Literature Circles and WBT

My students and I are embarking on a new journey into Literature Circles. This is the first time this year that students will be working collaboratively through a student facilitated discussion. In preparation for the lesson I thought about how WBT could be incorporated into the lesson to ensure everything is clear and runs smoothly. I decided to developed gestures to go along with the five Literature Circle roles that are introduced at the beginning of the lesson. 

The follow is a list of the five roles:

The discussion leader is in charge of facilitating the discussion and creating higher order thinking questions.

The summarizer retells the important parts and turns a few chapters into a concise paragraph.

The wordsmith looks for several words in the text that are new and interesting. They also put the word and definition on the word wall.

The journalist sketches a picture of the scene with a description.

The line lighter copies down evidence of great writing or important quote within the text.

Below is a video of my class learning the roles with gestures for the first time. Students are using my favorite strategy, mirror, to enhance their understanding.

If you are interested in worksheets for each role just comment below and I’ll post them! K

Super Improvers Student Feedback

Providing Super Improvers  Feedback

 

As part of my professional learning goal, I am tracking student behaviors every two weeks.  I finished the first round last week and calculated the percentage of time each student was meeting the targeted behaviors.  These targeted behaviors include following directions quickly, raising hand for permission to speak, staying on task, handing in neat work and applying practiced skills independently.  Each student has a card with these behaviors listed on the front.  I used these “Super Improver” Cards to provide students with feedback regarding their successes with these classroom behaviors.  When I pass out the cards, students find their percentage of success on the back.  When students received this feedback, their behaviors improved significantly.  For example, this week all of my challenging students increased their level to Fence sitter or Go-Along (I don’t have the data in front of me to quantify this but will add later).  The Alpha's maintained their performance, and only 1 student dropped from a Go-Along to a Fence Sitter. 

 

Providing the feedback also helped to eliminate the need of having to talk with all 100 students.  This week I am focusing on touching base with the student who dropped a behavior level and those students who increased their performance by two levels.  I want to talk to them to recognize their hard work.  All students who showed improvement and maintained Alpha status earned a sticker on their star.

 

After the feedback, we had many students move from Rookie to Phenom on the Super Improvers Wall. It was great to see how proud they were of themselves.  The other students also became more invested in how many stickers they had collected and how many more they needed. 

 

Admittedly, this is a bit time consuming but was well worth the effort and made a great case for the words written in Whole Brain Teaching for Challenging Kids, “there are no shortcuts to being an excellent teacher”.  More importantly, the students are invested in their success.  This is huge!!