Webquest Complete

Webquest Complete--find it linked through my classroom website.

Click here.

I hope you enjoy. Look forward to comments, suggestions, corrections, rotten tomatoes (I'm sorry about the intro video...I had to do it), etc.

Webquest Brief

Hi everyone,


What I've done is devised a end-of-the-year webquest that asks students to look over all of the books we've read this year in British literature, evaluate their literary merits, analyze what "literary merit" (or as the webquest puts it in its essential question "what is a classic book"?) means to them through personal definitions, scholarly articles, and reevaluation through a persuasive essay. This guiding question has been something that has always stuck with me and I'm glad to finally have a reason to create a webquest to explore it.


To make this a little more creative and less pedantic, I've devised a scenario where aliens have attacked the Earth and confiscated our books. They want to know "what makes a great classic" and if we don't figure this out, they're coming for you! Cheesy, maybe, but if I know my imaginative students I think they'll like the "over-the-top" approach I usually take...


I've linked my webquest to my own classroom website, so you can find my webquest through this link.

CCI # 4: Reading-Writing Connection

Layer 1

Like any good therapy, I feel that I need to admit my mistakes here before I can move on. Direct, explicit vocabulary instruction (how to do it anyway) is utterly and totally new to me. I have zero training in this. I admit: I failed my students. Not with biased grades or incomprehensibly difficult assignments, but with traditional vocabulary instruction. My classroom was an oasis of progressive pedagogy, filled with student choice and autonomy, learning was  a collaborative and constructive process and then there was: vocabulary logs. “Find five words. Look them up. Define them. Copy them. Label the part of speech. Write a sentence. Turn in on Friday,” I rattled off, annihilating all hope of actually reaching the students. No wonder they looked at me with eyes that could pierce medieval armor. Sometimes I felt more like a dentist than a teacher, poised with my vocabulary pliers, ready to remove any remaining vestiges of the teeth they might actually use to sink their teeth into real literature. But I felt fairly blissful with my ignorance, happily repeating an all too common problem in the process of teaching: if it “worked” when I was a student and it’s the way it’s “always” been done, I guess I’ll do it too. Actually, I think it goes even a step further, it’s not even resignation to implement prior strategies but a total lack of imagination in creating new possibilities.

Quite naturally, conceptual knowledge is constructed through activating and building upon prior conceptual knowledge. It is relational and interactive. After reading chapter eight, I am well-aware that my vocabulary/conceptual instruction needs some work. One of the more useful strategies was a Concept of Definition Word Map (VV&M 256-7). Its balanced and thorough approach of visually demarcating the conceptual components of a word seems in-depth enough for me, without out being trivial or artificial—a balance that I struggle with as a teacher of upperclassmen—they still need structure and guidance, but the teacher’s authority needs to be transparent and the assignments must be meaningful.  The way that CD Word Map strategy subdivides the word into categories, properties, comparisons, and illustrations is useful to truly understand the multi-faceted nature of a single concept and makes the most intuitive sense to me as a teacher and a learner. This strategy relates it to what they already know, how the word functions, and allows them to apply it to their long-term memory.

I also benefited from the in-depth evaluation of how to use “context clues” to define words—or for our purposes here, how to relate concepts/words to other words or concepts we already know. I think this process of teaching students how to use context clues would be very beneficial and something I wish I had received.

The focus of the chapter was on developing strategies to deal with “low utility” words that are found in textbooks, but I think there was a gap in dealing with how to develop strategies for “general utility” words using trade books. There is no boldface vocabulary, no technical concepts, just difficult vocabulary words that are useful for them to be cultured, educated readers and speakers.  Sure, I could use some of the concept maps or diagram the words, but it seems so artificial, so contrived.  Any suggestions?

Layer 2

It seems I’ve only tapped into the potential of one of the two-sided powerhouse of reading and writing—leaving writing far behind to fend for itself. Sure, I assigned the state mandated minimum six essays and a “choose a project of interest” research paper, but after reading the four differing viewpoints in the assigned readings I am noticing my own deficiencies and areas to improve upon. Chapter nine in VV&M really reminded me of the power of writing as a learning process. Joan Didion’s short quote spoke volumes to the power of writing to learn: “"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means, what I want and what I fear.”

The easiest way to do this is to incorporate the strategies found in Spires and Donley about building from the inside out through autobiographical worlds of words. Their writing prompts, the contrast between significant moments and insignificant moments was particularly striking and powerful. This process of writing on a critical and evaluative level does not come naturally and the article did an excellent job at detailing how students are slowly scaffolded (externally and internally) to achieve great writing heights.

