Instructing & Engaging
Students in Learning
Lessons from which the clips were recorded
The clips, and resulting learning, discussed here are from the lessons titles “Understanding Identity through The Bear that Wasn't,” the first lesson in the focus series and “Analyzing Propaganda,” the third planned lesson in this series. The clips shown focus mainly on the teacher’s direct instruction during the lessons, but the plans and execution of these lessons included extensive opportunities for students to practice with peers and as individuals. Student work samples are provided within the video as evidence of teacher-student interactions, evidence of student learning during the lesson, and teacher feedback.
Engaging Students in Learning
The first lesson featured in the video engaged students in several different ways. The entry points to the lesson, the first activity (listing as many traits of a bear as possible) and the teacher’s model (an identity chart for the main character from a shared class text, The Bear That Wasn’t), were both appropriately accessible to students. All students were able to generate a list of words that could describe a bear and the teacher helped to further motivate students by rewarding the student with the longest list with a piece of candy. The very beginning of the first video clip (00:18) shows the results of this exchange. The content the teacher used to create the model (03:25) (First French Kiss and Other Traumas) was also accessible to students, because the class had discussed the text and featured character in-depth throughout the school year and students generally enjoy the text. Both of these activities also helped to link the students’ prior knowledge (knowledge of identity traits, understanding of traits assigned to a bear, a deep understanding of a previously studied character) with the new content they were learning in this lesson.
The content of the lesson itself also kept students engaged. As young adolescents, the 7th and 8th grade students taught in the video are generally engaged by content that wrestles with identity and personal definitions. Many students could identify with the bear’s plight of confused identity and all students quickly engaged in the independent practice activity in which they got to make identity charts of themselves, as can been seen by the examples in the video (4:02).
Additionally, the new tool (identity chart) students were provided with in the first video helps them organize explicit and implicit information about a character that they gained from a close reading of the text. Specifically, students are better able to understand a character’s motivations (e.g., why the character used in the model picks fights at school, why the Bear fights back against his superiors) as well how a character’ s perceptions of themselves change over time (e.g., a character is told he is unintelligent so many times he begins to believe it) as well as how a character’s appearance to others changes over time (e.g., a character moves from an unpopular clique to a popular one). The increased understanding, especially of complex characters and stories, may be a motivator for students in itself, or may make many pieces of literature generally more approachable, and therefore engaging.
The second lesson featured in the video took advantage of visual media (posters and advertisements) to engage students. The students featured in this analysis were generally extremely engaged by the visual media presented, in part because of the change of pace and in part because of the “quick” accessibility of the images. Although the analysis of these visual images often took as long or longer than other literature analysis techniques students have used this school year, the visual nature of the task means students can often “start working,” writing down things, synthesizing ideas fairly quickly, and that factor seemed to provide motivation.
This lesson also connected to students’ prior knowledge through the media presented as well as explicitly through the PowerPoint presentation that preceded the teacher’s modeling of propaganda analysis. The teacher purposefully used a combination of images that were fairly unfamiliar to students (mainly U.S. World War II era propaganda) and images that would likely be familiar to students (modern political campaign advertisements, commercial advertising) to engage students and make the content accessible and relevant. Students’ background knowledge was also directly referenced in a PowerPoint presentation (found here) created by the teacher specifically to review students’ prior knowledge of persuasion techniques and relate that understanding to their new understanding of identity.
Deepening Student Learning During Instruction
The content of the first lesson featured here, the concepts of self-assigned and other-assigned identity and the visual arrangement of the identity chart, was taught specifically to help students interpret complex texts and visual images. The lesson was purposefully constructed to ensure that students had a deep understanding of the distinction between self- and other-assigned identities and could apply those concepts, via an identity chart, in a variety of contexts. The teacher planned instruction so that students generated a list of unorganized traits (00:22), then were exposed to an organized (by other- and self-assigned traits via identity chart) group of traits create by the teacher (2:03), then had the opportunity to organize traits with peer support (3:40), and finally to organize traits individually (4:03). Later in the unit students successfully used the identity chart to more meaningfully understand “Those Who Don’t” from The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. (student work from this task can be seen here).
