KAITLIN BARNES
ISSUE DISCUSSIONS
Students demonstrate the ability to speak/write/think about real-world problems.
Throughout the school year, my students have had multiple opportunities to read, write, and talk about real-world issues with their classmates. I pair these topics with a reading skill lesson so that students are still interacting with academic content during these discussions. In doing so, I am promoting my students' academic achievement while also building their knowledge and awareness of issues around them. In this section of my portfolio, I will demonstrate two distinct opportunities in which my students read, wrote, spoke, and thought about the hot-button issues of gun control and refugees.
Please use the Table of Contents below to navigate this section of my website. Clicking on each underlined subtitle will bring you back to the top of this section.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
After the school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglass High School in Parkland, Florida, I knew that I wanted to give my students an opportunity to discuss this topic. Many of them had seen news about the shooting on the news or on the internet, and I wanted my students to have a safe space where they could discuss their reactions to this tragedy. I ended up designing two lessons related to the topic of gun control in America.
​
The first lesson was part of our "Super STAAR Fridays," which is how I prepare my students for the STAAR test in an engaging and relevant way. Each Friday, students read a news article, we discuss it, and they work as a group to answer 5 STAAR-aligned questions. Using a news article makes the learning much more relevant to the students because they are interested in discussing the real-world problems that they hear about on the news and see on the internet. Using STAAR-aligned questions ensures that I am preparing them for the state standardized test while keeping my instruction relevant and meaningful to students.
First, students read an article from NewsELA about how student survivors of the shooting were stepping up and insisting that gun laws be changed. As a class, we discussed some gun-related statistics, and students worked with a small group to read the article and then answer five STAAR-aligned questions. Students also had a chance to come up with their own solution for reducing the number of gun-related deaths in America.
NewsELA is an instructional platform that I use often in my classroom. Each of the articles is available at five different reading levels, which means I can differentiate for my students as needed. In addition, the photographs provides students with a visual of the issue.
This PowerPoint served as the "hook" for the lesson and provided students with different statistics to think about. On slides 3-5, students thought for 30 seconds about what they noticed about the graph and then shared their thoughts with a partner.
After learning about some gun control statistics and reading the NewsELA article with a group, students contributed their own solutions for reducing gun-related deaths.
Having students provide their own solutions allowed this activity to differentiate to different levels of student background knowledge. The student on the left knew that you need a license to own a gun, while the student on the right clearly knows more about the different types of guns. Because guns and hunting are a popular part of Texas culture, many students had a strong background knowledge prior to reading the article.
Because student engagement was so high during this activity, I decided to continue this topic the following week when we studied author's viewpoint and author's purpose. In this lesson, students were divided into one of four groups: the National Rifle Association; student survivors of the Parkland shooting; parents and teachers for guns in schools; and parents and teachers against guns in schools. Students read about their stakeholder's viewpoints on gun control and explained how their group felt about this issue. This activity would ultimately prepare them for the stakeholder discussion that was held the following day. After reading about their stakeholders, students read a NewsELA article that described President Trump's proposed solution, which included arming up to 20% of teachers with weapons.
​
​
The NewsELA article I used for this lesson included several viewpoints on the issue of arming teachers, which prepared students for the part of the lesson in which they focused on a particular stakeholder.
The stakeholder descriptions that students read were written at a reading level that was accessible to most students.
The stakeholder worksheet helped ensure that students understood what side of the debate their stakeholder was on and why.
After reading about their stakeholder group and reading about President Trump's plan, students had another chance to get with their groups and prepare for a stakeholder discussion. Students were told that their stakeholders had been brought together to help President Trump put together his final gun control proposal. To help guide their thinking, students had four questions to think about and discuss with their group and jot down their answers. Afterwards, the discussion began and students had a chance to respond (as their stakeholders) to various proposals. This was a challenging activity for many students because they wanted to respond using their own opinion, but they had to stay focused on their stakeholder's viewpoint and what their stakeholder would want. After the discussion, students had a chance to express their personal opinions by completing a writing reflection.
This slideshow helped keep the lessons related to this activity on track. The tweets at the beginning served as the "hook" for students to start thinking about his reaction to this issue. The questions for the stakeholder discussion are included on slides 10-13, and the writing prompt is listed on slide 14.
During the stakeholder discussion, students sat with their groups. This helped them collaborate with each other before choosing a spokesperson to respond to each of the discussion prompts.
