Teaching Strategy:
Oral Communication
Brainstorming
and Organizing Ideas
Description
Brainstorming is
a process for creating a list of ideas in response to an initial question or
idea. Brainstorming emphasizes broad and creative thinking, inviting all
participants' points of view in an effort to
ensure that all relevant aspects of an issue or question are considered. Example: If there is a hurricane or another natural disaster,
what should everyone do to be safe? It’s usually a good idea to use graphic
organizers such as “idea maps” or flow charts so students can see the
relationship between various ideas. Brainstorming can be done with the whole
class, in pairs or small groups, or individually. It also lends itself to using
the Think-Pair-Share strategy.
Purpose
Brainstorming provides
an opportunity for students to generate ideas or solve a
problem. In addition, the activity prepares
students to use brainstorming as a tool for work and personal planning. It also
teaches them to organize the ideas they have generated into logical sequences,
into priority lists, or other meaningful units and evaluate which ideas pertain
to a topic, problem or a situation, and which ideas are
interesting but irrelevant to the topic at hand.
What to Do
1.
Introduce a topic, ask questions and ask students to write their ideas on the board (or give them
to one person writing responses on the board), either as part of a list or in
the form of a graphic organizer.
2.
Keep asking for more ideas and offer some of your own.
3.
Guide the brainstorm by
scribing ideas as they come, stopping any comments that evaluate ideas,
inviting new ideas, and encouraging the group to share their ideas freely.
Help generate energy
and free-thinking through encouragement.
4.
Organize the ideas and make the organization explicit, saying something like Ah, you said we needed
emergency supplies, so let me put “water” and “flashlight” under emergency
supplies.
5.
After a few simple brainstorms on topics that students are familiar with, demonstrate how brainstorming works and set some
ground rules.
·
All ideas, however
simple, creative, or off the wall are welcome.
·
No one will comment on the ideas
during the brainstorm.
· If you wish, offer a one minute "quiet period" before the brainstorm for people to reflect upon or start lists of ideas on their own.
6. Explain what will be done with the brainstormed ideas.
7. Ask for clarification of any ideas that are not clear to you or others.
Keep in Mind
Brainstorming relies
on people thinking
and sharing freely.
Remind them of this as you enter the activity,
and reinforce initial ideas and creative ideas to help everyone participate
freely and fully.
·
Be ready to stop the first effort at judging a suggested idea (as
well as subsequent judging types of comments). Remind the group that
brainstorming accepts all ideas without criticism or evaluation.
·
Especially in groups where
some individuals may be more
reflective thinkers, give people a minute to start jotting down some thoughts
on their own before starting
the group brainstorm aloud. This will help those
people get started with the whole group.
·
Scribing technique: Use two different colored markers, alternating them with each idea.
Make your letters 1.5 inches high or more so all can see (and work off
of).
·
With an active
group, use two scribes so the writing
doesn't slow down the idea generation.
·
In cases where the items on
the list should be prioritized, use “sticky
dot” voting. Give each participant 1-3 sticky
dots and ask them to put a dot next to the items they think is
most important or most answer
the original question. Identify those items that get the most votes and
eliminate those items that have the fewest votes. This is not a mechanistic
process. Leave room for discussion if someone feels strongly about an item.
Teaching Strategy
Clarifying
Description
Clarifying
belongs to a set of reading strategies called Collaborative
Teaching, but it can also stand on its own. Clarifying is an umbrella
term for a set of cognitive strategies that students
can use to identify where they have comprehension
difficulties and how they can get at the meaning
of a word, phrase, sentence
or passage. Students are encouraged to identify problem areas and
consider specific fix-up or repair strategies when understanding breaks down.
Clarifying strategies need to be adjusted for different kinds of texts and need
to take into account a variety of reasons for comprehension difficulties
(insufficient background knowledge, weak decoding skills, unfamiliar
vocabulary, or general problems with gaining meaning from print).
Purpose
Clarifying strategies teach struggling readers
to do what proficient readers
do: They stop reading
when a text no longer makes
sense and implement various repair strategies. Engaging students in identifying
unclear concepts, structures, and passages helps students to learn
self-monitoring techniques.
Understanding
and practicing repair strategies
helps students to look for synonyms
or other text clues.
Rereading can help pick up information that may have been missed. In using
various fix-up strategies students realize that the answer
to a comprehension problem may be found in their mind (as they
think about things more deeply), in the text itself (related words or
other text clues), or in an outside source (another text, an expert, or a
dictionary).
