language arts Archives - Page 3 of 7

Sociograms: An Alternative to the Essay

December 30, 2016 By David Rickert Leave a Comment

Sociograms are visual representations of the interaction of characters in a novel. They are a wonderfully flexible assessment tool and can be used in all grade levels. Best of all, they require the same sort of critical analysis that you would use in writing an essay. If you’re looking for something a little different than a final paper (or an alternative form of assessment), a sociogram might be just what you’re looking for.

How it works:

We just finished our unit on Romeo and Juliet and did a sociogram. Here’s the procedure that I gave them:

Pick a character to be in the middle. It doesn’t need to be Romeo and Juliet, but it should be a major character.
Add the other characters from the play by connecting them to the main character in the middle. Any characters that have some sort of significant interaction should be connected. This applies to the character in the middle as well as characters on the periphery that interact during the play. You can leave characters off, but be prepared to justify why you did.
Add something to the lines to indicate the importance of the relationship. You can add different colors, or make them dotted or squiggly lines, or make the lines actual shapes (like hearts or daggers.) Provide a key that explains what each line means.
To each line add a brief description of the interaction between the characters in the play. For example, you may already have a line that indicates that Romeo and Tybalt are enemies, but you might have a description such as “Romeo kills Tybalt” on the line.
Group the characters in some meaningful way with a color, symbol, or font that represents a meaningful grouping in the play. Obviously for “Romeo and Juliet” grouping them as “Montagues,” “Capulets,” and “neither” is appropriate. But can you think of any others? (I like it when they group them based on who is alive and who is dead at the end.)
Add a symbol that represents each character’s role in the novel. (This last part is important to emphasize, otherwise they’ll pick the Eiffel Tower for Paris.) Explain in 2 or 3 sentences on a separate sheet of paper why you chose the symbol that you did.

I have them create their sociograms on large pieces of paper that I purchased at Michael’s. We also have a bunch of markers in our department that hey could use for their final. I always require them to do a rough draft to show me first – some do it on notebook paper, but others used an app called Popplet to plan it out. It usually takes them one period to plan it out after I explain the procedure and a couple of periods after that to finish it. I always have them explain the symbols that they chose

Alternatives to the Essay: Sociograms — Students using the Popplet app to plan out their sociogram.

Other ideas:

I also I kept it pretty simple this year, but next year I’ll add a couple more tasks: the size of the character on the sociogram should reflect how important that character is to the character in the middle. Or I might have them do it based on their location – the closer they are, the more significant the relationship is. Sometimes I’ve had them pick a quote that describes the relationship between characters rather than just have them describe it (we ran out of time for that this year.)

I did this with freshmen who need more structure than my seniors. Once they get more advanced I have them use the sociogram to demonstrate a theme, or have them create a unifying concept that makes sense from the work. I have people do a spider web for Othello and a long braid of hair for Janie in Their Eyes are Watching God and add elements to it that reflect character roles. What you don’t want it to have them impose one symbolic structure on top of another – generally sociograms based off of Star Wars or Disney where they try to match up characters from one work to the other don’t turn out very well.

I have always bought a big pad of paper and provided markers and colored pencils for them to work from. I require them to draw out everything – they don’t tend to do a good job sizing things they print off of the computer and it always looks neater if they do it by hand. I tell them they won’t be graded on their ability to draw, but they do need to show an ability to work around their artistic limitations.

Learning should be fun! Check out my Teachers Pay Teachers store for fun comic resources like those below.

Adding Free Choice Reading to Your Classroom

November 1, 2016 By David Rickert Leave a Comment

In a previous post I discussed the reasons why you should add free choice reading to your English class – even if you teach upper level AP classes like I do. There’s a good chance that over the course of their high school careers they have lost a lot of their love for reading, and free choice reading can help bring that back. In this post I’m going to go over how I incorporated free choice reading in my classroom

1. Ten minutes a day, every day.

I know some teachers like “free read Friday” and have students read for the entire period. I like to do it every day because I’m trying to develop a habit and, as Gretchen Rubin says, “what you do every day is much more important than what you do once in a while.” A lot of students won’t read at home, and they can’t truly get into a book if they only read once every seven days. Furthermore, I don’t have problems with students forgetting their books like they did when they only brought them once a week.

I am very protective of this time – nothing makes me give it up. And once a week I’ll give them 15-20 minutes instead of ten.

2. Read with them.

With ten minutes a period and five periods a day, I could have 50 minutes to plan or grade papers. But I read with them. My experience has been if you read, they’ll read. And even though I’m taking graduate courses that require me to read novels, I don’t read those books either. I honor the obligation that I ask them to make for the time as well.

3. Have a classroom library.

We have a terrific media center at our school and it was hard for me to imagine that it would make that much difference if I had a classroom library. But it has. My students are much more likely to check out books from my library than they are to ask to go to the media center and look for a book there.

