Literature and literacies EDUP3032 week 9

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Literature and literacies EDUP3032 week 9

• Managing multilevel learning and teaching with
  literary texts in the middle school years

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Group work

• We believe that much of what is seen as small
  group work in classrooms today is not group work
  at all, but is merely individual work planned to
  be done in group seating arrangements.
• Reid et al 2002.

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The nature of groups

• forced groups - e.g. lifts, queues, tutorials,
  buses
• Self chosen groups - e.g. tute tables, car loads,
  trivia night teams, choir
• What is the difference?
• Body language
• Speech styles
• Comfort zones
• ...

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Why do groups exist?

• Social purposes
• Practical contexts
• Management - making it possible to achieve
  organisation

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Classroom groups

• home groups - free choice with friends
• Negotiated groups - for projects
• Teacher driven
• Mixed ability
• Same ability
• Age levels
• Boy vs girls (?)

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EDUP3032 Trivia
SEARCH AND
/R/E/A/D/I/N/G/
ME REPEAT
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Effects of groups

• Support
• Competition
• Loss of motivation
• Ownership
• Extension
• Remediation

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Theoretical underpinning

• Gee (1990)learning as social practice - primary
  discourses and secondary discourses
• e.g. talking at home and talking at school,
  reading at home and reading at school
• Children need to acquire mastery of a range of
  social discourses through participation as well
  as explicit teaching

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Modelled, guided and independent group work

• Genre approach allows us to explicitly teach the
  structures of texts.
• Group work allows us to scaffold different needs
  within the structures guided reading
• Group work allows children to learn along side
  others in social situations - the zone of
  proximal development (Vygotsky 1978)
• Practice and participation

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Practical advantages of small groups

• Students develop self-confidence as learners
• Students who are quiet or disruptive tend to talk
  more and more effectively
• Students are more prepared to think aloud and use
  talk to explore ideas
• Students gain confidence in presenting to
  audience because they have tested their ideas
  with a small audience first.

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Student centred learning

• The teacher is not the focus
• Teacher structures learning
• Students create communities of practice where
  common purpose and commitment are driving forces
• key is realtasks

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Productive pedagogy

• A model of classroom practice that recognises the
  importance of
• Intellectual quality - what to teach at what
  level
• Relevance or connectedness
• Supportive environment
• Recognition of difference
• through active involvement

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Flexible learning

• DO NOT FORM PERMANENT GROUPS
• For practical reasons - have practical groups
• How often do you change groups?
• How do you change groups?
• Why do you change groups?

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A teaching model

• Engagement teacher provides shared experiences
  for whole class
• Exploration thinking aloud in groups around the
  topic - no explicit task
• Transformation working with ideas at different
  levels and for different purposes
• Presentation explaining to discoveries to others
  (often assessed)
• Reflection what have I learned?

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Modelling group work

• Engagement teacher reads first section of Two
  hands Together to class
• Exploration students talk in pairs/ home groups
  about what they know about racism
• Transformation students predict what they think
  will happen to girl, father or mother (two groups
  given to each character)
• Presentation each group shares its findings with
  another group
• Reflection whole class reflects on possibilities

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Next step ...

• Exploration of more of the story after it has
  been read on a general level and for explicit
  teaching purposes. For example the language of
  narrative -Theme, pronouns, adjectives, action
  processes.
• Transformation in ability groups children work
  on task e.g. most able highlight the adjectives
  used to describe characters in the orientation.
  Two other groups turn their passages into cloze
  exercises by removing Themes or action processes.
  The least able group works with the teacher on a
  cloze to highlight pronouns.

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• Presentation regroup the working groups so that
  there are members of all groups within new
  groups. These groups share round their cloze
  passages for others to complete.
• Reflection students return to their home groups
  and discuss what they have learnt. This is
  followed by a whole class rap up of the key
  teaching points.

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Literacy development cycle

• Modelled, guided, independent
• Orientation to text
• Reading the text
• Working with the text
• Reviewing the text
• Using group then regroup strategy - similar
  strengths and then mixed ability
• Unsworth 2001

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Guided reading

• 1. Before reading - group size and type
• 2. Orientation to text - introduce text, text
  type, give specific focus
• 3. Reading the text - focus children, read with
  students or listen, monitor, select different
  student, monitor, pause and talk about text,
  remind student of four sources of meaning
  semantic, grammatical, graphological,
  phonological.
• 4. Working with text - use focus in reading
• 5. After guided reading - use focus in activities

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Different levels of scaffolding

• Give proficient readers text sample and ask them
  to identify stages of genre and name genre
• Give less proficient readers name of genre and
  stages on a separate sheet, they have to find
  parts within the whole
• Give least proficient readers the text marked
  into stages but with labels for sections as
  post-it-notes to name stages

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Literature circles

• Traditional approach to text but using discussion
  
• small temporary discussion groups
• Daniels 1994
• Roles for readers summarizer, literary
  luminary, artful artist, word wizard, creative
  connector, discussion director
• Pen 140 from PETA
• www.literaturecircles.com

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Role definitions

• Summariser gives a brief overview of the reading
• Literary luminary selects an interesting part of
  the reading to share and justifies choice
• Artful artist depicts a part of the reading
• Word wizard selects 4 words and defines them and
  creates a word activity
• Creative connector finds a link between reading
  and own life
• Discussion director devises a number of open
  ended questions about the reading

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Steps to run a literature circle

• Teacher presents books students choose text
• Groups decide how much they will read
• Students complete reading and prepare for
  discussion
• Discussion takes place with roles
• Steps 3 and 4 repeated until text is finished
• Group evaluates learning progress
• (Roles as a starting guide)

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Critique of literature circles

• How to go beyond I liked the book?
• Reader response journals in Netlibris
• PETA suggests more critical roles
• Paradigm profiler - using key factors such as
  age, gender, physical appearance to lead to
  critical analysis of value of character to story
• Investigator - reader picks out characters that
  author seems to favour or dislike and looks for
  character attributes that signal the values/
  ideology of author