Probing Questions from my Critical Friends Group

I'm lucky enough to have an amazing critical friends group at my school that is focused on looking at how we might adapt a Reading Workshop model to fit the needs of English Learners. I shared my initial video data with them this afternoon, and they came up with these probing questions:

- What kinds of support in other academic areas might give students a chance to practice dialogue that's authentic?

- The students seem ready to think more deeply about character. What do you plan to have students look at/pay attention to in order to understand them?

- Based on the units you have taught thus far, how would you like to hear students sharing with reading partners?

- How can we ask students to hold their partners accountable for sharing on topic? What do they need? What do they do to keep the dialogue going when they are out of ideas?

- What are students thinking, doing, comprehending when reading independently? How do we know? How do we know what they know? How can partners elicit those responses?

Where I am now, and next steps

Think sheet – 10/06/12

1. Who do you think you might want to have has a focal student? What criteria will you use to choose your focal students? (Some teachers like to choose one high achieving student and two or three of their basic or below basic students.)

I’m interested in looking at sets of reading partnerships. Jesus/Diego and Erika/Abel are both representative pairs in terms of their reading level (low for the grade level, but representative of my class) and their language proficiency (all language learners at intermediate or early advanced stages of language development). I’m wondering if it would be a good idea to look at a high achieving partnership as well — maybe Julio and Danitza?

2. How would you know what is happening for your focal students? What are you doing now that would make student thinking/ student understanding visible?

I’m interested in investigating what it would take to raise the level of discourse in students’ talk about their reading: moving them from taking turns retelling to engaging in analytical, interpretive dialogue. Major opportunities to talk about reading include sharing time with same-level reading partners at the end of independent reading time each day, conversations in book clubs, and whole-class conversations about our read aloud.

3.  What data did you bring today? What does the data tell you about what is happening for your focal student? Pick one focal student’s work to consider.

For today, I videotaped two different reading partner conversations after independent reading time.

Jesus/Diego:

Jesus begins by retelling what he read today. Diego asks, “What do you mean…?” Jesus clarifies, continues retelling. As he finishes, there’s a short pause, and then Diego begins retelling what he read. Jesus asks several questions: “What is her name? What is the cat’s name? Where are they getting married?” He asks one “why” question: “Why did the cat run away?” Diego explains. There’s a short pause as Diego finishes, and then Jesus adds on to his retelling of his own book (no transition). Diego listens, and as Jesus finishes, Diego adds on to his own retelling. (Again, no transition).

It seems as though these students are successfully using this sharing time to clarify their understanding of what they read. They seem to understanding that a good partner share involves asking your partner questions, but their questions are primarily informational clarifying questions. The only evidence of interpretive, analytical talk is when Jesus asks why the cat ran away, and Diego infers to answer. Aside from this example, their talk is limited to retelling. They don’t seem to know how to move from initial retelling into a shared dialogue that supports the development of bigger ideas—I’m not sure if they even would identify that as a goal.

4. If you had the opportunity to ask this focal student a question about their learning what would it be?

I'd want to know what they understand about what a good conversation about reading looks like. I might ask, "How do you know if someone is good at doing a partner share with their reading partner?"

5. What are you thinking now?

I'm thinking that I'll need to create a rubric of what high-level student talk about reading looks like. The rubric will need to address the continuum of retelling --> interpretation, as well as the continuum of "parallel talk" to a dialogue in which both partners listen and build on each other's ideas. A rubric like this would allow me to have consistency in my data and measurement across the year by periodically videotaping my focal students' partner conversations and scoring them. 

I'm hoping to get help from critical friends at my school to think about what high level dialogue about reading would look like. I've been inspired by video of student book club conversations that I saw at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project Institute I went to this summer; this video might be a starting place.  

 

6. What are the next steps?

Design my rubric, score my baseline data, think about what specific teaching points I'll teach toward next.