12/11/12 Think Sheet: Indicators of Success

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1.     What is the focus of your inquiry and why is this important to you?

What would it take to raise the level of discourse in students’ talk about reading? Students’ oral language development is hugely important, especially for my majority ELL student population. So often I see my kids simply retelling what they read when they talk with their peers about their reading, or engaging in “parallel talk” where they’re not really listening or engaging with each other. The quality of their ideas stays low, because they’re not working together to build stronger thinking. I was inspired by a video of a 5^th grade student book club from the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, in which students were engaging with each other about the ideas in the book at an incredibly deep level.

2.     What classroom data are you planning to use for your routine data source to see how students are (or are not) progressing towards this goal? 

 Field notes and/or video from whole class discussions and book clubs.

3.     Take some time to look at the routine data source for 1-2 focal students.  What would indicate if a student was successful? What were you hoping to see? 

- Over the course of the discussion, students develop high-level ideas: students move beyond summarizing to higher levels of critical analysis

- Students stay on one idea, collectively building on and developing it

- Students embrace disagreement as a way to push their own thinking

- Students engage in the discussion with energy and enthusiasm

- Students consistently refer back to the text to provide support for their ideas

4.     At the end of the year what is the learning goalthat you would like your focal students to reach? 

Students will be able to engage in critical discourse with each other around texts

“The next steps I am going to take are  ….”

I'd like to use the chart that my students made after watching the video to create a rubric that we can use to assess discussions. It would be great to start using this rubric regularly after each whole-class discussion, and to have students ultimately use it to assess their book club discussions. I think it will be really powerful to have the rubric come out of the students' own observations.