Skip to main content

How can we read and write with voice? My students will ask you!

Question Formulation Technique:

"IT IS POSSIBLE TO PERFORM WITH VOICE and TO WRITE WITH VOICE, LIKE WALT WHITMAN"

After a brief introduction to the rules of QFT from the book Make Just One Change (Rothstein & Santana, 2013), my students were ready to form questions in pairs (steps 1 and 2); they then vetted the questions in small groups (4 students) and we posted them on the board below.
The quality of the questions and range of participation was off the charts!  We are studying Walt Whitman right now, so the idea of writing with voice and reading with voice coincides well with their work to perform a piece of poetry from memory (Poetryoutloud.org)

 I can envision using QFT (Question Formulation Technique) in  broad range of contexts.  It was hard not to launch into an answer to the question or to discuss it; just ask the questions and use them a s focal points throughout the unit.



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Learning with Significance

What is Learning of Significance? By helping students to make their own connections and understandings, these awesome teachers of significance have helped students to find meanings that will resonate with them. How to do it? connect with real issues right-size the learning task (and then make it even more challenging) problematize texts use multimodal prompts and texts show students how experts make meaning What does it look like? English -- a student researchers the war in Afghanistan with a partner and presents his findings about the Soviet invasion, the Taliban, and the U.S. involvement following 9/11.   These same students connect this powerful new knowledge to The Kite Runner .  In turn, the complex events leading up to and following 9/11 help focus the reading of the novel and vice versa ; as meanings become connected, webs of understanding reinforce significant knowledge. Science -- a teacher challenges his students to read a textbook excerpt describing...

Classroom Controversy

Constructive Controversy     I want to draw my students into a supportive classroom environment that normalizes struggle and controversy. Argument does not have to be a winner-take-call debate or (on the other extreme) a series of head nods to a commonly agreed-upon platitude.  Democracy takes  more work than that.  The empathy and rationality of rich humanism requires greater depth and search, as well.   Even after 21 years of teaching, I am still learning so much about how to set the stage for respectful and engaged discussion.  What about you? Praise, Pressure, and Performance This short unit focuses on setting the norms of inquiry and engagement that will lead to constructive controversy.  Please check out any of the lessons, or the whole unit!  I taught this in the 2013-14 school year in grade 9, but it could easily run in grades 8-11.   This topic is so compelling, I think, because it will help students...

Blended Learning ELA White Paper Musings/Draft

Vision of Blended Learning ELA -- White Paper This vision concerns how implement Blended Learning in the High School setting, in an ELA department in particular.   What is Blended Learning?  In a secondary school ELA department, we see the opportunity to focus our work on three modes of interaction, each with several variations ( image link/credit ).  The result, we feel, will be a constructivist learning space, in which teachers and students address literary texts, literacy skills, and real-world problems in a problem-based learning format. The primary educational mode is still face-to-face interaction, even in a blended classroom.  Nothing seems to be quite able to substitute for the caring, insightful, focused presence of a teacher or coach, on hand and engaged with the learner in the content or skill being learned.  In ELA, a discussion of social class in The Great Gatsby benefits greatly from seeing the reactions on classmates' or the teacher's face w...