What to Do
1.
To introduce the point of
the strategy, create a short text that contains nonsense words that need to be
clarified and that eventually can be understood if fix-up strategies are used.
Example: When presenting an oral text, you can mumble (say "mumble,
mumble") at various points, encouraging students to stop you when they
don’t understand by raising their hand or holding up a red “STOP, I don’t get
it” card. If presenting a written text, you can start with a simple sentence
like, “The fire fighters rushed to the blazing fire and when they got there,
they pulled out the heavy houses.” Ask students if the sentences make sense and if not why not. Invite them to
use a fix up strategy, such as using their
background knowledge about what equipment firefighters use and their knowledge
of English spelling.
2.
Select a text that contains several
words or structures the students are not likely
to know. Use the
Think-Aloud strategy to illustrate clarifying and repairing comprehension
difficulties.
3.
Use a new passage
to engage students
in guided practice.
Teach the Click -
Clunk Strategy (students say
click when they understand a word or passage, and clunk when the meaning is not
clear). Consider sentences like I was
astounded by his nerve. How could he ask to borrow $200 dollars when he had not repaired the money
I had loaned him the previous month. The traffic was just awful.
Help students to
realize that sometimes errors occur in a text, and sometimes they are due to
carelessness (like skipping
a page). The point is for students
to stop when the text no longer
makes sense and think. Help
students understand that sometimes lack of comprehension is because the writer is careless and sometimes because
the reader does not pay
close enough attention (such as skipping a page before reading the third sentences above).
4.
Break students into small
groups or pairs. Designate a team leader in each group who uses the Think-Aloud
strategy to identify unknown words or unclear sentences or
passages. The team leader works with the group to see if these difficulties can be addressed and meaning can be clarified. They then report to the rest of the class.
5.
As you introduce new
readings, show students how to annotate texts to indicate where they have
difficulties (with markers
or post-its) and highlight various
fix-up strategies they should try, matching
them to the nature of the difficulties. Periodically review the strategies.
Keep in Mind
Allow students
to signal understanding or lack of understanding both verbally and non-verbally and focus
on both listening comprehension and reading comprehension. Encourage students to use signal
cards to let you know when you
are speaking too fast or when they lose track of what’s being said on an audio-
tape or video so that they see that they can use similar strategies with
written texts as with oral texts
Explain that
when something needs to be clarified when someone speaks, we often use
non-verbal communication to signal
lack of understanding (e.g. leaning forward
or frowning). And when a video stops making sense, we often hit the pause
and replay button to see if we may have missed something.
Sometimes we ask other people for help.
Explain to
students that similar strategies can be used in reading: stopping to think when
something doesn’t make sense, identifying the unclear concepts
or words and mentally rewinding and paying close attention are ways of catching on
and not losing the thread of a story.
Teaching Strategy
Click, Clunk
Description
Click, Clunk is
a teaching/learning strategy that students use to signal comprehension
difficulties to themselves and the teacher. Students simply read silently and
then say “click” for each word they understand
(and again for each sentence
or passage) and “clunk” whenever they encounter a word, phrase,
sentence or passage that they don’t fully understand.
Purpose
Research
indicates that self-monitoring of comprehension and becoming aware of what it
takes to make meaning can help students who have difficulty reading. Click,
Clunk is a self-monitoring strategy that helps students pinpoint where
comprehension breaks down so they can go back and try to “fix up” their lack of understanding. Used in a class with a group of students who quietly go click or
clunk, the strategy signals teachers where students
are getting stuck. Students can use the strategy on their
own as well as they read silently – all they need to do is to
mentally realize they have just run
into a clunk. The strategy encourages students to think as they read. Combined
with “fix up” strategies (rereading,
using text aides such as graphics or pictures, drawing
on your knowledge of the
world or guessing meaning from context)
gives them another tool to increase their reading comprehension.
What to Do
Select a reading passage
that students need to understand and are likely to find a bit challenging. Use this passage with the class after you
have modeled the strategy with a number of sentences that help students
understand how to use the strategy.
1.
On the board, write a couple of sentences that contain foreign
words or nonsense words so that no one has an advantage (Last night I had
Kohlrouladen for dinner and they were scrumptious.).
For more proficient classes, write a short passage that has several words that
none of the students are likely to know (Example: “Everyone has a cell phone
these days. They are ubiquitous. Their use in movie theatres and restaurants is
disconcerting.”).
