Graphic Fables to the Rescue!

Online Reflection #1

            

            The first few weeks of the school year in the classroom, I have observed my CT’s efforts to engage her students in the subject matter of Language Arts. The preferred methods appear to be having the students read along silently with an audio file or teacher read aloud, followed by pair shared reading in order to find textual evidence answer a related question. The class has tackled a few unmemorable short stories by this method. Finding textual evidence to support their claims seems as draining and foreign to them.  Like a dentist with no anesthesia in a cage full of cavity stricken gorillas, the CT struggles to pull answers from her students. They resist and avoid what needs to be done. They just are not acting engaged. This is alarming because I am pre-planning lessons to teach to this same group of un-enthralled students. I want to find a way to engage them in a text.

I feel that a high quality method of helping students to establish a comfort level with a text is to facilitate their production of a written work. We learn best by doing, or so I have been taught. I also recall the notion of writing students are thinking students. My lesson may need to include this facet of literacy training. In the past I have read about a method of fable writing in Beat Not the Poor Desk by Marie Ponsot. Ponsot described a palpable enthusiasm that begins to develop among the students half way through the lesson. The simplicity of the writing task and the personal philosophy that gets to be stated as the “moral” of the story grant young writers a chance to develop confidence and familiarity with the mysterious medium of words. To complement the fable writing lesson with which I will challenge these students, I wish also to include a graphic organizer for them to analyze either their own work and/or that of a peer. The graphic organizer will call for students to critically examine their fables and perhaps their future writings will be better for the experience.

Last year, I observed a CT who had an arsenal of graphic organizers with which his students displayed comfort and familiarity. Such organizers could be used regardless of the textual information’s format (letters, stories, newspaper articles, or textbook pages) and they were an easy way to chunk information for later study. The organizational nature of current graphic organizers amazes me with its practicality and user-friendliness for study or reference. When properly completed, the graphic organizers with which I am growing familiar as an educator can provide excellent study prompts, detail reference, and when they are stored in a binder or notebook, they help explain to students the scaffolding of information that they have been taught. Fisher and Frey claim that graphic organizers aid in “extending student understanding of concepts and the relationship between them” (p.101). The possession of worthy, self-made study/reference material should increase a student’s comfort level with the information as well as their confidence and motivation to show mastery of the material.

Fisher, D. & Frey, N.  (2012). Improving adolescent literacy: Content area strategies at work  (3^rd ed.).  Boston:  Pearson.

Ponsot, Marie, and Rosemary Deen. Beat not the poor desk: writing: what to teach, how to teach it, and why. Montclair, NJ: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1982. Print.