Including the writing activity at the end of this lesson allowed students to express their opinion about gun control in general, not just as it related to schools. This student cited information included in her stakeholder's description, such as laws that would make it harder for people to obtain guns. She also makes a reference to the issue of mental health ("We don't know what's going on in ther [sic] head."), which she read about in her stakeholder description and which the class discussed.
As a result of the stakeholder discussion, students felt comfortable to share dissenting opinions. This student supported arming teachers and explained why in his writing assignment. He cites the concept of "gun-free zones," which I explained during our discussion, and the idea of arming 20% of teachers, which was included in the NewsELA article.
Because my students had been so engaged in the gun control discussion, I knew that I wanted to recreate this activity with another real-world issue. I decided to do this during our study of making connections between texts of different genres, which is a learning standard that is tested heavily on the STAAR test. Over the course of a week, students read two texts: a NewsELA article about President Trump's proposed limit on the number of refugees who can come to the United States, and a poem with two viewpoints about refugees. We had also just finished reading Making Bombs for Hitler, a historical fiction novel in which the main character is a refugee after being liberated from a Nazi work camp, so students had a total of three texts to draw from during these lessons.
​
​
The NewsELA article I used in this lesson made parallels between the Holocaust and the current refugee crisis, which helped prepare students to make those connections on their own.
While students were reading the NewsELA article, they used a 4-3-2-1 graphic organizer to help organize their thinking. Students of all ability levels were able to record what they learned and what their thoughts, questions, and opinions were. The student on the left is an above-level reader, while the student on the right is a below-level reader and an English Language Learner.
The poem students read was actually two poems in one. Students completed a close read of the poems and jotted down what they thought each of the poems was about, what they noticed, and how they could connect it to something else. Many students were able to connect the poem not just to Making Bombs for Hitler, but also two of our other class novels, Zane and the Hurricane and A Long Walk to Water. This is evidence that the theme of refugees, injustice, and belonging has been incorporated into our class year-round.
After reading both of the texts, students worked with a partner to complete a Venn Diagram that compared the news article to the poem. To align with the learning standard as it is tested on the STAAR, students were instructed to focus on not just the content of the texts, but also aspects like the narrators, the author's viewpoint, and the theme. After the pairs had finished, each pair shared out one thing they jotted down and we created a Venn Diagram together on the white board. This way, students were able to hear from other classmates and add to their own understanding of these topics.
The Venn Diagram helped students think about how the poem and article were similar and different, which is what they will be asked to do on the STAAR.
After comparing and contrasting the two texts, students participated in a Socratic Seminar that asked them to reflect on and discuss their own opinions related to the topic of refugees. This discussion format built upon the gun control discussion because students were talking about their own opinions, and they were using a more collegiate style of discussion that did not require them to raise their hands. At first, they struggled with this form of discussion, but soon they got the hang of it and were able to chime in whenever a classmate had finished talking.
Above is a snippet of the Socratic Seminar on refugees. Students are able to transition from one speaker to the next without prompting from the teacher and are able to build off one one another's ideas. The snippet provided is short because students used accountable talk during the Seminar and stated their classmates' name when responding to his or her comment.
This PowerPoint helped the discussion stay on track. Whenever discussion of one question fizzled out, I switched to a new question. Students had jotted down their own responses to these questions prior to the discussion. This helped English Language Learners, special education students, and introverted students feel more prepared for the Socratic Seminar.
The process of bringing current issues into my reading classroom was very rewarding for me as an educator. Oftentimes, I think that teachers forget that students are internalizing what's happening in the world around them, and this is even more likely in our world in which students have cell phones, tablets, and almost 24/7 access to the internet. Guiding students through the process of reading, writing, thinking, and speaking about these issues showed me how important it is for students to be able to make their voices heard. Not only did they have the chance to practice the critical thinking and analysis skills needed in the 21st century, but they also got to practice having respectful discussions with their peers about controversial topics. In doing so, students were practicing being advocates for different groups of people and making their voices heard about real-world issues. In addition, because the topics we were discussing were relevant to current events, I noticed higher student engagement during these lessons. In the future, I will be incorporating more of these types of activities into my lessons. Ideally, I would like to identify current events that could be tied back to our class novels and have students participate in a Socratic Seminar using our shared text as a piece of evidence.