Blogs on Student Engagement

The high school social studies class has just gotten seated. The lights go out and a video projector immediately begins showing a scene from the film Boyz n the Hood. In the scene it's late at night and two black teenagers walking along a street, both nicely dressed, are stopped, thrown up against a wall and searched by two cops. One of the cops is black. The other is white. The teens are scared and angry. The black cop is physically aggressive and verbally hostile. Then the police just leave, one saying, "You have a good night."

The lights go on. The teacher asks the students to quickly write down a couple of sentences describing their thoughts and feelings while watching this. Students then share their thoughts in small groups.

Poverty is a huge factor affecting the performance of our elementary students. Schools, districts and states with a high percentage of low-income families can reasonably cite poverty as one explanation for lower test scores or poor performance in other measures of student achievement.

My concern, however, is always for the individual children in my classroom. At that level, should poverty be any excuse for poor student performance?

According to Robert Marzano's book, Classroom Instruction that Works, 80 percent of what is considered instruction involves asking questions. It makes sense then, that if we want to improve our effectiveness at teaching, of course we would start by improving our questions. I have thought a lot about this topic and I would like to share three specific actions that we can take to improve our questions. To begin with, we need to get students talking rather than the teacher talking. Second, prepare the questions when you plan the lesson. And third, scaffold the questions.

Even those of us who teach Shakespeare may never take the time to appreciate the dedication that he had to craft. He's such a fixture of Western sensibility that he's easy to take for granted; we might begin to assume that writing came easily to him, but wouldn't that diminish his hard work? According to the Folger Shakespeare Library, his complete works consist of 118,406 lines of verse. A solid majority of those verses are in rigid iambic pentameter or trochaic tetrameter or some other icky meter that most of us modern poets don't touch with a ten-foot quill. I personally lean towards haiku, as do most of my students.