One of the goals this year is to have our students use a variety of texts in each class. In September, according to our school walk-through data, 50 of the 96 documented classrooms used some sort of text. In those 50 classrooms, there were only 12 documented types of text, from math word problems to textbooks to novels. What our goal is is to push ourselves beyond the texts you expect to see in your class and try some new things.
In history classes, you often see students reading in their textbook or short stories. But what about drawing inferences from a picture? Making historical connections to a cartoon strip? A picture is text. A cartoon is text. Text doesn't mean just words in a book.
In math classes, students have texts as word problems, data tables, and charts. Can they read a newspaper article and answer math questions from it? Can they memorize a math equation from a song?
In science, students could read a short science fiction story and discuss what is scientifically fiction in the story. Or watch a short movie clip and comment on the science behind what happened in the clip.
Your goal is to try a new type of text in your classroom by November 6th. When you do, tweet it to me @ktorzalaWN. Then I will post all the awesome things we are all doing in this blog after that!
What can you try today?
Does this include the type of "text" students are producing in our classes?
ReplyDeleteFor instance, students in Physics and Core Physics are currently working on a RAFT (Role, Audience, Format, Topic) project in which they use physics to back up claims related to the dangers of distracted driving. The FORMAT of their project could be either an *informative poster* OR a *written letter*, but it needed to be created from the viewpoint of their ROLE and relate to their chosen AUDIENCE. I have never had students write letters before, simply because we focus a lot of attention on leaving out information that doesn't directly relate to the claim. Now that students are adding emotional stories and statistics into the mix, the text is much different than what we normally interact with in physics.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete