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Our recent PD series about formative assessment with Dylan Wiliam has inspired me not only to check in more often, but also to reach back and make use of some of my best best practices, namely, the strategies for teaching critical thinking I learned 12 years ago in the Critical Thinking Consortium led by Garfield Gini-Newman. Take this lesson, for example: students are reading and thinking about William Shakespeare's essential classic Romeo & Juliet. This play is the last text of our school year, so before this point the students have examined many different things that will help them in their examination of it - including symbolism, allusion, and character development, and they have delved into the world of literary theory, focusing on Reader Response, Feminist, Marxist, New Historicist, Post-Colonialist, and Psychoanalytical theories. After finishing the last act and reading lateral texts about the culture of honor and Shakespeare's language, the students got into groups to discuss what the play could mean - what could be a theme - and then completed an individual exit ticket asking the same question: Reading through the exit ticket responses revealed that students had very different ideas about what a theme is and how to communicate it. Some students were still thinking about topics, some had simple ideas about theme and some were wrestling with some pretty big and complicated ideas. One student addressed the difference in his response, and this is what inspired the lesson in the first place: After creating this slide for the lesson, and after reading more of the student responses, I came across one that did a great job moving from topic to theme and nodding to motif and its connection to the plot along the way, which led me to create this slide reviewing the difference between topic and theme and one possible pathway from one to the other. The students were able to see as well, in this one student's response, the possibility of an entire paper - the bones are here, just not the evidence! After briefly discussing each of these slides and reminding ourselves what a theme is (our definition: a truth about human nature (or life, or society, etc.) according to the author) we did a few formative checks using the Zoom Responses to make sure we were all on the right track - this kind of thinking, like the themes, is complex and nebulous, and it is important that we are able to think about it. Once we established that the class understood the difference between simple and complex themes, and that they could identify when the presentation of a simple theme was leading toward something more complex, the students got into groups to complete a sorting exercise with their own responses. Some they had seen in the lesson, others they had not, and they were asked - in groups of 4-5 - to have a discussion about the responses as they sorted them into the following categories on a Mural: Simple Theme, Simple but will be complex with more thinking, Complex Theme, and Amazing Topics that we've noticed and thought about which could lead to a theme: Of course it was the student conversation in groups ABOUT the responses that was most beneficial to student learning. But the final sort, as shown in the image above, revealed to the whole class that we have some work to do in our thinking about theme.
In our summary discussion, students shared that they feel they have a better understanding and a clearer target of what they should be thinking about with regard to theme.
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