Balboa High School
CAPI Coordinator: Kevin Conway
Teachers:
School Year: 2001–2002
Student Feedback
Coordinator Report
Demographics
- Number of students served: Not stated.
- Grade level: 9th
- Number of teachers participating: 3
- Number of ESL students served: Not stated.
Overview
During my second year at Balboa High School I spent much more time in front of the classroom, leading students in various lessons ranging from sentence combining to strategies for active reading to methods for peer editing.
I have found that my consistent attendance makes a great deal of difference as students respond to a regular presence. Consequently, following a period during which the students and I adjusted to each other, they grew more willing to work with me in a number of ways: asking questions, showing me drafts, considering my suggestions for revision, allowing me to look at later drafts. In the following sections, I’ll discuss how we can best direct our efforts at Balboa in the coming year.
Overall, I am pleased with the work I’ve done with individual instructors in the classrooms; however, at times, classroom management issues detracted from our efforts. While I suggest we continue with the model we have in place, I’d like to extend our outreach to work with more of the faculty. I have spoken with the department chair and he is very amenable to this. We plan to meet soon after classes resume in September to discuss strategies for department-wide workshops.
I would like very much to maintain the collaborative nature of CAPI and I think we managed that well this past year for, in every case, the individual teachers and I worked together to develop curriculum. I look forward to continuing our efforts at Balboa High School.
Critical Thinking
My work with the ninth grade classes in an academic literature class allowed me to introduce some activities that I have developed around critical thinking. For example, I led the class in an exercise that presents them with a variety of “facts” about a Mister X, and then asks them to categorize those facts and draw some conclusions about those categories.
Having completed this exercise, students learn that by organizing data, they can draw some inferences from categorized information. I also worked with students on a number of exercises about differentiating between fact and opinion. While that difference may seem obvious to competent readers it is less clear to developing readers.
These two activities—distinguishing between fact and opinion, as well as drawing inferences from a selection of categorized facts—dovetailed nicely with the lessons of the course. For example, a number of Ms. Martinez’ classes addressed helping students develop active reading skills, among them visualization, questioning, schema building, a variety of fix-up strategies, and distinguishing between major points and supporting details.
Students, I am convinced, need a great deal of help with critical thinking. Recent reading scores at Balboa show some increases; we can build on those gains by continuing to help students critically evaluate information.
Model Curriculum
I did a number of paragraph developing exercises with two of my instructors, each of which furthered my commitment to a model-based curriculum. When I presented students with a variety of paragraphs to choose from, they were very able to distinguish the well-developed paragraph from other less developed ones. Thus I have concluded that while students may have trouble dealing with various rhetorical notions in the abstract, they grasp the point more readily when we give them concrete examples.
This model curriculum also worked well during the composing phase because students could refer back to the paragraphs they deemed outstanding and evaluate how well their own work reflected those same qualities. As students continued drafting and revising their own paragraphs, we dispensed with my model paragraphs and instead used the students’ work as examples. This process proved particularly effective during an individual conference with a student who was having difficulty, as he said, “getting started.”
Essentially, he understood the essay prompt, but could not visualize how to fulfill its expectations. By looking at other students’ drafts and then reviewing the assignment, he came to understand what he needed to do in his own paragraphs. So, I suggest that the more we can ground our expectations for the students in the concrete and specific, the more they will be able to fulfill those expectations.
Peer Editing
Like the model curriculum, peer editing, I’ve found, allows students to consider each other’s drafts. Certain critics suggest that peer editing is not particularly useful, arguing that we cannot expect students to evaluate other students’ essays when they face difficulties composing their own.
Granted, we should not ask students to respond to the complexities of sentence focus, but they can address issues of development, thesis clarity, and organization. Lisa Morehouse conceived an outstanding and effective plan: she invited six adults to her class and asked that each student in the class peer edit his or her essay with one of those adults. Lisa, essentially, created a variety of “conference sites” where students could discuss their drafts individually and receive detailed and informed feedback. Peer editing also reaffirms the value of multiple drafts and reminds students that writing is indeed a process of composing and revising.
Sentence Combining
Sentence combining proved successful in all of the classes with which I worked. Students were very engaged in the activity and were interested to learn the ways n which the coordinating and subordinating conjunctions worked. I suggest we continue our efforts in this regard for sentence combining yields a number of benefits: it not only provides students with strategies for joining shorter clauses and, in doing so, adds a level of sophistication and coherence to their writing, but also engages them in critical thinking, for in order to use coordinators and subordinators effectively, students must first evaluate the implied relationship between the two sentences.
Follow-Up
I incorporate a series of questions in each of my lessons that asks students to examine how the exercise we have just worked on contributes to their knowledge overall. For example, following my Mister X inference exercise, I ask students to consider the following:
- What does this exercise teach us about evaluating inferences?
- How can we decide if some inferences are more reasonable than others?
- How does this exercise relate to our everyday experiences?
- How can we relate this activity to our own writing?
In responding to these questions, students (I hope) tie the activity at hand to their education overall and make cognitive connections. Thus, I suggest we find ways to help students link the various skills we teach them so they can see the relationships between and among them.
For example, the critical process involved in distinguishing main ideas from supporting facts—one of the reading strategies I referred to earlier—closely resembles one students engage in when they compose their own paragraphs: they consider how to organize their ideas so that they first present a general assertion (topic sentence) and then develop that topic sentence with more specific details (examples and analysis).
By incorporating a follow-up activity that stresses this similarity, we can help students grasp how reading and writing strategies intersect.
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