Becky Stolow Professional Portfolio

Engaging Students in Learning

            The two lessons that were depicted in the film clips were intended to be a pre-writing/brainstorming session. I believe that it is very important to prime the students’ prior knowledge of the concept and give students an opportunity to identify their own beliefs and hear the beliefs of others surrounding a topic. The two key terms that I was working with in these lessons were “leader” and “role model”. These are not terms that were particularly difficult for my students to understand on a literal level, but I wanted to give them the opportunity to develop their own personally meaningful definition of each of these terms. By creating a personal definition, I felt that they would be better equipped to apply their definition to a less familiar individual, which is what I was asking them to do in the final writing piece of this unit.

            In lesson one, I asked students to think about people in general and in their own lives that they might consider to be leaders and role models. Then we took those people and identified exactly why we thought they might be leaders and role models. In the beginning of the next day’s lesson, lesson 2, I asked the students to compile their ideas from the day before into a more formal definition. While discussing the definition of “leader” one student suggested that a leader has a “positive way” (4:58). The student then corrected himself and suggested that the leader could have a “negative way too”. I prompted the student to dig into his prior knowledge to explain his thinking. The student replied with the example of a gang leader. As I explained how this is a true statement I could see the recognition and the understanding of this example for my students. Although most of them considered people who have positive influences as leaders, this student’s prior knowledge allowed us as a class to examine the context of the definition from a different angle.

            For the remainder of that lesson, I asked the students to practice applying these qualities to a given example. First, the students practiced choosing specific qualities and examples that make President Obama a leader and a role model. The list of specific qualities came from the ideas that the class had brainstormed the day before. I attempted to keep the wording as authentic to what we had discussed as possible so that there would be recognition and familiarity in the definitions.

            There may be multiple factors contributing to what motivated the students in this portion of the activity. Although at first the students showed resistance to writing about President Obama because they were insecure about knowing enough information, they had plenty of background knowledge to support their examples from what they have observed, heard, or we had discussed in prior lessons as a class. I also feel that many of them were able to identify specific examples of qualities that are associated with President Obama because they had personal investment in the list of words they had to choose from. A final reason I think that they were successful in this portion of the activity is that many of the students truly believe that President Obama is a leader and a role model; this was not just a simulation where they had to go through the motions, but they were defending their true feelings. On multiple other occasions, including the first lesson of this learning segment, the students have identified the president as a role model, especially for African-American youth. Although they may not all have been very knowledgeable about President Obama, I felt that this was a good place to start to get them ready to apply this knowledge to President Mandela, an individual with whom they are less familiar.

            The second portion of this lesson asked the students to go through the same process of identifying qualities and examples that would make President Mandela a leader and a role model. This process would serve as a way of narrowing the options and focusing the students for when they would begin to write their paragraphs. My intention was to get them to identify a few specific qualities and examples, which could be applied to their Three Part Response. In this way, when they move on to the actual writing, they will have already done the heavy cognitive “lifting” and be able to focus on the construction of their writing, a key goal for me in this learning segment. One question that I can be heard asking over and over again in the video clip is, “How do you know this?” I used this question to elicit prior knowledge from the students as well as to have them begin to analyze their reasoning. I was continuously asking students to reach into their memory of what they read and saw to defend their points. In one conversation that I had with my students (which is not captured in the video) I asked them to synthesize what they saw in a scene in Invictus with their prior knowledge of social interactions. While discussing what evidence the students had to prove that President Mandela sacrificed things, I asked the students to consider a scene in which he has an interaction with his daughter. Although the message that he sacrificed a relationship with his family for his political aspirations is not explicit in the scene, there is a tone in dialogue and actions of the characters that imply this relationship. I asked the students to consider what they knew about this scene, knew about his personal history, and understood about social interactions to assess how this scene supports the idea that he was sacrificing. Throughout the entire brainstorming session, the students were synthesizing prior knowledge with these new concepts of leaders and role models to develop supported examples.

Deepening Student Learning During Instruction

            I very intentionally and deliberately developed scaffolded worksheets that guided the students through each and every step of the brainstorming process. These worksheets not only structured my lessons but also acted as spaces for brainstorming, for me to give feedback, and for the students to continually return to their ideas and refocus their own writing. Because a main goal of mine for this assignment is to help the students become successful evaluators, as mentioned earlier, I constantly ask “how” and “why” questions.  After volunteering an answer I would follow up most students’ responses with “how do you know that?”, “why do you think that?”, or “can you give an example?” By pushing the students to the next level of thinking they are being asked to push themselves to a deeper level of analysis that will be needed when they are writing on their own. I also find that asking these questions in whole-class discussion format allows opportunities for peers to jump in and support or add to one another. At times if a student struggled to give support for their postion, I asked the class, “can anyone help her come up with an example?” or I would call on a particular student and ask, “what can you add on?” Both of these questions involved other students and helped build a supportive community of learners. 

            Students used both a piece of text and a film to support their writing. While reading the text and watching the film, the students answered guiding questions that were focused on both simple comprehension and analysis of the media. These reading and viewing guides were discussed periodically throughout the reading and viewing process in small groups and as a class. This process of thinking and writing about what the students were reading or viewing allowed them to take momentary breaks throughout the experience to digest and comprehend what was happening, and even begin to make judgments, a college readiness standard that we were working towards.

            As the students began to choose specific examples from the text or the film, I had the opportunity to circulate the room and see what they were thinking. During this time, I stopped and spoke with most students to check their work. If at that point I noticed that their choices from the text were off base or needed refocusing I had that short conferencing time to hear why they chose that example, begin to understand their misconceptions and misunderstandings, and give them some feedback to redirect them. I was also able to identify students who had noteworthy examples, and when we came back together as a class I would ask those students to share their examples with their peers. This allowed me to spotlight students who were excelling and allow the other students the opportunity to hear and understand their thinking. For those students with whom I was unable to speak, I was able to review their work after class and I gave them some written feedback. In the fourth lesson of the learning segment, I again had the opportunity to check in with students individually. I took this time to work with the students who I was not able to talk with on the first day, and especially check in with those whose written work showed large gaps in their understanding.