2.
Do a quick think-aloud, saying
something like “Mhmm,
Let me read this. There
are several words here I don’t recognize. Let me try a
new strategy, called Click, Clunk."
3.
Go through the sentence, saying “click” at the familiar
words, and “clunk”
at the unfamiliar words.
Later on, use the strategy
with sentences and paragraphs as well.
Write a sentence containing a nonsense word on the board and have
students try the strategy as a group. (Example: Street racing is lawunful and very dangerous.) Tell students
that “clunks” are important signals that tell them that a word or a sentence
doesn’t make sense to them. “Clunks” tell us when we should reread a sentence
and what we should pay attention to.
4.
To demonstrate passage clunks,
write a text on the board that contains
words that students know but that don’t make sense in the
context of the passage (Example: The
firemen rushed to the scene in their tricycles. At the scene of the fire, they
pulled out the big houses from the truck and painted the house in the direction
of the fire. Ask students to try the strategy, explaining what to do one more
time, if necessary. Move your finger under the words and ask students to say “click”
or “clunk” after each word. Then stop after each sentence and ask “Is this
sentence a "click" or a "clunk"?” Ask students to identify
why some sentences are clunks (they don’t make sense) and highlight that sometimes we may know all the words in a text, and we still can’t make sense
out of what we read.
Sometimes the difficulty is due to lack of clarity on the part of the writer
and other times it is lack of knowledge on the part of the reader.
5.
Highlight the point of the
strategy: Click, Clunk allows us to identify where we are having difficulties and it allows
us to pinpoint what we don’t understand. It is a signal to reread and think
about a sentence or a text a bit more to try to figure out what the writer may
have meant. The strategy also serves as a signal to identify difficult words
and to highlight them so they can be looked up and studied.
6.
After a break of a day or
two, return to the strategy, using a somewhat difficult text that is related to what students are working on. Ask
students to read silently, but verbalize the click, click,
clunks to themselves and mark
the clunks with a pencil.
Walk around and observe students
as they mark their pages but don’t intervene. Ask students to work in
pairs to compare their clunks and see if they can help each other. Encourage
more proficient readers to help low level readers by highlighting the fix-up
strategies they know about – not
just simply to explain an unknown
word or clarify a passage.
7.
Bring back the entire
class and debrief
the “clunks”. Include
words, sentences, and passages.
Ask students to re-read sentences with clunks to see if meaning can be
clarified. If you have covered “comprehension fix up” strategies, repeat and reinforce
them at this point.
If not, start introducing them so you can turn “clunks” into “clicks”.
Continue using the strategy
anytime students indicate
that a text is too difficult.
Keep in Mind
It takes students a while
to feel comfortable with a new strategy, so stick
with it. Identifying what you can and cannot understand is a key skill in reading comprehension so it’s
worth the effort to help students self-monitor.
You can also try this strategy for listening comprehension. Simply create (or have students
create “Signal Cards” that say
Click or Clunk. Present information orally to your class (using the same
approach as above) and ask students to hold up the cards to indicate they
understand or don’t understand what you say. Pause after each sentence as a
cue for them to signal and purposefully speak fast or use new words
to “force” the use of the cards.
To simplify
things, you can also use red or green coloured paper, with red indicating clunk
or I don’t have a clue as to what that means and
green signaling I understand, no problem.
Teaching Strategy
Predicting
Description
Predicting belongs
to a set of strategies called Reciprocal
Teaching or Collaborative Teaching. Predicting asks students to take in information (a headline or
title, a picture, a summary, or a chart) and make an informed guess as to the
ideas or concepts that might appear in a text. After making a prediction,
students read or listen to a text and either confirm or revise their
predictions.
Purpose
The predicting
strategy activates students’ background knowledge and starts engagement with
key concepts. It activates background knowledge and shows students that they
are smart enough to figure things out
even if they have trouble with with reading.
Students learn to make connections between their own
prior knowledge and the ideas in a text. It’s helpful for students to see that
sometimes their predictions are off and they have to stop and think and
possibly revise their predictions. Predicting and revising also assist students
in thinking while they listen
or read, as they pay attention to see if they were right in their predictions. Having
students revise their prediction supports “rereading”, an important component
of comprehension, especially for struggling readers.
What to Do
1.
Introduce the strategy and
discuss why it is important. Explain to students that thinking about texts
(visual, oral, written) engages the brain and helps greatly in understanding.
