Deeper Reading: Comprehending Challenging Texts, 4-12 by Kelly Gallagher

Author:Kelly Gallagher [Gallagher, Kelly]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Stenhouse Publishers
Published: 2003-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Accountability

Students in groups work better when they are held accountable for their collaboration. Accountability can be applied to individuals as well as groups.

Individual accountability occurs when each student in the group has to produce a product—for example, one student takes notes on interesting vocabulary; a second student shares written responses to the most interesting passages; a third student comes up with a metaphor for the passage. Sometimes students have the same job. For example, I may ask students to keep a record of their discussion, including bulleted items to represent the input of every student in the group. Instead of one person’s keeping a master sheet, every student is required to keep his or her own set of notes.

Remember the story “Love” from Chapter 2, where I asked students to search for the foreshadowing of Miss Vera Brown’s death? In a group situation, my instructions might be as follows: “Now that you have uncovered evidence of foreshadowing, get in your groups and share ideas. Create a master list with as much evidence as possible. Among the three of you, how much foreshadowing can you uncover? You have nine minutes before your group will be asked to share your findings with the rest of the class. Everyone in the group will turn in his or her own list, even if they are identical to your teammates’. I will choose each group’s presenter at random, so make sure everyone in the group is prepared to share. John, before we begin, explain the directions back to me … Good. Let’s get started.”

Group accountability occurs when the group as a whole produces one product. For example, I may put students in groups and give each group one overhead pen and one overhead transparency. I will then give them seven minutes to symbolically represent the main character in Chapter 3 on the transparency. Even though the group is producing a single product, each member is held accountable because they know that they will be required to share their group’s work, and they also know that the person selected to stand in front of the class to do so will be chosen at random. When randomly choosing who will speak for each group, I may use one of the following criteria to determine the presenter:

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