Lately in my classroom I have been noticing much
more the sense of pride that my students have whenever they go public or
present their work to an audience. I
always knew that giving students and authentic reason to write and a meaningful
audience to write to would really enhance their writing, however, I have
noticed that it enhances a lot of other things within them as well. The conclusion of my literacy unit was an
author’s presentation of my student’s all-about specialist books to all the
other classes in Bret Harte. Reminding
them about having a large audience definitely motivated them to write better,
but what happened inside the gym in front of their audience was what really was
amazing to me. My students were not only
proud of their work, but they were able to tell others so much about their
book, the non-fiction features we learned, and facts about their animals. I expected that students would only have
absorbed and been able to re-tell the information that they had written in
their books. However, as I walked around
to each table to hear the conversations that were occurring, my students were
able to tell information I didn’t know they had even read about. They spoke knowledgably about their animals
when asked questions and even presented some of the non-fiction text features within
their books to others. I was truly blown
away.
My students took such pride over
becoming a “specialist” over the two week unit and it really came through
during this presentation. The excitement
from other students was evident as well as the confidence in my students. After seeing their mature behavior in this
setting my MT have decided that this will not be the last time we hold a
presentation of this kind. Our students
proved they are capable to take on this task and executing the sharing portion
beautifully and we would like to challenge them to do this again. We have talked about possibly doing the same
type of “specialist” research in science about different types of storms.
This must have been a great experience and really does tie together so much of what makes education and schooling so powerful and meaningful. The challenge of course is to think of ways to include this process of "becoming a specialist" into other domains of content as well. In math, for example, how might you do this? Of course, you can't have one person become a specialist in "addition" and another in "subtraction", but the best approach seems to be involving having students bring in information and experiences from their own daily lives (e.g., becoming an expert in figuring out how much money you need to create a budget for doing laundry). Again, the more that the curriculum can be applied to actual interests and actual lived-experiences, the more meaningful it becomes.
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