Stress that students will comprehend more and remember more if they think while they watch,
listen or read.
2.
Explain to students that daily life is not possible without constant
predictions (e.g., you may ask How do you find things you always buy in a
new store? You use your background
knowledge. You predict that the milk
and the butter will be
close to each other or that the
eggs will be in the refrigerated section. This may not be true in other countries where eggs may not be refrigerated
and can be sometimes be found next to the flour on a shelf. Use examples like
this to lead students toward the need to revise their predictions and start
thinking anew.
3.
To illustrate how the mind makes predictions and then confirms
or revises them, use an activity
such as “Thingamagigs” to let
students experience how their mind tries to make sense out of information that
is presented bit by bit.
4.
Select a text students
might read in class. Choose a reading
with titles, pictures,
and graphs that make predictions and informed
guessing worthwhile. Ask the class to generate ideas that they think they might
find in the text using their background knowledge and other clues. Encourage
thoughtful predictions (Amazing Stories or
stories about accidents or natural disasters seem to work well.)
5.
Create a few True/False
statements to build suspense and ask students to make informed guesses as to which statements about the passage
or story are right or wrong (informational texts work best). Include the main points of the text as well
as details. Ask students to discuss their predictions in pairs or small groups.
Explain that the answers will be found in the text (oral or written), but for
now, you just want to see how good the class is at using their prior knowledge
of the world to guess the right answer. Keep track on a flip chart.
6.
Read the text with the class
or ask students to read the text and then ask them to work individually or in
small pairs. Ask them to highlight all the words and ideas they predicted and
underline all the true statements that they had guessed right.
Congratulate them when they are right.
7.
Explain that sometimes we
predict right and sometimes our guesses are wrong because everyone’s brain works differently, and sometimes we don't have enough
information to make thoughtful predications.
8.
Ask students to circle the statements that are contrary
to their guesses
and discuss why there is a
mismatch between what they expected
to find and the content
of the text. Bring the class together and reflect on the strategy (use
and importance). Continue using the strategy with different kinds of text.
Teaching Strategy
Problem-Solving Scenarios
Description
Students work in
small groups to analyze a problem and discuss possible solutions. Students may
work from written scenarios, situation
cards or cues, or they may create their own situations. Scenarios
used in the classroom often
use a problem related to a “hot topic”.
Purpose
Scenarios are an
excellent way to build problem solving skills and enhance literacy and
communication skills. As students
read a scenario, they are engaged in texts that require thinking.
Students learn to use
their thinking skills to analyze the situation, identify the problem,
brainstorm ideas, and consider the consequences for each idea. Scenarios allow
teachers to gain insights into what students are thinking about and how they
interpret particular situations.
What to Do
Select several scenarios, create your own, or work with the students to describe a hot situation in which they have found themselves. Choose
one scenario to discuss with the
entire group, modeling the steps you want students to take as they
discuss the scenario in a group or in pairs.
Students or the teacher:
1. Read the scenario and clarify key vocabulary.
2. Identify the problem and clearly state it or write it
down.
3. Brainstorm possible
solutions (without getting
bogged down in what may or may not work).
4. Select reasonable solutions worth discussing and lay out the consequences for each.
5.
Decide as a group on one solution that might work, and, if appropriate, also identify minority
opinions if the group cannot agree.
6. Report the solution along with a rationale to the rest of the group.
The teacher then
debriefs with the students, summarizing the problem, and highlighting the
solutions that were offered along with the reasons behind
each solution. The teacher links
the discussion back to
similar topics that have been studied and discussed in class and makes
connections to students' lives.
Keep in Mind:
·
Make sure students are comfortable working
in small groups
or in pairs so that the activity
doesn’t not fall flat.
·
Select situations that are likely
to engage your students. For beginners, use problems that you
have heard them discuss or that are part of their every day life. For more
advanced students, connect the scenario to a topic that students have read
about or that has been in the news.
·
Introduce the scenario
orally to make sure students are with you. Clarify vocabulary and allow
students to work in pairs or small groups with the content of the scenario to
ensure comprehension (e.g., question
generating and answering; filling out an Event Map; T/F questions etc).
·
Make sure scenarios allow for a variety of opinions even if discussions might get contentious.
·
Walk around to keep students on track
and clarify the problem (some students
get off track quite easily).
·
Avoid identifying one right
solution since the point of the lesson is to help students think things through on their own. Discourage silly answers and highlight what consequences might be when questionable solutions are
suggested.
