Cooperative Discussion as a Differentiated Activity: Part II

As soon as I posted my last dissertation, my Education Leadership (March, 2010) was in the mailbox and low and behold the WHOLE thing is related to reading and integrating more reading strategies into the curriculum—So… —here are some additional ideas:


The Case for Slow Reading by Thomas Newkirk. “To be quick is smart; to be slow is to be stupid.” However take this on for size—”The term taste applies to both literacy and eating. And to taste, we have to slow down...because in the folktale, the turtle always wins.” Have you had the pleasure of reading and re-reading the same book over and over. My husband read at least 1 book in the If you give a …. Series by Laura Nurmerof every night for a year to our daughter Ashley. I have read the final book in Harry Potter 5 times and Breaking Dawn 4. (But I am also caught up in the Sieg Larsson trilogy - so please don't kill me)Let’s look at the possibility of allowing our students to learn something ‘by heart,’ and introduce them to the pleasure of reading a passage aloud with inflection, savoring passages….

The activity that I was drawn to involves annotating a page. The value was further reinforced when my second grader sat down beside me to read a Junie B. Jones book and wanted to share passages on a page—reading aloud, she was so taken with the author’s humor—she just had to share—

“In this activity, students probe the craft of a favorite writer. They pick a page they really like, photocopy it, and tape the photocopy to a larger piece of paper so they have wide margins in which they can make notations. Their job is to give the page a close reading and mark word choices, sentence patterns, images, dialogue—anything they find effective” (pg. 10).

There are two applications—the first is to make this the Quote Finder assignment— and the other is to have each student find and share 1 favorite page of annotated notes from the assigned reading in addition to their assigned role.
Okay– so you aren’t into the warm fuzzy—


Texts That Matter by Gay Ivey pg. 18—23.

“As a university professor, I also think about the contrast between the literacy experiences students have in kindergarten through grade 12 and those they encounter in college, where they are often expected to access, evaluate, and critically analyze both print and non print texts...even students who enter the workplace right after high school need advanced literacy skills, including reading critically across various sources of information…”

One of the main reasons I get for math and science teachers not wanting to incorporate scientific readings into their lessons is that they fear their students can’t read it. (and they are probably right—)

So, we are going to have to scaffold and be picky about what we choose—that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have a chance to read Aristotle, Newton, or original work by Einstein. Use the Cooperative Discussion strategies to provide support to the text.