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About This Video Clip
“Literature comes alive when kids have a chance to interpret and to interact. It allows kids to not only see themselves as active readers, but as people who can make meaning.”
Barry Hoonan
The Odyssey School
Bainbridge Island, Washington
Barry Hoonan believes teaching is much like poetry. It is crafted, it is magical, and it is powerful when shared. As an act of creation, teaching illuminates the tiny details of living and learning. Entering literature discussion groups as a teacher, Mr. Hoonan sees himself as an improvisational artist, listening and responding to student comments and questions. He is on the spot and ready to take the disparate pieces and help students put them together. Moving in and out of group discussions, his ultimate goal is to help students become independent thinkers and learners.
Trust in students and in their abilities as readers and thinkers is central to Barry Hoonan’s teaching. Understanding that students come to his classroom with a great deal of knowledge and information, his approach to literature begins by taking his cue from the students. Although he makes suggestions and adds information to a discussion when necessary, he prefers to have student voices and understandings predominate.
Each literature group has a facilitator, entrusted with keeping things moving, making sure everyone has a voice, and getting the students to develop their insights. However, Mr. Hoonan has learned that too much structure in such groups can get in the way of creative conversation that sparks ideas students may not have had before. Experience has taught him that students respond to overly structured situations by becoming stiff, asking questions and answering each carefully in turn around the circle. The literature discussions portrayed in this video display the organic, respectful, back-and-forth exchanges of authentic conversations in which ideas are offered, tested, and developed.
Mr. Hoonan believes strongly in the importance of community, especially in this multi-age classroom, and feels that literature discussion groups are an important way to foster classroom community. To accommodate a diverse range of interests, ages, and abilities, Mr. Hoonan offers students a choice of 15 titles linked to the theme, “Life’s Not Fair.” Students are invited to read at least two books and form discussion groups based on the reading of shared titles. In addition, the class read-aloud book Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli further enriches the theme. As a way of enriching literary readings, an important component of the literature discussions involves linking issues from the literature with the students’ personal experiences.
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.
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Chasing Redbird by Sharon Creech
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Freak the Mighty by Rodman Philbrick
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My Louisiana Sky by Kimberly Willis-Holt
Although both her parents are mentally challenged, Tiger Ann Parker is a happy little girl growing up in Louisiana in the 1950s. She always gets straight As, and has won the spelling bee several years in a row. When she enters middle school, Tiger begins to feel embarrassed by her parents, even though she loves them very much. When Tiger’s grandmother dies, Tiger goes to live in the city with her aunt since her parents can’t care for her on their own. At first, it’s exciting to be able to reinvent herself. She cuts her hair and starts using the name Ann. Eventually she discovers the strength of her parents’ love and realizes that home is where she really belongs.
Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse
Set in the bleak landscape of Oklahoma during the dust bowl, this Newbery winner is told in a series of free-verse poems by 14-year-old Billie Joe Kelby. Her mother and newborn brother die as a result of a terrible accident, and her hands are severely burned in the fire that kills them. Denied the solace of her piano playing, she fights her guilt, anger, and estrangement from her father, finally learning to forgive him and herself.
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Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli (class read-aloud book)
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Tangerine by Edward Bloor
Paul Fisher lives in the shadow of his older brother Erik. Visually impaired since five, Paul is an outsider in his own family and seems to be the only one to understand the brutality behind his brother’s football star façade. With the help of prescription glasses, Paul can see, and is an excellent soccer player, earning a position as goalie on the middle school team. As Paul records his story on his computer journal, he begins to remember menacing incidents involving his brother. He senses that the mysterious accident that damaged his eyes is also the reason he fears his brother.
You can access additional resources related to this video clip’s texts in the Additional Resources section.
School: The Odyssey School
Location: Bainbridge Island, Washington
No. of Students in School: 125
Teacher: Barry Hoonan
No. of Years Teaching: 19
Grade: 5th and 6th grade cluster
Subject: Language Arts
No. of Students in the Classroom: 31
The Odyssey School is an alternative public school on Bainbridge Island, eight miles from Seattle by ferry. It is one of four elementary schools serving this community of 20,000. When it opened five years ago, it had 75 students in grades one through six, organized into multi-grade groupings known as clusters. This year, the school grew to 125 students with the addition of a 7/8 cluster. Class size at Odyssey is on a par with that at other island elementaries. Students are looped, staying with the same instructor for two years. Although approximately 80 percent of parents commute to Seattle, the school represents a wide range of incomes and includes artisans and local farmers as well as stockbrokers and lawyers. Families must agree to volunteer between five and 10 hours a month at the school before they may enroll their child. With twice as many applications as available spots, the school has a lengthy waiting list and is currently evaluating whether it needs to undertake further expansion — and if so, how to achieve that growth while maintaining the current sense of community.