·
If there is an important
point you want students to take away from the discussion highlight that point at the end of the lesson. Restate
the points that students have made that are worth thinking
about and remembering.
Teaching Strategy
Question Generating and Answering
Description
Question
generating and answering is often taught as part of Reciprocal Teaching, a powerful set of techniques that also includes
peer-to-peer strategies for summarizing, predicting, and clarifying. Students are invited to generate
questions about a text (oral or written) and work with others to
find the answers in the text. Students can work in
pairs or in teams, with individual students leading the team and asking
questions while the rest of the group finds and discusses the answers.
Question
formation can be difficult for students who have not been actively engaged in
learning for some time. The structure
of questions may need to be pre-taught and may require
practice before they can form questions easily and clearly focus
on the content of the text. Informational texts work well, but for low level readers, personal narratives can be
used. Some teachers use question generating to help students focus on
literature concepts (character, plot, sequence, conflict, etc.).
Purpose
Question generating (or asking)
encourages students to engage the text and pay attention to key content information. It is part of a set
of strategies found to be effective in increasing comprehension of texts.
Asking and answering questions with a partner or as part of a group engages all students, and students get significantly more time on task and
opportunities to grapple with the text. Shyer students are more likely to participate since
their answers (and possible mistakes) are not made public. Using
team leaders as “experts” who
ask comprehension questions for others to answer provides more proficient
students with a challenge and offers examples of “cognitive apprenticeship” to
others as they listen to their peers formulate questions.
What to Do
1.
To introduce Question Generating and Answering, use a text that is slightly
above the skill level of the students and contains interesting
information.
2.
Let students know that question asking
and answering is a great way to help them understand
and remember what they are reading.
3.
Model the strategy first
with the entire class asking questions about both literal content and
information to be inferred. Use the Think Aloud
technique to allow students to see how you select a question to be asked. Be sure to
include both “yes/no” and open-ended questions. For example, when reading “The
7 Habits of Successful Readers”, you could begin with a warm-up question such
as “Yes or No: The article discusses the habits of struggling readers.” or “How
many habits are discussed in the article?” and move on to “What are 3 things
that successful readers do?” Ask the class to answer either orally or in
writing. Provide feedback.
4.
Select another
section of the text and ask
a question (e.g., What do successful readers
do before they start to
read?). After students answer, invite a student to ask a question using the
same or the next section of the text. Help the student formulate the question
if necessary by gently rephrasing. Invite the class to answer. Emphasize that this
is a comprehension activity and questions have to be such that the answers can
be found in the text.
5.
Introduce the text to be read. Break the class into pairs or teams and designate a student to ask
questions for others to answer.
6.
Debrief by asking selected teams to report out. Reemphasize both the
structure and purpose of the
activity and discuss with students the benefit of learning with this strategy.
Teaching Strategy
Reciprocal Teaching (RT) – Peer to Peer Teaching
Description
Reciprocal Teaching
consists of a set of
strategies that are first introduced
and modeled by the teacher and then used by students in
pairs or in small groups. The skills are (1) summarizing or retelling, (2)
predicting, (3) clarifying, and (4) asking and answering questions (see other
strategies for more detail about individual strategies). Strategies can be
taught in any order but are most powerful if taught in combination. During the
initial phase of instruction, the teacher assumes the primary responsibility
for teaching and demonstrating the strategies. Students
slowly take over and practice
these strategies with each other until they can work
independently in their groups. The strategy is best used with
“informational” non-fiction texts but can be adapted
for narratives.
Purpose
Reciprocal
teaching consists of a set of strategies that are used to increase
comprehension, promote collaboration, and foster meta-cognitive skills.
Teachers and students take turns interacting with the text and leading various
activities. The technique not only supports improved listening skills and
greater understanding of written texts, but also helps students
monitor their own learning and thinking. Low level
readers can greatly benefit from the
opportunities to practice
communication skills in a supportive setting (pairs or small groups) where they can interact with
authentic or adapted materials and practice their communication skills while
completing a meaningful task.
What to Do
1.
Prepare students
to use Reciprocal Teaching
strategies by explaining that you will teach them how to improve their comprehension
skills (listening and reading).
2.
Introduce the Retell or
Summarize strategy by reviewing a text (oral or written)
that students are familiar with. That way, students can
focus on the strategy without getting frustrated by too difficult content or
new vocabulary.
3.
