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 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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