If the strategies they propose are not sufficient or if you need to work with younger or struggling students, the various “writing frames” Fray and Lewis provide are extremely helpful. These frames provide organizational structure for the students without eliminating the input that teachers want: their personal responses. It’s truly a win-win situation, because teachers will receive the organized and thorough responses they desire, while students are not bogged down in the arduous task of formulating the “bones” of the essay, they can simply put the “meat” on it. I think this strategy would be most beneficial as a prewriting exercise, to activate knowledge and organize thoughts and concepts for later in-depth writing.

Chapter ten provided some strategies on how to use studying text in conjunction with writing to learn that I believe will be very useful. Many of the strategies that are offered in chapter ten overlap with many of the structural frames that we’ve covered before, including graphic organizers, writing summaries, and how to take effective notes. I also believe that writing can be extended to be an excellent resource for meaningful homework assignments. Because I struggle with taking meaningful time away from families when the students are sent home, I try to use autobiographical or creative nonfiction writing assignments that build a coherent narrative with the students’ families. For example, when we read Beowulf—the ancient English heroic epic that captures the ideals of an ancient society that is passed down orally and then written down—I asked students to interview the oldest living member of their family and talk to them about how life was like growing up, what kind of heroes they had, and how society has changed. You might predict that they would be the rambling rants of a bitter generation at the reckless mistakes of the younger generation, but I found this writing exercise to be deeply moving, provocative, and genuine.

It is this type of assignment that I believe all of the secondary resources we read are pointing us to. There was clearly writing to learn through self-analysis (ch. 9), writing frames through questions I asked them to answer (Fray and Lewis), autobiographical writing (Spires and Donley) and an emphasis on creating meaningful habits outside of class (chapter 10).

Thank you for your time and I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this blog. 

Revised SRE

Revised SRE--Please note that revised sections are highlighted grey--I tried to incorporate your suggestions with my own touch in these sections. I just read chapter 8 of VV&M today, so I couldn't truly have done this work on vocabulary instruction until today...I've always been the "look up the definition, copy it, and make a sentence" kind of guy, but that's only because I was never taught any other way...hmm, no better time to change than now, right? Hope these revisions are sufficient and beneficial. Thanks. 

Scaffolded Reading Experience—A Study in Shakespeare’s Hamlet—Kindle Edition!

Andrew Chilton

Introduction

Text: The text we will be reading is the famous soliloquy from Act III of Shakespeare’s masterpiece Hamlet—we will be reading Act III, Scene I, lines 57-91. In total this is 34 lines of iambic pentameter text, consisting of 276 words, which have been rated on the Flesch Reading Ease scale at 72.0 (which should be easily understandable to an eleven year old), and a Flesch-Kincaide grade level of 8.6 (appropriate for students in the eighth grade)—To be quite honest, I find these statistics extremely misleading, but I wanted to include this data that I collected and will certainly “take it with a grain of salt” as I implement the study. This will be roughly the seventh or eighth day on Shakespeare, so students will be familiar with the style of language and hopefully will have “bought into” the joys of reading it (I’m an idealist, what can I say?). We will also be using the Kindle software on our laptops to view and manipulate this text; therefore, students will be able to highlight (vital to the overall lesson plan), collect notes, and quickly cross-reference words or ideas throughout the full body of the text (also crucial to the overall lesson plan).

Another “text” that students will be bringing to the discussion is their own narrative and the dialogue they have with each other. There will be prereading journaling that will ask them to bring the “text” of their life into the reading and therefore I must include it under the broad definition of “literacy”.

Setting and Students: For this lesson plan, I will be addressing the reading experience of twenty-four young students, ranging in age from seventeen to eighteen years with a multitude of cultural backgrounds as they struggle to interact with the inherent difficulties of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in an English IV class at Surry Early College High School. The class demographics are fairly homogeneous, with 60% female, 40% male, roughly 85% Caucasian, 7% Latino, 5% Hmong, and 3% African American. The economic background of the students is a little less obvious, with a median family income in the town of the school of $29,000—so I would characterize this as moderately poor, and the geographical location of the school district is in a predominately rural, agriculturally-based (at least formally) economy. The school is an Early College High School that focuses on choosing students from low socioeconomic backgrounds and choosing students that will be “first-generation” college students for their family. With these factors in mind, the high school is on the campus of very successful community college, with a beautiful campus and state-of-the-art facilities, including my own classroom which was built just two years ago. There is abundant technology available in the classroom, including a SMART board, enough laptops (1 year old) for every child, access to flip cameras, iPod touches, and printers. Some of the intangibles about the school that are difficult to quantify are the positive environment that the administration has nurtured amongst the faculty and their level of education and training. Seventy-five percent of the faculty or staff have advanced degrees and we participate (or lead) in monthly trainings in pedagogy, technology, or skills. Because of the small size of the school (approx. 350 students), the principal is able to be a very visible leader in our classrooms and helps influence the culture at the school.