Start by using the Think Aloud strategy as you model how
you would retell or summarize the section. Say something
like, “OK, this text is about Multiple
Intelligences; let me see if I remember all the important points. I
remember that there is not just one type of intelligence but there are many and
that people are smart in different ways. So that can be my first sentence of my
summary. ‘There are many ways of being smart.’ So now I need to explain what I
mean by that."
4.
Demonstrate the Clarification Strategy and continue to
use the Think Aloud process. Say
something like, “I don’t remember
the difference between
‘interpersonal’ and ‘intrapersonal,’ so let me write this
down as a question so I can double-check and clarify this point." Then
write down
the clarification question, “What is the difference between …?.” Use the same procedure to identify a part of a sentence or
passage that might be confusing.
5.
As the week progresses,
introduce the other RT strategies by modeling them. Select texts that easily let you demonstrate a particular strategy
(e.g., texts that have multiple
headings, pictures, or graphs
that allow students to practice “predicting”).
6.
Set up pairs or teams and clarify roles.
Ask a team leader to model use of the strategy or lead the task while other students respond.
Circle the room and
observe but don’t
intervene unless invited to do so.
7.
Ask students to report back on their discussion and highlight interesting ideas from the group.
Keep in Mind
It may take students a while to become
comfortable as peer teachers but it is a set of strategies worth sticking with because of its many benefits. Highlight
how much communication skills practice students
are getting when they work in small groups or pairs where everyone is
involved.
Focus on one
strategy at a time, model it, and give students content materials that are easy
to understand for the most part. (The exception is practicing clarifying
where the focus needs to be on sorting out unfamiliar information or
understanding new vocabulary).
Teaching Strategy
Role Plays
Description
Students
work in pairs or small groups to act out a situation. Each student has a role.
Students may work from cards or
cues, or they may create their own situations. Role plays may be used in
conjunction with other strategies and activities such as Working with Scenarios and Reader’s
Theatre. Role plays can be simple (You
lost your wallet on the bus and need to talk to Lost and Found.) or complex
(You are a supervisor and need to tell an employee who is always late that she needs to shape
up. She has sick
kids at home and needs the money.)
Purpose
The purpose of a role play is to give students an opportunity to work with others to act out a
situation and explore how others
may think, feel or respond
in a situation. Role plays are meant to build communication
skills as well as problem solving skills. They
help students think on their toes because they need to listen carefully
and respond to what they hear. They can’t simply recite a memorized dialog. By
putting themselves in real situations, students learn to think about what they
might say and gain practice expressing thoughts and ideas in response to
others. Role plays can be created from current events, short stories, novels,
and screenplays to help students understand dramatic structure in texts. They
also are useful in having students act out sticky or stressful situations that are part of their daily lives (your
boss wants you to work late but you
have a test the next day; some girls in your class are telling lies about you
on My Space).
What to Do
1.
Prepare students
by presenting a situation or a problem and discussing the people
involved. Highlight the different perspectives that each person might
bring to the situation.
2.
Select a situation and brainstorm
what each person might think and feel. Use dramatization, chalk talk, or puppets to illustrate how an interaction might flow or role play the situation with one of the more mature students.
3.
Use retelling or an event map to make sure that all students
are clear on the situation
or the problem and the
various actors involved.
4.
Delineate roles and discuss
what each person
is trying to accomplish in this situation. Assign roles and make sure students are clear on their
“motivation” as actors in the role play.
5.
Depending on the size of the role play, have students
work in teams or in pairs and give them
their own space to practice. Encourage them to be articulate, convincing and
dramatic.
6.
Circulate and observe but do not intervene. Then ask
a few of the students
to demonstrate their role plays.
Keep in Mind
Allow your role plays to emerge
from themes or topics
the students find engaging or show interest
in. (applying for a job, reenacting an historic event, dealing with a
tricky social situation with friends,
an interaction with police).
Have students
generate possible language
they might use in a situation and demonstrate how differences
in tone can signal differences in attitude (Excuuuuuse
me) and serve to irritate or antagonize others.
Consider
using Role Play Cards to assign roles to students. Spell out what each actor is
trying to accomplish as part of the role (You are a landlord
and your young tenant has not paid rent in two months, and besides you think he smokes
dope in his apartment and you don’t like it. Tell the person he has to move by
the end of the month).