Fortunately I was given a pretty substantial amount of money for a classroom library from my district. I know that books are expensive. I’m not an expert on building a classroom library on a budget.

4. Don’t add any work.

My students know they’ll never be asked to do a book report. They won’t have to annotate. They won’t have to complete a certain number of books each quarter. Any of these run the risk that reading once again becomes work.

There’s always this nagging voice in the back of my head that says “shouldn’t I be doing more with this?” But the fact is, I really don’t want to rob them of the pleasure of reading. We can work on skills with other things that we do in class.

However, there are some teachers that are doing really great activities with free choice reading if you’d like to add a little more structure to it. B’s Book Love has a great blog post on this topic and Room 213 has a bunch of great activities (and products) that she uses with reader’s workshop in her classroom.

You’ll find that free choice reading has an amazing transformative effect on your classroom.

Annotation: Why Students Hate It (And How To Fix It)

September 20, 2016 By David Rickert Leave a Comment

Annotation is a common reading strategy used to promote active reading. Annotation is a skill that helps students comprehend what they are reading and leaves a trail of “bread crumbs” for students to follow if they have to respond to the text in writing. Ideally, it will help students make meaning of what they are reading.

As language arts teachers we want students to be good readers and also learn to love reading, and in many ways the two go hand in hand. However, for many students annotation promotes the first goal at the expense of the second. Many of my students who like to read tell me that they hate to annotate. It takes away from the pleasure of reading and makes a chapter of assigned reading that much more time consuming. And as nice as it for teachers to know through annotating that kids have read the book instead of reading Sparknotes, it’s apparent that for many students annotation is something they do for the teacher and not for themselves. They don’t find the value in it and consider it busywork.

However, it doesn’t have to be this way. If we change the way we present annotation to students – and change our expectation of what the end result should be – annotation can be a valuable tool that won’t seem like so much of a chore.

Here are some ideas:

Don’t give students too much to manage.

In the past I have required students to look for literary devices, ask questions, and do chapter summaries. I required them to have a certain number of comments per page. In short I was asking them to do about five different things when they annotated.

What I had to learn was that annotating is essentially multitasking – they have to read and do whatever else I asked them to do. When they were looking for personification and characterization and setting details all while asking them to comprehend what they read at the same time, they were not likely to do any of those things particularly well.

The solution? Give students one thing to focus on while they annotate. That way students can read for comprehension but focus on an important part of the assigned reading. Maybe they can look at setting for one chapter and examine the use of literary devices in the next one. This way they can really build the skill of annotating without becoming overwhelmed.

Have a purpose.

Annotating works well when students have a reason to do it other than “to make you better readers.” I try to tie annotation into a final product, whether it be an essay or a presentation. If they are writing a paper on a particular character from Pride and Prejudice I give them the prompt and tell them what to look for as they read. I don’t want them to have to reread the book again, and I don’t want them going online to find quotes. I model this myself – the books that I teach are heavily annotated so that I don’t have to reread every time I want to find a particular passage. In some cases, I don’t even have to read the book again to teach it – I can read my annotations and go from there.

If students know that annotating will benefit them in concrete ways, it will help them see the value in it.

Give them a break from annotating.

There’s nothing wrong with letting kids read a chapter or two without annotating. Let them just enjoy the book with no strings attached. Better yet, incorporate independent reading in your classroom so they always have an opportunity to read for pleasure.

Do an annotation on the second read.

Something that has worked well for me is to do a simple light annotation the first time students read the book. For struggling readers, it does help give them a way in to a text they might find difficult. But I find a tremendous amount of value in doing a second annotation of what they just read on the following day. The students aren’t spending time keeping track of what’s happening, so they are free to look closer at how the text is put together. This is a great way to address foreshadowing, for instance.

In conclusion

The best thing that we can consider with annotating is to think about how much of the reading task should be taken up with it. It’s not something that many teachers I’ve talked to have ever thought about.

I think a good ratio is annotating should only take up 10-20% of the total time spent reading. That way the vast majority of the time, students are simply reading. The annotating won’t add what is perceived as an unreasonable amount of time, and you can still accomplish a lot.

Annotation is a valuable skill, but the love of reading is even more valuable. We don’t have to sacrifice one or the other if we employ sound strategies for both.

Online Discussions: Make Them Sizzle With These Ideas

August 2, 2016 By David Rickert 1 Comment

Teachers have been using online discussions for a while, way before “flipped classroom” was even an idea. They can be a valuable tool for extending learning and allowing kids to interact outside the classroom. But how do you get the most out of online discussions? Here are some ideas.

1. Keep the online discussion groups small.

If your online discussion groups are too large, students will be overwhelmed. If you have a class of 25 students and require three responses, that will be 75 posts in one group! Small groups -no more than six – will allow students to read everything and respond when they feel compelled to rather than randomly picking a couple of people out of a large number of responses.

