Stealth reading

When I call an activity "reading," it's not proving to be the best sales pitch for my students.  But when I feed some reading activities in that have film study as the big context, and involve learning through moving pieces of paper around to make sense of some exemplar texts, then my covert sales pitch works better.

In 10QI, my focus class for my 2019 inquiry and MIT project, we have been looking at a range of film techniques and building our skills in writing SEXY paragraphs showing our understanding of how meaning is made in a visual text.

I've been experimenting with different ways of students acquiring the skills to discuss film techniques.  Earlier this month, I set up the class with resources for students to read and make their own notes on a range of film techniques.  The class looked very "compliant" - they were reading the documents, everyone was quiet and no one complained.  But when I looked again at their work afterwards, I could see that many students had stopped at the reading activities, a few had made notes which were in phrase form rather than sentences which could help another person learn and no one had gotten all the way through to explaining how the technique developed meaning in the trailer for Akeelah and the Bee. 

We then spent some time practising identifying film techniques, describing how they were used and explaining what we learnt from them, using the opening scene from Akeelah and the Bee (which we have already watched in its entirety - great film).  This section was strongly teacher-led, so that no one was left behind on identifying two visual and two verbal techniques and understanding how they were used and with what effect.

Several students identified that when we went slowly, looking at one technique at a time, as a whole class, with everyone drawing visual techniques and writing to describe verbal techniques, they felt much more confident about their learning.  In a parent-student meeting later that day, one student identified that when she could just see one task at a time, it worked really well for her, such as our one that day.  Conversely, when the whole lesson/series of tasks was laid out at once, she felt overwhelmed and, often worried that she would appear stupid, she sometimes opted out of attempting the learning.  It was a helpful insight that has guided my planning since.

I wrote two sample paragraphs so that my students could see what I was looking for.  This is important preparation for two NCEA English assessments for these students next year and, of course, for having the tools to analyse how we are positioned by visual media texts in our leisure time and on social media.  I broke my paragraphs into separate sentences, and then printed each one on a different coloured piece of paper and cut the sentences up.  As we started the lesson, each group was engaged in organising their sentences into logical order and there was a satisfying level of conversation about the choices in each group.  My paragraphs (as originally constituted) are below:

Now that we have put these together and discussed the use of the SEXY paragraph structure (Statement-Explanation-eXample-whY it is important) for writing an effective paragraph, we are each writing our own paragraphs.  This time there is a lot of scaffolding, but later in this film study, students will be ready to write more independently. 

I like that the examples have helped students see what is possible in a really concrete form.  One previously frustrated student who had been thinking it was silly to be doing this much analysis of a film can now recognise the process and skills involved. 

In the next 1-2 lessons, each student will write their own SEXY paragraph showing their understanding of how the director uses visual and verbal techniques to help us understand the Akeelah's world.  I am going to bring Socrative in to this process, getting all students to submit their answers on Socrative, and then using their voting function to get students to decide which is the best paragraph and why.

There is a lot of detail in this blog post.  My purpose in linking to the actual exemplars and describing the process in quite a bit of detail is to make the resources as well as the thinking available to others.