Teaching Strategy
Summarizing
Description
Summarizing is
part of a set of strategies called Reciprocal
Teaching that involves peer interactions. Reciprocal teaching also includes
predicting, question generating, and clarifying. Summarizing is a challenging
task for most struggling readers, and is often preceded by practice in
retelling and note taking. Summarizing requires
that students first get the gist of a reading
and then distill
key points in the
reading. Summarizing requires that students develop a shorter version of a
longer piece that includes both the main points and essential details.
Most struggling
readers have difficulty with summaries, since they may not have the literacy
skills required to distill and restate ideas. To start, they may need a chance
to practice paraphrasing and retelling a short
text in their own words. Even at low-literacy levels,
students should get the idea that just copying sentences is not an
acceptable way to retell or summarize.
Purpose
Summarizing
builds comprehension skills in reading and listening by focusing students’
attention on essential points. It is often used in academic work, both as a way
to engage students in texts and to capture their understanding of key ideas. Although mostly used in writing, it
also serves students well in team interaction
in school and at
work as they present the main points
of a discussion to others
or report an event or
incident.
What to Do
1. Introduce the importance of being able to summarize by using
examples from students’ lives, from work, newspapers, and from academic
subjects. Show students models of
summaries for films or books. Show headlines from newspapers that are a
one-line summary of the story. To further build familiarity with the concept,
start by summarizing an event or incident that students
know about. Explain that you could go on and on retelling every detail of the event but that your audience might get impatient.
Highlight that a summary saves time for listeners and readers.
2. To focus students’ attention to the point of the strategy,
select a text that contains familiar content, possibly
a news story or a previously discussed reading. Present the information orally
to make it easier for students to paraphrase and not copy.
3. Model your own summary of the text you just presented by
doing a Think-Aloud. Use guiding questions (who, what, when, where, why, and how) to present key points on the board.
Include a title, and a strong
first sentence in your summary. Invite students to help you with this task.
4. Select a new high interest
text. Ask students to read the text with you
or have them listen as you present the
text orally. Ask students to take notes or highlight key ideas in the text.
5. Pair up students
and ask them to discuss
what they’ve heard using their notes. Then invite them to
represent the information in visual form using a graphic organizer, such as an Event Map or a Flow
Chart. Circle the room and guide students
if they ask for help, but don’t interfere otherwise.
6.
Bring the class together and
work with the class as a whole to create an oral summary, guiding the group by
saying something like, What do we want to
say about this topic (e.g., a short biography of Leonardo de Vinci)? What’s an
important point that we want to make? (e.g., Leonardo was a genius)
We should probably
explain that point a bit. What is our evidence
that he was a genius (e.g., He
was the best in his field in science, art, and inventions). What question might
people have about this statement (e.g., how do you know, what are examples of
what he did?)
7.
Ask students to work individually and create a summary, rephrasing the first sentence
(e.g.,
Leonardo may have been the smartest
person ever) and using different examples .
8. Continue the summarizing process with different kinds of texts (descriptive, sequencing, cause and effect, narratives). Keep breaking the process down
into structures the students can work with and keep pushing students to focus
on key information, not trivial details. Use graphic organizers to help them
see relationships between details and global ideas.
Keep in MInd
Summarizing is a task that
is cognitively challenging. It may be best to start
having students retell a multi- step event and practice telling it
in its long form and then in its short form.
Students will
need practice summarizing what they hear as well as summarizing what they read.
News stories that grab students
might be a good way to build
listening skills that then get reinforced when they
read about the same event and are asked to present the gist of the story. They could create a headline, for example.
Use video clips from TV or the internet
that have students
talking and use those as prompts for retelling
and summarizing. Invite students to send an e-mail to a friend summarizing a
YouTube video that they think is worth watching.
Teaching Strategy
Teaching with PowerPoint or Overheads
Description
The teacher
creates a presentation or a mini-lesson that focuses on either content
knowledge (e.g., electricity, multiple intelligences), a theme designed to
build vocabulary, a reading strategy. Slides containing visual information are
created and supplemented with slides that contain visual information plus text and eventually just text alone. This process
is an effective way of teaching content
and also an ideal
medium for introducing strategies as words can be highlighted and sentences deleted
or added to make a point.
The slides are
used to set the context, focus students’ attention and pace the class. Students
are encouraged to work individually or in teams to create
their own PowerPoint presentations to teach others.
PowerPoint lessons allow teachers to create and store images and text
permanently, allowing for easy retrieval, modification, and update. (If
computers and digital projectors are not available, projection transparencies
can be created from drawings or collages.)
