Article Review: TEXTMASTERS

In her article, "Textmasters: Bringing Literature Circles to Textbook Reading Across the Curriculum," Linda Wilfong discusses the development of what she has termed the "Textmasters Strategy," a method of using literature circles not only in an English classroom, but in any other content classroom as well. I will discuss her article in answer to the following four questions:

1. How/why did the Textmaster's strategy develop?
2. What distinguishes the Textmasters strategy from a traditional literature circle?
3. How was the strategy's effectiveness tested by Wilfong and her colleagues?
4. What are the benefits of the Textmasters strategy?

How did Wilfong come up with the idea of bringing literature circles into all content areas through the Textmaster Strategy?

• Wilfong's masters students, who were also teachers, told Wilfong about the frustration that stemmed from wanting to engage students through the use of additional trade books and literature circles, but being denied requested books because of schools' limited resources.
• Wilfong and one of her students, a science teacher, thought that perhaps they could work collaboratively to figure out a way to use the textbook to spur class discussions and further engage students in this way.
• The professor and student began to devise a model that would better allow for literature circles to be used in discussing textbook texts.

 So what makes the Textmasters strategy more effective with textbooks? Why not just use the typical roles used in a traditional literature circle (e.g. a discussion leader and a summarizer)?

• The two researches realized that discussing a textbook presents added difficulties, such as difficult vocabulary or the presentation of many abstract concepts. They decided to add two roles in addition to that of the discussion leader and the summarizer, resulting in four roles to be used by a small group in discussing a section from the text:
• Discussion leader: guides and facilitates the conversation
• Summarizer: writes a short summary of the assigned text
• Vocabulary Enricher: copies down and defines new/difficult vocab
• Webmaster: creates visual aids to help articulate difficult concepts
• What really makes the strategy unique is that for a student to be considered a "Textmaster" of a certain text, they must be proficient in each of the four roles, not just one of them.

How did Wilfong and her research-partner test their strategy?

• Wilfong and her colleague decided to test the strategy on the colleague's science class. After the first month of science class, which was taught using traditional methodology, the researchers administered a content test to 73 science students, who scored an 86% average.
• At the beginning of the second month/unit of science, Wilfong visited the classroom to teach and model the Textmaster strategy for small literature circles of four students. 
• The rest of the month, the students used this strategy to complete learning the content of their second unit.
• At the end of the unit, Wilfong returned to check the students' progress. They were administered the unit 2 test, and their average score was an 89%, indicating that the strategy had been successful.

 What are some main benefits of the Textmaster's strategy?

• While the students' scores were raised by 3%, the more considerable benefits of the program implementation were found in the student and teacher's feedback about their experiences.
• The students reported that they understood the content better, had a lot of fun, and learned how to stay on task/ focus on a text
• The teacher reported that the students became more and more self-sufficient as time went on, becoming independent learners and collaborators. Students also stayed on task and were better behaved, feeling as if they had a responsibility to their small group to behave well and complete their tasks. The teacher commented one of her favorite elements of the project was that the students' creativity emerged in a way that was unprecedented in her previous classrooms.

Responding to Art: Developing Skills of Observation and Inference

 

I just stumbled upon an incredible website titled "The Athenaeum," which catalogues hundreds of pieces of art according to artists, museums in which pieces are located, and date produced. On its Mission Statement page, the organization that produces the site explains it's ideals:

• "All creative work should earn its creator a fair wage."
• "All people should have maximum access to art and the good things that flow from creative works."
• "Following the first two rules, once copyright has expired (long after the artist has passed away and therefore ceased to be able to profit), creative works should be FREE."

Thus, "The Athenaeum" provides a center to share, enjoy, and discuss some of the greatest art ever produced.

 

So, how would I use "The Athenaeum" in my classroom? What place does art have in an English classroom? Well, I suppose my answer is rooted in the fact that literacy is not merely the ability to read and write traditional written texts; it is a skillset that reaches into all areas of communication and critical thinking. Thus, teachers must move beyond merely encouraging word recognition and reading comprehension and begin to offer alternative methods for developing higher-level thinking skills. And, one way to practice the skills of interpretation, observation, and inferencing is by exposing students to art and helping them understand processes by which they can take away profound/surprising/interesting discoveries from one image. Furthermore, the patience necessary to observe a piece of art and glean meaning from it is the same patience a student needs in order to delve into a text and make discoveries.

Practically speaking, I would present students with a piece of visual art and give them ample time to respond to it:

1. First, students would be directed to jot down pieces of objective information.
2. Then, students would be asked to write down questions raised by the situations depicted by the photo/painting/sculpture
3. Finally, students would be asked to write a paragraph hypothesizing about what is going on within that piece of art.

Summarizing Articles as a Writing Exercise

While it is extensive and perhaps not immediately relevant to the English content area curriculum, The New York Times website provides a wealth of articles which can easily be utilized to help students exercise their writing skills. The site provides various pages, differentiated by topic or journal format, and provides links to these pages on the left side of the Home Page. These pages include World News, U.S. News, Politics, Sports, Technology, Science, Health, Arts, and Opinion, and each page offers relevant ground-breaking news in its respective field. The pages oftentimes also include pertinent images or videos.