Odyssey is located in a spacious old elementary library building and is designed to have the nurturing feel of a one-room schoolhouse. Students call teachers by their first names. The elementary grades spend part of each morning together, and they share computers and other resources as needed. Each elementary cluster has one teacher who is responsible for all instruction. Within such a small environment, parents are a vital resource, sharing their skills and expertise in the classroom. For instance, since Barry Hoonan’s expertise lies primarily in language arts, he recruits family members who are strong in math and science to help teach advanced concepts to his cluster. Teachers of grades one to six coordinate a three-year cycle of instruction together. Although the state mandates that children must know certain concepts by certain grade levels, it has been supportive of Odyssey’s alternative approach to education.
Like all public school students in Washington, children at Odyssey must take the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) in grades 4, 7, and 10. But for Mr. Hoonan, assessment is far more than a measure of what students have accomplished; it is also a tool to help them grow. Mr. Hoonan keeps a daily journal on the progress of individual students and targets five or six students a day for individual assistance. He has children maintain a portfolio of their work, and actively involves them in establishing the criteria on which they will be evaluated. In addition, he asks parents to conduct formal interviews with their children at various points in the year, using a sheet of questions designed to show students the progression of their thinking over time.
Teacher: Barry Hoonan, The Odyssey School, Bainbridge Island, Washington
Barry Hoonan’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: Fifth and Sixth
Topic: Life’s Not Fair
Materials Needed:
Background Information:
Mr. Hoonan’s students are invited to read two books chosen from the dozen thematically linked sets available. Using their writer’s notebooks and sticky notes, they record their questions and responses in preparation for discussion. Meeting with others reading the same book, students select a discussion group facilitator, share the questions they have prepared, and determine where to begin their conversation.
As the conversation unfolds, the facilitator ensures everyone has the opportunity to contribute, while encouraging group members to develop their thoughts fully. At the end of the discussion, the group lists questions with which to begin their next meeting. They also decide if they need additional background for their reading. If so, they frame research topics to explore prior to their next conversation.
Mr. Hoonan wants students to connect issues that emerge from their reading with their own experiences and world understandings. Literature discussion groups, he believes, allow for the easy exchange of ideas that encourage such connections.
To enrich the thematic background, Mr. Hoonan chooses a related book (Stargirl) to read aloud. During these readings, he may pause and invite students to interpret a passage or a scene dramatically.
Lesson Objectives:
Students will:
Expected Products From Lesson:
Instructional Strategies Implemented:
Collaborative Structure of Class:
Students divide into discussion groups determined by the books they are reading. If a large number of students is reading the same book, they might form two discussion groups. A discussion group might have as few as four members or as many as seven. Desks are clustered to form a convenient meeting area for as many students as are in a group.
Lesson Procedures/Activities:
Follow-Up Activities or Culminating Activities:
Artistic response to literature discussion book(s) and Save the Last Word for the Artist sharing strategy.
Assessment:
Students may be assessed on a daily basis through:
The following activities might receive holistic or scaled evaluation (see Assessment and Evaluation: Some Useful Principles for a detailed explanation of holistic and scaled evaluation).
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.
Popcorn Reading
Many teachers like to use popcorn reading (metaphorically named for the way students pop in and out) when they want to hear from a number of students, without reverting to the row-by-row (or around the circle) tedium of round robin reading. Without naming anyone specific, a teacher invites students to begin reading. When that person finishes, another student is expected to follow, again without explicit direction from the teacher. The process continues until everyone has taken a turn. With popcorn reading, students have the responsibility of participation coupled with the choice of when to do so. In addition, attention to the readings is enhanced when students are prompted to listen to peers for the opportunity to link their contributions to what has come before. Popcorn reading can be used with any text-even with students’ own writing.
