For Class March 20

Peer Teach Week 6 (KA): More Questions

KA presenters: Jessica, Josh, and John 

Not all those who wander are lost – JRR Tolkien

Ciardiello’s emphasis on question finding is essential to the idea of teaching through inquiry. Being able to excite your students about a subject through questioning will be one of your ‘ah-ha’ moments in teaching.  When students ask a question that you have not even considered you feel proud and a little shocked; students always manage to rise to the occasion when they are challenged.   Ciardiello’s four levels of questioning are an essential part of understanding how to teach through inquiry: Memory: “Who was the first President?”, Convergent: “How did the presidencies of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson differ?” Divergent: “ If you were president how would you be able to better balance our budget?” Evaluative: “ Defend your position on supporting government run healthcare?”  Thinking back to my days as a student in pubic school I scarcely remember any questioning past convergent. Now even our state standards are requiring a deeper understanding of content using TEI questions; this type of deep understanding can only come from teaching through inquiry and using question finding.  Both strategies suggested by Ciardiello emphasis and foster the concept of ‘deeper thinking’ in the classroom. I also think that the Reciprocal Teaching strategy or ReQuest and the QAR strategy would both work well with Ciardiello’s techniques.

Peer Teach Week 6 (KB): Questions, Questions and More Questions

Questions, Questions and More Questions...

By: Matt and Colleen (KB Session)

            How can we, as educators (or future educators), place more emphasis on student-based questioning?  How can we get students to take their questions beyond obvious answers?  What strategies can we use to help them not only come up with deeper lines of questioning but to be cognizant of their questioning?

            Imagine that you’ve been presented with an image that conflicts with what you already know.  You begin generating questions.  What is clearly understood about this image?  What meanings are imbedded in the image?  What sort of questions do you have?  Do your questions have answers that are concrete, that resolve the conflict?  Are your questions open-ended, without resolution, leading to further inquiry?  Distinguishing between convergent and divergent questioning is a metacognitive skill and one of the goals of this weeks article on “Question Finding” (Ciardiello 2003).  Consider, as well, a text that conflicts with your prior knowledge. Again, you may have questions.  What is the author’s intention?  Has the author made assumptions on your behalf?  Do you have other interpretations of the text?  Can you find meanings different from what is apparent?  Do you find the text misleading?  Where does the search for meaning in our literacy end?  What is the ultimate goal?  These are the kind of questions that generate from a critical text inquiry, and this is the other goal of Ciardiello’s article.

            Ciardiello has presented two strategies for promoting inquiry and critical thinking in classroom: Discrepant Images and Critical Text Inquiry.  Both seek to elicit thinking that is deeper than that involved in standard question / answer scenarios.  Here the questions are student generated, a constructivist approach, and ideally open-ended.  Both strategies put the students in control when it comes to making meaning and both place the responsibility of interpretation on the students.  Ciardiello has made a clear case for his methods and supports his case with reasonable and appropriate examples from his classes.  We found the sound nature of the article and the broad scope of possible applications exciting. We can see opportunities for either strategy in most if not all grade levels and disciplines.  We did notice, however, that special attention would need to be paid to the knowledge that students will enter these experiences with.  Do students have enough prior knowledge to generate questions about the image or the text?  Will they be able to develop a deeper inquiry about this subject? Does this discrepant image or text relate to what they are learning? If not, can it serve as a springboard to a new, relevant topic?

            The “Reading Comprehension in Science” article (Kinnibaugh, Shaw 2009) will play a part in our peer teach for the coming week. The QAR strategy could compliment a discrepant text or be modified to work with images as well.  We liked the attention paid to comprehension in science where the expository text remains dominant.  We hope to keep everyone busy with questioning this week.

Week of March 13: A Questioning Attitude

"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it."

    ~J.D.Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

        How many times have we met someone who’s done something, seen something, knows something from the inside out? I’ve had a million questions for people I admire. Just getting to ask a question of someone that has something fascinating to offer can be a thrilling experience. And what if we could get inside the heads of our favorite authors? Hey, maybe we’ve already been inside their heads, it’s just that we didn’t know what questions to ask ourselves when we were reading to initiate a deeper conversation and get at the essence of the author’s thinking. This process brings up a mental image: Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz—she had the power to get home the whole time, but never thought to ask.

