Activity 1
This cycle of learning includes a sequence of activities that develop novice teachers’ understanding and skill with eliciting and interpreting individual students’ thinking. Novice teachers are introduced to a new practice, prepare to enact it, enact it, and analyze their enactment (McDonald, Kazemi, and Kavanagh, 2013; Lampert et al., 2013).
This unit invites novices to "reverse engineer" a student-led discussion of To Kill a Mockingbird and criminal justice statistics. They analyze and practice the “invisible” work of teaching that supports students to independently facilitate and engage in rich and purposeful literary discussions, with particular attention to English learners. Novice teachers plan, rehearse, revise and enact a discussion-enabling mini-lesson.
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Introduce
After surfacing their own tacit knowledge of literary norms and routines, novices consider the way they inform work in English language arts and analyze several examples of teachers introducing them to students.
Prepare
Novices prepare to teach a close reading mini-lesson by carefully examining the content, co-planning the lesson, and engaging in coached rehearsal.
Enact
In their field classrooms, novice teachers deliver a close reading mini-lesson, filming it for later analysis.
Analyze
Novices will analyze their own practice, first identifying features from the decomposition and then comparing their pre-planning predictions to actual student responses.