Theoretical Rationale: I have chosen this text because it is a “required” text of the NCSCOS for English IV. I have chosen to implement the study in the fashion that I did because of my inherent beliefs about literacy and the power of literature. I will be using electronic texts, collaborative groups, and embodied performance because I believe that these three “progressive” techniques are powerful tools towards creating meaningful learning. Literacy is an umbrella term that includes the myriad interactions that learners have with all forms of “texts”. Therefore, I believe that their own narrative (explicitly brought through journals/interviews, or implicitly brought through their SES and cultural background) is a text and I believe that I must help facilitate the construction of a powerful and meaningful social interaction with the given text.

Question Labels:

Throughout the lesson, students are engaged in questions in all levels of Bloom’s taxonomy (they will be labeled as they are asked in the lesson plans) with the bulk of the assignment revolving around Creating and Evaluating.

Lesson Plan Overview

I.               Review of graphic timeline of previous action and predictions discussion (5 mins.)

II.             Group viewing of different film version of the soliloquy and completion of short graphic organizer (10-15 mins)

III.           Handout of assignment prompt and two group readings of text—in round robin format (10 mins)

IV.           Complete highlighting, vocabulary-building, and notes part of assignment (20-30 mins)

V.             Highlighted, alternating reading “performance” of the text by group members 1 / 2 and then members 3 / 4  (10 mins)

VI.           Reflect on step V and create visual representations to assist in step VII performance (15-20 mins)

VII.         Group performances with post-discussion about how groups differed, what were their visual and acting strengths, how it relates to film versions, etc. (20-30 mins)

VIII.       Turn in vocabulary words and review homework journal prompt (5 mins)  

Learning Target: After this experience, students will be able to comprehend the divided nature of Hamlet’s mind, its relation to past events, and recreate in collaborative groups an embodied performance of this inner soliloquy.

Materials:

·      25 laptops

·      Kindle software

·      Free download of the text of Hamlet, found here.

·      Room arranged in collaborative (3-4 person) groups

·      Construction paper

·      Markers/Colored Pencils

·      Makeshift props (cardboard, anything lying around the room)

·      Links to various Hamlet performances via Youtube: Richard Burton, Laurence Olivier, Ethan Hawke, David Tenant, or Mel Gibson.

Pre-Reading

Students are placed in six groups of four students each. Students will be asked to look over their collaborative group timeline that they have been working on. The group timeline is a long sheet of bulletin-board paper that is divided horizontally into four distinct sections: brief summary of action, visual representation of summary, analysis in your team’s own words, and a powerful quote that is meaningful to your team. As students look over this timeline, they will be reminded  of the past action and the facilitator will lead a short discussion about what they can infer will happen in today’s scene. I think it’s very important at this crossroads of the play for the instructor to not make value judgments about Hamlet’s “sanity” or condition and leave it wide open for interpretation from the students.

Each collaborative group will then view a different film version (as linked in the materials section) of this famous speech. Students will complete a very short graphic organizer (three part graph) with the following questions involved(in ascending Bloom’s order):

1.     What did you observe?

2.     In five different words, can you summarize the feeling/mood of the scene?

3.     How is this different/similar than what you expected and why?

I wavered between having this as a pre- or post-reading activity, but ultimately decided to let this stand as a pre-reading activity in order that it inspire their own interpretations instead of having the film clips as the capstone of the lesson, hence making them feel as though their interpretations are inferior. By keeping it as a pre-reading experience they can have it as a “dialogue partner” in their subsequent discussions about constructing the text for themselves and can also critique it in their post-reading performance assessment.

To begin to introduce direct vocabulary instruction to the lesson, I will preview them before watching the film that they may encounter difficult or unfamiliar words—I will ask them temporarily to overlook these words—take mental notes of them, but the film is designed to introduce them to the flow of Hamlet’s thoughts, not a dissection of it’s intricacies (our subsequent exercises will do a sufficient job at that). I decided to temporarily overlook vocabulary (at least on an in-depth level) because I do not want students to be overwhelmed with definitions when they might be experiencing arguably the greatest speech in the English language for the first time—you can’t take that experience away from them.

