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About This Video Clip
“Helping them to look at characters as people and try to personalize and make connections is something that I have found really is helpful and I know is an important thing to do.”
Dr. Jan Currence
Stephen Decatur Middle School
Berlin, Maryland
Integrated language arts provides an interdisciplinary learning experience for Dr. Currence’s inclusion students. Units are thematically planned, weaving social studies, science, and even math into the language arts experience. The lesson featured in this video clip is part of a historical fiction unit, where students read a novel as a class and select one of their own from the same genre.
Dr. Currence creates a student-centered environment for her students, where meeting a range of students’ needs is a priority. Because of this, it is nearly impossible to determine which students in her class have special needs and which ones do not. Dr. Currence wants her students to choose to learn, and this philosophy drives her work with them. She hopes to engage her students in literature through a variety of activities, including read-alouds, dramatics, writing, picture books, journaling, and creative culminating projects.
In this lesson, students participate in an activity Dr. Currence refers to as Tableaux With a Twist. A tableau is a dramatic activity where a group of students are asked to physically construct a significant scene from literature through body placement, facial expressions, and the use of a few props. This “freeze frame” invites students in the audience to identify the scene, its importance, and the significance of the characters, their actions, and reactions. Dr. Currence’s Tableaux With a Twist invites students in the audience to tap a character in the scene, hearing what they have to say. The tapped characters in the scene explain what they are doing and why they are doing it. This activity focuses on characters’ actions and motives, allowing students to walk in the characters’ shoes. This is particularly important for the students’ current unit of study, historical fiction, in which they are expected to see how realistic characters change when some element of history influences their lives. Tableaux helps kids become part of the book, create personal responses to the literature, and connect with the characters, conflicts, and plot in a meaningful way.
For resources that can help you use this clip for teacher professional development, preservice education, administrative and English/language arts content meetings, parent conferences, and back-to-school events, visit our Support Materials page. There, you will find PDF files of our library guide, classroom lesson plan, student activity sheets, and other Teacher Tools.
The Watsons Go to Birmingham — 1963 by Christopher Paul Curtis
Ten-year-old Kenny and his 13-year-old brother Byron have typical sibling rivalry. When Byron tries his parents’ patience for the last time, they decide to ship him off to his grandmother in Birmingham, Alabama. These Flint, Michigan boys encounter Birmingham at its most turbulent time, the burning of the Sixteenth Avenue Baptist Church with four young girls inside.
Dr. Currence selected a young adult novel for an historical fiction unit of study. This particular novel features sibling rivalry at its best, which engages students in making personal connections to the text.
School: Stephen Decatur Middle School
Location: Berlin, Maryland
No. of Students in School: 650
Teacher: Dr. Janis Currence
No. of Years Teaching: 28 Years
Grade: 7th
Subject: Integrated language arts
No. of Students in the Classroom: 26
Stephen Decatur Middle School is located in Berlin, five miles from Ocean City on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. It is the largest of Worcester County’s three middle schools, with approximately 650 students in grades seven and eight, of whom 30 percent are minorities. Decatur draws its students from three areas — a retirement community, a tourist destination, and a rural town. Most live outside walking distance. Families represent a wide range of incomes. Many parents, especially those in Asian American households, are employed at nearby Perdue Farms, while many others work in Ocean City’s thriving tourism industry. Students take the Maryland Functional Reading and Writing tests, which they must eventually pass in order to graduate from high school.
Although its students come from neighborhoods pocketed by both ethnicity and social class, Decatur has a close-knit school community. The building’s four wings house separate schools-within-a-school, each with its own teaching team and student population. This fosters a sense of security and identity by allowing children to interact within a smaller group of peers and adults. Teaching teams, two at each grade level, encourage interdisciplinary learning and create a standard set of behavioral and academic expectations across the day. Jan Currence’s seventh-graders know, for instance, that they must use correct punctuation not only in integrated language arts (ILA), but also in science and social studies. Dr. Currence’s team includes two math teachers, two ILA teachers, one social studies teacher, and a science teacher, as well as an educational assistant and an in-class special education resource person. The team has regular meetings to facilitate cross-curricular planning. Class periods are double-blocked to allow greater freedom of instruction.
