I really love, love, love the anticipation/reaction guide. I think it’s a strategy best used for engaging diverse cultures. Basically, you ask students a bunch of questions about something they can agree or disagree with to in an effort to introduce the themes of the subject to the students. It’s used best as a pre-reading exercise, this way you start to familiarize the students with what you’re about to be reading, but I think it could be a fun post reading exercise to see if students have changed their opinions after reading the work.
I used it a couple times, I think before reading Breaking Through and The Secret Life of Bees, and it created excellent class discussions. One of the questions for SLB might be “You should never forgive someone that tries to hurt you,” and then they agree or disagree. It works best if students have a lot of varying opinions on a topic and you can really find out how students feel about something, and watch their opinions change as the story reveals itself. It’s also not a bad way to get students out of their seat, by making the “agrees” go to one side of the room or if you’re providing multiple responses you can have the “A’s” go to a corner. After doing one of these before SLB a student that usually slept in class was fired up and said, “we should do this more often, this is fun,” because the whole class was arguing their points about abuse or love or whatever. This is a fun strategy to use.
No comments:
Post a Comment