Reading

The question students are guided by during their reading is: What textual evidence can you find to justify Hamlet’s stance on continuing life or ending existence? Students will track, in reading through the text, highlight line by line, word by word the subtle changes in Hamlet’s attitude towards life and death. Their goal is in the end to understand his inner struggle and embody that division by a performative reading of the differing highlighted sections, aided by visual representations and theatrical skills. In their collaborative groups, students will read through the text using the Kindle software. They will be able to look up any unknown words simply by putting their cursor over it—which will help immensely with the estimated 30 words (out of 276, quite substantive) I predict they will be unfamiliar with.  To assist with this vocabulary task and to actually achieve the reading, each member of the group will be responsible for a quarter of the total assigned reading. For five minutes before we read together as a group, students will read over their section (numbered and based on their group numbering) with the assistance of the audible tool on Kindle—it is a program that comes on Kindle that allows students to have the text read to them in either a man or woman’s voice, in three different reading speeds. The dictionary function on the Kindle has a phonetic pronunciation guide, an audible pronunciation option, detailed definitions, and example sentences through which students can gain in-depth comprehension. This will help with pronunciation anxiety for later when they are to read their assigned section to the group.

The assignment revolves around the teams highlighting the different sides of Hamlet’s inner fight (To be or not to be…); therefore the highlighting function of the Kindle will be very important for the students to have and they can add explanatory notes or questions alongside the highlights. To actually accomplish the reading, I

Post-reading

After our first reading, students will revisit the text and begin work on dissecting the differing sides with different highlighters. Facilitator may model by demonstrating the technique as follows:

Green = Hamlet wants to be, to exist, to live

Yellow = Hamlet wants not to be, annihilation, to die

57   To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
60    Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?

Hopefully this model will help assist the students as they work on highlighting and parsing out the text. Since there are no “right” answers to this exercise, the teacher will simply need to briskly monitor throughout the room and assist with questions. Remind students that we will discuss differences between highlighted interpretations during our class performance post-discussion.

During the post-reading time, students will also collect ten to fifteen words they either are (1) completely not familiar with,  (2) need some reminding on what it means, or (3) simply believe their group members will need to know because of its importance to the passage. After randomly collecting these words on a sheet of paper, they will then organize the words based on the aforementioned three categories. Below this three column notes graphic organizer, they will be asked to complete two small assignments: 1) a pictorial representation of three of the words in category 1 or 2 (realistic or mneumonic) 2) share # 1 with a shoulder partner and share with the entire group a short rationale for why they chose the words for category 3.

After students have completed the highlighting, vocabulary share, and note-taking, team members 1 and 2 will read aloud the green highlights while team members 3 and 4 will read the green highlights while facing each other.

Students will then prepare visual representations of what they read on construction paper and collect makeshift props for their assessment performance. This does not have to be necessarily elaborate, for example, one student may mimic snapping their watch like a whip when Hamlet says “the whips and scorns of time” (line 71).

Assessment

To clarify our differing assignments and to make it truly meaningful, students will perform their readings with other groups. Before they can do that, the six groups of four will be combined into three groups. Once in a larger group students will compare highlights, discuss differences, and work to construct one unified text. After this has been accomplished the groups will practice performing their divided and highlighted text in different portions of the classroom. After a five minute practice, we will circle up and watch the different performances. The facilitator will lead a discussion (based on the identical questions of the youtube video graphic organizer) after each performance, hopefully going more in-depth after each one because of the deepening layers of conversation because of more performances to compare to.

As a homework assignment, students would journal on their personal reactions to the speech today. They would have three options for the journal:

Personal: Have you ever experienced something like this? Tell about how you dealt with the conflict and how your experience is similar or different to Hamlet’s response. How has this changed your view point of both Hamlet and yourself?(Bloom’s: Applying and Creating level questions)

Literary: How does this speech function in relation to the rest of the play? What significant themes or symbols do you see explored in this soliloquy? (Bloom’s: Analyzing level questions)

Philosophical: Evaluate the merits of Hamlet’s logical (or illogical) propositions. Is he right or wrong and why? In true Hamlet fashion, you could argue positively for both (haha)! (Bloom’s: Evaluating level questions)

Evaluation

For this lesson plan, I modified an existing one to reflect a more textually based and scaffolded approach. These are the new elements that I added to this lesson plan:

·      Graphic timeline for review purposes

·      Pre-reading youtube videos and graphic organizer

·      The use of Kindle software for highlighting and dictionary usage

·      Smaller group performances, instead of whole class being divided into two

·      Three-tier journal assignment for further post-reading evaluation

I believe the timeline will really help with putting this speech (as decontextualized as it already is) in context to the rest of the play. I hope that the youtube video will further contextualize the speech and assist with student’s comprehension of the text by seeing it embodied by a living actor, instead of simply being “viewed” through the spoken word of their classmates.

