Skip to main content

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

By Tim Pappageorge
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.



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Blended Learning ELA White Paper Musings/Draft

By Tim Pappageorge
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...
Post a Comment
Read more

Synthesis Writing

By Tim Pappageorge
Synthesis Writing involving The Role of Women & The Scarlet Letter Conflicting Sources. What does it mean to have students write meaningfully about sources that conflict? In this attached writing prompt, students evaluate Hester Prynne, a character whom Nathaniel Hawthorne posits as strong, capable and independent in chapters 12-15 of the novel. The question is whether or not the students think that she is a strong female character by today's standards. Embedded in this prompt is a problem or controversy that the students have had some interest in addressing, even though the documents are challenging. Charting an Inquiry. Prior to today's class, students have examined other synthesis prompts together, charting how the sources conflict and setting up how each of them would proceed through them. Today, they were ready to address the prompt independently, so they wrote alone, creating a mock outline of their essays, and we reviewed these together as a group. The impo...
Post a Comment
Read more