Lesson Plans
Media Literacy and the Critical Process
As a Do Now activity (below), students described Melinda, the main character in Speak. Students were then introduced to the 5 stages of the critical process (right) and asked to apply them to the painting "Christina's World" by Andrew Wyeth. Afterwards, they drew intertextual connections between their understandings of the girl in the painting and Melinda.
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Personal Narrative
One of the overarching goals throughout this unit was for students to be able to not only identify and analyze literary elements in the text, but also apply these elements to their own writing. To practice doing this, students were asked to write a personal narrative incorporating figurative language and imagery.
Harkness Discussion
Since communication and communication pitfalls are central to Speak, it seemed important that, in addition to talking about the role of communication in the novel, students also practice their own communication skills. I used the Harkness discussion model to introduce the idea of a collaborative, rather than a competitive group discussion. I established rules (below) meant to optimize the number of student voices heard throughout the course of a given discussion.
I emphasized that, even though the prospect of speaking up in a group can be scary, it was an important experience to have. Nonetheless, I allowed some of the more reticent students to volunteer as discussion trackers (below). This enabled them to participate in a way that felt safe to them.
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ReflectingAfter our first Harkness discussion, in an effort to promote self-awareness, I asked students to reflect on the new model. Many of the students considered it to be more successful than previous discussions, due to the fact that a larger percentage of students participated (23 out of the 30 students present participated either by speaking or tracking). However, several of the students who remained quiet saw things differently. Below are four excerpts from exit tickets submitted by students (not acting as discussion trackers) who did not speak up:
These comments, especially the first, suggest that the students wanted to speak but felt uncomfortable doing so given the atmosphere of the class. In preparation for our next discussion, one of the things I stressed was the potential value of silence - that it gives hesitant students a chance to gather their thoughts. We also talked about the importance of listening, as well as the difference between quality comments that move the conversation forward and comments that derail it (which can be as bad as or worse than students not speaking).
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