Today - I was working with some students about the process they use to answer ECR questions. We learned some important things. All of these kids made zeros on their essays in April. Most of these kids made a question: What is the situation in Antarctica? And then didn't answer it. Then they said, "The text says..." and copied a bunch of text. That's it.
Previous lessons involved using the online tools and reasoning processes to diffuse the prompt. Then we collected text evidence.
Selecting, Using and Incorporating Text Evidence
But...here's the kicker. Kids don't really know how to USE the text evidence to answer the questions. And, they have a problem putting the ideas into sentences. Here's a few solutions.
Diffusing and Writing from the Prompt
The source: Sirius Online Solutions for English II STAAR Practice
The text: Wild Orchards
The prompt: Explain how the poet uses sensory details to establish the contrast between the orchard and the landscape.
The strategy: Ultimately, we use Gretchen Bernabei's QA12345. We replaced the Q with P for prompt.
Analyzing the prompt: Explain how the poet uses sensory details to establish the contrast between the orchard and the landscape. We use the highlighter tools to make sure we are answering all parts of the prompt. Then we use those ideas to help us craft questions to guide our search for text evidence.
Rewriting the prompt: Delete the question words and start a sentence. Change the verbs if you need to.
The poet uses sensory details to establish the contrast between the orchard and the landscape.
Flashback and Connecting to the Released Exam:
This was the same process we used in the EOC II - Explain what makes the situation in Antarctica unusual. If kids wrote about a situation in Antarctica that wasn't in the text, they scored a zero. If they scored about a situation in Antarctica, but didn't explain how the text expressed how the situation was unusual, they made a zero. What was the situation in Antarctica described in the text? What words expressed those situations? What would we call those situations (inference)? That's the original writing that was expected. If kids just quoted from the text but didn't name the situations these words expressed, they got a zero for unoriginal writing. Too much quoting from the text and no real proof from their own words that they understood what the situations in Antarctica were.
Additionally, writers had to express what evidence from the text proved that these situations were unusual and name these inferences to prove their comprehension.
If they didn't write about the (situation + Antarctica + unusual characteristics) squared with text evidence and multiplied with inferences and connections of their own comprehension and interpretations, then they got zeros.
Kids wrote: The situation in Antarctica is unusual because... OR The situation in Antarctica is unusual.
NOTE - we had to tell them that the topic sentences of their body paragraphs were the ANSWERS to the prompt. They thought rewriting the prompt WAS the answer. NOPE. They still have to have answers to how and why.
Use the prompt for prewriting and rereading questions
For the Wild Orchard and prompt, we also have to divide the prompt into questions that guide our thinking/reasoning and search for usable text evidence. Furthermore, this prompt was an author's craft prompt and not just a comprehension one. Again, it's one prompt, but multiple questions and steps to answering. Here's the questions the kids composed with me today.
- What are sensory details? (And note - don't TELL them what these are. We had to make the kids look this up in their dictionaries.)
- What are the sensory details for the orchard? What are the sensory details for the landscape?
- How do the details show contrast?
- What is the contrast? Why did it matter?
Analyzing the text to Collect Evidence
Students used one color to collect sensory details about the orchard and another to collect details about the landscape.
So, imagine the colored text - blue for the landscape, yellow for the orchard. (One conceptual problem was that the kids didn't realize that the landscape and orchard were occupying the same space - spatial issues here complicated the visualization beyond what the assessment is supposed to measure. But don't let that get in the way right now. We can't really fix that part globally. This variability of spatial reasoning within text visualization as a tool for comprehension is another reason the test doesn't measure what they say it does.)
Kids had something like this on their papers:
P: The poet's use of sensory language in the poem establishes a contrast between the orchard and the surrounding landscape.
He highlighted: "soft, ripe, heavy", "apples green and red stand out" and "broken", "rugged", and "rocks."
C: The poet's use of sensory details in the poem's purpose is for more of a feeling of what the contrast is between the orchard and the surrounding landscape.
She highlighted "laden with fruit", "rugged", and "rocks".
What do we do with the evidence? Name the connection
The kids usually write something like this as stems: The text says... and This means/shows... But that wasn't working. We got things like:
The text says "soft, ripe, heavy" and "broken." This means that the apples are big and the landscape is messed up.
That won't work because the kids are just paraphrasing and not connecting to why the contrast matters.
or
The text says, "the apple trees are laden with fruit." The text says, "it is a broken country."
That wouldn't work because the kids copied text but didn't explain why the author needed to contrast them.
Basically, kids are just copying the text. The stems don't help the kids understand why the ideas are important. We needed an intermediary step. Which text evidence goes with which idea?
But what do we DO with that to find the inference?
First - we decide if the words are positive or negative.
Second - we ask what the contrast is between the two terms
Third - Some kids could find text evidence for one, but had trouble finding what text evidence matched for the other topic. We focused on what is the opposite. We asked them to name what was opposite about the ideas. As you can see in the image above, the kid decided that the orchard was alive but the landscape was dead. Now we had some ideas that were effective and were closer to meaning...
Before you can have author's purpose, you have to understand what they are saying.
Putting it into words with text organization sentence stems:
So now we used our other questions to help us - Why did the author need to show the reader a contrast?
The kids needed contrast language to add to the text says stuff. The text says ______ about (topic one) while _____ about (topic two). This means that topic one is ____ and topic two is _____. This helps the reader (see, visualize, compare, contrast, understand, etc.) the big idea of ___________.
Your sentence stems must hold the organizational structure that matches what the prompt asks you to do.
Samples:
Student Two wrote and then I showed him how he could use the names of contrast as the answers in his conclusion. It's a start at getting something on the paper that will count. Lots of things we can still teach.
More Practice on Naming Moves with Comprehension
So, we crafted the activity below for tomorrow. Students have to match evidence, select evidence, name what the evidence is doing and meaning. Then we are going to show them how to use those ideas in the intro and conclusions.
We started with pretty obvious text and moved to the more sophisticated imagery and symbolism. We also tried to select evidence that could have multiple right answers/names/interpretations.
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