Flexible Grouping Strategies: Part 1

This semester, one of our school focuses is upon flexible grouping strategies. Prior to the kids returning to school, we had half a day of professional learning focused on different types of groups and grouping strategies to use in the classroom to meet the needs of all students. The expectation was for us to immediately implement what we learned. So I am jumping to it as I am always up to a challenge. 

All teachers have also been expected to readdress class and school rules this week, especially those that have been trouble spots for us this school year. Most teachers have been giving students handouts and having conversations about them. Not me! We are writing skits that we are going to film and share. 

For the latter half of the first semester, I had not rearranged my student groups. Today, I found a lesson in which to incorporate the flexible grouping strategies. At the beginning of the school year, I used a grouping strategy using play cards. Today's strategy was a variation of that one:

• Desks were arranged in groups of four. 
• On each desk, I taped a playing card suit.
• For each group, I taped a card number (9, 10, J, Q, K, A).
• As students arrived at class, they choose a playing card. 
• Students found their assigned number and suit, creating random groups. 

The card suits were for this particular strategy. The A/B signs are for a partnering activity.

Although there was some initial grumbling about who was working with whom, I only had one group out of five classes that struggled to find a working relationship. Everyone else took a few minutes to find their groove, and once they got started, some great ideas started pouring forth. I am anxious to see where we end up with the final products next week. 

Writing - How Data is Changing My Instruction

I have been fortunate (or unfortunate, depending on your viewpoint) to be involved in numerous programs and committees in my district that keep me informed about district and school strengths and weaknesses. I am the lead for my school literacy initiative and our ESL program and also work with these programs at the district level. I am part of my school leadership team, a group that works to set instructional and student goals. This year, I was invited to participate in a district committee that looks at district and school data. The point of this brief resume is to show that I am fully aware of my district and school needs, and within the past few weeks, a great deal has come to light in a new way. I have had to shift gears in regard to how I teach and how I model my instruction. 

Our eighth-grade English curriculum has focused heavily on reading and less on writing for the past few years. As we (the teachers) become more educated in how to understand and use student data, we have started to balance more writing into our instruction. I feel like teaching writing is much more my area of expertise than reading will ever be, but with limited time for writing instruction, I have to admit that I have truly glossed over the writing process for the past few years. 

For the past couple of weeks, my students have been working on an essay about teens cheating on schoolwork (see NY Times writing springboard). I had my kids using a generic expository graphic organizer to create an opening sentence (thesis) with three reasons for their viewpoint and three supporting details per reason. I chose an organizer that I have used in prior ESL training to best meet the needs of my student population. I created my own example and modeled how to create each part. 

While this was occurring in my classroom, I had a meeting with my principal and instructional coaches. We were having a conversation about what is missing in teacher instruction and came to the conclusion that teachers are modeling, but we are not modeling our thinking and metacognitive strategies effectively. Teachers show how to do something, but we are not necessarily conducting a thorough think-aloud to show the students the thinking process and inquiry involved in the work being done. 

Shortly after that meeting, I had an expository writing workshop to attend that provided some new strategies that I immediately brought to class and applied with more thorough instruction and modeling of my thinking. Here is what changed:

• I had my students analyze the reasons and supporting details that they created to determine if they had facts, personal experiences, and/or references (this piece was presented to us for planning, but I was already on the flip side of that). The kids also decided that we needed to identify commonplace assertions. I conducted a think-aloud, deliberately asking questions of myself and expressing the steps I took in sorting through my own ideas. Although it was not a thoroughly planned think-aloud, I do feel like I made progress in making my invisible thinking visible. 
• References were new to my students, and this provided them with an option for making revisions after discovering they had too many facts and personal experiences. Students who lacked personal experiences suddenly had more information to include in their writing. 
• We used a four-question technique to determine what information needed to be included in our paragraphs. Without this, students were simply copying over their reasons and supporting details without any additional thought. I again conducted a think-aloud on how to answer these questions to build a paragraph, rather than just modeling my writing. 
• What point am I trying to make?
• What details support my point?
• How can I show this? or Why is this important?
• How do these ideas connect back to my thesis?
• Another step with the questions was to color code our work to show the thought process. For each question answered within the paragraph, students had to use a different color to ensure that they were actually including all necessary information. 

