June 11, 2013

Starting the second half of Tuesday, Jean and Marsha introduced ideas for getting students to analyze short texts (in this case, two articles) in terms of purpose and structure, specifically in the way an article's purpose informs the logic of its structure. Marsha did this by introducing the "Inverted Triangle," a guide to the structure of journalistic articles. The guide opens with a "lede" and then proceeds through various sections from there, each section having its own purpose; teachers would have students attempt to identify and then outline/label the various sections of some article. Jean offered the "X-Ray" method in which students would proceed paragraph by paragraph through a written work attempting to infer the purpose of each paragraph based on its content (i.e. Why did the author include this paragraph? What is its function?).

Next, Penny presented further advice about how to make Accountable Talk (AT) effective:

1. Clearly define AT so that the students understand what it is.
2. Model examples of it, so that they understand what it looks like (be explicit). In class, we should:
• press for clarification and explanation
• require justification of proposals and challenges
• recognize and challenge misconceptions
• require evidence for claims and arguments
3. Allow your students to practice AT and give them feedback as they practice.
4. Use AT throughout your lessons everyday.
5. AT should be related to content.
6. Talk MUST be planned for. Write it into your lesson plans.

After Penny, Deborah introduced what turned out to be a popular method for reading a visual image. The strategy is detailed step-by-step as Strategy 7 in the Texts and Lessons for Content Area Reading book that we all received (pp. 58-61).

From there, we broke into our various Content Area groups. In my group, we used Jean's X-Ray method to try to the understand the logic of "On Learning Shame" a powerful section from Dick Gregory's autobiography. If conducted in a way that makes understanding the text--and the intent of the human being behind the text--the ultimate goal rather than the reverse (i.e. in this case, reducing Gregory's writing to a mere vehicle for acquiring skill in analysis), I can see how this could be a powerful method for helping students get more from a piece of writing than other students not using the method and reading it more superficially would get out of it. I'd tried this method before (not calling it "X-Ray") but my way of explaining it to students was much more convoluted than the way Jean explained it to us. She helped me realize I was making things unnecessarily complicated.