         With the right encouragement, preschool children already begin to discern the power of asking good questions on a daily basis, and peeling back the layers of a text or a situation. We might say they are insatiable with their “What is this? How come? Why is the sky blue? as they read the world in their natural learning environments, and have no issues questioning the authority of things. But as they mature and begin to face reading words and symbols, when they are asked it to move from world knowledge to school knowledge, they must relearn and be re-encouraged in this natural curiosity to question what they read and experience. This kind of encouragement needs to be actively shown (modeled) not told—hence, ReQuest or Self -Questioning Guide (Buehl, 157) both reciprocal questioning approaches where teacher and student reverse authority roles, and students take on responsibility for finding and asking questions using varied levels of thinking.

         QAR (Alv, 243; Buehl, 133) is perhaps the most well known strategy that helps us learn how to distinguish and pinpoint the relationship between a question and its proximity to text. It is the best strategy I know of for working backwards to help children make meaning and strengthen connections (text to text, text to self, text to world). Buehl's B/D/A questioning charts (52) can help instructors work on different levels of thinking (literal, interpretative, applied) as they anticipate what students might ask or encounter in the readings.  The same could be done with Discussion Web RE Coleen's presentation of the question, Is War Justified, or the various consolidating strategies we looked at with the Dust Bowl / Okie Migrant Unit. We will hopefully have time to review these options over the next two weeks, as well as go back to Questioning the Author (Buehl, 137) which we used to critique the 21st C learning film on the first night of class.  QTA is a way to help students independently get inside the head of the author, but it has been approached using very different kinds of language, both in narrative and expository texts, even multimodal compositions like images and music. I see it as one more step past “sourcing”, which you will want students to do with varied genres of text. We chose the QTA approach with the film because we were facing a text with a broad, convincing context, but we wanted to make sure you were able to look beyond the density of the film's appealing message in order to understand, and then discuss the intentions and perspectives of the filmmaker. 

         QTA is often considered a tool for questioning a text whose language is very flat, with seemingly no point of view or objective. Textbooks are often criticized for this. Buehl refers to these texts as “authorless” (p 137). By developing “queries” to draw out and discuss this kind of author we are, in effect, constructing a point of view or intent through our questions and taking control of the text—this helps us with our purpose for reading, knowing the significance of what we are reading, and giving us access to inference and subtext by digging at the particular moves an author might be making with the text structure, word use, etc. Through this process, teachers can learn to facilitate discussion rather than merely limit questioning to comprehension assessment.

         Though QTA is usually a response to a “flat” text, I have also seen QTA being the strategy of choice when an author appears to have a strong (if not clear) message, such as in the film—and this can be with either an informational or fictional text.  Here less proficient readers have trouble taking an active, critical stance because they accept the text’s authority, have trouble translating text into their own language, and assume how the text will be discussed. Again, the teacher needs help boosting confidence in inquiry. Remember looking for "strong lines" in the insect poems, clues in the Dorothea Lange or Stephanie's family photos, or responding in the "I wonder" column for the ASIS exercise with Mark Twain? We began a conversation with our own wonderings (roots of questions), searched for responses, and then determined a perspective. We also posed questions before and after to determine his intent. The Essential Question I originally raised with this text was, "Are we shaped by history, or do we shape it?"

         As you read and think about questioning this week, Coleen and I want you to consider why this literacy process is seen as “perhaps the most common kind of academic work in comprehension instruction” (Dole et al., 1991) and how it might pull together all of the other reading proficiencies we have been studying, including engaging mental imagery, prior knowledge, understanding text frames, synthesizing, inferencing, understanding vocabulary in context, and so on…

Finally, I have attached a brief study guide for Essential Questions and Leading/ Entry Point questions work in for teachers and students in unit design (Wiggins and McTighe article, scan TBA). I'll leave you with a few questions as you consider readings and guides. Are the VA DOE essential questions really essential, or just guiding unit questions? What questions can we ask in our unit to ensure enduring understandings, instead of the dreaded syndrome of forgetting after a unit test? Are questioning strategies only useful after reading? What kinds of questions should we ask to develop 21st C learners?

ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS are designed help us “uncover” the heart of our disciplinary discourse and engage students in various kinds of literate understanding as they read and inquire within and across discipline(s). Remember, you are the designer, not the SOLs. This is your opportunity to go back and look at the questions, thoughts you have already posed in your Multiple Literacy Project and explore their relationship to the SOL content as you prepare to expand on them, and design reading and writing strategies that explore them for the Content Inquiry.

The following excerpt quotes a journal entry from a 3rd grade teacher thinking about EQ's and their teaching:

"Essential. The first definition in my iBook dictionary defines essential (adj) as "of the highest importance for achieving something."  That "something" for our purposes as educators (and learners) is comprehension. However, there is a second definition on my iBook that applies. It states "being the most basic element or feature of something or somebody." To me a basic element is a building block that is essential (of the highest importance) to reaching our goal of comprehension. Therefore, essential questions are both basic and of highest importance. 

I had an ephiphany while reading the Wiggins and McTighe article. It was not so much that I did not understand essential questions; I've read about them on the VA DOE website, typed them into my unit organizers, and I've thought about them. My epiphany came from seeing essential questions not just as a goal of comprehension, but also as an element to planning the whole unit. Sure I knew what they were when I planned my unit, but I did not plan the whole unit around them, with them, or from the ground up based ON the essential question. Now I see them as part of the hook or cue set, while at the same time they are part of the bigger picture.

W & T Article Overview: 

The use of Essential Questions promotes enduring understandings; in other words, true not just surface comprehension.  Essential questions pose dilemmas, subvert obvious or canonical "truths" and force incongruities upon our attention:

"Is gravity a fact or theory?" ; "Is biology destiny?"; "When is war justified?" ,"Are mathematical ideas inventions or discoveries?"; "Do artists reflect the world or shape it?" ; "Who is responsible for what happens to Earth--human beings, or mother nature?"; "Are stories just for entertainment?"

Characteristics of Essential Questions:

* Go to the heart of the discipline

* recur naturally through learning

* raise other important questions 

* are not always the best doorway into a specific topic--can be too global, therefore may also need related unit questions (closer to what SOL column offers).  

Purpose of Essential Questions: 

* Frame the learning

* Engage the learner

* Link to more specific or more general questions

* Guide exploration of ideas

* Establish priorities

Entry-Point Question Guidelines:  (hook or cue set for frontloading)

* Should be in student-friendly language

* Maximal simplicity

* Provoke more questions and discussion 

* Point towards the larger unit and essential questions

Comprehension Strategies that focus on questioning (not exhaustive)

* BDA Questioning charts

* Use of Bloome's Taxonomy (HOTS) or see Self-Questioning Taxonomy

* Question the Author (QTA)

* Request

*Inquiry Charts

*Questions, Clues, Response

*QAR:

(literal-right there, inferential-author and me, scriptal-on my own) 

 

 

Week of March 6: "Author Say, I Say" --Guiding Comprehension of Texts

We are entering our second week thinking about guiding comprehension, and I wish we had eight weeks for this extensive topic! Last week Buehl, Alvermann and others outlined the idea of text frames, and how each content discipline uses them in both informational and narrative texts. We learned that with explicit instruction, particularly how we pay attention to the language of the text, we can help students use these “mental frameworks” to frame their purposes for reading, such as,

“I’m reading this text to compare and contrast types of governments”,

as well as the kinds of questions they need to be asking, such as,

“How do they differ in giving power to the people? Why? What is the author trying to say about governing power, its strengths and its weaknesses?"

Using a frame to focus their reading will help them question and understand the authors’ intentions, as well as locate important key words (differs, contrasts, comparable) instead of wandering about looking for “the point” of the text.

