Instructional Session 22

Objective: By the end of class, you will be able to…

Beginner: write phrases or sentences in French to answer questions in French about the pictures people in class submitted to tell what they think about when they think about France

Intermediate: write a series of sentences in French to answer questions in French about the pictures people in class submitted to tell what they think about when they think about France

Advanced: write a series of connected sentences in French to answer questions in French about the pictures people in class submitted to tell what they think about when they think about France, and using transition words to organize the information

Preparation:

The Guided Oral Input strategy you will be using today is Academic Card/Slide Talk. This is a content-based variation on the familiar strategy of Card/Slide Talk. The only difference is that you will ask students to submit/ sketch images that reveal their prior knowledge, and perhaps bring to light any misconceptions, stereotypes, or other erroneous conclusions that they may have in their minds.

The question that I like to use, and which will be modeled in this example lesson, on Regions of France, is “What comes to mind when you think about X?” In this case, the question is “What do you envision when you think about France?” and students are asked to submit three pictures of what springs to mind about France. Of course, many students will submit the same typical images: the Eiffel Tower, cafés, mimes, bérets, etc.

Sometimes teachers can get discouraged because the images their students submit reveal very “lazy” or “surface-level” understanding of the topic. This, however, is no cause for alarm, or even mild concern. The whole point of beginning the Information cycle with this strategy is precisely so that your students have a safe way in which to “brain dump” their prior knowledge, including any misconceptions or limited thinking on the topic. The purpose of this strategy is not for you to heroically disabuse everyone in class of their erroneous thinking, but rather to accept the information they submit, not as the gospel truth, but as “what you thought of when you thought of France.”

As you work through the topic study, you will find that the organization of the Information cycle is designed to support you in returning to these original understandings and misunderstandings, so that students themselves can begin to “correct” or refine their original thoughts on the topic. This is student-centered, constructivist unit design, and it is one of the main strengths of the Information cycle.

Much of the structure and many of the strategies in the Information cycle were adopted and perhaps modified from the powerful work of Project GLAD (Guided Language Acquisition Design), an evidence-based approach to teaching content and language to bilingual students. Because the needs of students in the average World Language course are different from the average English Language Learner, I have experimented with the GLAD strategies and adapted them for my own students. The Information cycle can be thought of as a mini GLAD unit adapted to suit World Language courses. Page 388

We will now take a break to explore the structure of the Information cycle. Because the planning for the cycle begins with the teacher making a “Process Grid,” and the cycle ends with the students working together to complete a blank version of the same Process Grid, after they have learned facts to fill in each of the squares in the grid, I call this series of lessons the “Process Grid Process.” Below, you will find a detailed walkthrough of the Process Grid Process, from planning to the end of the instructional sequence.

The Process Grid Process

This lesson sequence scaffolds students, at any level, to become “experts” on their part of the information and teach it to the class. The process is basically a jigsaw activity, but the amount of scaffolding involved before dividing the class into their “expert groups” to read their part of the jigsawed information provides a high level of pre-teaching content and vocabulary that will support comprehension during the subsequent reading and processing activities.

The texts will be so scaffolded by the series of lessons in this process that even first-year classes can comprehend informational text containing content-area information and academic vocabulary, as well as a wide range of language features such as verb tenses and aspects and transitional and cohesive devices.

With practice and experience, you will be able to plan two to three weeks of a topic study in a few hours, by beginning with the Process Grid, using that to write the Expert Group Pages, and then planning the remaining input charts (beginning with the Visual Syllabus) and processing tools from those. For now, since this is most likely your first time through the process, rest assured that this is an overview and each lesson will be explained in the sessions that follow this one.

This sequence is carefully designed and sequenced to prepare students to read and comprehend their Expert Group Page, working with a small group (three students is suggested). Even first-year students can, when the reading is simple, become “experts” on their subtopic.

Students will also learn an “expert” level of knowledge about the first subtopic (Breakfast, in the example above) because they will read the Expert Group Pages for that subtopic together with your support. Then they will complete a class Mind Map using the information in the class reading, before dividing up into groups to work on their own subtopic.