As students were being instructed in the use of the identity chart organization system the teacher explicitly asked them to reference source material in several different ways. Most directly the teacher explicitly asked for text references to support each descriptive word students added to the class identity chart for the bear from The Bear That Wasn’t (3:40). When students were creating identity charts for themselves (4:30) students were encouraged to talk to peers (one of the “source texts” for this activity) about how they view one another and incorporate those feedbacks into their discussions. Students were also encouraged to explain their use of certain descriptive terms through informal conversations with the teacher.
Student interpretation of the visual images used in the second lesson featured here, and throughout the unit, was primarily facilitated through the use of the propaganda analysis sheet whose use is being modeled in the video (4:38). The questions included on this analysis sheet (seen here) move from basic identification tasks to higher order thinking questions that ask students to consider why an image was created and what effect the image could have potentially had on viewers. The questions in the analysis sheet further facilitate deep analysis of images by explicitly asking students to support their thinking with information from the image (e.g. “Provide specific evidence from the image to support your ideas,” “Explain”). The teacher further facilitated understanding of the analysis sheet and concepts it explored by extensively modeling its use (4:38), by giving students repeated opportunities to use the propaganda analysis sheet, with peers (17:56) and individually (18:22), and by providing feedback to students in writing and verbally during instruction.
Evidence of Academic Language
In both of the lessons featured in this video there were several instances in which the teacher purposely supported students’ uses of academic language, and several occasion in which students were able to use specific academic language without extensive support. In the first lesson the teacher specifically references “thick adjectives.” (00:51) Although not traditional academic language, the terms “thick” and “thin” are use extensively in academic conversation in this classroom. The resident teacher and mentor teacher specifically taught students these terms to scaffold conversations about terms, questions, analysis, and conversations that require higher order thinking and synthesis (thick) versus basic understanding and knowledge reiteration (thin). In the video the teacher clearly used the term without a need to explain or explicitly check for understanding. According to students’ eagerness to participate (see in hand raising at 00:53) and individual student responses (00:53 – 1:15) the class understood the term. Students also demonstrated an inherent understanding of the term characteristics throughout the video by continuing on with the activity without a need for clarification and by providing characteristics of a bear as the teacher had asked.
In the second lesson shown in the video there was a much greater need for explicit academic language instruction. At the very beginning of the video (4:58) the teacher explicitly delivers instruction on the word caricature. It seemed that, from preceding conversations with the class shown and other sections of students, in general student had little to no knowledge of the word before the teacher’s instruction. However, after the teacher’s explanation, the majority of students were confident in their understanding (6:02). The term “World War II” also proved to be an academic term that required explicit instruction for students. During the PowerPoint presentation that preceded the instruction shown here, the teacher discovered that many students had little or no understanding of what World War II was and so took time to explain the fundamental characteristics of the war and the basic division of allied powers. On the same topic, teacher purposefully, although somewhat informally, aligned the roman number “II” with the English word “two,” (9:04) because she was unsure of students’ familiarity with roman numerals. Students showed no indication that they were not able to process the material because of the teacher’s use of roman numerals. However, not all academic language needed to be explicitly taught to students. Quickly after the discussion of roman numerals students were able to use the term “intended audience” (9:18) without any instruction. Students showed no signs of misunderstanding during the teacher’s initial modeling and were able to repeatedly identify images’ intended audience throughout the unit.
There were also several academic terms that the teacher planned to provide explicit instruction on, particularly several terms drawn from the propaganda analysis sheet. The first instance of this explicit instruction can been seen at 10:50 when a student struggles to read the word “specific.” Although it was unfortunate that this individual student struggled with the pronunciation of this term, the teacher felt the need to obtain a correct pronunciation because the term was so integral to comprehension of the question being reviewed. For the same reason the teacher purposefully reviewed the meaning of “utilize” (15:45) and “mislead” (16:05) because those terms were also extremely important to the students’ understanding of the task (to answer the assigned questions). The teacher purposefully asked students to clarify meaning and to provide synonyms (another academic term used frequently by the teacher and understood by all students) for those words, instead of delivering a definition to students, to give students the opportunity to build upon their own collective background knowledge and assimilate the terms into their vocabulary quickly. By putting more of the cognitive work on students and building on preexisting background knowledge the teacher made it easier for students to quickly assimilate new vocabulary into their understanding.
