Instructional Session 29

Objective: By the end of class, you will be able to… Beginner: say phrases or sentences in French to give information about the Grand Est region, using the class text to say more Intermediate: say a series of sentences in French to give information about the Grand Est region, using the class text to say more and using transitions to organize your information Advanced: say a well-organized informational paragraph in French to give information about the Grand Est region, using the class text to say more and using transitions to organize your information and restate content-specific words in simpler terms to teach new vocabulary to the reader

Preparation:

You come now to the expert group reading day, when you will read the Expert Group Pages on the first subtopic (in this example, the Grand Est region of France) together as a class, and model the process that students will later complete with their Expert Group, using an Expert Group Page on one of the other subtopics (in this example, either the Normandy, Corsica, or Nouvelle-Aquitaine region). This lesson is basically one long, extended Reading Workshop, and therefore we will not follow the usual daily framework.

You have, by now, provided quite a lot of input about the first subtopic. You looked at pictures of the Grand Est region, and all the regions, in the Picture Inquiry Chart in Session 23. You read a Big Book on the Grand Est region in Session 24. You taught basic information about the Grand Est, and all the regions, using the Visual Syllabus in Session 25. You taught more details on the Grand Est, specifically about facts from the Shape and Concept Categories (Geography, Important Cultural Sites, Economy, and Cuisine), using a Pictorial Input Chart in Session 26. You reviewed key terms from the Pictorial Input Chart on the Grand Est using the Word Card Review strategy in Session 27. And, finally, you used a video clip on the Grand Est in Session 28 using the Reverse Movie Talk strategy. Additionally, if you have implemented the suggestions in Reading Workshop in Sessions 27 and 28, you have already previewed the Expert Group Page on the Grand Est (or your first subtopic) to prepare for this lesson.

In this session, you will lead students through their first Expert Group Page reading, teaching and modeling strategies that they will use when they work with their own expert pages. You are advised to run off copies of the pages for each student, or provide some other individual response format, for example, perhaps a Desmos lesson, or a Peardeck or Nearpod slide, if teaching via computer.

Once you work through this reading together, your students will be very familiar with this process, and they will then to apply it to their own Expert Group Page that they will read later as a group with their little expert group of three kids.

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First you will read the entire text aloud in the course language, without pausing to teach specific terms/words. This may push some of your “teacher buttons” because you might notice that some of the words are quite low-frequency, such as “hauteur” (“height”) or “siège” (“seat”), and you might feel some anxiety that you have not taught these words. You should not have pre-taught all the words in the reading. They are designed to include a few unknown, challenging terms. This is intentional.

Words such as these, presented in a meaningful context, and with all the prior scaffolding that you have built into the “Process Grid Process,” are like Easter eggs for your students, little hidden gems that they maybe have never seen before, but that give their minds something to work with. Some readers will just pick up the meaning from the context, while others will have a chance to experience a slight breakdown in comprehension (or, for some readers, even a major breakdown in comprehension) when they encounter these terms.

However, this is a controlled and scaffolded level of challenge, because with all the context and information that you have provided, and the support of the process that you will use to read and mark the Expert Group Page as a class, the overall meaning will be clear, and students will have a chance to “discover” or “figure out” the meaning of the terms, which is using the powerful educational strategy of “teaching into cognitive dissonance,” as described in great detail in Session 17 on page CheckXX.

You are going to scaffold your students through reading and marking the pages using the following process. First, as explained above, you will read the entire text aloud, fluidly, at a natural pace (suited to your students’ abilities, of course), and not stopping to teach specific vocabulary. The idea is that students experience the text as a whole piece before you dive in and work through it in detail.

Before you continue with the second reading, you will want to direct students to raise their hand to indicate when you come to a word that they think is important to know, or a word that sounds very “brainy” or “smart” or “impressive” or “academic.” If your classes are not very volunteer-oriented, or you have reason to suspect that they will not be a forthcoming as you want them to be, with the raised-hands request, you might specify a certain number of these “fancy” terms that you will want them to indicate to you in each paragraph.

For example, you might say, “I will read very slowly, and we will mark at least five terms per paragraph. If we don’t see them the first time we read, I will read the paragraph again, to give us time to find at least five important, “fancy” terms. Most students really dislike having to repeat the same thing over and over, so this trick will train even a reluctant class to make with the words or suffer through multiple readings of the same passage.

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Then read the text again, very, very slowly this time. As you are reading, when you get to a word that someone thinks is important, they raise their hand to signal that they have a word. You will stop there and model how to highlight using a specific procedure - highlight the first letter, then the last letter, then the middle letters.

Maybe somebody raises their hand when you say “habitants” (“inhabitants” in French).

So then, speaking in the language, you will say each letter in the language as you highlight it.

With the example of “habitants,” you would say, speaking in the course language, “Color ‘habitants.’ Color the h, color the s, and color the a-b-i-t-a-n-t. Habitants.”

This process is shown in more detail below.

Students will work along with you, highlighting on their paper, marking as you model, the first letter, the last letter, and all the letters in between. This way of highlighting gets students to think a little harder about the words they choose, and at it slows them down. Sometimes students will just paint the entire page with the highlighter color, and this “paint the page yellow” approach doesn't really do much for memory, retention, or learning. It does keep the highlighter companies in business, though. Their shareholders are probably jumping up and down with glee every time a seventh-grade social studies teacher starts a “notetaking unit.” This specific procedure, which I learned from a BeGLAD training, gives purpose to the highlighting.

After you highlight the word, you will want to switch to pen or pencil to circle the word and draw a line

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from the word to the box under the paragraph, where you will copy the word and then draw a little sketch to help remember the meaning of the word. In the example for the word “region” you might draw a map pin symbol on a shape to look like a region. These steps are illustrated in more detail below. It is best if you can discipline yourself to not start doing a lot of talking in the class’s stronger shared language, but rather to talk about the vocabulary and model the steps (circle, color in, draw, etc.) in the course language. You can so very easily get lost in the weeds with every hand in the class up in the air, hoping to use you as their Personal Walking, Talking Dictionary.

You will want to avoid just “giving the answer away,” by just saying, “This means that.” The learning for students is in the doing, in this case (and in many others), so just giving them the translation deprives their brains of a valuable learning experience.

The purpose of this strategy is so much deeper than just simply providing the word in the stronger language, or even teaching that specific vocabulary in the course language. This process gives students a carefullytitrated dose of challenge: not too much, but just enough to keep their brains engaged with some “puzzles” to solve (in a supported, low-stakes way, of course). If students stop the process to ask you exactly what the word means, you could define it for them if you want, or you could lead them to try figure out in the context, by re-reading the section and asking the class to paraphrase, or having everyone talk to a partner to paraphrase/ process the sentence(s) you re-read.

After you model highlighting and sketching for the first term, continue to work through the whole paragraph. I like to “back up” to the beginning of the paragraph, or at least to the beginning of the sentence, to re-read and get us back into the flow of the text.

This process really unpacks the language and the information. You will read and highlight paragraph by paragraph, most likely working the whole period to read through and mark the entire text. If your students would find this challenging - so much reading in one day! - then you can choose to read one paragraph per day over the course of a series of lessons, during a longer-than-normal Reading Workshop, using this method of marking the text. The example Expert Group Pages for the Grand Est region contain four paragraphs, so if you choose this approach, you would spend four days of extended Reading Workshops to process the entire reading.

If you choose to divide the reading up in this way, you will want to have another strategy prepped for the Guided Oral Input and the rest of the daily instructional framework on the days when you schedule the

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reading. The Reading Workshop will most likely, especially on the first day, be at least twice as long as a normal class session, so you will want to plan a very simple Guided Oral Input strategy, or perhaps a game or other interactive activity, to make use of the remaining time in the class period on these days.

You have learned, in this book, a number of various strategies that, if you want, you could plan for the rest of your class periods. If you are especially planned-out, you can use these strategies to help students gain exposure to terms and facts that they will encounter in the next paragraph of the text, which you will read in the following class session. You could plan Movie Talks or Reverse Movie Talks, review your Big Book, or make a second Big Book specific to the information in an upcoming paragraph of the reading, or take a break from all the Information strategies to tell them a story about the topic, perhaps using a Visual Story. Suggestions for how you might schedule these lessons are provided below.

You will either read and process the entire passage in one lesson, perhaps continuing on to the suggested Student Application and Assessment strategy (Finish My Sentence) given below, or spend three to four days “spreading out” the reading during an extended Reading Workshop period and then continuing on to an abbreviated daily instructional framework, as suggested in the images below.

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Finish My Sentence

Move to your Quiz Spot. For more details on “Finish My Sentence” see Session 5. For a sample of how Finish My Sentence might sound in a lesson on informational texts, please see the Scaffolded Oral Review section of Session 28.

Extensions to Fill the Rest of the Period (if needed)

If the reading went very quickly, and you have so much time at the end of class that three or four rounds of Finish My Sentence don’t get you to the end of the period, you can move on to any other Student Application and Assessment strategy that you have used in this book, or any other closure/review strategy that you and your students enjoy.

At the end of the period, you might want to debrief with students, congratulating them on what went well, and setting goals for future improvements.

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