Collaboration

Save the Last Word for Me

Each student in the group copies a passage from the reading that he or she finds thought provoking and writes it in large letters on a sheet of paper. Students take turns silently holding up his or her passage so other members can read it. Taking turns, each group member verbally responds to the passage; they can try to guess why it was chosen or discuss why it was important to the development of the chapter, etc. The person who chose the passage gets to speak last, responding to what others have said and adding his or her own thoughts.

Conversation Log Exchanges

Using composition notebooks, the teacher facilitates conversation between different class periods reading the same text. The teacher considers all the students across the different class periods and gives them a number, one person from each class to each number, if that works mathematically. Periodically, students are given time to reflect via written responses in the log in each class period involved in the logs. The teacher can provide questions or prompts if needed. The logs are shared across classes; students can respond to each and discuss the text through writing. Identities are not revealed until the end and the writing should be solely about the reading. At the end, students go through the log with a highlighter, drawing a line in the margin of each of their entries to designate it as theirs. This effectively allows the teacher to assess participation at a glance. The teacher does not read the whole log; students decide which entry of theirs they want the teacher to read for assessment and mark it distinctly with a post-it note.

Theme Triangles

This collaboration occurs at the end of the reading and could easily be a final, major project taking 2 weeks depending on class time. In groups, students write what they believe to be the central theme in the novel. Once they’ve got that, they have to do three things:

1. Analyze how the theme is developed in the novel.

2. Choose and watch a film (not a film version of the novel) that addresses the same theme.

3. Find one more example of the theme in some other medium or genre (poems, songs, art, books, speeches, etc.)

Groups will then prepare a 10 minute presentation in which they discuss the importance of their theme in the novel and demonstrate how it relates to the other two points of the triangle, the film and other example.

Figure 6.3