Sunday, March 1, 2015
Your favorite activity?
For homework this week, we had to take a look at three different videos from the Teaching Channel website. Between the Silent Tea Party, Text Graffiti, and the SIFT Method, what did you find was your favorite activity? Which of them would you like to one day implement in your own classroom, and why? What did you like about this activity specifically? Every teacher has their own way of doing things, so how would you change the activity to fit your style and your classroom?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Of these three methods, I like SIFT the best. It is the most organized of the three, pointing students to specific aspects of the text that they should be looking at. It takes concepts that all texts have (symbolism, imagery, figurative language, tone/theme) and has students analyze their use in the one specific instance. When used after reading the text once and determining/brainstorming over the "gist", I think it could be a great method to starting students toward close analysis.
ReplyDeleteText Graffiti is very unspecific; it relies on the students supplying their own directions to dissecting an isolated quote. Students can choose to react to the quote or explain the quote, but they most likely will not go beyond the "Understanding" aspect of Bloom's Taxonomy.
Meanwhile, the Silent Tea Party is more organized, having students answer specific questions about a quote. However, contrary to the Text Graffiti method, it can suffer from too much work on the teacher's end. By providing students with specific questions to answer based on quotes, this method seems to fall prey to text-reliant instruction, instead of providing students with the tools they will need to approach ANY text effectively.
I think that the SIFT method is the most effective way to teach preliminary comprehension strategies to students. While it shouldn't be the only method, it covers the basic elements of a text to pave the way for deeper analysis, understanding, and synthesis. The teacher states that she only uses it for short texts; however, with longer, more difficult texts, I could see it being used to break the text up and draw attention to the most important sections during class.
I might use the SIFT method as a graphic organizer to supplement evidence-based claims in literary analysis; making connections between texts (as the teacher does), life, or the world; or even a "reading as writers" type of close analysis.