Download
1 / 10
100 likes | 106 Views
This presentation discusses the Collaborative Curriculum Revision Project's final implementation of the Shape Shifter game to enhance students' analytical abilities. By addressing the bottleneck of students only summarizing text, the curriculum revision uses metaphors, revisions, and the Body Biography lesson to promote deeper analysis, inference-making, and real-world connections. The presentation concludes with gratitude.
E N D
CUNY COLLABORATIVE CURRICULUM REVISION PROJECT Final Presentation
Emotional Engagement Let’s play a quick game I call: SHAPE SHIFTER!
The Bottleneck • Analysis • Students would think they were doing it, and feel proud of their accomplishments as “grade-level masters of analysis.” • However, in practice, they were merely paraphrasing or summarizing the text. As a result, they were never making inferences or revealing any deeper information. In other words, they would read the text, but never go beyond what was explicitly written by the author, question what they read, or make real-world connections that would prompt further application. • This damaged their prospects in college and beyond, as professors would give them their comeuppance in the higher grades. Professors would expect them to analyze texts, students would feel like they could confidently find the hidden nuances in a text, and proudly submit a summary of text, which would be promptly torn apart by their professors.
The Initial Metaphor • Initially, to provide a bit of an arts base so as to engage students, I decided on a tattoo metaphor • Stenciling for getting an initial sense of the text • Printing for evidence • Illustrating and modifying with analysis • However, it became clear that an “umbrella metaphor” wouldn’t work, as students needed more varied approaches. • Since the artistic element fostered some interest, it became a basis for future smaller metaphors to apply throughout the curriculum.
Revisions Revisions to the Curriculum included: • More explicit modeling • The TEAL structure • Use of document cams • More effective questioning techniques • More opportunities for peer engagement and formative assessment • Formative, drafting-based mindset • More connections to the arts through the morphing from a major “metaphor” to smaller arts-based “analogies,” or connections
The Body Biography • The most successful application of an artistic metaphor in bolstering student progress came in the form of a lesson I called the “Body Biography” • Students began by reviewing denotation and connotation, specifically focused on body parts • From there, students were asked to design a character from a text (in this case, The Alchemist) and justify not only their design, but why they were attaching pieces of evidence to specific parts of their character’s “body.”