The most improved function of this may possibly be the use of the Kindle. Last time I ran this lesson, students were absolutely bogged down in the unfamiliar language—and I was frantically running from one group to the next answering language questions (instead of helping with evaluative ones). Groups took a lot of time looking up words in the dictionary and it really interrupted the “flow” of the speech and reinforced their disdain for Shakespeare. With the Kindle, students will simply move their cursor over the word, learn the definition, and move on.

Overall, I believe this lesson is well scaffolded. I am still concerned with the numerous transitions and directions that are necessary to accomplish the various tasks they are given. However, I would prefer this active, transitional style of teaching (almost to the point of “over-assign”) to the boredom tedium that is traditional modes of learning. I enjoyed re-thinking this lesson plan, adding valuable scaffolding to assist learners to the heights I call them to, and I look forward to your suggestions on how to improve it. Thank you very much. 

CCI # 3: ¿Comprende?

Layer 1

Pre-Reading

Much of my classroom motivation revolves around my own personal charisma. I don’t say this is necessarily a long-term beneficial strategy, but my first year was characterized by a teacher who used his own personal excitement to generate excitement in his students. Luckily, I am young enough (assuming this strategy doesn’t work forever) to appeal to the students on a similar social level—we can relate on musical tastes, movie interests, shared views about the world and our generation’s place in it. They also are more eager to buy into my excitement because of my similar, but slightly older thus we’ll look up to you, age. I’ve got just enough life experiences, world travel, and college education to make me a role model without all the “uncool” baggage that will most certainly come later.

On a more serious note, I also did my best to actually apply some pedagogical practices I learned from my in-service trainings and my peers and mentors. Honestly, I did find the whole process of “activating prior knowledge” extremely easy, productive, and beneficial to motivating students. I teach British literature, which has the possibility of being, hands-down, the stuffiest subject on the planet. Most young adults could care less if Shakespeare was born in 1564 or who the Romantic poets were, but if I asked them interview their heroes and then compare those people to Beowulf in a hypothetical conversation over coffee they seemed to care. Another exercise I often tried was have them journal about a hypothetical personal experience that connected (tangentially at least) to what we were reading. For example, before we began reading Shakespeare’s The Tempest, I asked students to journal about what they would do if they were locked in a room with their worst enemies, what would you do if you had complete control over them. This situation is similar to the protagonist, Prospero, who has magical power over all his enemies on a deserted island. We then acted out in groups some of their responses to these prompts. The effects were not immediate, but it served as an amazing jumping off point for later discussion. When we finally reached Prospero’s response, light bulbs were going off as students were reminded of how they were similar or different to a fictional character conceptualized 400 years ago. If that isn’t indicative of the power of literature, I don’t know what is.

If I wasn’t asking them to activate through a personal connection, I would start almost every new reading with stories that I pretended had happened to me or a college buddy of mine. Students goofing off in the back would instantly perk up—literally on the edge of their seats waiting to know more about me. Much to their dismay, the stories were dramatic retellings of what actually happened in the upcoming book—deliciously unspoiled by the cliffhanger I left them all dangling on.

Post-reading:

After reading, my understanding did not so much change as it deepen and I found myself more resolved to use specific strategies to enhance comprehension. As with all learning, reading comprehension needs to be theoretically grounded, intentional, and child-centered. I was particularly impressed with the idea of creating “problematic perspectives” (VV&M, 176). You can utilize this using RAFT writing prompts, situated dramas (i.e. improvising a courtroom scene with defendants, plantiffs, judge, jury, and court reporters instead of simply having a formal debate). I firmly believe this activates the long-lost imagination of our older students and helps them create a meaningful interaction with the text.  I would like to push VV&M however to incorporate higher-level evaluative processes into this exercise. After being given a particular role, students should metacognitively evaluate their justifications for why they responded in the ways that they did—unfortunately, the book stops simply at responding to the imaginative prompt when a opportunity for true learning and comprehension awaits the question: “why do you think the way that you do?”

