I'm currently taking Tom Ferenbacher's class on teaching Reading and Writing. I'm writing weekly reflections for this class on a wordpress blog, and I'll be reposting them here. Here's the first one - in theory it's about exit cards, but it touches on lots of different aspects of teaching reading.
This week I assigned my first-ever exit cards. This feels a bit shameful to admit, since they've been a fixture in my own credentialling classes ever since the Odyssey, but unfortunately it is the case.
I assigned the exit cards on Monday. I have declared Monday "Reading Monday", and decided that every Monday we will focus on a bit of text, and a reading strategy. This was my second "Reading Monday". My first had been the launch of the first novel we're reading as a class, Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie. We'd written a double-entry diary about the book's dedication, in order to generate interesting questions, build curiosity, and demonstrate how much you can find in a short, seemingly-innocuous set of words (you can read the class plan here).
For my second "Reading Monday", I wanted us to read a piece of non-fiction about American Indians (You can read my plan for the class here). This anticipated Tuesday's class, when I would launch our project, whose essential question is "Why is [the protagonist] Junior's life like it is?" During the previous week, students had been asking questions about schools on reservations on our blog, so I chose an article about a new Indian-run education department on a Lakota Sioux reservation. The article provided a different, more hopeful perspective on the potential for positive change to happen withinreservations (Alexie's attitude to reservation life is notoriously dyspeptic), as well as providing some insight into the history of education on reservations (in retrospect, I wish I'd directed students to key passages FIRST rather than having them read the whole article).
I used this session to introduce the students to "coding" - that is, using a set of five symbols to mark up a piece of non-fiction writing (you can see the symbols here - they are a modified version of a set of symbols I learned from Spencer Gooch). When the students came in, they were prompted to respond in their humanities notebooks to the prompt "what do you know about the reservation school in ATDPTI?") I don't know anything about their responses to this, as I didn't have time for any sharing-out (this semester, my classes are one-hour long). I'be been thinking about good ways to check in on students' writing to learn within the constraints of one-hour classes. One option is to read over students' shoulders as they write, but this only works for students who write pretty quickly, and I find it difficult to keep track of whose work I've read and whose I haven't). Another option is to collect notebooks at the end of the week. I'm increasingly learning towards doing this (apart from anything else, it will give students an extrinsic motivation for writing in their journals, which would, for some, be helpful). However, I'm balking because of the time this will take, and also because I'd like students to be reading over the weekend, and if they're reading, I'd like them to be holding their thinking in their notebooks!
So that was the "opener" writing to learn exercise. I then introduced coding (some students had used it in their classes last year, which meant I got a mix of nods and groans of familiarity). I'd printed out copies of the Lakota teachers article, and had students "code" on post-it notes that they could then put on a page in their notebooks and refer to in the future (problem with this is that it bulks up their notebooks and makes them unwieldy, and I post-its are not adhesive in the long term). However, I didn't want to print out 62 copies of the article, so this seemed like the best solution. I used a dot cam to model my own coding on the first page of the article. I then gave the students time to read and code, then get into pairs to share their coding with each other. I know that for a few students, getting in to pairs was critical to their understanding.
So now we get to the exit cards. On a post-it, I had the students respond to the following:
- How well do you feel you understand coding as a method?
- When do you think it might be a useful strategy for you?
I had them stick their post-its on the whiteboard, around the prompt. A couple observations about this:
- I think it was a mistake to let the exit cards be anonymous - I ended up with post-its that said "I don't really get this", but I had no idea WHO didn't get it. If I had names, I could have helped kids individually during team time at the end of the day.
- It seemed (and I'm only guessing, because they were anonymous) that the students who are most strategic about their learning immediately saw the potential for coding to help their writing, whereas students who had not developed the same resourcefulness saw coding as an artifice and a burden on them. I have noticed that in general, there is an inverse relationship between actual and perceived note-taking ability (that is, students whose note-taking is limited tend to think "I know how to take notes already, I don't need any extra structures", whereas students who take notes effectively already can tell that their note-taking needs improvement). I worry that the structure of the exit card prompt encouraged responses like "I don't think it's very useful" - that it put students' responses into a "consumer" frame, which is not a helpful place to be.
- Having them on a post-it meant that I could literally read through them during the break between classes - this was very helpful. If they'd had names on them, I could have separated out the notes that expressed confusion and made sure I caught up with those kids by the end of the day.
- I noted on the "sample writing to learn exercises" that "exit cards" are only one subgenre of "lesson reflections". I think it would have been good to include both a time for writing a lesson reflection in notebooks, and and exit card. However, I don't see how I can do this within a one-hour class. I noticed that in our reading on "Writing to Learn", Fisher, Frey and ElWardi recommend 10 minutes for writing to learn - meaning an opener and lesson reflection would take up one third of my class.
- Kids go a bit wild with post-its. I ended up needing to pick up post-it scraps, balled up post-its, post-its that had been pulled apart and artistically rearranged - I need to build in some clean-up time when we're using post-its (again with the stuff that takes time!)
Wow. Well, that was long. What I need to do in the future is to continue to experiment with opening and closing prompts (given the one-hour limit, I don't think middle check-ins will be helpful to me this semester) and see which are more and less generative.