 

One of the questions that came up was how we can introduce these common frames of thinking (like compare and contrast) to emergent and developing readers through objects, experiences like flower-arranging, and trade picture books and other accessible materials-some of you seemed worried about the Venn Diagram in the article as a dependable option. Our presenters in KA gave us some great choices, and we can certainly bring in more over the next few weeks if you need ideas. In our KB class we looked at Buehl's "problematic situations" with the Hoot literature study, where student moves from discovering problem in a narrative to then moving on and researching the problem of specific habitat endangerment. This is where motivation helps them over the hump towards more difficult research!

 
This week, Buehl’s Chapter 4 builds further upon these MENTAL FRAMEWORKS we find in texts, arguing that teachers need to take time to analyze instructional texts (along with essential knowledge for the SOLS) to determine where and how the central concepts are laid out, as well as what “ factlets” and supportive (but secondary) language might be making it hard to prioritize and comprehend the most important ideas.

 

Buehl’s discussion of essential questions that focus on the bigger ideas, generalizations and conclusions will help keep students from getting mired in detail. Next Week (Questioning / Inquiry Week) you will read an additional handout by Wiggins and McTighe (2005, mentioned by Buehl on page 32) to help you distinguish Essential Questions from other types, such as literal, “factlet “ questions-- “Where did Abraham Lincoln get shot?” with questions such as “Why was President Lincoln’s role so important to our legacy as a democracy? The latter focus on essential knowledge as well as critical thinking processes like synthesizing and inferencing. To use Buehl’s metaphor, we are trying to guide them through the forest without getting stuck at every little sapling and thus, losing our way. Because essential questions are “arguable”,rather than merely a "yes or no" answer, conversation (involving connections, inferences, summary of main point, synthesis toward new ideas, more questioning) is required to participate in the inquiry.

 
Organizing our discussion about the upcoming assignment, the Content Inquiry, around Buehl’s pyramid structure will help us all think about the relationship between comprehension processes like inference and synthesis of different perspectives so that we can discover“the gist”, and how reading logs (double entry, interactive, Author Say I Say, Say Something!”) and other study strategies help to organize student responses to your content texts. I would even recommend using the pyramid structure to set up your inquiry topic as you think about the big ideas / essential knowledge you want to highlight, and then what short term, background knowledge can be offered by your resources to help you get at those big ideas.


Our peer presenters will help us understand the Subtext Strategy as a dramatic, multimodal way to guide students in making more intimate connections with the "hidden knowledge" of a text in ways that will extend the working memory and keep texts alive. What I find most compelling about this strategy is that empathy, a type of comprehension that had lost its footing in SOL-based teaching, is beginning to make a comeback.

Have a great week! Stephanie


GLOSSARY:

Hierarchy of Knowledge: (Buehl, 31) This template references Bloome's Taxonomy of higher order thinking tiers, beginning with literal ("factlet")searching or questioning (who tried to eat the three little pigs?) on up through determining purpose, to synthesis and evaluation of big ideas(how is the three little pigs a reflection on childhood storytelling, or why is this story considered a classic when others fade away?)

Working Memory: (Sousa, 2005) What we call the part of the memory that holds short-term information, to be flushed and ready for more immediate needs.

Essential Questions vs Leading/Guiding Questions: (Buehl, 33) Whereas leading questions are teacher directed towards a set answer/ clue, essential questions provide a larger context for student inquiry and independent research. Essential questions are not yes or no, they offer possibility of "argument" (thus, higher order thinking) AND they can provide the teacher with a way to frame an entire unit for both frontloading, guiding, and reflecting on comprehension of concepts.

FACT Pyramids: (Buehl, 33) A great tool for organizing learning priorities and opportunities (for teachers and students, with teachers and students!) as teachers determine "shortcomings" in resources, and help students sift through text for what is essential (lasting and meaningful, like causes, effects, impact/consequences), what is short term info we might need to secure understanding of essential knowledge, and what is background detail that provides "depth" but isn't necessary on its own. These are often good to develop before students do something like an I-Chart (Buehl, 101), if they are determining research topics, questions around a unit inquiry.