Layer 2

I believe I was very fortunate to have secondary teachers who understood the detrimental effect textbooks can have on minds who want to learn in-depth and focused our class on “trade books” instead of focusing on textbooks and supplementing with trade books. As a teacher now, I actively and openly confront the teaching of textbook literature in my classes—dramatically disdaining the use of the textbook by always showing the full body of the text with a trade book and comparing it to the shortened scrap the textbook calls an “excerpt”. By their very nature, textbooks create superficial comprehension through superficial interaction with the text, generalized and universalized bodies of text that have little to do with the specific needs of the students or the interest of the teacher, and seek a cookie-cutter comprehension assessment with bland and uninteresting prompts.

Trade books, on the other hand, allow for the liberating freedom of choice for the teachers, teachers who are intimately in touch with the needs and interests of their diverse student body. This is a daunting tasks for teachers, because it actually forces them to do the following:

1.     Know their students—if a teacher decides to move beyond the bland universalism of textbooks, they must commit to a pedagogical vision of what their individual students need. This is a commitment (financial and otherwise) that is a calculated risk and it can certainly fail to engage students, but the risk is minimized by know what will engage your particular students.

2.     Know the material—without the easy supplements of textbooks, teachers will have to do their own research, their own broad reading of the author’s work and commentary on it, and their own formulation of authentic questions.

3.     Know the end result—without built-in assessment, teachers with trade books will have to know how to mold the transactional experience of their students with the text in order to guide their progress through it. There are no question and answers found in the margins of Hamlet or Jane Eyre. When teachers decide to use trade books, they have to formulate the questions (or better yet, have students form the questions!) and be open to diverse answers. Project-based learning follows naturally from the use of trade-books because it naturally gives students (and teachers) choice and autonomy in creating their learning environment.

By using trade books, instead of textbooks, teachers are more likely to facilitate a “transactional” mode of interaction with the text (Probst, 378). The image Annie Dillard provides of literature necessarily changing the landscape of the reader’s life and the reader’s life form the literature like a river flowing within a riverbank is a powerful metaphor. Using trade books provides the possibility to do all of the things transactional theory hopes to do: put the reader first, tap into the power of prior knowledge and experience, and honestly honor the diverse primary response each reader will have with the text.

Position Paper Proposal

The purpose of this paper is to persuade my administration to provide funding for the use of e-reader technology in the classroom. I will be evaluating current research on the effectiveness of e-readers in education, their neurological effect on learners, and the applications they could potentially be used for. On a very practical level, I will also be doing some research on the financial feasibility of this proposal (This is an actual project that my principal wants me to research and present my findings on to her) and evaluate what non-monetary benefits will be given to students through the knowledge I have learned in this course. The completed project will be given to my principal and presented to the county school board at the opening meeting in August, so this is an important project that I hope I can utilize all that I've learned in this class and impact my entire school system with the findings.

Scaffolded Reading Experience

Scaffolded Reading Experience—A Study in Shakespeare’s Hamlet—Kindle Edition!

Andrew Chilton

Introduction

Text: The text we will be reading is the famous soliloquy from Act III of Shakespeare’s masterpiece Hamlet—we will be reading Act III, Scene I, lines 57-91. In total this is 34 lines of iambic pentameter text, consisting of 276 words, which have been rated on the Flesch Reading Ease scale at 72.0 (which should be easily understandable to an eleven year old), and a Flesch-Kincaide grade level of 8.6 (appropriate for students in the eighth grade)—To be quite honest, I find these statistics extremely misleading, but I wanted to include this data that I collected and will certainly “take it with a grain of salt” as I implement the study. This will be roughly the seventh or eighth day on Shakespeare, so students will be familiar with the style of language and hopefully will have “bought into” the joys of reading it (I’m an idealist, what can I say?). We will also be using the Kindle software on our laptops to view and manipulate this text; therefore, students will be able to highlight (vital to the overall lesson plan), collect notes, and quickly cross-reference words or ideas throughout the full body of the text (also crucial to the overall lesson plan).

Another “text” that students will be bringing to the discussion is their own narrative and the dialogue they have with each other. There will be prereading journaling that will ask them to bring the “text” of their life into the reading and therefore I must include it under the broad definition of “literacy”.

