Planting Thought Seeds: Using Class Discussion to Support Students’ Short Answer Responses

September 18, 2017

By Travlyn Langendorff As a high school American Literature teacher, Travlyn knew that her students needed to develop their discussion skills. Through collaborative inquiry with her colleagues, she not only deepened her understanding of what it means to engage in substantive discussions, but also made discoveries about her learners, her teaching practice, and herself. Her knowledge gained through inquiry had a direct, positive impact on her students' ability to express their ideas through discussion and writing. “I am a complete idiot,” I thought as I attempted my first experiment in my Mills Teacher Scholars inquiry. “This is never going to work, and I am going to look stupid in front of my new colleagues.” Hired after the school year started, I was invited to join the Mills Teacher Scholars group at my school after my colleagues had already started their inquiries. Eager to make friends and worried that my teaching skills were rusty after a five-year hiatus, I took the plunge. In classic “me” move, I decided to use the inquiry process to take on the most challenging issue of my teaching with my most difficult class: Third Period, or as I thought of them, The Period of Doooooom. The goal? Improve my students’ class discussion skills. So there I was, faced with an 11th-grade American Literature class filled with recently reclassified English Learners, most of whom had already decided to go to continuation school. Several students had 504 plans and some had IEPs. None read or wrote at a high school level, with the exception of one student. I was determined to do a better job of getting these students to have substantive conversations about the texts we were reading. I am a talker, so facilitating class discussion is tough for me as well, as I tend to feel convinced I know a lot more than my kids do. True story: this inquiry taught me otherwise. The Plan As I began to watch videos and read articles, it seemed like the most effective class discussions had a high rate of participation. So at first, to gather data for my inquiry, I just counted the number of students who participated and tallied the number and types of their responses. I tracked group and individual responses and started awarding points for participating. However, after a few months of this counting strategy, my students’ responses were not any more substantive. Then a colleague in my inquiry group asked me a question: What do you mean by substantive?

Tags: Students at the Center
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Two young students talking about a story plan

Arts Integration and Literacy: A Powerful Combination for ELLs

April 26, 2017

Teacher scholar Emily Blossom, OUSD I’ve invited five of my first-grade students to join me for lunch in our classroom. In this group are two native English speakers and three English Language Learners (ELLs), a ratio which is reflective of the school population. We’re sitting at a classroom table, looking at videos taken during the creative dance class we just finished about a half hour ago, taught by a dance educator from the Luna Dance Institute. The kids are excited because they are the stars of the movie they’re watching! I ask them to describe what they see. Liz: I saw Kyle spinning around Zara and he was doing this (gestures with arms wide). Antonio: I see Zara doing a shape and Kyle doing like this (gestures turning and going backwards). Teacher: Now this time, I want you to think as dancers and use dance words. Liz: He’s bowing and spreading his arms wide. Jori: I think that was like a bird. Teacher: Do you think that was what he wanted to do? Can you use any dance words? Jori: Smoothing. Jessica: Loose. Elodie says, “She’s moving like a little slug, like a little caterpillar.” Elodie’s an ELL, and she’s struggling to find the words, but she’s using her body to show the way an inchworm folds itself and then expands forward. The others supply some more ideas: “bursting,” “falling,” “twirling,” “balancing.” When they’re finished eating, we move to the classroom rug and I ask them to show me some of the moves they saw each other making in the video. They happily demonstrate for me, reenacting each other’s creative explorations. I listen to the recording of this lunchtime conversation on my way home. I’m hearing the kids’ processing in a new way, when I have the luxury of not managing the class or thinking about the next step, but just listening to them. While their language is imprecise, they’re noticing details about each other’s dancing that I didn’t appreciate because I was so focused on whether or not they could use the specific vocabulary. I’ve kept these recordings of lunch conversations with my students on my phone for months now, because every time I listen to them, I hear something I hadn’t noticed before. I keep thinking about the value of teaching dance, and the ways that the arts can support a child’s emerging literacy. This is the type of powerful arts integration that I was able to understand and apply in my classroom, thanks to my inquiry with Mills Teacher Scholars --arts integration that I had always supported, but for a long time had not worked to fully leverage.

Tags: Inquiry and Equity
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Meeting the Needs of Struggling High School Students Through Putting Student Voice at the Center

March 1, 2017

As a teacher of struggling readers, I find myself constantly grappling with what to do with my high schoolers who are reading multiple grades below level. They walk in and out of my classroom each day and I see their sense of self as students waver as they are confronted with harder and harder texts. The need to serve them is immediate but also daunting. No two struggling readers seem to have the same need and the research about supporting readers is vast and divergent. In an effort to design the best strategic reading class for 14 incredible students who are challenged by reading each day at my small school in the Fruitvale of Oakland, I leaned on best practices. I had learned about the practice of “Mazes” to support reading comprehension during my Masters program and decided to adopt it as a weekly routine. Mazes are short passages where every 7th word has been omitted. Students then choose the correct word from a choice of three as they read the passage. They have 3 minutes to do so and are measured on their number of correct selections and their words per minute. This provides both the student and the teacher immediate data about silent reading comprehension and fluency. I hoped that weekly practice with this exercise would help them develop their fluency and comprehension and, as they saw their own improvement, develop their confidence in themselves as readers. A few months into the practice I found that students were not seeing growth, nor was I, and collectively we were feeling more and more frustrated around the practice. With my Mills Teacher Scholars facilitator, Jen, I began to think about the forms of data I could collect about the practice in order to gain a better understanding of whether it was helping meet my learning goal for students. She suggested that I provide students more space to reflect on the practice and share with me their own opinions about the plateaued results on the exercise. I decided to embed an additional data source into my routine in the form of a post- Maze reflection that asked students to look closely at their progress. I found myself unsure about how best to serve my students as I read their reflections that were bleeding with frustration. One student wrote, “In my opinion Mazes are not helping my reading because I am still only getting 13 correct answers.” It was answers like these that caused me to dig deeper and turn to the students even more around the routine. The class was for them, and their needs were urgent.

Tags: Students at the Center
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More Than Just Rock, Paper, Scissors: Relationship Skills to Support Mathematical Partnerships

January 26, 2017

Carla, an English learner student who was in the Spanish bilingual program the year before, is working with Jerome, a fairly confident math student. Carla has written down an answer, 783 and explains to Jerome how she got her answer. Jerome, has a different answer on his page: 837. He explains his answer, and here is where an interesting thing happens: Although Carla is correct, she erases her answer, writes down his answer, and they continue working on the second part of the problem. For my inquiry last school year, I chose to explore math partnerships because our math curriculum required students to work together in partners on tasks to solve word problems. At the beginning of the year, I noticed that when I told the students to work together, almost all of them worked on the task individually and hardly talked to or looked at their partner at all. A few students would get into small arguments and then refuse to work together. By mid-year, students seemed to be working together well, but the video data of Carla and Jerome, which I collected to look at with colleagues in our February Mills Teacher Scholars inquiry session, helped me see the complexity of what it really means to help students develop the Social and Emotional skills they need to grapple with content and construct new understandings together.

Tags: Inquiry and Equity
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