June 14, 2013 Claim and Evidence

Started out with Slider sharing a strategy, Silent Dialogue citing textual evidence which we felt was an excellent way to get students to think about and process what they read.  This exercise also reinforced text annotation that we discussed earlier in the week.

Marsha introduced a murder/mystery activity, Who Killed Mr. Xavier?, that would be engaging to our students and good to use as a beginning of the year activity to introduce students to Claim/Evidence.  This activity lends itself well to using Accountable Talk because there is not actual solution to the mystery so students are left to argue their own positions using the evidence from the text.

Ryan followed up on yesterdays closing activity where we had to write down 1 gift and 1 challenge that we were given this week.  She randomly distributed the post-it notes we wrote on and we shared them with the group, and when we agreed with someones gift and/or challenge we acknowledged that by nodding our head.  This was strategy we could use in the classroom that would affirm that the students were not alone in their beliefs.  This strategy could be used in a number of ways, in the classroom, to anonymously present ideas.




Sample these to make a claim!

 Going along with the Claim/Evidence theme for the day, our wonderful facilitators tempted us with doughnuts!  Turns out,
doughnuts do have a place in the Lalli schedule!
During the morning we were challenged to form a claim and give evidence for an investigation involving "what makes a quality doughnut?".  We started out with a brainstorming activity to develop the criteria for "What makes a quality doughnut?"  (ie.  yeasty, fresh, toppings, moist, hot, sweet)
Then we sampled three different types of doughnuts and as a table group we constructed a claim for which doughnut was the ideal doughnut. 

 

 Next we shared our claims and critiqued them determining which were acceptable claims based on the indicators.  Then lastly we made changes to our claims if necessary and discussed ways that we could further gather evidence to support our claims.

 Next we continued our practice using Claim and Evidence but took it a step further with linking the two by analysing text, with the help of Mary Poppins!  While the doughnut investigation was more reliant on our personal experience with doughnuts, we were now challenged to cite significant and sufficient evidence from text.

 

We continued our practice of supporting our positions but shifted gears from using a fictional text to a non-fictional, scientific account about vampire bats.

 

 



Using an article from Texts and Lessons for Content-Area Reading, we again practiced constructing claims, and highlighting evidence from text, but took it step further by challenging the claims of others.

 

Each activity built upon the next, giving us a stronger understanding of how Claim-Evidence-Analysis/Reasoning can be used in our classrooms.

 

Wrapping up our session today, we broke out into our content area groups and created an inventory of the strategies we have been introduced to this week.  Using that inventory we individually set professional goals along with an action plan for achieving those goals.  All in all, it was a productive day :-)

He! Slider, hope you do well at your interview!!!!  We wish you luck!

 

Jennifer and Liz