Hi Matt! I’m also hoping to focus on the same core practice
you are- activating and connecting background knowledge so I hope that I can
give you some suggestions. I am planning on using this core practice with
non-fiction texts, while I believe you are working on fiction texts, but maybe
we can bounce some ideas off each other!
A section of the book I am finding to be really helpful is
Chapter 7 Activating and Connecting to
Background Knowledge mostly because this chapter gives so many ideas about
how to activate students knowledge and make it meaningful.
One of the sections that I really liked was on pages 100-101
Building Background Knowledge Based on
Personal and Text to World Connections. I still find my students to be more
or less egocentric and I think activating background knowledge based on
personal and then moving on to text to world connections would be very beneficial.
Also, allowing students to SHARE their experiences will help other students who
may not have as much knowledge about a specific topic hear from others who do
have more knowledge about these topics. The example they gave in the book about
the Vietnamese family was a great example of how this will help other students,
so I suggest you look back over that example.
Also, on page 103-104, the book discussed “Will any
connection do?” Here, they talked about helping students differentiate from connections
and MEANINGFUL connections. I don’t know if this will be as much of a problem for
your older students, but it might be a good idea to do a paper where students
have the opportunity to make connections and then decide themselves if that
connection is helpful to the text, or just simply a connection. I liked this
strategy because it doesn’t make students feel as if their knowledge or ideas
are “bad” or “stupid”, but it allows students to sort through all this
knowledge and sort it into meaningful groups so they can synthesize this
information.
In regards to how to assess if students are able to activate
background knowledge, this is something that I am struggling with as a result
of starting to plan my unit. Do you have any suggestions as to how you might
assess this? How will you decide if there is growth from the beginning of the
unit to the end? Share any ideas! Thanks :)
In Response to Liz:
ReplyDeleteI agree that Chapter 7 is extremely helpful for ideas on how to use this reading comprehension technique.
My sixth grade students do not appear to be egocentric. My students are able to empathize with others and characters from literature. However, I want my students to make these text-to-self and text-to-others connections more often. Rarely do students make connections during class discussions without a prompt, and when they do, they rarely make important connections to the story. For example, one student read about “bees” in a short story that we were reading. He then elaborated that he is a bee keeper. This was good that he was able to relate to the main character, however, his connection did not go any deeper than him saying that he did the same thing. I would like for him to seek deeper meanings with his connection, such as: “Why did this character like bees?” And then, “Why do I like bees?” and “Are our motivations similar?” How else might you focus students’ attention towards meaningful connections?
I really like that you explained that students can benefit from other student’s knowledge. Allowing students to share background knowledge will give students new insights from people their own age. I also believe that these connections that are made could make students more comfortable sharing their own experiences, thus making the classroom environment more cohesive. I will look back over the chapter regarding the Vietnamese family.
I like your idea about taking out a piece of paper and recording their connections. This would give students the opportunity to read over and compare their connections with one another, ultimately deciding if the connections are meaningful. To add to your idea, perhaps they could identify whether the connections were: text-to-self, text-to-others, or text-to-text. All of these connections are useful, and perhaps you could focus separate days on each of these types of connections. Also, I think it would be beneficial for students to have the teacher model making connections. She could use some of her own “connections” that she made to the story, and then have the students decide if they were meaningful. I believe it will be far more obvious whether the information is meaningful when the students are not emotionally attached to the teacher’s experiences. The students’ viewed will be far less biased. I will review the two pages you mentioned, and ensure that I have taken away all of the information that I need. How did you plan on teaching students which ideas are “meaningful?” I feel like meaningful can also be different depending on the person, so I am looking for any advice that you have!
I plan to assess my student’s background knowledge by reading a short story and quickly modeling the reading comprehension technique. Once students get a vague idea of what I intend to do, I will then hand out a document that asks for students to find similarities between the text and themselves. The worksheet will also tell them to explain “why” these connections are important or meaningful. I believe this is a key component to this reading comprehension technique. Students need to be able to explain why these connections are meaningful, otherwise their responses will simply be finding similarities. I believe that the deeper the connection, the more the student will derive from the reading as well as the more the student will remember what they have read. In terms of comparing growth, I would like to compare the depth in explanation as to “why” these connections are meaningful. I would also compare whether the students were capable of making text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-other connections. I believe that most students can make text-to-self connections, but the other two types of connections are likely less common. These are my ideas so far. What have you thought of Liz?
Matt.