Subtext Strategy Peer Thoughts

KA POST By Courtney & Kamanie

You’ve probably been asked by a teacher at some point to think about how a certain character feels. Maybe you had just read a picture book and were reflecting on what happened. You could have been responding to a painting hanging in a museum, or a newspaper article.  

It is natural to empathize with characters when the trigger is something we can relate to. Making connections based on our prior knowledge is one way we do this. You also can make inferences or predictions based on available information. But it may be harder, especially for younger students, to understand perspectives that differ from what they are accustomed to. This could be especially true if the context is culturally or socioeconomically different from the students’ own backgrounds, and that why it is important to let the students step into someone else’s shoes to enhance comprehension.

Subtext strategy, presented by Jean Anne Clyde (2003), is a comprehension tool that combines visual literacy with original drama by prompting students to imagine what characters are thinking. This strategy is a natural fit with inquiry because it transforms “school from a place where we tell students what to think to a place where we can help them experience thinking” (Clyde 152). 

Terms

perspective-taking- a learner’s ability to identify with multiple perspectives or character in a text

transmediation- moving the experience from one communication or sign system to another

egocentric- unable to appreciate others’ feelings or circumstances

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KB POST,  Nikki and Karen

“Everybody knows the story of the Three Little Pigs.  Or at least they think they do.  But I’ll let you in on a little secret.  Nobody knows the real story, because nobody has ever heard my side of the story.”

-       By A. Wolf in The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs as told by John Scieszka

                                

            Perspective can significantly alter the story.  It can also support comprehension by promoting critical thinking that fosters a deeper understanding of the story’s events.  A college friend of mine used to talk about perception being reality.  An individual’s reality was based on their unique point of view.  By stepping outside of ourselves and looking at things from a different vantage point, we can see things differently.  When you do this, things are not always so black and white, much like Colleen’s question “Is War Justified?” and our reading of Faithful Elephants by Yukio Tsuchiya.

            Often authors do not explicitly share a characters thoughts and feelings.  The reader is required to make inferences either from a combination of text and illustrations in picture books or simply the text in chapter books.  There are many references in child development to a perfectly normal stage of egocentrism in childhood.  In her article, Clyde references research that points to young children’s inability to assume multiple perspectives from different characters in a story. 

                  Promoting perspective taking, Clyde’s Subtext Strategy invites students to try on a character and “walk around inside a story.” (p. 150)  This enables the reader to make deeper connections as they activate their imagination and engage with the story.  By incorporating all dimensions of a text, the words, pictures or illustrations, context, setting, plot, action and characters with drama, readers take on the roles of the characters in the story.  No longer an outside observer, the reader experiences the story and makes personal connections that deepen their understanding and more fully develop their comprehension.  Using drama, students become the character and use their own experiences to interpret what the characters are thinking and feeling.

            By assuming the roles of different characters, readers are able to successfully identify and integrate multiple perspectives.  This strategy takes comprehension to a higher level as all components of a story are opened up for exploration.  The reader isn’t merely walking beside a character through the story.  The reader is transported into the story as a participant, which makes the reading personal and creates an experiential learning opportunity.  In an on-line background essay for the video Integrated Teaching: The Subtext Strategy, Clyde is quoted as saying:

                 

                  “Thinking like an artist, thinking like a musician, a dramatist, changes the way you can           see the world. The things that we all remember and understand best in our lives are the things we’ve lived. So that’s what I try to do in teaching—give students opportunities to step into a character’s world, into the story.”

            Using the Subtext Strategy to promote empathy with the characters, not only solidifies reading comprehension, but it also broadens our understanding of historical events.  The Subtext Strategy facilitates looking at history from the perspective of all sides.  History is no longer written by the winners in one sided accounts.  “The empathy inherent to the subtext strategy is a powerful tool for anchoring even young children in times, places, and conflicts.” (Clyde, et. al. 2006, p. 123.)  This holds true for creating sensitivity to others in everyday life as well.  In a world plagued by bullying and uncivil behavior, this is a valuable tool for students to learn.