In their Expert Group, students will mark up the text and take notes using a Mind Map. Then the whole class will come back together to engage in a class discussion to process all the subtopics in the final lesson of the sequence: the Process Grid.

The lesson sequence is designed so that students encounter key concepts and vocabulary that will help them comprehend the class Expert Group Page in the lessons that lead up to it. In the image above, lessons 1 through 7 prepare students to read the whole-class Expert Group Page.

Because the Expert Group Pages contain so much repeated language, reading the class page previews the language used in the pages that students will tackle in their small group.

Now, on to the lesson procedures:

Greet the students, review expectations, and share the lesson objective. Distribute or project a text for Reading Workshop. Then, share the lesson objective if you have not already done so, check in with your Class Starter (and perhaps Videographer), and begin the lesson.

Find That Cognate

In this sample lesson, I use the reading provided in the Cycle Four Phase One materials from our Teachers Pay Teachers store (CI Liftoff) for Cycle One Phase Four, shown here in French. The text for this phase is an E-Lit reader about the topic of the Information cycle. This is a Level One reader about visiting Paris, which extends upon the topic of “Regions of France.”

Of course, in any Reading Workshop, you can always choose to use a text that your class wrote together in a previous lesson’s Shared Writing. This might actually be the ideal option, especially for beginners, since the texts that they co-create with you will be the most comprehensible.

As always, the lesson notes are written in English. The course language is in black. The class’s stronger shared language is grey.

We will use the “Find That Cognate” strategy with the Reading Workshop text today, to ease you and your students into this reading. We will return to this reading during all the lessons in Cycle Four Phase One (the current phase), deepening our work with the language and information in this ELit text.

“Find That Cognate” should be a very familiar strategy for you by this point in the year. If you would like to review it, please see Session One for a very detailed explanation.

If you are using the E-Lit text, you will not have time to read every page today. That is fine; we return to this text repeatedly, so you can

work with the remaining pages in a later lesson. After a few minutes, you will move into the Guided Oral Input, with a short calendar check-in and then begin the Academic Card/Slide Talk.

Move to the calendar for a brief calendar check-in to transition to the Guided Oral Input, and then Academic Slide Talk (or Card Talk). This variation on Card/Slide Talk follows the same procedures that you have used in the previous sessions in which you used this strategy. Please see Sessions 5, 8 and 17 for detailed explanations. Below, you will find a very brief graphic demonstration lesson. Your lesson will most likely be substantially more detailed. But by this point, you are familiar enough with the Card/Slide Talk strategy to fly on your own with this minor variation (“Academic” Card Talk).

After about 12 minutes of Guided Oral Input, regardless of how many of the slides you covered, even if you found that the discussion of the first slide was so interesting to your students that you spent the entire Guided Oral Input time on one slide, you will move on to Scaffolded Oral Review.

Five-Finger Review Chart

Move to your Review Spot. This strategy will set students up to, in Session 25 and 26, begin using the FiveFinger Review Chart in the Question and Answer Game. You will model its use today as a Scaffolded Oral

Review strategy, drawing the chart and introducing it, and then using it, with the help of the class, to retell some of the main ideas you discussed today. Example procedures are shown below.

You will continue to use the anchor chart that you set up for the Scaffolded Oral Review. In the images below, you will see the setup for the anchor chart as part of Shared Writing, if you chose to use a different Scaffolded Oral Review strategy.

The “Go-To” Daily Strategies

Shared Reading is not modeled in this lesson, as you are simply continuing to use the “go-to” strategies explained and modeled in the previous sessions. Refer to Sessions one through ten for more details.

Written Quick Quiz

This familiar strategy is is explained in more detail in Session Five.

Walk to your Quiz Spot. Students will need paper. Leave the Shared Writing text projected where students can look back at it, and have the Anchor Chart visible. Ask questions and give students time to write answers, and then leave time at the end of the period to correct the quizzes. You may want to refer to Session Five for more details.

At the end of the period, you might debrief on what went well, and perhaps setting or reviewing goals.