Adapting Curriculum

Standards and Curriculum Video

Minneapolis Public Schools gives schools a curriculum to follow for our literacy instruction. Often times the curriculum that is given feels frustrating when planning because the way the standards are told to be taught don’t take into account student experiences, language needs, and the way my students learn. Therefore, when lesson planning and enacting lessons, I focus on using the curriculum as a skeleton while inputting what I know about my students and skills outside of the standards that need to be worked on. This video shows what students are doing after I have adapted the curriculum to still meet the standards. The standards that students are working on in this video are 5.1.6.6 (describe how a narrator’s or speakers’ point of view influences how events are described) and 5.8.1.1. (engage effectively in a range of collaborative discussions). The learning objectives coinciding with these standards was, “With a small group of peers, I can identify examples of memoir characteristics in ‘Reverend Abbott and Those Bloodshot Eyes’ by Walter Dean Meyers” and “I can discuss a short story with a small group of peers”.

The first adaptation that was made was the text that was read. The curriculum instructed teachers to read ‘Reverend Abbott and Those Bloodshot Eyes’. However, taking into account our students developmental age and experiences, that piece of text had more to do with a child’s experience with a Reverend and “Boot Ladies” among other concepts that students did not have relatable experiences with. As can be seen in the video, Ingrid and Carla are discussing another chosen text “Why I Never Ran Away from Home”. This text is more developmentally appropriate and relatable to students’ lives. As shown at 1:25 Carla makes a connection to the text based on something she did over Halloween and at 2:21 Ingrid makes a connection to her cousin. Both these pieces of thinking show me that the text is relatable to personal experiences which makes for productive readings.

According to Wolf, Crosson, and Resnick in “Classroom Talk for Rigorous Reading Comprehension Instruction”, collaborative dialogue between peers is necessary to increase comprehension. Furthermore, close reading strategies, such as annotations, increase that comprehension. The curriculum instructed students to independently annotate the piece of text and then have a discussion with the teacher about the characteristics of a memoir. However, I adapted that to have students annotate together and verbalize their thinking as they annotated. Wolf, Crosson, and Resnick cite a study by Brown et al. (1993) that their “...study reported that use of collaborative dialogue during the reading comprehension lessons was positively associated with the students’ gains in building knowledge and comprehension” (pg. 2). Based on this, I wanted to infuse student led discussion in every component in the lesson. While this is not necessarily a student led questioning of the text as the study likely anticipated, it encourages students to verbalize their annotations together and use accountable talk to justify and show their listening skills when listening to their partner. For example, in the video at 3:16 Carla uses the accountable sentence stem “Can you tell me more?” to encourage Ingrid to justify her answer. Just this piece of justification between students can increase comprehension according to the piece of research by Brown. By adapting the curriculum in this way, I was able to hit the standard of annotating while infusing more collaborative talk.

Third, the theory on reciprocal teaching states that students should become the leaders and teachers in small group reading and the discussions should be student led. Instructional approaches like these, according to Wolf, Crosson, and Resnick, “...acknowledge that reading comprehension is a collaborative process where the teacher and students co-construct meaning from the text” (pg. 3). The curriculum did not provide any room for this while students were doing their annotations and discussing the text. Therefore, I decided to add it in to boost student based discussions and comprehension. As can be seen in the video, I am not present in order to keep the activity student led. At 0:17 you can see Carla and Ingrid deciding on their own who is going to talk and annotate next rather than me telling them who should go first. This gives students more autonomy. The collaboration portion between students and teachers that Wolf, Crosson, and Resnick refer to happens at the end of the lesson where students share their ideas with me.

The curriculum also had students (independently) “annotate the text” without providing any scaffolds for what this could look like. As can be seen in the video, around 0:39 (and other places), Carla and Ingrid have a blue annotation bookmark that is guiding their annotations. They are putting “!” when something surprises them, a star for an important event (key characteristic of a memoir) and underlining and commenting on feelings (another key characteristic of a memoir). This scaffold gives them a place to start with how to record their thinking. Therefore, they are still meeting the curriculum expectations for annotating. This also provides a scaffold for finding important parts of a memoir (learning objective). They are able to use the annotation bookmark and find the important events and feelings and then go back and write about it.

While this video only shows a short piece of this lesson, I hope to improve on self-guided discussions. Carla and Ingrid discussed their annotations well but according to the research cited above, they should be leading own discussion circles with more peers. The video showed only two students interacting. Therefore, when the curriculum has students doing independent work with text or teach led work, I am going to strive to incorporate more student based discussions within the curriculum.

Wolf, Mikyung Kim, Crosson, Amy,  and Resnick, Lauren. “CLassroom Talk for Rigorous Reading

Comprehension Instruction”.  American Educational Research. 2004.