This week's strategies, identifying similarities and differences, homework and practice, and generating and testing hypotheses, hold great purpose in the classroom as students practice, review, and apply their learning.
When students identify similarities and differences, we are asking them to place their learning in a new structure that communicates their level of understanding; it requires them to actually USE their knowledge. Asking students to identify similarities and differences allows teachers to gauge students' level(s) of comprehension as students strive to make connections. Some of my favorite moments in the classroom stem from when a student makes a connection by identifying a similarity to prior knowledge, content, etc.! I quite frequently facilitate small and large groups discussions during which I ask students to create metaphors for our new learning. Asking students to identify similarities and differences in this fashion allows students to place learning in a context at their level that they can truly grasp and hold onto. Inspiration is a great tool for vocabulary word sort activities students complete in literature. It allows my students to create categories for the vocabulary and manipulate them in an engaging environment.
The purpose of asking students to complete homework and practice activities is to provide students opportunities to review and apply their learning and me opportunities to monitor and assess their understanding AND provide me with the opportunity to provide them with individual, meaningful feedback. In the rush of the day and getting things done, it's all to easy to write great job, exemplary work, or lacking effort the top of the paper, but these comments do not help students see what they did and/or did not do well, understand completely, etc. Homework and practice allow me to have personal, written conversation with my students. BrainPop is one of my favorite quick assessment tools for practice.
The purpose of asking students to generate and test hypotheses is for students to extend and enhance their learning. I find that early in the school year my students look at my like I'm crazy when I ask them to predict or hypothesize what will happen to the meaning of a sentence if we place or move a particular word, for example. I think sometimes we associate predicting and hypothesizing with scientific processes. I find as students become more comfortable with hypothesizing in the language classroom, their language use grows and their learning grows by leaps and bounds.
