Questions for Carol Jago

1. How do you keep a sense of what was difficult for you to understand the first time through?  How do introduce difficult texts to students for the first time?
2. You seem to advocate giving students lots of opportunities to share in your classroom.  How do you develop a cohesive and safe enough community for students to feel willing to share their own work?
3. I really like the idea of identifying senses in a text.  Do you ever have students do this for their own work?  Do they continue to use this strategy outside of being specifically assigned it?
4. When you talk about choosing whether or not to reveal the context or author’s intent in writing something, how do you decide when it is beneficial to tell students these facts?  How do you decide when in the sequence of the lesson to reveal them if you’re going to?

2 Questions and 2 Statements for 1/26

1. The process that Weir goes through when she cuts apart stories in order to embed questions directly into the text is a wonderful idea that allows the students to better develop an envisionment of the text, and allows the teachers to customize formative assessments throughout the reading process.  If she can see how her students’ envisionments are shifting as they read the text, then she will be more likely to help them create more knowledge around the text and the theme the text is centered around.
   1. Weir pg 3
2. When working with current events in the classroom, can a disconnect from the real world, and a low sense of political efficacy, disrupt the motivation of students to continue with a project, particularly a social justice project?  For example, when the journalists in the Hobbs article routinely ignored the students, what would have happened if the teacher had not been able to make contact with the journalists and get a correction printed?  Would the students have stayed interested in pursuing the project, or would it have been better to move on and “cut their losses” so to speak?  How can we keep our students from becoming jaded?
   1. Hobbs
3. How can teachers make use of the current generation’s ease of trial and error testing to develop and understand new concepts?  Our students are willing to play with new technologies in order to learn how to use them, so how can we transfer that to the classroom, and encourage students that trial and error and guesswork are okay for building an envisionment of a text too?
   1. Williams pg 684
4. Students are very good at shifting their identity, or at least the portrayal of their identity, in order to adapt to different social contexts.  They are often unaware that the culture they are immersed in shapes the way they develop these identities.  This lack of awareness opens up an opportunity for exploration in the classroom into the idea of multiple identities, and technology can be a great resource to include making the discussion more relevant to students.
   1. Williams pg 684-5