Personalizing Process: Sample Mini Lesson

1) Read the following micro-story.

2) In your group, meet at least one of the lesson objectives.

Objectives

·    -  Demonstrate your understanding of the overall meaning or message of the story through identifying a theme. Be ready to discuss how the author explores this theme in the story.

·     - Identify a language device such as a metaphor, simile, repetition and share how the author’s use of this language device contributes to the meaning of the story as a whole.

3) Choose your own approach from the menu of options.

·      Create and perform a song or short skit which highlights the author’s theme or use of language.

·      Use technology to share your ideas with others.

·      Write a short reaction paper.

·      Identify and analyze a pattern in the author’ use of language.

·      Write a letter to Yolanda to help her to feel more comfortable in this new place.

·      Predict how living in a new climate will affect Yolanda’s life.

·      Or, select your own method of demonstrating at least one of the lesson objectives have been met.

(While you decide how your group will approach the project, discuss what your group members have in common!)

“Snow” by 
Julia Álvarez

Our first year in New York we rented a small apartment with a Catholic school nearby, taught by the Sisters of Charity, hefty women in long black gowns and bonnets that made them look peculiar, like dolls in mourning. I liked them a lot, especially my grandmotherly fourth grade teacher, Sister Zoe. I had a lovely name, she said, and she had me teach the whole class how to pronounce it. Yo-lan-da. As the only immigrant in my class, I was put in a special seat in the first row by the window, apart from the other children so that Sister Zoe could tutor me without disturbing them. Slowly, she enunciated the new words I was to repeat: laundromat, cornflakes, subway, snow.

Soon I picked up enough English to understand holocaust was in the air. Sister Zoe explained to a wide-eyed classroom what was happening in Cuba. Russian missiles were being assembled, trained supposedly on New York City. President Kennedy, looking worried too, was on the television at home, explaining we might have to go to war against the Communists. At school, we had air raid drills: an ominous bell would go off and we'd file into the hall, fall to the floor, cover our heads with our coats, and imagine our hair falling out, the bones in our arms going soft. At home, Mami and my sisters and I said a rosary for world peace. I heard new vocabulary: nuclear bomb, radioactive fallout, bomb shelter. Sister Zoe explained how it would happen. She drew a picture of a mushroom on the blackboard and dotted a flurry of chalk marks for the dusty fallout that would kill us all.

The months grew cold, November, December. It was dark when I got up in the morning, frosty when I followed my breath to school. One morning as I sat at my desk daydreaming out the window, I saw dots in the air like the ones Sister Zoe had drawn random at first, then lots and lots. I shrieked, "Bomb! Bomb!" Sister Zoe jerked around, her full black skirt ballooning as she hurried to my side. A few girls began to cry.

But then Sister Zoe's shocked look faded. "Why, Yolanda dear, that's snow!" She laughed. "Snow."

"Snow," I repeated. I looked out the window warily. All my life I had heard about the white crystals that fell out of American skies in the winter. From my desk I watched the fine powder dust the sidewalk and parked cars below. Each flake was different, Sister Zoe had said, like a person, irreplaceable and beautiful.

Banquets vs. Menus -Jen Howard

The major epiphany that I had as a result of attending this past fall’s MTC Conference on Personalization through Differentiation was that there are some simple ways I could personalize assignments that I’ve been missing out on. Several teachers shared the idea of the menu of options: students can reach the same objectives via different routes.

I kept thinking about the assignment my freshmen were working on in my absence: a project I’ve done many times. It’s called the Short Story Seminar. Students essentially become the teachers and present a lesson on an author and story from the unit. Over the years I continually tweak the assignment and add and subtract elements. I’m proud of the fact that I’ve been able to see the quality of the projects improve over the years as I revise the rubric, and present both a sample “what to do” presentation of my own and a “what not to do” version.

But as I listened to the very first full group presentation, it hit me: why did all of the projects have to take the same form?

Why couldn’t students who were kinesthetic learners add an element of movement—a skit or movie? Why couldn’t a musically inclined student include music as a part of his or her project?

Our first session was with Kathleen Malanowski and Tanya Lynch, who are the division heads for NBP’s lower school. But even though I teach high school, I can definitely see possible applications for my students. The NBP team use both Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences and Costa and Kallick’s Sixteen Habits of Mind as resources. They ask students to self reflect and set their own learning goals.

Overall, they shared, you can use these various categories of learning to offer a menu of options for activities and assessment.

They also suggested that at some points you can and should ask students to work in the areas have been avoiding because these are weak areas they need to develop. This idea was particularly intriguing for me, as one of my standard objections to the idea of always personalizing learning is that the “real world” often won’t allow us to tailor our choices or work to fit what we do best (often, in fact quite the opposite happens and we must find a way to make our skills fit in with what’s already in place).

But, while students are learning new concepts and skills, it may be a very good idea to—at least sometimes—allow them to process the information in the ways they feel most comfortable.

For my part, I’m definitely going to put a menu in place for my next project. After all, I don’t like a banquet with just one or two choices—I like to pick for myself. ;)