Within a seventh-grade class of 26 to 28 students, Dr. Currence may have reading levels spanning from second grade through college. According to county mandates, she must focus on particular genres — realistic fiction, historical fiction, mythology, poetry, and drama — but within this structure, she may select the individual texts her students will examine. To accommodate the range of interests and skill levels in her classroom, and to give children a voice in their own education, she allows students great flexibility in what they choose to read. She also reads books aloud to engage children in challenging discussions of texts that are above their reading level but not their comprehension. Individualized learning goals and performance-based assessments are the norm, and Dr. Currence regularly enlists students’ help in developing rubrics and grading criteria.
Teacher: Dr. Janis Currence, Stephen Decatur Middle School, Berlin, Maryland
Dr. Currence’s lesson plan is also available as a PDF file. See Materials Needed, below, for links to student activity sheets related to the lesson.
Grade Level: Seventh
Topic: Using drama to engage students in meaningful responses to literature, with a focus on character development
Materials Needed:
Background Information:
Students in Dr. Currence’s class are studying a historical fiction unit, examining the nuances of the genre and how actual events in history affects the lives of fictitious characters in significant ways. Here, students read a significant portion of the book The Watsons Go to Birmingham — 1963, so that they could begin to examine the characters’ actions and motives. In addition to reading this book, students were required to select another historical fiction novel to read on their own.
Students interacted with the novel through a variety of classroom experiences designed to help them access the text and interact with it in meaningful ways to increase their understanding of the text. These activities included:
In order to assist students with understanding the fictitious characters, their motivations, and how historical events influence their actions and reactions, this lesson provides an opportunity to participate in a dramatic activity called Tableaux With a Twist.
Lesson Objectives:
Students will:
Expected Products From Lesson:
Instructional Strategies Implemented:
Collaborative Structure of Class:
Students are placed in groups of four to five each.
Lesson Procedures/Activities:
Day 1: 10 Minutes: Model Tableaux With a Twist
Day 1: 20 Minutes for Preparation
Day 2: Performance of Scenes
Follow-Up Activities or Culminating Activities:
Assessment:
Students’ successful participation in the tableaux activity is assessed through teacher observation. Students are also required to submit a reflection on the activity.
Some suggested criteria for evaluating their presentations include:
Take a step back from your classroom and examine the video clip in relation to your own instructional practices. Use the questions below to spark discussion about instructional practices in department meetings, team meetings, or as a writing prompt in your own professional journal.
Consider:
Whether you are a classroom or preservice teacher, teacher educator, content leader, department chair, or administrator, the materials below can assist you in implementing the practices presented in the video clip.
Modeling for Students
Understanding character is one key to unlocking a more complete vision of any text. Teachers can help students do this by extensive modeling, clearly demonstrating how they interact with a story to understand characters as they read aloud to their students. You should not afraid to make conjectures about motivation or relationships that might prove more complicated or even contradicted at a later point in the reading experience. Students need to see that all readers, even the most expert, make and then refine or perhaps discard impressions as they form envisionments of the text.
Resources focused on Building a Literary Community
Use these resources about improving literary understanding and improving thinking skills produced by the National Research Center on English Learning and Achievement. Information about scaffolding instruction, strategies for improving literary understanding, and including struggling readers is provided at CELA’s Web site. All of these resources can help you as you begin to assess your own classroom success in helping students create envisionments.
Improving Literary Understanding Through Classroom Conversation
Effective Literature Instruction Develops Thinking Skills
Text Pairings
As you begin to plan literature experiences for your students, consider offering text pairings, so that students have a rich palette of text background and reading experiences to draw upon in their literary conversations. Some texts that may complement the ones used in this classroom lesson plan include:
Online resources related to the texts used in Dr. Currence’s classroom:
The Watsons Go to Birmingham — 1963
Additional resources related to the tenets of this lesson: