Week 4: Follow-Up From Last Week & Holding Students Accountable

Last week, I wrote about how I was trying to hook my students into reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I was only assigning reading in class, and I was letting the kids choose their reading strategy. At the time, it seemed as if things were going well. Unfortunately, when I returned after the weekend, and after having a sub at the end of the previous week, I discovered that, to my dismay, quite a few students had not read what they were supposed to read in class with the sub. I don't know if I chalk this up to the fact that it was Friday, that it was Halloween, that there was a sub, or a combination of all of these. I don't, however, blame the reading strategies. Why? On Thursday of this week, I had my students write their journal as a reflection of their chosen reading strategy. The topic was: "Reflect on your chosen active reading strategy. How's it going?" When we debriefed the journal after the students wrote for 10 minutes, the majority of them said that their strategy was working well for them. Interestingly, the majority of them have chosen to take notes in their notebook, which is what I would have forced them to do, if I had forced them to do something. The funny thing is that since they got to choose to take notes, instead of being told they had to take notes, they are all, for the most part, actually taking notes! Win. Win.

I realized that that part of what I was doing was working for the kids, but I still didn't have them 100% hooked into the book. On Monday, one of my few avid readers came in and told me the book was killing her. She said she'd tried to read the chapter and put what Jim was saying into modern language, but she couldn't; it was too hard. I thought to myself, "Oh man, if I've lost this student, I am definitely going to lose the rest of them." I needed to figure out what to do. I also needed to speed up our reading and start assigning homework. I came up with two solutions.

Solution #1: Holding Students Accountable

My first solution was that, if I needed to assign homework, I needed to hold students accountable for doing the homework. In the past when I've assigned reading homework, I'd follow-up the next day with a 1-question quiz right at the start of class. I tell the students that the quiz will be really easy if they read. (I make sure that the question can't be answered if the students simply looked at SparkNotes.) I also tell them that the point of the quiz is for me to see if they read, so if for some reason they can't remember the answer to the quiz question, they can write me something else that proves that they read. I make each quiz 20 points, and it goes into the "Tests & Quizzes" category in my grade book, which is worth 25% of their grade. This is enough to get the kids who care about their grades to do the reading. In order to get the rest of them, I would tie the quiz scores to some incentive at the end of the unit - something like, "If you don't pass X number of quizzes, you will have to do X at the end of the unit." This still never worked as well as I ever hoped, and I realized it was because it wasn't immediate. The kids didn't care right then about having to do whatever I told them they'd have to do later on. 

I realized that the punishment needed to be immediate, and it needed to be worse than doing the reading for homework. (For those of you who are familiar with EEI, I realized I needed to "raise the level of concern.") Therefore, I decided to make all students who failed the reading quiz do the reading in class that day and write a 1-page summary, which would serve as their ticket out the door stole. (This is a method I stole from Emily Toone, another English teacher at Fallbrook High School who is currently working as our ELL TOSA.) When I introduced this to my students, I asked them why they thought I was doing this. One student said it was because I was mean, but the rest of them understood it was because I wanted them to actually do the reading. 

Did it work? For the most part, yes. In my 1st period class, I had about 5 students out of 38 who didn't do the reading and had to write the summary; in my 2nd period class, I had about 6 students out of 36 who had to write the summary. With my previous method, I usually had about 1/3 of the class who wouldn't do the reading, so those numbers are much better. I am hoping that the number of students who don't do the reading will decrease over the next week, because the kids who had to write the summaries were pretty miserable when they realized I was serious. ("Yes, you really have to do this." "Yes, it really has to be a page." "Yes, you will not leave until you give it to me.")

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Ease of use: You have to have some time built-in in order to be able to check the quizzes right away and determine which students need to write the summaries. I just have my TA's check them quickly while I am explaining the next activity. Then, I wrote the names of the students who failed the quizzes on the white board and told them they needed to write the summary instead of doing the next activity. Aside from making sure the timing worked out, it was really easy.
Would I use this again: Yes; I am going to continue to do this throughout our unit. If it goes well, it may become my go-to method for what I do every time I assign reading for homework.
Downsides: As I mentioned above, it means the students who write the summary miss whatever you are doing in class, but honestly, they wouldn't have gotten much out of what we were doing in class since they hadn't done the reading.
Applications: Holding students accountable for homework assignments.

Solution #2: Creating a "Glossary" for Jim's Slang

With the strategy above, I got my students to read for homework. Now I needed to make sure they could understand what they were reading when we weren't reading together in class. While I was putting my son to sleep on Wednesday night, it hit me. If I gave them a glossary for Jim's slang, then they would be able to reference it while reading in order to help the understand what Jim was saying. Then I thought, "Wait a second... if I just give them a glossary, half of them won't even look at them, and it won't really help them to be able to figure out what they're reading when they come across words that aren't on the glossary... I need to make them make the glossary! I need to make them do the work!" Then I fell asleep, since it was Wednesday night and putting my son to sleep involves me holding his hand and falling asleep on the floor next to his crib. 

The next morning before school, I created this worksheet, which I copied and gave to my students on Friday. (The reading they had to do on Thursday was a chapter in which Huck and Jim weren't together, so I didn't have to worry about them not having the glossary before Friday.) Here is an example from the worksheet:

1. “No, sah - nuffn else”

1. sah = sir
2. nuffn = nothing

Translation of line: No, sir - nothing else.

I included the line in addition to the words I wanted them to translate, so the students would be able to use the context clues in order to help them translate what Jim was saying. I figured this would be a good idea because it would help them be able to dissect the language on their own later on in the text.

I gave the students the worksheet after their vocabulary quiz on Friday, and they worked on it in their table groups, with a partner, or individually. Overall, they seemed to get it. Even my ELLs were successful with it. Now, the test is to see if they actually use it. (But, I suppose, even if they don't use it, they've done the worksheet, which has helped to build their skills at using context clues to understand the words that aren't written in standard English.)

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Ease of use: Really easy. In the future, I think I will give my students this worksheet before we even start reading the book.
Would I use this again: Yes. See above.
Downsides: None.
Applications: Helping students become independent readers. :)
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Stay tuned for next week... I am going to attempt to get my ELD 2 students to write a precis!