If I were to do a summary writing exercise with my students, I would choose one manageable article from each of the pages listed above and post the list of titles as links on my classroom website. I would then give students the option to choose an article from the title list that they would like to read and summarize. They would be expected to access the article online, read it, and copy/paste the most important sentences from the article into a Word document (making sure that they put the sentence excerpts into quotations.) In the same Word document, they would construct a paragraph summarizing the main points of the article. If they choose to incorporate key words, phrases, or quotations, they would be expected to cite the name of the article's author. Finally, students would create a bibliographic entry for the article.

Online Study Rooms

East of the Web is a site which provides teachers with the opportunity to design and create a unique "Study Room," or a site that offers students the opportunity to access games and activities based upon the classroom content. The teacher can create definition quizzes, word games etc., and then keep track of the students' individualized progress through an online report. Most of the games/quizzes are often timed, making it more competitive for students, and the animation  is visually attractive and engaging.

While I would probably not use Study Rooms often, I think that it could be a very good way to review grammar and vocabulary, particularly definitions of pre-fixes, suffixes, and common root words. I would create a timed game for prefix definitions, another for suffix definitions, and a different one for root words. I might also develop games based upon identifying different parts of speech, or diagnosing incorrect sentences. At the beginning of the grammar unit, without any prior grammar instruction, I would take students to the computer lab and have them take the various quizzes, recording their scores afterwards. Then, after completing that particular grammar unit, I would would bring students to the computer lab and have them re-take the same quizzes, recording their final scores and comparing them to their initial scores. Hopefully this would provide a fun, interactive way to challenge students and allow them to witness and quantify their own progress and achievement.

TED-ED: Videos to Stimulate Critical Thinking

TED is a non-profit society dedicated to furthering and sharing innovative ideas that have been developed by some of the most brilliant minds around the globe. The society holds two annual conferences during which speakers from all different intellectual and educational backgrounds present short, interactive lectures on a topic of their expertise. Many of the speakers choose to incorporate animated videos to provide gripping visuals that help articulate the topic discussed. TED records each of these videos and collects the sub-videos used by speakers within their lectures, and makes them available for viewing online. One of the website's features is a subsite called TED-ED, which categorizes some of the most interesting and educational videos according to subject area, also providing reflection questions for each video and direction for further research.

TED-ED is a site that I would use in class, perhaps choosing one or two days a month to show a video and afterwards have a discussion circle to further explore the relevancy of the ideas or issues presented by that video. Depending on the topic, that discussion can serve as the beginning of a larger project that integrates several content areas. For example, if I wanted to teach a secondary unit on symbolism in advertising (say, perhaps, to a 12th grade English class), I would show the TED-ED video titled The Key to Media's Hidden Codes. Beforehand, I would introduce the word "symbol" and do a careful breakdown of the different types of symbols, giving several examples of words, images, or sounds that function as symbols. Afterwards, as a class, we would take the quick quiz provided by the website and then form a circle to have a seminar discussion about the power symbols have to move us toward action. Questions to consider would include:

• Do you think that it is important to be aware of the symbols around you? Why?
• If, as the video states, the brain is like a sponge, why would it be important to be attentive to the things to which we expose our minds?
• If you were a business man, in what ways would symbols be important to your work? What about other professions?
• Is there an honest/dishonest way of using symbols to influence people?
• How does the way an artist uses symbols differ from the way an advertising firm uses symbols? 

The video and the discussion would hopefully lay the groundwork for students to complete a team project to invent an imaginary product and create a video advertisement for that product that incorporates verbal symbols, visual symbols, and aural symbols.

Welcome to Tidbits of Lit, a blog designed to explore online resources available to high school English teachers and brainstorm new and exciting ways to use them in the classroom!

The first website I want to suggest for use in the classroom is called Poetry Out Loud. Poetry Out Loud is the name of a competition sponsored by The National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation that seeks to encourage and foster an appreciation of poetry within our American culture. While the website provides poetry resources in order to help students and teachers prepare for the national competition, it also makes those resources available to anyone who would like to grow in their knowledge of poetry or even host an informal competition. There are four particularly valuable attributes of the website that I would like to focus on in regards to teaching resources:

• The online anthology of poetry organized by poetic form
• The option of bookmarking your favorite poem's by registering for a free account
• The video library which includes tips for poetry recitation and videos from past competitions
• An online collection of poetry read aloud by actors, poets, and artists.

As a teacher, I would hold a mini-poetry recitation competition in my classroom, following the same format laid out by the website's overview of the competition. I would first introduce the competition by showing a video of the previous year's winning recitation, and I would then move on to articulate the requirements of the assignment. Students would be shown how to access the online anthology of poetry and directed to choose a poem with a minimum of 20 lines. Students' first assignment would be to write out their respective poems by hand, and included a brief explanation of the form along with 5 figures of speech used in the poem. For homework, students would then be instructed to watch the video series on "Learning Recitation," and to create a document in word that uses the "comments" feature to insert suggestions of interpretive choices that can be made in the reading of the poem. Finally, students would have a week to memorize and perfect their poems, and on the final day of the poetry unit, students would perform their poems in front of the classroom and two guest judges.