P.S. If you are not familiar with The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs, we have included a link below.

            http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m75aEhm-BYw

Both, Alike, Different? The Struggle with Comparison

This post is meant to serve as the entry for KA and KB presentations of the Dreyer and Gray article, which will support our conversation about introducing text frames to elementary thinkers and framing Alvermann and Buehl's big ideas concerning reading to learn expository text. 

Please find Erika, Yvonne and Chastity's dialogue journal for this week below:  

“Text frames describe a set of questions that reflects how authors organize their writing” (Buehl, 22).	The different frames of texts can help students to organize concepts in a way that will be easier to file in their schema.  Cause/Effect-what happened?  Compare/contrast-what is the same/different, what is being compared? Sequence-is their a specific order?  Description-what is being described, what are the characteristics?  Problem/solution-What has happened, how can the problem be solved?
‘Research has shown that early experiences with instruction in the use of informational texts support student’s comprehension of these types of texts” (Dreher & Gray).	When we teach students using diverse text frames they learn to read and comprehend using these expository structures.   Educators give these students the tools to actively read the text books which will be an essential part of their learning as they go through school.
“The compare/contrast structure may be more difficult for students to navigate” (Dreyer & Gray).   There is a particular vocabulary associated with this text frame.  Common words that cue a comparison are:  “both, alike, different, same, similar, compare, tell apart, resembles” (Dreyer & Gray).  More signal words are available for other text structures in figure 5.2 (Alvermann & Al, 84).	Because compare/contrast is difficult for students to read educators must model this text feature.  This is a wonderful opportunity to introduce new vocabulary associated with comparing and contrasting texts.   Teachers can model their thinking to teach strategic reading of texts as well as create lists of comparative words to cue students of this kind of text.  Through the introduction of these academic words students begin to learn text language.
Compare/contrast bridges the gap between what students already know and new content” (Dreyer & Gray).  This connection is especially helpful when teaching ELL students.  These language learners possess a prior knowledge different from the typical English speaking student.	When we compare and contrast we think about what we already know about a topic as we gather new ideas.  We learn similarities and differences of this new concept to an old concept which allows us to classify the new information.  This organization of thoughts makes it easy to file new knowledge in our schema.
Text frames provide the “internal road map that guides readers to discern the relationships that stitch together details and information to produce a message” (Buehl, 25).	It is often difficult for students to find the main points of a text.  They are bogged down with irrelevant information.  Text frames allow students to clearly see the author’s purpose.

“The organizational structure of a text serves a similar purpose of the structural features of a building:  the frame, the floor joists, and the roof trusses work together to provide structural support for the whole building” (Alvermann & Al, 80).	The comparison of these two concepts reminds me of the building scaffold as well as the scaffolds of education.  Each level is meant to serve as an essential step in the process.  A visual scaffold is present in certain text structures, the steps act as SHAPE poetry, the new idea is presented through words and image.
Teachers should use examples students can relate to in order to introduce particular structures.	Examples:  cause/effect-experiments, compare/contrast-look at two flowers, Sequence-recipe, description-shape poetry, problem/solution-mathematical problems.
Linear frames and narrative text	I sometimes forget that linear frames are text structures as well.  Modeling the structure of a paragraph can also explain organizational strategies in reading and writing.

In response to Erika, Chastity and Yvonne’s dialogue journal, I hope you’ll allow me to share some additional thoughts on the Dreher and Gray article (along with Erika, Yvonne and Chastity’s views.)  In KB class tonight, I would like to take a little time to use and elaborate on the Buehl Author Says/I Say strategy.  I apologize this didn’t get posted sooner; I hate to offer excuses but we are moving and spent the last few days doing just that! I have been pretty brain-dead tired in my free time as a result! 

Coleen

            Erika, Chastity and Yvonne have shared a preview for you of what the main points are from the week’s reading. I especially appreciate their real-life examples of text frames (sequence-recipe, for example). It was also helpful for them to take something large (a text that would fall under a specific frame) and shrink it (a paragraph) to be something that they remind us is also something which teachers should devote time to evaluate the organizational structure with students.