Setting and Students: For this lesson plan, I will be addressing the reading experience of twenty-four young students, ranging in age from seventeen to eighteen years with a multitude of cultural backgrounds as they struggle to interact with the inherent difficulties of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in an English IV class at Surry Early College High School. The class demographics are fairly homogeneous, with 60% female, 40% male, roughly 85% Caucasian, 7% Latino, 5% Hmong, and 3% African American. The economic background of the students is a little less obvious, with a median family income in the town of the school of $29,000—so I would characterize this as moderately poor, and the geographical location of the school district is in a predominately rural, agriculturally-based (at least formally) economy. The school is an Early College High School that focuses on choosing students from low socioeconomic backgrounds and choosing students that will be “first-generation” college students for their family. With these factors in mind, the high school is on the campus of very successful community college, with a beautiful campus and state-of-the-art facilities, including my own classroom which was built just two years ago. There is abundant technology available in the classroom, including a SMART board, enough laptops (1 year old) for every child, access to flip cameras, iPod touches, and printers. Some of the intangibles about the school that are difficult to quantify are the positive environment that the administration has nurtured amongst the faculty and their level of education and training. Seventy-five percent of the faculty or staff have advanced degrees and we participate (or lead) in monthly trainings in pedagogy, technology, or skills. Because of the small size of the school (approx. 350 students), the principal is able to be a very visible leader in our classrooms and helps influence the culture at the school.

Theoretical Rationale: I have chosen this text because it is a “required” text of the NCSCOS for English IV. I have chosen to implement the study in the fashion that I did because of my inherent beliefs about literacy and the power of literature. I will be using electronic texts, collaborative groups, and embodied performance because I believe that these three “progressive” techniques are powerful tools towards creating meaningful learning. Literacy is an umbrella term that includes the myriad interactions that learners have with all forms of “texts”. Therefore, I believe that their own narrative (explicitly brought through journals/interviews, or implicitly brought through their SES and cultural background) is a text and I believe that I must help facilitate the construction of a powerful and meaningful social interaction with the given text.

Question Labels:

Throughout the lesson, students are engaged in questions in all levels of Bloom’s taxonomy (they will be labeled as they are asked in the lesson plans) with the bulk of the assignment revolving around Creating and Evaluating.

Lesson Plan Overview

I.               Review of graphic timeline of previous action and predictions discussion (5 mins.)

II.             Group viewing of different film version of the soliloquy and completion of short graphic organizer (10-15 mins)

III.           Handout of assignment prompt and two group readings of text—in round robin format (10 mins)

IV.           Complete highlighting, vocabulary-building, and notes part of assignment (20-30 mins)

V.             Highlighted, alternating reading “performance” of the text by group members 1 / 2 and then members 3 / 4  (10 mins)

VI.           Reflect on step V and create visual representations to assist in step VII performance (15-20 mins)

VII.         Group performances with post-discussion about how groups differed, what were their visual and acting strengths, how it relates to film versions, etc. (20-30 mins)

VIII.       Turn in vocabulary words and review homework journal prompt (5 mins)  

Learning Target: After this experience, students will be able to comprehend the divided nature of Hamlet’s mind, its relation to past events, and recreate in collaborative groups an embodied performance of this inner soliloquy.

Materials:

·      25 laptops

·      Kindle software

·      Free download of the text of Hamlet, found here.

·      Room arranged in collaborative (3-4 person) groups

·      Construction paper

·      Markers/Colored Pencils

·      Makeshift props (cardboard, anything lying around the room)

·      Links to various Hamlet performances via Youtube: Richard Burton, Laurence Olivier, Ethan Hawke, David Tenant, or Mel Gibson.

Pre-Reading

Students are placed in six groups of four students each. Students will be asked to look over their collaborative group timeline that they have been working on. The group timeline is a long sheet of bulletin-board paper that is divided horizontally into four distinct sections: brief summary of action, visual representation of summary, analysis in your team’s own words, and a powerful quote that is meaningful to your team. As students look over this timeline, they will be reminded  of the past action and the facilitator will lead a short discussion about what they can infer will happen in today’s scene. I think it’s very important at this crossroads of the play for the instructor to not make value judgments about Hamlet’s “sanity” or condition and leave it wide open for interpretation from the students.

Each collaborative group will then view a different film version (as linked in the materials section) of this famous speech. Students will complete a very short graphic organizer (three part graph) with the following questions involved(in ascending Bloom’s order):

1.     What did you observe?

2.     In five different words, can you summarize the feeling/mood of the scene?

3.     How is this different/similar than what you expected and why?

I wavered between having this as a pre- or post-reading activity, but ultimately decided to let this stand as a pre-reading activity in order that it inspire their own interpretations instead of having the film clips as the capstone of the lesson, hence making them feel as though their interpretations are inferior. By keeping it as a pre-reading experience they can have it as a “dialogue partner” in their subsequent discussions about constructing the text for themselves and can also critique it in their post-reading performance assessment.

