Kuunari

A year ago I read the book A Close Look at Close Reading: Teaching Students to Analyze Complex Texts, Grades K-5 by Barbara Moss, Diane Lapp, and Maria Grant. This book was disappointing, never naming race or rarely discussing multilingual learners. It did explain what close reading is clearly, and as a tool, it has it’s place in a complete language arts classroom. I’ll be posting the essays for the next 11 weeks on Tuesday.

As a fourth grade general education teacher, I am tasked with providing comprehensive instruction in a wide variety of topics and subjects. There are few as important as oral and written communication. Students must develop their own voice in both writing and speaking while also being able to efficiently and effectively convey their ideas to others in many different contexts. This is an area that is a passion for me, and while there are always ways to continue to grow in my teaching, it is an area of strength and my students typically perform well in oral and written communication.

  The book A Closer Look at Close Reading, Grades K-5, introduces the concept of code switching through the term language registers, but views ELL students and children of non-college educated parents as being deficient in formal or academic register language. Code switching is the term to describe the ability of students from non-dominant backgrounds to be able to switch their language usage from their home language usage, or casual register, to a more formal register when the situation calls for it.

In addition, ELL students, or multi-language developing students, are gaining the skill of communicating in multiple languages. Both of these skills require higher-order language and communication skills, and need to be celebrated and enhanced within the classroom. One way that I do that is to encourage students to convert my “academic” language to “kid-friendly” language.

As students develop their comfort level in my classroom, they begin to bring in more casual register language, thereby helping themselves and their classmates to make the strong connections needed to be able to code switch effectively in the real world. 

The book also describes a number of activities like partner talk and sentence stems that are a key component of the reading curriculum used in my school, Making Meaning. These supports are used daily within the curriculum to help the students develop their ability to discuss orally texts using academic language.

An activity I would like to try that was suggested by the authors is the Socratic Circle. I have tried using the socratic method with my students in the past, but find that the questions quickly get nonsensical. Through the supports of having students use texts to drive their questions and students writing down notes throughout the activity, the Socratic circle can enhance the students understanding through inquiry and student-directed questioning. As students grow in their ability to ask questions, I often find that they ask questions that are more probing and engaging than I am. 

My writing instruction includes daily writing time with multiple opportunities for the students to write pieces that are opinion, narrative, and informative/explanatory. My classroom utilizes a modified writers’ workshop model to allow the students a chance to write multiple pieces on topics both related to our studies and also of their own interest.

At the same time, I want to incorporate more inquiry/exploratory writing about text. I have started having my students write their thoughts down before sharing with a partner to allow more students a chance to think and grapple with a question or topic inspired by a text before we start to discuss it. I find that this allows all my students to develop their own thoughts before one student’s ideas begin to drive the conversation about the text.

I get more engagement and more voices willing to share their ideas when I give them a chance to write and think about the text before we have a class discussion. I also thought the GIST activity would be valuable for my students. My fourth graders struggle to make concise summaries of what they read, and by forcing them to limit themselves to 20 words, they will be more considerate about their word choice.