This week we were looking at using advanced organizers to help students learn and retain knowledge better. One of the articles we read was written in 1960, but is still appropriate to teaching students today. The gist of this article was that if teachers are able to connect new information to the prior knowledge of students, then the learning and retention of the information is enhanced.
Cues, Questions, and Advance Organizer
My class starts daily with a "focus question" that brings higher order thinking (according to Bloom's Taxonomy) and gives students an idea about what we will be doing during the class period. For the majority of students, this is taken in stride and they at least make a guess when they do not "know the answer", even if there is not technically a "right" answer to the question. The problem with this is that in some cases, I have students who do not want to think more than it takes to find specific answers that would be located in a textbook. These students exhibit a huge amount of resistance to the probing questions as well as attempt to disrupt the discussion of the questions.
Non-linguistic Methods
The longer I am in the classroom, the more I employ non-linguistic methods of conveying information. Maybe it is due to the prevailing entertainment culture of current students, but most are not practiced at being able to sit and listen to a lecture on a topic. However, if that same information is put into a YouTube video, they will pay attention raptly for 20 or more minutes. Streaming video has become an integral part of my classroom, since it is one medium that I know my students are engaged by.
This is a weak spot for most of my students. Most students have been trained to copy verbatim from textbooks to answer questions posed by their teachers. In my class, I try to design my lessons so that this is not able to be done. If I ask questions, I ask some that would need to be answered by synthesizing information from multiple passages. Another thing that I have started doing is that I give my students a synopsis of the unit we are going to be investigating. The only problem is that these are worded using scientific terms. One of the first assignments for the units is for the students to translate these synopses into "regular English" so that anyone would be able to read it. This is done in groups so that the students who do not have the best reading abilities are still able to participate with the rest of the class. Once all the groups are done "translating", the groups all share out what they thought the synopsis meant. We then discuss these interpretations as a class, and what their teacher actually meant. This is usually an engaging discussion.
Review of 3 Non-Linguistic Applications.
I love your "translate this into your own words" assignment for the students to complete during the summary of the unit. I'd love to hear more about how you grade the assignment and what kind of grade you assign to it. Since the assignment needs to be correct, but you don't want to cut down a student's own voice, how do you walk that fine line between the two?
ReplyDeleteFor the most part, I let the students have their own voice in the translation. However, they do know that they need to make sure they have the "translations" correct. I have also asked them to be able to redefine the text into something a 4th grader could understand. Unfortunately, that is higher than some of the lexile levels of my students.
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