Podcast in 5th Grade

The iCoaches, Courtney O'Connor, Michelle Fishcer, and Ed Beringer have launched a joint project centered around the novel Esperanza Rising. The story begins in Mexico in the 1930’s; twelve year old Esperanza is the main character, an only child of a wealthy Mexican landowner. After her father is killed and her heritage is taken from her by her uncles, Esperanza and some of her family travel to California where she works as poor migrant worker.

The story gives readers many themes that apply even today– male authority, corruption, the American dream, stark plight of many immigrants, social inequities, and on and on.  And teachers are using many of the social justice themes of the story to teach/discuss the current immigrant caravan story.   
Angela and Justin Gonzalez, our instructional coaches, are working with the teacher teams to compose a series of podcasts highlighting student discussion around the characters and themes of this story.  Irving and Piper students will alternate podcasts. This link is this week’s podcast featuring five Irving students discussing Chapters 1 and 2.  Please take a few minutes to listen. 

Quite honestly, I was blown away by the high level of student discussion and engagement -

  • students paid attention to one another’s comments 
  • students “piggy backed” on other student’s ideas 
  • students elaborated on ideas – fleshed out weak assertions
  • students backed up their opinions by returning to the text
  • students considered other classmates’ perspectives
  • students inferred character motives and future behaviors based on text evidence

I was reminded of the powerful student voices that emerged from the Stoneman Douglas High School massacre earlier this February; these students most definitely participated in discussions like the one featured on this podcast in their early years.  And, we absolutely want our students to be able to speak in multiple contexts – and to speak well. We must give them the opportunities to do just that.  Kudos to all working on this project – you are promoting and encouraging students to speak out.  Also, you are making administrators think about how to foster more of this best practice.

Some very good stuff in this research article about how talk facilitates learning.. “Oral language is the foundation of literacy, and as such it requires focused attention in planning”.  While some of the article gets down “in the weeds” about oracy, some great examples of what teachers do when they use the “think, pair, share” technique.  The authors remind all of us of the need for our students to give me more than one word answers. We need to promote meaningful student talk – that will promote deeper learning.

Do take a few minutes to listen to this group of our fifth graders defend and assert and change their opinions as they interact with other – great stuff here.  This is what learning sounds like!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Slice of life

Good evening  I am curious about your own writing.  Do any of you have a writing practice, such as, journaling?  Just wondering.  If I were a betting man, I’d put money on it that many of you do have a writing habit of sorts – if not now, perhaps earlier in life.  Please consider sharing a posting with us – or even on the bigger stage of Two Writing Teachers Blog. Last week I talked about the blog – Two Writing Teachers. This blog offers us the opportunity to share a piece of our own writing on pretty much any subject. You will find the means to do that under “Slice of Life” .  Just wanted to throw this out to anyone so inclined.  I’m going to push myself to post something.  Courage, right?    At any rate, my thoughts on writing focused on Heart Maps or Close to the Bone maps.  It seems to me that such a map would be beneficial for different writing responses, and most especially when we require students to write to an on-demand assessment.  We want to get a baseline
Read more

Student Growth

It is hard to believe that we are now into our 3rd year of PERA/Student Growth.  When I think back to the beginning of this initiative, I remember the apprehension around not only the Type III assessments, but the reality that these assessments were going to be linked to teacher evaluation. Now in year 3, PERA seems like second nature.  In the beginning of the year, I held an evaluation meeting for meeting for the staff who would be evaluated this school year and, at that meeting, I suggested that we should focus on formulating meaningful Type III assessments.  I get that it’s easy to pull out last year’s assessment and use it this year, but unless the assessment reflects current classroom instruction, then we are just going through the motions for the sake of compliance. After our session on examining student work at our last institute day, looking at an assessment through this lens could prove to be a practice that not only improves student achievement, but improves teacher instruc
Read more

Valentines Day

Carpe diem!  Happy Valentine’s Day!   Kids – and boyfriends and girlfriends– and adults who have special relationships with kids - that would be grandparents, for sure, want to show some expression of their love.   We send our cards with hearts and Xs and Os – and many of us spend a few minutes reading the sentiment inside the card – the thought needs to be a good fit.  Why not take the time to compose our own message to our Valentine?   I have been reading a fair amount about using mentor texts to teach the craft of writing.  Lucy Calkins and Katie Woodray (Wondrous Words) continually advise us to really get to know several good books – like inside and out.  What are the “tricks” of their writing?   What are the craft elements the author weaves into the writing? Writing gurus are reminding us to stop when we are reading a well written passage - “Hey look at that.  Look at how she wrote that!”  Try to figure out why the sentence/s work.  Children’s literature is replete wi
Read more