I still feel like I have a long way to go to provide writing instruction of the quality that I used to when teaching it independently, and working in more focused and specific think-alouds is definitely challenging (and you will hear more about it as I read through Jeffery Wilhelm's Improving Comprehension with Think Aloud Strategies). As adults, it is amazing that we know as much as we know, and it is not very easy to verbalize all of that in order to help students learn how to think on their own. 

Comprehension Processing Questions with videos

A few weeks ago, I wrote a short post about using Comprehension Processing Questions. I was asked for some follow-up information, so here is follow-up number one (yes, there is even more to come). 

I teach at an incredibly diverse school. Because we are in Texas, we tend to focus on our Spanish-speaking population, but we have students and families here from all over the world - Vietnam, Nigeria, Middle Eastern countries, South American countries. 

We are moving into a unit on expository text, and our first reading set is about immigrants and the challenges they face. Although some of my kids have a great deal of background knowledge in this area, some have none. So I searched for a video to help, and I ran across this: 

Although it had not come up in my summer training, I wanted to give my students something to focus on with this video. I created a Comprehension Processing Question to guide them: What do immigrant parents give up when moving to the United States? We discussed the question, and I clicked play. 

At first, my kids starting making notes in response to the CPQ, but I noticed that their pencils were being put down very quickly. I sat back and watched, wondering what was happening. As soon as some of my students started getting teary, I declared victory. I had, as the kids say, put my students all up in their feelings. That moment was worth so much more than their responses to the CPQ. 

We did, however, watch the video a second time in order to answer the question. My kids were able to discuss - in detail - what they had heard in the video. I do not show many videos in my class, but this certainly added value to what I was attempting to do with my lesson. 

Up next - CPQ with expository text. Stay tuned. 

Spelling Madness

Yesterday was yearbook picture day for my middle schoolers. Because the length of time needed for each class to be photographed varies based on how many other classes are waiting, I was improvising time fillers upon each return to class - organize binders, work on homework, new seating charts. 

One of my classes is fifteen minutes longer than the rest due to our lunch schedule. We took pictures, then came back to class and created our new seat assignments - and I still had thirty minutes left. On a whim, I issued a spelling challenge that worked far better than I expected. 

I had my students take out an index card, and I gave them five words to spell: Wednesday, February, library, university (student requested word), and pneumonia (just for fun). I then called individual students up to the board who thought they spelled the word correctly. If that student was wrong, she/he called on someone else to come up and correctly spell the word. 

I was not expecting the madness that followed. My kids were raising their hands, pleading to be called upon, and jumping up and down.They were determined to show their classmates that they knew something. We do not conduct formal spelling lessons at this stage so having students get excited about spelling is like encountering the Northern Lights. But now that I know it is a way to sneak in spelling, I am certainly going to have to do it again. 

Kagan Remixed

I am very fortunate to receive numerous opportunities for training in my district, but somehow, Kagan training has always bypassed me. That does not mean I will allow myself to be left out, however. I have grabbed bits and pieces here and there, and I use them in my classroom legally or illegally, gosh darn it! 

My favorite strategy to use is Stand Up - Hand Up - Pair Up. I like for my students to get up and move (because who wants to sit on a hard chair for seven hours a day), plus it gives them a chance to talk to different classmates. I can also incorporate reading,writing, listening, and speaking in one strategy, addressing the needs of my English language learners. 

from Cooperative Learning

For some reason, my eighth graders are not into the Hand Up part of the routine. So I have put my own spins on the strategy:

• Remix #1: Speed Friending
• This concept is similar to speed dating. The kids mix-and-mingle, like they would at a social gathering, sharing their work with different students. They have to communicate with three different people and make it "home before curfew." I call curfew two times. The first time, the kids are expected to wrap up and head back to their seats. The second time, they get "threatened" with grounding (and for some reason, they found this highly amusing). 
• Remix #2: Dah Club
• We are still doing the same thing, but I set the scene as a dance party. It's easy to turn on some music while kids are moving around. I even pull out some of my corniest dance moves and work the room while the students are engaged in their conversations. I am silly to begin with, so this is not out of character for me in the least. 

The strategy works without any revisions, but my students seem to be enjoying it more in the remixed versions. It's easily modifiable for any age group by simply adding a scene - playground, mall, football game. And secretly, I have ulterior motives to develop an Oscar-winning actor at some point in time. 

Comprehension Processing Question (CPQ) - Fiction

This summer, I was introduced to a simple little strategy that has completely changed the way I have been teaching this year: the Comprehension Processing Question (or C.P.Q.). With one question, I was able to hand over much more responsibility to my students and take a lot of pressure off myself. 

My students struggle tremendously with making inferences. For many, many years of my teaching career, I pre-loaded all the information kids needs in regard to this topic: definition, parts, Total Physical Response moves, props... But not anymore. 

This year, as we sat down to read our first story, I gave my students a C.P.Q. to guide their reading and annotations. Our beginner question: What do we learn about the protagonist? That's it. Short. Sweet. To the point. 

I had my students write this question at the top of their story. Next, they worked in small groups to read the story, making notes in the margin that answered the C.P.Q. When called back together for quick checks, I learned that my students were making inferences without that academic-ness of the concept wearing them down. Once they finished reading and annotating, I went back and discussed how they were already professional inference makers. 

We were also able to transfer their responses to the C.P.Q. to characterization. With a minimal amount of teacher presentation, my students were able to sort through their notes to find both direct and indirect characterization about our protagonist. 

I am excited to continue using this process and providing more complex questions. We read a poem after our short story, and I should have used it then. This is a genre with which my kids struggle, and I had not considered using the C.P.Q. until after finishing the lesson. Next poem, it's on! 

Right now, my focus is incorporating the C.P.Q. into non-fiction reading and training my students to create a question on their own when reading independently. 

Getting to know you: Super Empowered Student

In addition to getting to know my students during the first week of school, I wanted my new kids to get to know themselves. I know some kids are always going to be quiet (I was one of them), and I want those students, in particular, to understand that they have a voice in my classroom, that they have something to contribute. I also hate seeing kids get stuck in a rut from one year to the next. Once I moved from teaching seventh grade to eighth grade, I realized how important it was for every student to be granted a fresh start full of new opportunities. So a lesson I was given this summer jumped out at me as a great way to communicate this to my incoming students. 

One of the activities I received from  AVID Summer Institute Culturally Relevant Teaching session I attended is Super Student. Super Student allows kids to examine what empowerment means, discuss people of various groups whom we empower, then find their own personal empowerment. We then use those ideas to create our super hero versions of ourselves: SuperYOU. 

I provided the kids with two separate super hero templates, plus gave my artistic students the opportunity to create their own from scratch. My new students were instructed to pick five skills or tools that they have or use in real life, then magnify those into super powers. For example, I use my super power of engagement strategies to draw my students into lessons without them ever realizing that they are actually learning (insert evil laugh here). They then had to write a short paragraph describing their skills/traits, providing me with an opportunity to formatively assess their writing skills. 

Here are some examples of what they came up with: 

Initially, many of the kids had a hard time getting started with their super heroes. They struggled to find qualities with which they are empowered. It didn't take too long, though. I only spent two days on this in class, and every student ended up with a SuperYOU. 

At the end of the week, I asked what their favorite activity had been. Many choose the Super Student: 

I looked through most of these assignments at the nail salon while my daughter got her mani/pedi. A woman sat down next to me, peeking at my papers.

"Do you teach first grade?" she asked. 

"No," I giggled. "I teach eighth graders."

I am not sure if the woman was simply shocked or disgusted, but her reaction was far from positive either way. Unlike her, I am very proud of the personal empowerment that my new students discovered about myself, and I cannot wait to use this lesson again in future years.