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How to Combat Spring Fever at School
Rare would be the teacher who is not affected by spring fever during the month of April.
Your restless students are certainly no exception. Instead of trying (probably in vain) to fight the phenomenon, spend a little extra time planning lessons that will make class enjoyable for your students during this time. Here are some suggestions to consider:
• Be careful to build in relevance to make sure students are aware of the benefits of what they are learning.
• Consider using multimedia in your presentations to engage student interest. Music, art, video clips…whatever your students enjoy can be used to snag their attention.
• Sometimes tangible rewards can help students pay attention when they may otherwise be distracted.
• Challenge your students to beat their personal best on assignments.
• Challenge your students to beat each other in friendly competitions.
• If your subject or grade level is appropriate, arrange for your students to participate in a WebQuest project. To learn more, try www.webquest.org.
• Plan plenty of review sessions at the end of class so that students can see the relevance of what they are learning as well as the progress they are making.
• Allow more wiggle breaks when students are restless. A thirty-second stretch break every now and then is preferable to a loss of thirty minutes caused by distraction and boredom.
• One sure way to make your classroom a livelier place during the month of April is to present a silly fact each day for your students to think about, dispute, talk about, research, write about, and enjoy.
You can search the many fact sites on the Internet by using the key terms, “fun facts.” Another good place to begin is with either of these sites: www.hightechscience.org/funfacts.html and www.factmonster.com/index.html.
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Creating Readers, Creating Meaning
Constance McGuire
8th grade Social Studies Teacher at the American School of Warsaw
In his book, Deeper Reading: Comprehending Challenging Texts, 4-12, Kelly Gallagher uses baseball as a metaphor for reading. As a baseball fan, over the years, the author has learned the game deeply, so that he is not focusing only on the action with the batter and the hitting. He reads the entire field, including the dugout, and can figure out the hidden meanings in hand gestures, can predict what play might be called and anticipate the outcome of the game. These are all things that a strong reader does by not only reading the literal meaning of words, but by using prior knowledge and imagination to understand figures of speech and to help the writer tell a complete story.
The author’s analogy makes me think of hockey. I was watching a hockey game recently when my oldest daughter came into the room and when she saw what I was watching, asked me if I found it entertaining. I told her that I did, but I also told her that it was the sort of thing that I did not need to pay close attention to, so I could do something else at the same time as the game was on. So watching a game in that way is like reading a tabloid magazine, or even just the headlines of a newspaper. I can dip in and out of it, and I do not need to read every word to get the sense of the story.
But if I really want to read deeply, it is like following a recipe. If I were to just skim a recipe or not follow every word, then the result could range from tasteless to disgusting. A recipe is laid out in a certain format, and it needs to be followed in a particular way, paying attention to measurements and ingredients. If I want to make something that is edible and tasty, then I need to follow some basic rules. So making a cake from a cake mix might be compared to reading a picture book. It is purposely designed so that anyone can do it, with perhaps a little help the first time. But reading Finnegan’s Wake is more like preparing a five course tasting menu for a dinner club that has paid for the experience and expects a wine list which perfectly complements the food. The basic recipe rules are still the same, but with some challenges added, such as cooking more than one dish at a time, and ensuring that everything is prepared to be ready to eat at the right time, so that hot food is served hot and the food is served in the right order. Having dessert first would be like finding out from the book jacket which character has committed the murder in an Agatha Christie whodunit – the book would still be a good read but perhaps not as satisfying.
So how do teachers help students learn how to create meaning from what they are reading? If only we had a recipe card for each piece of text they might encounter, then how much easier our job would be. Gallagher offers a plan of how to help students approach challenging texts and to outfit them with a variety of tools that will help students create meaning out of what they are reading.
Some strategies for teaching challenging text include guiding students through first and second draft readings or using metaphorical graphic organizers to help students reach deeper comprehension by analyzing various aspects of the text. Our minds are always seeking connections between things, for a variety of reasons, but one of the most basic is that it helps us remember things better. If you have trouble remembering names, one piece of advice is to associate the name with something that will remind you of that person. Creating metaphors to compare two things helps us make connections. In addition, being able to think metaphorically helps us understand something in more than simply a literal way. For example, I have often used the idea of a metaphor project to have students learn more about a topic, for example, having them compare China’s development in the 20th century to a road, where sometimes it is a dirt path, at others, a fully-paved highway. Asking students to think about historical topics in a more creative way than simply writing an essay forces them to think more deeply about the topic and apply the information they read about the subject in a more evaluative format, since the details they include have to fit the metaphor.
As Gay Ivey points out in Texts That Matter, it is imperative that we also give students meaningful texts to read, instead of just the usual textbook-style content that discourages many middle school readers. Perhaps if we give students the tools to create meaning out of any text, we will be less likely to see readers turned off by text. Gallagher uses the metaphor of “nurturing palm trees” to describe how we support student reading by exposing them to a variety of genres, thus to encourage the growth of branches and the development of new branches.
I like the comparison to trees, but I am not sure a palm tree is the most appropriate choice, as there is such a large part of the trunk that has no branches on it and while palm trees are associated with tropical paradises, I would rather have a leafy, full-branched tree that offers shade in the summer, changes colors in the autumn and then reminds me that spring is here, when it comes alive again, after losing its leaves for the winter. If we think of the seasons of reading, spring is that time when parents first read to their children, who then go on to summer time fun by learning to read for themselves and spend a great deal of time exposed to a variety of print-based resources. Autumn is made up of those students in middle school who read only when they have to, if even then, while winter is full of the high school students who can barely open Sparks Notes to do the writing assignment connected with whatever text the teacher has given for homework. Luckily, even after the harshest winter, spring arrives and any teacher armed with Gallagher’s gallery of teaching strategies will see a love of reading blossom once more.
Works Consulted
Daniels, E. (2010). Educational Leadership: “The Power of Strategies Instruction.”
Gallagher, Kelly. (2004). Deeper Reading: Comprehending Challenging Texts, 4-12. Portland, ME:
Stenhouse Publishers.
Ivey, G. (March 2010). Educational Leadership: “Texts That Matter.” pages18-23.
Marzano, R. (February, 2012). Educational Leadership. “ The Art and Science of Teaching: Writing to
Learn.” Pages 82‐83.
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ISTE Conference: Philadelphia, PA June 28-July 1
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WRITE FOR TIPS
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