Thursday, 13 March 2014

Julie Coss - I’ve Got Something to Say! – How Student Voices Inform Our Teaching By David Booth




I’ve Got Something to Say! – How Student Voices Inform Our Teaching By David Booth

            For the Teachers Toolbox, I chose “I’ve Got Something to Say! How Student Voices Inform Our Teaching” by David Booth. This book is very practical and has a lot of interesting activities that encourage and promote oracy (the understanding of spoken language) within the classroom. David Booth has been a classroom teacher, consultant, writer and speaker and currently works for OISE/University of Toronto, coordinating their Elementary Ed. Programs. Needless to say, he has a lot of interesting perspectives and a lot of experiences to back them up. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and feel like there will be a lot of practical ideas that I can bring into my classroom during practicum.

Summary & Resources:

This book is full of examples of classroom talk, from many different sources and example classrooms. Often David (the author) has visited classrooms in various schools, cities and demographics and carefully recorded his findings. It’s interesting to see a book written in this manor, not simply as a “how-to” or giving a list of helpful suggestions but also including student’s dialogue with each other and their teacher as well as including examples of student’s written work. The following are some of the most important themes within the book along with some of my favourite activities that were shown as examples of elevating student’s voices.

-Chapter 1: Why Classroom Talk Matters

This chapter lays the foundation for the rest of the book, and gives many examples of students dialoguing and how that opened up understanding. My favourite strategy from this chapter is the “Discovery Box Wonderings” in which every student in a 3-5 class made a discovery box for a science question they were pondering. They then wrote out their question on the lid of their box, and filled the box with the necessary items (and instructions) for a fellow student to carry out their experiment to answer their question. They would then meet with each other and discuss the experiment, their findings, observations and reasoning for asking that question. A sample question being, “does pulling an elastic band back farther make an object that’s being launched go farther?”
This chapter also discusses different modes of classroom talk that are beneficial for building up oracy.




-Chapter 2: Is Anyone Listening to Me? (Classroom Voices, finding, freeing and expressing voice)
-Chapter 3: Building a Community of Voices (students and teachers working together)
-Chapter 4: Releasing the Story Makers (how story supports voice)
            One of the most amazing activities that I read in this book was the “Finding Voice Through Photography” activity. Which although wouldn’t work terribly well for early years, it was a powerful activity in creating classroom community and allowing students to become story tellers by sharing things with the class that they wouldn’t have otherwise shared. This allowed their classroom to become a safe place and they example that’s given in the book is so moving.

-Chapter 5: Finding Student Voices Inside Texts (how literacy encourages and supports voice)
-Chapter 6: Who Can I Be? (Imagining the voices of others)
            This section of the book had a lot of great ideas as to how to incorporate drama and role playing as a way to get students involved with what their reading. While reading a story pause and ask questions to the class of what they might do if they were in that situation. If they were going to continue the story what would happen next, and allow them to have a conversation about it. By allowing these “interruptions” in story time it can allow that time to be more productive in developing their communication and reasoning skills.  




-Chapter 7: Listening to Our Own Voices (speaking and reading aloud)
-Chapter 8: Capturing our Voices (constructing, composing and creating)
            This chapter talks a lot about the value of having a writers notebook or journal which students can look to and use to revise their stories. A journal is a priceless time capsule of how and what you were thinking about at any given age, it can be helpful for assessing children’s basic comprehension, conventional spelling or sentence structure. But it can also be helpful in monitoring kids lives in and out of school, a journal can help bring to light social issues or if something at home is going on that might be tough. A journal is a safe place to develop voice, students are able to revise, organize, choose language to create effects and mood and become more comfortable with their own voice.
            Here are some helpful questions to encourage writers to strengthen their voice through feedback:

 -Chapter 9: Supporting Voice through Technology (communicating face to screen)
-Chapter 10: Organizing and Assessing a Classroom of Voices (assessing student voice as a condition of learning)
            The assessment section of the book encourages strengthening voice through differentiated instruction and encouraging students to be able to discuss what they’re having difficulty with or what they don’t understand. This chapter also encourages observing and formal record keeping in combination as a way to properly assess where the students are at and what they need to move them forward. By keeping notes daily or summative weekly notes you’re more able as a teacher to track student’s progress and really be able to speak about their growth when it comes to report card time, you won’t be rushed to assess them to be able to write meaningful comments.


Critique:
            Though I really enjoyed this book, there were a few things that left me wondering about the way it was written. In the portions of the text that are directly quoting student’s interactions with one another (these often begin a chapter, or new idea) the very insightful information that we begin to think about because of those snap shots of student interaction are never fully explained. Very often those sections of text abruptly end with the end of a page, the further context or analyzation of what they were talking about is never offered. These sections of student discussion were just used as a jumping off point to talk about other topics, which is okay but I feel like it was just a bit mysterious and choppy in terms of writing style to consistently give no explanation of these texts. I also found the section on supporting voice through technology to be very idealistic. At the beginning of chapter nine some grade 6 students are having a video conference with grade 6 students from another city, and discussing novels that they’ve both been reading. We get to read their dialogue and some of their journal comments, which potentially means that students had multiple computers set up with video feeds via Skype or something similar set up. This seems like a great idea, but I can’t see this working well in any classroom I’ve been in, there always seems to be major technological issues. At my practicum school right now there are only maybe 12 functioning computers in the lab and there is no wifi available for laptops (not even for administration or teachers) the equipment that is needed for things like this video conferencing to work within a school seems very idealistic to me. My overall largest critique of this book would be it’s idealistic nature; there are no stories that talk about a situation where an activity didn’t go well. As beginning teachers we all know that sometimes things just don’t go as planned, someone throws a fit or uses their voice to bring other people down rather than build them up. It would have been nice to see some real examples of what doesn’t work, or a situation that didn’t turn out to be as successful as the planning might have implied.

Reference:
Booth, David W. I've Got Something to Say: How Student Voices Inform Our Teaching. Markham, Ontario: Pembroke Limited, 2013. Print.

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