1930s perspective and one from today.  On Tuesday, to demonstrate their learning, the students created 2 positive presidential campaign posters for 1932.  They had to show that they understood why Hoover might be a good choice as a traditional, capitalist, laissez-faire guy (despite history evaluating him quite negatively) and also decide why the people may have been drawn to FDR and his promised "change."  Students had to look at Hoover less emotionally and evaluate his attempted policies in context of not knowing the Depression would be so bad.

After they completed the activity and we discussed why people might actually have voted for Hoover, we looked at the electoral college map of 1932 to show the landslide; kids wondered why, and I followed up with a documentary on the Bonus Army March which turned public opinion away from Hoover just before the election.

I think they learned a lot and liked the change of visually representing their thinking, rather than having to write and fully explain it.

Questioning in Math

Over the last 11 years, we have been going deeper in math through questioning.  Questioning isn't something that can be done in a lesson and checked off a list as done, but rather questioing in something we do every day as a part of a classroom culture of thinking.  Some examples of questioning in my classroom are in the current unit of study students are studying exponential functions, but are asked to make connections to the last 2 years of thinking about linear and directly proportional and make connections between the 4 representations of the 3 functions.  As they compare and contrast and notice, their thinking is privledged and they gain not only greater understanding, but greater confidence in their mathematical abilities.  I also had my students watch a video about scientific notation and asked them what they noticed.  We had deep meaningful conversation about how this related to their learnings about place value when they were in early elementary school.  This became not about memorization of how to "do the process" of moving the decimal place, but rather an understanding of how prior knowledge could make sense of the process that they developed.  BTW... if anyone actually reads this, please ignore the run on sentences and lack of grammatical correctness.  Thanks and have a great day.

Gallery Walk Inspiration!

Remember back when we went on that gallery walk on the very first late start day of the year?  I sure do.  That's because that was the day that the unthinkable happened.  I was inspired.  Motivated.  Moved to tears.  Ok, I went a little too far there.  But it was the math department that inspired me so much.  How can you connect math to history?  You can't.  But...I saw a diagram on one of their cultures of thinking examples that inspired me to think.  And think I did.  It pushed me to recreate my lesson for that very day, changing the entire scope of my lesson on a dime and reworking my delivery of the curriculum after so many years of doing things the same.  The math assignment I'm talking about had four boxes with a question in a circle in the center of the page.  Inside the four boxes were four different ways to approach the same question.  I took this and altered it for my history class.  I put an essential question in the center circle.  The four boxes represented four different classroom conversations that we had surrounding different viewpoints of that same question.  Some of the discussion in the classroom was historically based, and others were in a modern context.  The results were outstanding.  Students owned this information at the end of the unit.  I put this question on the test as an essay question, and by and large it was the most thoroughly answered question of any essay question we've had so far.  Most people actually wrote something down!  Amazing stuff, right?  I'm guessing that by now you really want to see this assignment, so you can be likewise motivated to change the world to be more productive thinkers and learners.  Well, here you GO!

Challenge # 1

Prior to introducing the idea of traditionalism vs. modernism, I had the students respond to the question How did social, economic, and religious tensions divide Americans during the Roaring Twenties? This initially sparked a heated debate. They were not allowed to blurt out thoughtless opinion, but use only facts or statistics to support their side of the debate.  We then shifted our debate to the 1920’s.  Students were to create claims based on evidence and reasoning to support or oppose the movement of the 1920’s. After our traditionalism vs. modernism debate we made connections from the past and related it to present day.

Cantu - Using Questions to Make Thinking Visible

9th grade students reflected on an essential question, “Did the Republican Era of the 1920’s bring peace and prosperity to all Americans?”  Students worked in small groups to generate ideas on events that did or did not contribute to peace and prosperity.  Groups noticed events could fall in both categories.  Students were able to build on each other’s ideas and considered different viewpoints.  We reconnected as a whole group and I wrote responses on the board.  Finally, using a claim and evidence, students reflected on the essential question and generated their own individual thoughts.

Challenge 1: Student Generated Questions

In 8th grade ELA, we have been working the skill of how to write different types of questions. The question types we focused on are close-ended ("right there") questions, open-ended questions, connection questions, and theme/core questions. After reading a short story, students generate these different types of questions in connection with the story, and then share them with a small group to understand the story on multiple levels. They then use this same skill when reading their own independent novels, and later share them with their small group that is reading the same novel. Close-ended questions address the surface level thinking of describing what's there; open-ended questions can use a variety of different thinking processes like wondering or uncovering complexity; connection questions help students build their critical thinking with different types of connections; theme questions use capture the heart thinking to get to the core of a story.

The following day, we use questioning to understand the author's purpose with the use of different writer's craft (repetition in particular, but also simile, metaphor, personification, hyperbole, etc.). Students identify a writer's craft the author used. They then ask questions about why the author used that particular writer's craft, and draw conclusions about the author's intent/message based on their questioning.

When students form questions, they need to think a lot deeper about the text then when answering questions provided to them. When discussing more complex questions with others, they understand different aspects of the story, the connection to our world, and the message(s) at the heart of it all, which leads to more concrete comprehension. In forming their own questions, they better understand the process of reading comprehension - that it is not something that usually clicks on the first reading, but instead takes a great deal of thinking and discussion before coming to the core meaning.

Sacco and Vanzetti Essay

For this lesson I asked students to give reasoning for an opinion using evidence. Co-Taught History completed a trial organizer as they assumed the role of a jury member in the clemency hearing for Sacco and Vanzetti. Students gathered facts related to the case and the initial trial and logged them into a t-chart separated by facts that hurt and helped the two's clemency appeal. Once the students finished gathering the evidence, they were asked to pick two facts which they believed pointed to them being granted or denied clemency. Finally students wrote a short essay using the ClEaR format, paying special attention to how they reasoned their presented evidence in favor or against clemency. Students then were able to share their decisions with the class in discussion.

Challenge 1

During our water safety lesson I had students think about the following questions:  What would you have done differently?  Why do you think the person did what they did?
They than watched a short video about three young men who had died on the West side of the state in unfortunate accidents.  Once the video was over I asked the students to answer the questions aloud.
I think the fact that I asked the questions before the video made them think more while watching the video instead of just watching.  They gave very thoughtful answers that then prompted other questions and comments from classmates.  I would not let them just give yes no answers and asked them why they felt this way, from there they gave more in depth reasoning.

Challenge 1

Over the past few years, Clarkston Math has focused on digging deeper, math practices, and student discourse in the classroom - not just the old-school "answer".  Each and every day, I try to focus on "Reasoning with Evidence" from the Understanding Map; when we discuss an exercise and possible solution paths, we always inject "why do you think so" or "what makes you say that" questions.  Our Visibile Thinking work and Professional Challenges are a chance for me to re-invigorate the way my classroom discussions run.  It is challenging to keep 34 students engaged and interested in Algebra 1 discussion, BUT it is essential ... so I'll keep at it.

Challenge #2

I had my students reflect on a print advertisement as part of the argumentation unit which focuses on how advertisers use argument to sell their product.  After analyzing several print ads in class, students had to find their own ad and analyze the difference between the actual words used in the ad and the actual picture compared to the perceived value of the product.  Each group then made a copy of the chosen ad and placed it in the center of a big sheet of paper.  Together, they examined the parts of the ad identifying the who, what, where, when, why, how, and stated the claim, evidence, and the argument being made.  I think by working as a group and including this information on a poster it not only made their thinking visible but also gave them a chance to hear other ideas that they maybe had not thought of.  Several groups had students who came up with completely different interpretations of the same ad.