Articulating rich, nuanced themes / main ideas is almost always the goal line in English class, right? What does this text MEAN?
But it's challenging for Ss.
A big reason for this is that we often wait until the end of the text to start honing in on themes. (1/)
I've been experimenting in a current unit with encouraging students to use strategies to articulate "hypothesis themes" early on + throughout their reading. (2/)
This way, readers aren't overwhelmed with trying to find THE theme in a whole novel. They are collecting possible, potential themes as they read. This feels more doable. (3/)
Then, when we finished the novel, we gathered all those possibilities together and vetted them using these questions:
Here's the micro progression:
In the end, I feel like this helped. There was a lot less staring into space and semi-randomly pulling something out of the air because Ss had been thinking about it + collecting ideas all along. Then, they weighed those ideas, sorted them, curated them.
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It's crucial for writers to have the opportunity to revise after receiving feedback. But, I hate assessing revisions more than anything. (1/)
Today, I tried something new, and this is my plan forevermore: I conferred with each writer +asked them to show me where they made revisions. I asked:
- What did you think when you read my feedback?
- What were you thinking as you revised?
- What were your main revision goals?
- What was hard about revising this piece?
- How is this version of your piece stronger than the previous version?
- What did you learn through writing + revising this piece that you want to take into our next piece of writing?
Would you like your students to use interesting figurative language in their writing? Or do your students study analogies, and you need a way for them to apply that understanding? Check out this pattern in two potential sentence studies: (A Thread)
"Beyonce is to Millenials what Christianity was to our grandparents; there's a societal expectation that you will be involved + occasionally perform conspicuous acts of piety" from theringer.com/music/2018/4/2…
Look at the frame here: "_____ is to ______ what _______ was to ______; _____EXPLANATION OF THE ANALOGY"