Читать книгу Academic Moves for College and Career Readiness, Grades 6-12 - Jim Burke - Страница 53

When Peter’s teacher wanted each group in the class to construct useful prompts for possible essays, she created a series of instructions that helped each group develop their questions:

Level One (Recall)

 Sample Task: Identify all central characters in the work.

 What Peter’s Group Did: Discussed the meaning of “central” and then made a list that included the six most obvious characters, three men and three women.

Level Two (Skills)

 Sample Task: For each character, choose phrases or words from the text or identify moments that help define that character and explain the character’s behavior.

 What Peter’s Group Did: Assigned each group member a character and looked for key words and phrases; they then worked together on the last character and added to others as a group.

Level Three (Strategic Thinking)

 Sample Task: Choose three ways in which the characters in the novel could be compared and contrasted and, for each, compose a question that could generate possible discussion or writing.

 What Peter’s Group Did: Realized that the most obvious comparison in this novel would be to compare males to females, but each member thought of other possible comparisons: characters who wind up happy to those who wind up unhappy, for instance, or characters who follow the rules and those who break the rules. In the end, the group wound up with several questions, including the one Peter answered.

Level Four (Extended Thinking)

 Sample Task: Imagine that your group has been asked to write the preface to a new edition of your group novel, including an assessment of the work’s historical importance, literary merits, and effects on other authors over time. As a group, investigate and present your plan for this preface with appropriate citations.

 What Peter’s Group Did: Peter’s group assigned each group member research tasks and then compiled the information and worked together to create an outline for the preface. After discovering that the novel had originally appeared only in magazines and was first published in book form in 1979, they decided in particular to research the genre of utopias and dystopias written by women in the 20th century and the effect Gilman had on those writers.