eBook - ePub
30 Big-Idea Lessons for Small Groups
The Teaching Framework for ANY Text and EVERY Reader
Michael J. Rafferty, Colleen A. morello, Paraskevi Rountos
This is a test
Share book
- 248 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
30 Big-Idea Lessons for Small Groups
The Teaching Framework for ANY Text and EVERY Reader
Michael J. Rafferty, Colleen A. morello, Paraskevi Rountos
Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations
About This Book
30 Big Idea Lessons for Small Groups provides an amazing framework, with a bank of engagement tools, that gets students interacting with texts. Follow this unique 4-part process to develop students’ literal, inferential, evaluative, and analytical skills:
- Engage: Before Reading Students use a tactile tool like a topic card or a pyramid
- Discuss: During Reading Students read and mark up a short text
- Deep-See Think: After Reading Students re-read and revise their interpretations together
- Connect: After Reading Students begin to transfer their understandings to other texts
Frequently asked questions
How do I cancel my subscription?
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlegoās features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan youāll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, weāve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is 30 Big-Idea Lessons for Small Groups an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access 30 Big-Idea Lessons for Small Groups by Michael J. Rafferty, Colleen A. morello, Paraskevi Rountos in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Bildung & Bildung Allgemein. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Chapter 1 Big-Idea Groups Scaffolded Reading Instruction Where Engagement Rules
Do we really need another approach to small-group reading instruction? After all, we can choose from literature circles, book clubs, guided reading, and strategy groupsāto name a few. As I began to write this book, what kept me saying, āYes, teachers do need this twist weāve been using in Connecticut schools,ā is that the lesson framework we share gets us back to the core reason we read anything: to better understand life and the big questions within it. And it gets us back to the core reason we teach: because each lesson helps students approach reading a text with a little more engagement, confidence, and collaboration than occurs with many other small-group protocols.
Colleen, Paraskevi, and I teach in Connecticut, in the luminous shadow of the famous aviation engineer Igor Sikorsky, who designed the first helicopter and lived in nearby Stratford. He once said, āWhatever contribution I have been able to make to aeronautics has been a product of diverse intellects working together in freedom and harmonyā (Calhoun & Knapp, 2004, p. 37). Iāve always admired that quote, because freedom and harmony are all too rare in our discussions about teaching readingāperhaps especially the concept of freedom.
When I give professional development workshops, I ask teachers, āAs you think about your own classroom, how much freedom of thought do your students have in the day?ā
Do their students have opportunities to
- ā Take risks in response to texts?
- ā Engage in inventive thinking about what an author might be getting at, shaded by their own experiences?
- ā Expect that a book is meant to engage their emotions?
Most teachers shake their heads, no. We are all feeling such pressure to have students comprehend at high levels, but we may be actually creating conditions for students to disengage from reading because weāve overfocused the lens.
A final set of questions to ponder: If we spend the majority of small-group discussion time nose down, attending to what the text says, are we neglecting something important about the reading process? Are we neglecting the reader?
Author Lois Lowry wasnāt asked this question per se, but in her 1994 Newbery Medal acceptance speech for The Giver (1993), she sure does remind us that when it comes to a bookās meaning, the reader matters: āThose of you who hoped that I would stand here tonight and reveal the ātrueā ending, the ārightā interpretation of the ending, will be disappointed. There isnāt one. Thereās a right one for each of us, and it depends on our own beliefs, our own hopes.ā
In big-idea lessons, students figure out what the text says and means, and do all the interpretive, evaluative, and critical response work of best practice, but what sets this approach apart is that it builds in more room for students to bring their own personal beliefs and hopes into the response process. It embraces the transactional theory of reading, and as explained in this chapter, we have designed interactions with texts that tap both the efferent and aesthetic responses defined by Rosenblatt (1995; Rosenblatt & Progressive Education Association, 1938). Students are given the chance to bring their own aesthetic, personal, and emotional response into discussion from the outset of the lesson design, yet are guided to tether it to universal understandings of concepts like fairness, justice, and love. And when they read a text, they learn to adjust their response to the information and ideas on the page.
We devised the big-idea framework based on the questions teachers often raise about deepening comprehension during book discussion:
- ā How can I see more interaction during small-group reading sessions?
- ā How can I make responding to texts hands-on, literally, for students who need it to be as concrete as possible?
- ā How can I get students to discuss a text with one another and not through me?
- ā How can I encourage deep thinking?
- ā How can I assess my students for thinking across levels of comprehension and levels of thinking?