Compelling images
help create a picture in students' minds. They connect
visual information with text and activate prior knowledge. Images
enrich background knowledge in ways that are not dependent on print. Students
are asked to respond to visuals with a series of question prompts, memory pegs,
or the use of diagrams to show relationships between ideas.
Purpose
Low literate
students have difficulty understanding information provided primarily in print
and they have difficulty taking notes from a lecture. PowerPoint presentations,
however, allow students to access information
or concepts without getting
mired in print.
Images and graphs
represent ideas that the teacher can make accessible to students through
interactive discussions or a mini-lesson. Images allow struggling readers to access information without having to read text and help to both activate and enrich background knowledge. When images are
connected to concepts or to text, they act as “memory pegs,” and become
anchored in the brain.
What to Do
1.
Show a PowerPoint (or overhead projection) presentation using only visual information. Keep your slides simple and related to one another.
2.
Describe the ideas represented by each slide, reinforcing key concepts and introducing new vocabulary as needed.
3.
Repeat images on subsequent slides
to reinforce key vocabulary on subsequent slides.
4.
Ask the students
to respond to key words and concepts
on the slides from time to time and keep
the presentation interactive.
5.
After working with students
using only pictures
and oral input,
show the same or similar slides
but this time include written text or use text only.
Keep in Mind
As you go through
the presentation, ask questions periodically to check for comprehension.
Create your
slides in such a way that the first
run through consists of students hearing the information presented and ideas
reinforced by visuals. On the second and third presentation, written text is
introduced and visual information serves
merely as a prompt to help students
remember the key ideas.
You can use text only slides
to engage students
in various forms
of interactive reading
(echo reading, shared
reading).
Consider printing
out the PowerPoint slides as hand-outs so that students
can make notes or highlight key ideas as they review the
materials after the initial presentation.
If you don’t have PowerPoint capabilities in your classroom, use overheads and a projector to similar effects.
Involve students
in various forms
of retelling (putting
prints of PP slides in order; using Event Maps to talk about Who, what where and why or Story
Boards to show sequencing.
Ask students
to create their own presentations using either PowerPoints or Posters with graphics and pictures to provide information.
Encourage team and pair work and offer opportunities for students to present
their projects to a wider audience (other classes, program staff; the wider
community).
Teaching Strategy
Think-Pair-Share
Description
Think-Pair-Share is designed to have
students think about a topic, then pair with another student and share their thoughts. It allows students
time to formulate their thoughts
and involves all students, not just
the few who volunteer or whom the teacher calls on. Think-Pair-Share works well in all classes and can be adapted for
all levels. It can easily be implemented in large classes.
Purpose
Think-Pair-Share allows students to
think about a response before sharing their ideas with another student or the class.
Students are often more willing to share an idea with a partner than
speaking up in class. This strategy allows them to try out their ideas in, one
hopes, a supportive dialog with a partner. Thinking and talking about an idea
also helps students to formulate sentences in their minds and sharpens their ideas as they listen
to others. If students are asked to report
out to the whole class,
more confident students get a chance
to volunteer the answer for their pair, while less confident students
hear their ideas presented by a team member. Think-Pair-Share is an
excellent way to build workplace communication skills, since even low skilled
employees are often expected to work in teams.
What to Do
1.
Think about how you want to pair up students, either informally, or by pre-assigning pairs within or
across proficiency levels. You can
also organize the class by numbering students 1 to 4 and asking 1s and 2s and 3s and 4s to work together as teams.
2.
Introduce
your prompt – a question,
a picture, a situation, a problem, a reading, or a PowerPoint -
- that you present
orally and ask students to respond. Be sure to ask
questions that require
some thinking and where students
are likely to diverge in their answers.
You can also make statements and ask students to think about
whether a statement is True or False and give a reason.
3.
Ask students to work
individually first for a minute
or so. Encourage them to think
about the answer. Students may
write down their answer, but shouldn’t always be required to do so.
4.
Announce partners and ask
students to pair up and share their ideas. If they have written lists, they should combine their lists (leaving out
redundant ideas. If they are to give
an opinion, they should compare and discuss their opinions. Remind
students of the social language
that makes interactions work
more smoothly.
5.
Finally, call on pairs
to share their ideas with the entire class. To help ensure that students
listen, ask other students to repeat what’s been said and ask if they
agree or disagree or would like to add some of their ideas.
There is no need to have every group talk (in
fact, that slows down the class). But come back to hear other people’s ideas as you
review the lesson.
