Upper level Strategies-Pt 2

Our Monday lunch presentation with Stephen Krashen was a little strange, so I'll blog about all of that later, after I get a chance to see the man in person later tonight...

So back to the upper level strategies.  I have to admit that my brain is turning to mush from so much input, so I'm hoping to get it all down here now before I have to learn more.  One day later, and I'm already having difficulties decoding my notes.

We started with Reading strategies.  The ladies recommend PQA and a story before giving students the story in print.  While you are reading your text, you are pointing out (or asking them to find) structures that have just been taught, linguistics, translations for meaning or for money (as described in the previous blog), ambiguous words that might exist in the TL (ex. to, two, and too in English), and finally, word families.  I had no idea what a word family is, but it's taking a noun, like hair (bad example), and finding the adverb, adjective, or verb that goes with that word.  If you know of a better example, please put it in the comments, because I know they exist, but I can't for the life of me think of any right now.  Mushy brain!

Next, we went back to the weekend activity to move it more into writing.  I touched on this yesterday, but here are some more ideas from Carmen and Lynnette.  First, have students write about their weekends instead of doing it as an oral task.  Lynnette says that the first time she does this with classes, she checks in with them afterwards.  "What was hard about this?  What did you want to say that you didn't know how to say?" and she answers the questions, writing needed structures on the board.  Then, she has them do the writing a second time (without looking at their first writing), with the aid of the board.  After this, she has them exchange papers with a partner and the partner finds one really good thing in the paper and corrects one mistake.  They give back the papers, teacher answers any new questions, and they do the writing a third time (still without looking at the previous writing).  After this one, Lynnette collects the papers and grades them.  I love this idea of scaffolding the writing so that the students are engaged in writing and EVERY student makes progress.  If they started with one sentence, I'm betting that they are writing more than that the third time.  It's genius because it allows each student to focus on what THEY can do better the next time.  If they aren't ready to check for agreement between subject and past participle, they don't work on that yet. (I think Bryce gave me that word on moreTPRS a few weeks ago).  Great stuff.

Now, when grading writing, both Carmen and Lynnette say that they don't usually correct for errors.  IF they do, they say to only correct 10 errors because that way each student is equal.  They start by focusing on the errors that hinder comprehension and that should be internalized and then move to smaller errors if they still "need" more errors to get to ten.

In this session, there was a lot of encouragement of metacognition by the students.  Carmen uses a reflection sheet so that each student reflects on what they are putting into class, how that is reflected by what they are learning, and what the student can do in the future to get better.  I am definitely going to be doing some sort of reflection in the future.

The last two nuggets that I got from this session don't really fit with the title, but I will put them here:

• Lynnette had a brilliant insight.  She asks students to imagine themselves at 35 with the life they want.  Then she asks, "When you are there, what would you pay to have someone teach you?"  Think about this.  As an adult, I would never choose to learn calculus.  I would never pay for a biology class for entertainment.  But I will pay for cooking classes, language classes, and the arts classes.  It's amazing that we are the bottom of the totem pole at school when you think of things like that.
• Also, I found out about the Badass Teacher group on facebook.  This is for teachers who don't believe that schools are failing, who don't believe that today's kids are horrible, and who don't believe that teachers are only in it for the summers off.  These are teachers with a fire in their hearts for students and who take offense to being the butts of jokes and the scapegoat for an invisible problem.  So I joined.  If you consider yourself a Badass Teacher, I invite you to join too!