- ā How can I get students to see the small-group work as a session that links to other parts of the day and night (their independent reading, their homework, their dinner-table talk)?
The Ultimate Goal: Real Student Independence
Behind all these questions is a teacherās desire for students to own more of the learning, something more and more educators are concerned about. There seems to be a groundswell of voices around this issue of student independence. In her book Mindsets and Moves: Strategies That Help Readers Take Charge (2016), Gravity Goldberg goes so far as to call it an ownership crisis and puts forth a wise first step when she says, āWe have to step back so our readers can step forwardā (p. 2). And sheās right. We all want to witness that āahaā moment, when we see our students are using what weāve taught them on their own, but itās easier said than done.
How do we turn small-group reading sessions into high-spirited discussions among students working together? How do we get students to reach outāsitting on the edge of their seats, fired up with thought and opinions, and fueled by curiosity?
Now Look at Student Independence During Big-Idea Groups
āReading and writing float on a sea of talk,ā educator James Britton famously said in 1970 (p. 164), and we hope that as you look at the following photos, of what my colleagues and I are doing with small-group reading and discussion, you will sense the energy of studentsā talk. See what you notice (or, rather, what you donāt see!).
The students go off to work on their own and hold themselves responsible to the task and ideas.
Four Facets of the Framework
1. The texts are deepāand brief. The first ingredient is a set of carefully selected, brief but theme-rich, stand-alone texts or excerpts from longer works that provide students with sufficient challenge. When I travel to their classrooms, teachers often ask if I can provide them with exciting and discussion-worthy texts. This is where the journey to this new brand of small-group reading groups started for me: In order to be a real resource as a curriculum leader in language arts, I was faced with supplying teachers with engaging texts that would provide sufficient stretch for students. What I found is that discussion-worthy texts are those that are rich in their ideas and invitations to inference. So, as you will see in this book, the texts are often spare, but the thinking around them is always robust. The first one youāll come across in this book? āHumpty Dumpty.ā
2. Students converseābut with the teacher in the wings. What didnāt you see in those photos? The teacher! The teacher is coming on and off stage from the wings, modeling his or her thinking when needed, but the key is that students are asked to think, talk, and ruminate on their ownāeven before they read the text. So the second ingredient is to have students lead their own thinking and reading sessions. Stepping back allows students to take over the task because you trust the ideas youāve put in front of the students. Yes, it is a big measuring cup of collaborative learning, during which students are reading, writing, speaking, and listening, bringing their own selves to bear on the topic, first. The research shows that students learn more deeply when they are engaged in complex tasks that involve collaboration, and peer collaboration is a high-impact practice, meaning that, when implemented well, it brings about a year or more of growth in students (Fisher, Frey, & Hattie, 2016).
3. The conversation starter is highābut low. The teachers I work with always give me an amused, puzzled expression when I mention this ingredient. What I mean is that the sparkāthe initial promptāhas a high degree of reliability for students and a high level of thinking attached to it, but itās low-hanging fruit in that it is accessible and taps into studentsā lived experience and knowledge. For me, the spark happens when we make the discussion more interesting from the get-go, when we dare to lead with a well-considered, debatable idea or topic that can be talked about in advance of the text. In a way, this prereading discussion question helps students do their own frontloading, building peer-to-peer understandings that will be mirrored and refracted by the text the teacher has selected.
4. Students move toward conceptual knowledgeābut with physical tools. The fourth ingredient: concrete, touchable tools so students of any reading level can literally have something to hang onto as they work to grasp abstract textual ideas. My colleagues and I have been bowled over by how much these materials help advanced and striving readers demonstrate how their thinking changes as they read and talk. There should be ideas on the table worth discussingāideas you can literally reach out and touch. Word sorts, graphic organizers, and concept maps all have strong research support (Fisher et al., 2016).
How Big-Idea Groups Fit Within Other Small-Group Models
Big-idea groups are another tool in your toolbox, along with guided reading, close reading, literature circles, book clubs, strategy groups, and the whole-class novelāall choices that we make at different junctures for different reasons, and for different students. Each of these formats offers a different pathway toward the same goal: to have students understand the reading process and use it independently. As a teacher, itās your knowledge of your readers that will guide you in deciding which students need which format when.
A Few Important Frameworks for Reading Closely
We think of big-idea groups as scaffolded, small-group reading instruction, meaning the teacher has carefully choreographed the reading experience. We also would say these groups fall under the umbrella of close reading, if we define close reading as an approach that has been around since Gutenberg invented the printing press and people began poring over pages. That is,...