            In their post, they shared, “Text frames allow students to clearly see the author’s purpose.” This really got my gears turning. Lately, I have had to devote a lot of planning time to meetings about data-driven instruction. Based on my students’ test performances in weak areas, I have found some areas of instruction that I will need to spend a great deal of time on in order to help them show improved results in taking the SOL test. This will require some “teaching to test” and all opposition I feel towards the very idea will have to be put aside for now! Back to Erika and Chastity’s thoughts: one of the weak concept areas that students in 3^rd, 4^th, and 5^th grade struggle with is Author’s Purpose. Reading the Dreher and Gray article and the ladies of our KA class’ statement made me wonder if Text Frame instruction and assessment is really a more useful way of evaluating texts.

            Allow me to simplify the current instructional focus of Author’s Purpose: Students are asked to determine an Author’s Purpose. Did the writer write to Entertain, Inform, or Persuade? Two purposes that often get confused are Entertain and Inform. It would seem that those would be different as night and day, but, if you think about it, you’ll realize that sometimes informational texts could be misconstrued as entertaining. Authors will try to make things interesting for readers. Suddenly, you have a confused student that can’t determine whether it’s information or whether it is entertaining! This is not to say that Author’s Purpose does not serve a great purpose in the education of readers and writers; however, I feel that the instruction of Text Frames will be much stronger instruction of Author’s Purpose. What is the author’s goal in the way the text has been created? Thank you, ladies, for helping me find a solution in my own classroom! Teaching Author’s Purpose through Text Frames instruction will provide more meaningful literacy instruction and me meet the required data-driven goals I must set.

            What were some of your own thoughts about the Dreher and Gray article? Did you nod your head the whole time or did you perk up your chin and shake your head, at times, like I did? I know that I will be so curious to hear your own thoughts in class! I might have just been grumpy from moving, but I was left with more questions than answers after I read what the authors presented.

            For many reasons, the Dreher and Gray article presented some meaningful ideas. I have so little experience with ELL students that I am not quite sure I’d be able to describe their general needs in comparison to other students. I appreciated the clear method of Compare/Contrast strategy instruction and the information the authors presented about the Compare/Contrast Text Frame. I can see this instruction being meaningful not only to ELL students but all students. Last, the Venn diagrams did seem a perfect graphic organizer to use with this text frame. From this point on, though, I feel the article missed many opportunities.

            I will be sharing my thoughts tonight—with KB class, especially. For everyone, though, I would like to present a few questions for discussion:

Was the opening example of ELL students with Insects/Arachnids a purposeful example? Were you able to evaluate, by the article’s end, why the original text or instructional approach did not work? Did you, like me, wish they would revisit the original example?

"Compare and contrast texts can be used to build ELL student’s background knowledge and
tap into knowledge and experiences they bring to school.” (Dreher and Gray, 141). The authors make that statement towards the end of the article, but I wonder if they really could make that claim based on what they shared with readers.

"What other statements would you have added if you were the authors? What was missing from this text, in a discussion of text frames like Compare/Contrast?

I really look forward to tonight’s class. I have really enjoyed your presentations, and, as a former student of the class, I’d like to share a few thoughts. Many of you will soon be preparing your Reflective Synthesis. In the process of gathering articles, strategies, and arguments that you will use to defend the use of Inquiry in your own classroom practices, you’re going to do much more than summarize texts you’re including in the paper. You’ll need to be critical, thoughtful, and surprising. Many of you have done a great job with that in your discussion board posts and your presentations, but some are heavy on the summarizing. We are all reading the same texts each week and we’ll all get so much more out of it if we hear your arguments or take-aways, I personally love to see novel techniques or strategies, and I prefer the unexpected over the tried-and-true. Show us your personality and leave us with more questions—leave us all thinking! Tackling your presentations in a more critical way will make it easy for you to feel like an expert on the topic, and this will  easily transfer to being a reliable resource for you to use in your Reflective Synthesis.