I decided to try a new strategy for helping my class learn to effectively develop an idea for writing in a paragraph. This is always an ongoing challenge when teaching history, identifying the main idea for the argument and then supporting it with evidence. When the students can come up with an idea, they often struggle with how to prove it, or when they find lots of facts, it is a challenge to organize them effectively. I know that I often do some of my best thinking when I am talking with other people, so I developed a lesson to let the students see if talking and listening to themselves would help them organize and articulate their thoughts.
They first read a section of the textbook individually and then again in small groups, identifying together the most important facts. I regularly have them read a section twice: first to identify the main ideas and then a second time to annotate what is significant in the passage. To start the next part of this assignment, I posed a question to them and had them brainstorm from the facts that they knew. Some of them did it on paper and some of them used different programs on their laptops to make mind maps.
I gave them 10 minutes to look over what they had read and the work they had done the day before. Then I gave them this challenge. Using Garageband, they were to record their planning process, identifying which facts they wanted to include and what order they wanted to use them. Then they were to listen to the recording. They were then to repeat the process, only this time with the focus being on developing a topic sentence for the paragraph, one that clearly stated their argument. After they had tried a few sentences, they were to listen again. Then the goal was to record a paragraph that answered the question. After doing that, they were listening to see if they had a clear point of view and had proved their point with evidence.
At first, they were really worried, assuming that this was about creating a finished product that would be graded and, even worse, listened to by the class. When I told them that this was just for them, they became curious but still sort of doubtful. One girl was almost frozen due to her embarrassment at “talking to herself.” When I explained that the goal was to use their laptops in a new way to develop their thinking, and most importantly that no one was going to hear their recordings but them, they began to loosen up and enjoy the process. As they started to experience it as a different means of identifying what they wanted to say, they got really excited. There was no “product,” except their deeper understanding of the material and of how to put together an effective answer to the question.
For some of them, it was a huge success. They felt like they had really been able to more their thinking forward over the course of the hour that they had to work in this way. They wanted to do it any time that they had to write. For others, they hated it and felt that it didn’t help at all. For both of those groups and the ones in between, it was a learning experience, which was exactly what I wanted.