Learning Site / Learning Cohort
Final Artifact
Name: Shumon Jenkins
Date: 11/08/22-1/6/23
Learning Site / Learning Cohort Topic: Secondary Literacy: How do we promote critical thinking and productive struggle with text?
The Challenge:
How Do I Create More Productive Struggle?
What’s The “WHY” behind this work?
What challenge or need were you addressing as a Learning Site/Learning Cohort?
“I needed to learn more about creative productive struggle in my assignments as I feel it makes students better critical thinkers and learners and I don’t believe I do the greatest job in this section of teaching.”
What specific piece of that challenge were you addressing in your specific context? What made this topic relevant to you?
“I specifically wanted to focus on my question creation and eventually having students create their own questions that lead to collaborative and engaging discussion . This topic is relevant for me as I believe students learn better this way, its fun and it's how I learned the best growing up and to this very day.”
What I Tried
I tried these things/steps…
I tried creating more scaffolded questions in my readings, specifically when we read short stories, that focus on the purpose and importance of certain words/paragraphs in those texts.
I expected that…
Doing this would help them practice their critical thinking skills and not just look for a specific answer, but think, "what COULD this mean?" These questions may seem hard to them and it’ll probably cause some struggle. But I think it will be productive and create buy-in because their own opinion will be tied to it and I think that's nice for students to still express their own opinions on what they're reading.
Early impact
With my students, I started to notice...
They did a better job answering and creating questions than looking for the craft. I'm not mad at this as the language is difficult, it's hard to find the figurative language we've focused on in short stories compared to poems, and answering questions was the central focus anyway.
Based on what I noticed, one thing that I (adopted / adapted / abandoned) was…
I created a new document with "right there" questions as well as inference-based questions. And with each question, I would add a second part that asked for their opinion on what's happening in the story. I really saw an increase in student response and understanding of the text and craft because of this. Students were able to identify tones more and be able to see transitions between them throughout the story.
I want to abandon the need to identify craft and its importance. Although I do think it is important for the students to know and understand, I don’t think it is essential for their learning or understanding of the content or in their ability to create questions.
What I Learned
Key ingredients: what made this work?
# 1: Creating questions that build on top of each other and include student voice.
#2: Make the content engaging and have student led conversations.
#3: Plan out a week in advance and let student know what the plan so they can prepare mentally.
Next steps...
I want to keep: Experiment with:
I'm going to keep creating questions “building block questions” (right there, opinion piece, inference, etc.) and eventually do more live debates/discussions around people's opinions that are rooted/stem from evidence from the text.
I'm want to give Socratic seminars centered around the questions they created and some I'm giving them. I want them to fall in love with creating and figuring out questions. I want to keep doing a practice like this over and over again until I can literally not say a word and they navigate through everything.