2. Keep your expectations a little vague.

If you tell students in online discussions that they have to respond to the prompt and reply to two other students to get full credit, that is all that most of them will do. Your type A students will log in and do all three in one sitting and never go back to the online discussion board.

One way to address this is to tell the students they can get a 20/25 if they do the minimum requirements. In order to get full points, they have to check into the discussion more than once (if the discussion is open all week, several times) and do posts with some substance. This will force the kids to do more than they otherwise would.

You can also play around with having the students come up with the topics of discussion instead of always giving them something to start with.

3. Assign roles.

One of the problems I have had with online discussions is getting a wide variety of responses. How can you ensure that the group will have a lot of different ideas floating around and they aren’t just agreeing with with everyone else has said? One of the ways I have done this is by assigning roles. Here are the roles I have used in the past that have worked well, especially when I’m only giving them a day to respond:

First Responder -This person has to be the first to respond to the prompt. A lot of times I take on this role to ensure that whenever someone logs in, they have something to respond to.
Devil’s Advocate – has to question other people’s opinions.
The Yes-Man – has to agree with other people’s opinions.
Free Spirit-can respond however they like.
The Contemplator – introduces new topics of conversation based on what has come before.
The Summarizer – summarizes the group’s discussion the following day.

Because the First Responders and Summarizers operate under a time constraint they are only required to respond once. The others have to respond twice.

Every time we have a new discussion I shuffle the roles.

4. Require engagement over time.

There are two participants that can be a problem – those who respond quickly and then don’t go back on again and those who wait until the last minute to contribute. I require them to post on several different days to get the full points.

5. Participate!

Kids love it when you participate in the discussion too. Plus, it’s a good way to make sure they are going smoothly. I always make a point of responding to the kids who are reluctant to participate in class discussions instead of the kids that always seem to be engaged.

6. Continue the online discussion the following day.

Another problem I have had was that once students did their required work, they had no incentive to go back and read what others had posted. However because my students could access their discussions through the Canvas app we use as our platform, students could go back and review the previous discussion and read it all.

There are a number of things that you can have the students do at this point. Make your grading easier by having the kids see if everyone met the requirements of the discussion. However, I like to have them discussion a few things, such as:

Find the most insightful comment. Who really said something interesting? What did they say?
Pick one of the questions that remains unanswered and discuss.
Find textual support for something that wasn’t posted by a member of the class.

If you create in class discussion groups that are different than the online discussion groups, students can report to the other class members in their group what happened in their online group. Did they discuss the same stuff? Did anyone bring anything up that was insightful that the whole group should know about?

5. Require detailed responses.

Have students find textual support for their responses. Tell them not to make them too long or they won’t be read, but a paragraph is a reasonable amount to expect. If they write this way every day it is good practice for the longer essays they have to write later.

Learning should be fun! Check out my Teachers Pay Teachers store for fun comic resources like those below.

My Emergency Sub Plans (And You’ll Love Them Too)

May 9, 2016 By David Rickert 2 Comments

emergency sub plans

Most of the time when I’m absent I can plan ahead and design an activity that goes right along with what we’re doing in class. However, there are those times where I’m out and don’t have time to come up with anything or it’s just a weird time to be out. For instance I missed the day before Winter Break this year with a stomach virus. We weren’t ready to start anything new yet, and I couldn’t really give them anything to do that was too rigorous.

So when I need a lesson plan quick this is what I do and I thought I’d share because it’s perfect for high school students. It’s engaging and fun and the kids love to talk about it.

I have a class set of the story “Ordeal By Cheque” that’s ready to go – I just let the sub know where they can find it. The story is an old Vanity Fair story that is told entirely through checks. You can find a pdf of it here. You have to read carefully – and make inferences – to figure out what’s going on in the story. You’ll find out in the first three checks that a baby is born, but if you look closer you can tell by the amount of the checks that the family is wealthy and that the baby is named after his father (the signature has the suffix of “Sr.” on the third check.)

The 45 checks tell the story of the father and the son and supports a lot of different interpretations. Who are all the different women that receive large checks. Who are all the women that receive large amounts of money? Why so many expensive flowers? Who is Tony Spagoni? There are lots of possibilities here, and my students have always had a good time figuring the storyline out. I have them use a blank sheet of paper, number 1-45, and tell what each check was for. We can talk about it the next day.

This year I didn’t have to use it, so for the first time in ten years I was able to do it with the class. They found a lot of things that I had never noticed before, and found some plausible interpretations that I had never encountered. (There are a number of interpretations out there online if you search for the title.)

If you are so inclined once you return, you can finish up the activity with a discussion about whether the check format actually works or not. Do the multiple interpretations expose the limitations of the format, or are they a strength? Let your students decide.