Reading

The question students are guided by during their reading is: What textual evidence can you find to justify Hamlet’s stance on continuing life or ending existence? Students will track, in reading through the text, highlight line by line, word by word the subtle changes in Hamlet’s attitude towards life and death. Their goal is in the end to understand his inner struggle and embody that division by a performative reading of the differing highlighted sections, aided by visual representations and theatrical skills. In their collaborative groups, students will read through the text using the Kindle software. They will be able to look up any unknown words simply by putting their cursor over it—which will help immensely with the estimated 30 words (out of 276, quite substantive) I predict they will be unfamiliar with. The assignment revolves around the teams highlighting the different sides of Hamlet’s inner fight (To be or not to be…); therefore the highlighting function of the Kindle will be very important for the students to have and they can add explanatory notes or questions alongside the highlights. The reading will be done in round robin format, switching readers at the end of every “hard stop” (period, question mark, exclamation mark).

Post-reading

After our first reading, students will revisit the text and begin work on dissecting the differing sides with different highlighters. Facilitator may model by demonstrating the technique as follows:

Green = Hamlet wants to be, to exist, to live

Yellow = Hamlet wants not to be, annihilation, to die

57   To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
60    Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?

Hopefully this model will help assist the students as they work on highlighting and parsing out the text. Since there are no “right” answers to this exercise, the teacher will simply need to briskly monitor throughout the room and assist with questions. Remind students that we will discuss differences between highlighted interpretations during our class performance post-discussion. Also, remind students that a list of at least five new words and their definitions will be due at the end of the lesson.

After students have completed the highlighting, vocabulary look-up, and note-taking, team members 1 and 2 will read aloud the green highlights while team members 3 and 4 will read the green highlights while facing each other.

Students will then prepare visual representations of what they read on construction paper and collect makeshift props for their assessment performance. This does not have to be necessarily elaborate, for example, one student may mimic snapping their watch like a whip when Hamlet says “the whips and scorns of time” (line 71).

Assessment

To clarify our differing assignments and to make it truly meaningful, students will perform their readings with other groups. Before they can do that, the six groups of four will be combined into three groups. Once in a larger group students will compare highlights, discuss differences, and work to construct one unified text. After this has been accomplished the groups will practice performing their divided and highlighted text in different portions of the classroom. After a five minute practice, we will circle up and watch the different performances. The facilitator will lead a discussion (based on the identical questions of the youtube video graphic organizer) after each performance, hopefully going more in-depth after each one because of the deepening layers of conversation because of more performances to compare to.

As a homework assignment, students would journal on their personal reactions to the speech today. They would have three options for the journal:

Personal: Have you ever experienced something like this? Tell about how you dealt with the conflict and how your experience is similar or different to Hamlet’s response. How has this changed your view point of both Hamlet and yourself?(Bloom’s: Applying and Creating level questions)

Literary: How does this speech function in relation to the rest of the play? What significant themes or symbols do you see explored in this soliloquy? (Bloom’s: Analyzing level questions)

Philosophical: Evaluate the merits of Hamlet’s logical (or illogical) propositions. Is he right or wrong and why? In true Hamlet fashion, you could argue positively for both (haha)! (Bloom’s: Evaluating level questions)

Evaluation

For this lesson plan, I modified an existing one to reflect a more textually based and scaffolded approach. These are the new elements that I added to this lesson plan:

·      Graphic timeline for review purposes

·      Pre-reading youtube videos and graphic organizer

·      The use of Kindle software for highlighting and dictionary usage

·      Smaller group performances, instead of whole class being divided into two

·      Three-tier journal assignment for further post-reading evaluation

I believe the timeline will really help with putting this speech (as decontextualized as it already is) in context to the rest of the play. I hope that the youtube video will further contextualize the speech and assist with student’s comprehension of the text by seeing it embodied by a living actor, instead of simply being “viewed” through the spoken word of their classmates.

The most improved function of this may possibly be the use of the Kindle. Last time I ran this lesson, students were absolutely bogged down in the unfamiliar language—and I was frantically running from one group to the next answering language questions (instead of helping with evaluative ones). Groups took a lot of time looking up words in the dictionary and it really interrupted the “flow” of the speech and reinforced their disdain for Shakespeare. With the Kindle, students will simply move their cursor over the word, learn the definition, and move on.

Overall, I believe this lesson is well scaffolded. I am still concerned with the numerous transitions and directions that are necessary to accomplish the various tasks they are given. However, I would prefer this active, transitional style of teaching (almost to the point of “over-assign”) to the boredom tedium that is traditional modes of learning. I enjoyed re-thinking this lesson plan, adding valuable scaffolding to assist learners to the heights I call them to, and I look forward to your suggestions on how to improve it. Thank you very much.