The Gap Between Recognition and Implementation

Perhaps the best part of my first year of teaching was getting to observe in the classrooms of far more experienced teachers. In particular, one visit was incredibly powerful. The class had been reading The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle as a class novel/literature study. One of the things that they did was use Activotes ("clickers" if you will) to have students voice their opinion. From there students would offer why they made their choice, and debate their respective reasoning.

I walked away with a vision of my own. I wanted to kids to have discussions about books, but also to write about books. I also wanted to have them talking about ideas, and debating. What did I do? I modeled responses to literature ("What is one word to describe the character?", "What is the problem in the story and how do you think the main character will resolve it?") along with some basic criteria for "is it good enough." This gave students a baseline for whether the response that is at standard.

Since last year I've had kids scoring responses on a 4 through 1 scale. The point is to uncover "good enough" looks like. We'll look at a few different responses modeled after student work past and present, and score them. We did this last week and the discussions kids were having were fantastic... When you hear kids say "That response referenced the text, and explained why they chose strong to describe the men.." you feel really good because they are getting it. The issue I ran into was that not all kids were making the leap when it came to their own responses.

Why was that? Part of it was because of the way I crafted the questions for their novel study books. When you don't necessarily provide multiple avenues for kids to travel down then you won't get the quality you're looking for. That was one reason. Another connected to stamina. Writing a quick couple of sentences gets you just above the threshold, and is "enough." This was an instance where I gave feedback to almost all in order to have them improve. Most knew that they could add more, and simply needed direction. More of the same is planned for this week. Should be fun.