Thursday, 15 October 2015
I was nervous today. I don't know why, but I get that way sometimes. I did too much thinking about what students would be doing; I'm a chronic over-thinker. I wanted students to practice stating a central theme based on a quote. I had a sample answer prepared - provided by the district - and had pre-highlighted key words in the sample. The class and I read the quote four times and then dug into highlighting key words. Afterwards we picked apart those words to see how they were used in the text. This was a lot of thinking for a 3-line quote, but they did it. After the analysis, I then restated the notes we took and asked "What is the central theme?" At this point, I should have let them struggle with an answer. What did I do? I continued talking, and provided the prepared answer which didn't perfectly fit what we did in class. One very astute student said, "I wrote something different." Although I felt really stupid at this point, I was smart enough to write down her statement, which fit our class work perfectly.
So what did I learn? Trust your students to do the work, especially after putting forth so much analysis effort. Hmmmmm.....
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