Quick Writes
Quick writes have many names (journal jottings, freewriting) and multiple uses. Briefly, quick writes afford students the opportunity to pause momentarily during reading or discussion and record their thoughts and feelings in writing. Teachers can then ask students to share their writings, confident that every member of the group has had the opportunity to grapple with the issue at hand and has something to offer.
Responding Visually to Literature
Many language arts teachers have come intuitively to use visual activities to support their literature instruction. Non-verbal activities provide an opportunity for students to develop and display their growing understanding and enjoyment of the literature in informal ways as they develop visual representations of their thinking.
In his preface to Phyllis Whitin’s Sketching Stories, Stretching Minds: Responding Visually to Literature (for the complete citation, see “Additional Resources” in the Library Guide), Jerome Harste reminds us that “literacy is much more than reading and writing” (x). He tells us that literacy is “the process by which we mediate the world” which “means to create sign systems — mathematics, art, music, dance, language” — which “act as lenses that permit us better to understand ourselves and our world” (x).
When we take what we know from one sign system and represent it in another — as when we take a written text and represent it graphically — we are using transmediation, a process that “is both natural and basic to literacy” (x). Such transmediation has enormous value in the classroom. As students resee, they rethink. Rethinking, they understand in fresh ways, and their pleasure grows with their developing insights.
For less able readers, the very act of focusing on a brief passage or scene and doing what more skilled readers seem to do invisibly helps them develop the visualization powers to process texts effectively. Not only are they developing their understanding of a specific text, they are expanding their skill as readers.
Using Overheads in Discussion
Give each group an overhead transparency and a pen and ask them to record the results of their discussion for sharing with the class. Then, when it is time to report out, they can use the overhead to guide their contributions. This strategy has several benefits. First, the overheads can be saved, and referred to again days or weeks later to remind students of observations made earlier. Second, the use of a prop offers support for students who may be anxious about standing and speaking in front of the group. Finally, the use of the technology itself has a grown-up appeal that students respond to positively. When ordering materials, be sure to get clear transparencies that can be written on. Those intended for copy machines or printers don’t always receive ink well. Also, overhead pens come in a number of colors and students like to choose a color to represent their group. The transparencies can be rinsed off after use and reused for years.
Using Webbing To Keep Track of Student Discussions
Often it is difficult to remember who said what during a lively discussion. Even harder — when teachers have multiple sections of the same subject — is remembering which class or which group raised which issues. Following Mr. Hoonan’s example, teachers can web the content of a discussion to create a concrete record of what topics were raised in each group.
Assessment and Evaluation: Some Useful Principles
The terms assessment and evaluation are often used as synonyms. Distinguishing between them can be helpful as you plan instruction. Assessment means looking at what students can do in order to determine what they need to learn to do next. That is, assessment, whether of individual students or an entire group, is done in order to inform instruction. Typically assessment is holistic, often recorded simply as “credit” or “no credit.”
Evaluation occurs after a concept or skill has been taught and practiced and is typically scaled, indicating the level of achievement or degree of competence a student has attained.
Using Personal Writing To Extend Literary Envisionments
Look here for suggested ways to help students respond to their reading.
Sketch to Stretch
Based on ideas developed by Phyllis Whitin and presented in her book Sketching Stories, Stretching Minds: Responding Visually to Literature, the basic premise behind Sketch to Stretch is that creating a visual based on a literary work stretches student thinking, helping them to see the text in new ways. Visit the Sketch to Stretch page for ways to use this in the classroom.
Save the Last Word for the Artist
After a student (or a group) has completed a visual representation from the literature, it is shared with the class. In Save the Last Word for the Artist, the visual is displayed so everyone can see it, and the class is invited to comment on what they see and their understandings of how the visual connects to the text. When the group has finished, the artist is invited to offer his or her thoughts, validating what the group has said and suggesting other possible interpretations. Often the artist will be surprised that the group found things about the work that were there, but were not consciously intended.
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. While Mr. Hoonan has chosen to link the texts in this lesson thematically, you may wish to offer students other works by the same authors. If you do, some texts that may complement the ones used in this classroom lesson plan include:
Online resources related to the texts used in Barry Hoonan’s classroom:
Professional and Research Organizations:
Resources related to the tenets of this lesson:
Young Adult Literature sites
Instructional Resources: