Ambitious Instruction by Cawn Brad;

Author:Cawn, Brad;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Solution Tree
Published: 2020-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Connecting (Forty-Five to Ninety Minutes)

At first glance it may seem prudent to focus initial student engagement with texts purely on comprehension. Understandably, the problem and the texts may be complex; there may be a lot to read or write or do during the investigation. Our instinct is not wrong in wanting to make sure students get it before going deeper.

But focusing solely on understanding the main ideas of each text, or even just identifying similarities and differences among texts, is not sufficient to enable synthesis (Kobayashi, 2015). Even at the outset of the investigation, our key goal has to be positioning students to move beyond a mere surface or superficial level of the text, or even across texts, and toward higher-order thinking during their reading. Of course, we do want students to understand the gist of the arguments or descriptions that the text provides, but we want them to do so in support of understanding the landscape of the problem they are investigating. Furthermore, we want students to make connections—that is, not merely comprehend content but also begin to draw analytical relationships among ideas and in response to the problem.

To do so, initial engagement with the texts needs to position students to engage in three performances concurrently and flexibly: (1) leveraging what they are learning and applying from previous positioning, (2) reading within and across texts for both literal and inferential purposes, and (3) developing understanding through discussion and consensus building. Given these demands and opportunities, the four-part sequence that follows features a significant amount of chunking of tasks, lots of quick and engaging movement between independent and collaborative activity, and plenty of options in terms of how the teacher or students could choose to tackle the texts.

Note: This component of the task is likely to comprise the most instructional time of any in the sequence; it may extend across multiple periods or days. Of course, time on task here will vary based on the number of texts students will read and their complexity, students’ readiness and familiarity with the content, performance, and so on—it’s an instructional situation–specific decision.

I devised the following four steps that discuss setting up initial engagement.

1. Preview the landscape: Provide students with a macro-, high-level understanding of the texts and investigation by looking quickly and briefly at an element of the content that best conveys the range of ideas and issues students will investigate. This can be the launch text or your nonprint source, assuming either is part of the investigation (you can also reread, if relevant). Most likely, however, you’ll want to grab short excerpts—a quote or a paragraph, say—from each of the texts. The excerpt you select should be the sentences that capture the ideas in the text most compelling to the investigation. With these blurbs, you’ll want to prompt and facilitate students to do two things: (1) be able to restate what each piece is about in their own words and (2) create a quick classification scheme (for example, pro-or-con, common solution or alternative solution) that they can use as a label for each text.

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