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language
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Much of what I see in the classroom parallels the story of Manolo from Valdes' book. more words to explain soon.. |
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For these examples regarding scaffolding, I'm using the lesson we're teaching this week about storybooks. Our 7th grade class is creating "a storybook", based on the model of picture books for younger (age 4-6) readers.
While not every student has had trouble with generating ideas, some do get stuck with the blank page. So we use a version of Text Re-presentation, by having the student consider existing stories, movies, myths as inspiration. That more general directive catches only some of the kids, a few need very explicit routes to exercise their creativity. For these kids, a more formal approach to adapting an existing text is the key.
We have children's books in the class that we've been using as texts for discussing in simple terms story structures (beginning, middle,end) and messages in the story (morals, etc), so some kids are revising the story they can see to make it their own, so instead of "one fish two fish" a student is doing "one frog two frog", and he still has creative room to write his own rhyme and invent new illustrations and situations..... an alternative that one of the other art folks suggested this week was to get the students to describe a real story that happened to them, "what happened this weekend?" type thing. That would make this project a type of Bridging then.
The other type of scaffolding that this project demonstrates is Schema-building, in that we're explicitly talking about and naming parts of a story. Not only are we having the students consider character and setting, but we're talking in simple terms about beginning, middle and end, or setup, conflict, and resolution. We're obviously not doing what we'd do if this were a scriptwriting workshop, but we are identifying these parts of a story structure, and the students are asking and answering questions about these ideas as we work.
Not only are we talking about this, but with this project we're doing the thumbnail/planning process, and we're looking at the production schema of idea -> character sketch -> story brainstorm -> thumbnails & planning sketches -> final work, which applies to real world creative efforts just as much as in class. By making these planning documents, the students can literally see the structure of what we're doing, and we can point to parts of these diagrams/thumbnails as we discuss the work with a student, so that gaps in academic language pertaining to this type of planning don't hold us up at all. I have one special needs student who's verbal communication and attention is poor, yet this type of map is clear enough for him to successfully participate in the project.
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Within the context of my current art class placement, assessing language is a little challenging. The listening and speaking component of the ELD standards can be applied without too much difficulty, since we do talk in class ;) The reading and writing components would be difficult to ascertain given the context of the projects and work so far. Fortunately, the design of my particular teaching event looks like it will include some measure of reading and writing, since we'll be digging into the concept of illustrated stories. While I doubt we'll be making the students write passages of great length, we will be testing the student's language ability to some degree.
Tomas keeps mentioning that language issues will come up and need to be addressed with students who *aren't* designated as ELD students, and that appears to hold true for my population of students. The few kids who're marked as ELD at various levels don't seem to be too far out of sync with the non-ELD counterparts, so language development will be addressed per the needs of the whole class, not just the marked kids. I suspect some of my ELD students have a better command of language, in the ways the standards consider it, than some of the non-ELDs, and that areas like "Vocabulary and Concept Development" in Reading will need to be worked on with everybody....
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The most direct impact of policies from above is the paper shortage. At my placement we've been told not to make any more copies, which seems a little nutty to me for an art class. Add to that an awareness that the paper we have in the classroom is all we have, there's no more resupply this year... It's a funny thing that decision-makers love to cut these little tangible line items, subtractions that directly impact the students. I'm picturing a stereotypical gnomish accountant smiling and saying "we can save 3% if we stop supplying pencils!"... Students fall asleep when they're sitting down, so why don't we just stop supplying chairs, think of the money that'd save!
Oddly enough, over at west oakland m.s., there doesn't seem to be any problem with photocopying and paper at all. It's a handout-heavy school, more than I would give in my own classroom, but there just seems to be this assumption that if a teacher needs to copy something to teach class, he or she should be able to do it, no problem... It's a difference of focus, since it's a small school both physically and in population and the kids are pretty energetic, teachers and administrators are immediately concerned with the kids in their faces all day every day. That kind of proximity helps keep everyone there very clearly focused on getting the kids moving forward.
as far as the communities in which I'm teaching and language development... San leandro is still an unfamiliar city to me. I've driven through it once, gotten the tourist impression of it, other than that I've only seen the neighborhood between the highway and my school, it has a tranquil suburban quality, there's a nice deli... yet despite all that, my CT told me just yesterday that a school-wide "investigation" into gang activity has begun. From what she tells me, it sound more like a fact-finding and survey project, since no one really seems to know what's going on (or able to communicate it due to bureaucratic limitations).
Supposedly there's a couple kids in my class that might be participants, identified (in proper murky profiling fashion) by black hoodies and being latino. The particular kids in my class who fit the mold happen to be (generally) more pleasant and reasonable students, that's saying much for 7th graders, so I hope that whatever action results from this investigation is proactive rather than punitive...
there was a recent ban on sharpies due to tagging activity, though we are allowed to use them in art class (but since we don't have funds, we can't buy sharpies, and the kids aren't allowed to bring their own to school)... There's undoubtedly more irony buried in the directives and regulations surrounding where I'm at, I'm still figuring it out.....
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