Thoughts on reading chapters eight, nine, and the bibliography of Action Strategies for Deepening Comprehension by Jeffrey Wilhelm. 

Chapter eight, “Writing in Role,” focuses on the correspondence aspect of writing – that nothing is a silent, time consuming, transaction between student and teacher. As I often have students write me letters and notes, I am excited to read about these techniques. 

Wilhelm lists out the following to try: phone call (the student develops the script of what they want to ask and what they think the text will say), letter writing to peers in character, poster presentations, postcards with text and visual rhetoric, public service announcements, brochures, protest manifestos, and other ideas (pp. 155-165).  

I think I would like to try protest manifestos or some other politically based platform in the fall when my students read Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson. I’m hoping that this will allow them to see that they can be political activists either in our small community or on a national or global scale.  

I’ve had students write letters to each other before, mostly focused around  what they read and how they connected with it. Now I would like to bring that back to them in a much more guided way where they are directly commenting on the issues and challenges surrounding equity in the judicial system that they will encounter in this text. I think they will wind up writing a lot more than they would have with my previous assignments simply because they want to express their ideas. I have already found several literacy based texts to show them in order to connect them with the text such as judicial transcripts, and interviews with the parties involved. I was thinking about having them do dialectical journals and pulling quotes, but I think I will add in letter writing too so they have time to reflect and process what they are reading.  

Chapter nine, “Discussion Dramas,” essentially highlights different strategies for you to facilitate large group discussions in the classroom. These can be framed as a consensus (lining up who agrees), a news cast, allowing students to choose roles and argue their points out, and town meetings. Wilhelm reminds us that “John Dewy once said that all learning floats on a sea of talk” (p. 169). And this chapter is designed to get your students talking about what they read, or are reading, in an accountable way.  

I think that I would use poster sessions with my students followed by a panel discussion. This would allow them to discuss a text in a deep way, but also experience the activities as something they very possibly do during their academic careers. It would be a way to foster their growth in the content but also foster their experience in tasks they may find themselves doing elsewhere in the university.  

“Bibliography” This is a section that students largely ignore, but I feel that it is very important to always read – at least skim, common – this section of a book or article. A bibliography can do two important things: give you resources to utilize in your own work, and let you know how the author is politically positioned in the field. 

It is easy to see that this teacher builds a lot of trust with his students and that he sees them in class every day for an entire academic year. I only get to see my students for 2.5 hours per week for 16 weeks, so I will choose wisely the things that I want to integrate into the classroom. 

Thank you for reading about this book. I highly recommend that you buy it and use it. The binding should be completely worn and there should be all kinds of highlights, sticky notes, coffee or tea stains, and you should consider buying a copy for a teacher friend who might enjoy it too. 

Thank you, Dr. Pence, for putting this book on your list! 

Thoughts on reading chapters five, six, and seven of Action Strategies for Deepening Comprehension by Jeffrey Wilhelm. 

As an aside – don't forget that if all the students remember is the marshmallow, then you probably haven't taught them much. That is to say that all of Wilhelm's strategies sound fantastic, but if they are not grounded to the content that you need to teach, or want to teach, then students will probably remember having fun but not much else.  

Remember that Gee talks about mentorship, so while you try out such things as the "Mantle of the Expert," be sure to foster student growth along the way. I think that if you directly tie some of these activities to a specific lesson where there is a clear learning goal that students can demonstrate, then you will be implementing theory and practice embedded in your strategy.  

Chapter five, “Mantle of the Expert,” really makes use of the practice of shared authority in your classroom. I would highly recommend you try this concept out! “’Mantle of the Expert’, trains the muscles necessary for gaining and practicing expertise” (p. 98). There is a twelve step model for planning on pages 104 through 109.  

I would say that this activity would especially be good for efferent texts as brought to us by Rosenblatt in “The Transactional Theory of Reading and Writing.” It would be a different way, and a creative way, for students to explain what they know about events in history, or scientific concepts, or things we have looked at like bats and the use of coal.  

Different roles can be taken such as documentary maker, web site designer, museum designer, and so on (pp. 109 – 113).  In a discussion group of four students, assigning roles, can be an effective tool for assessment -- everyone has a job, students can produce tangible results through their job, and can help assess their learning process.

I would try to use this with my students in some sort of a researcher role, because as adult learners in the university setting this would be the best skill set to develop for all of their coursework. I would craft roles like archeologist, social worker, environmentalist, hydrologist, and health care worker – because these types of profession connect directly to the advanced degree work happening in our community.  

In chapter six, “Tableaux,” we learn about visual and kinesthetic methods, “this technique can be adapted to include some movement, speaking, and other features” (p. 116). 

Wilhelm includes a list of benefits on page 117, and guidelines for students that would be very easy to adapt on pages 118 and 119. The most interesting framework is for “enacting tableaux slide shows” where students essentially become a living PowerPoint presentation (p. 120).  

There are 18 variations included, and some that would work for my students are kamishibai (where students tell their story and use visual aids at the same time), human issue trees (like a web map but of human issues from the text), and story boards. Honestly, I thought this chapter would be the one where I would make excuses and say, “nah, not appropriate for my students.” But with the variety of variations every teaching style can find at least one take away from this chapter. 

Chapter seven, “Reenactments and Interventions,” asks us to explore the notion of authorial reading and let students really own their process and be acknowledged for that “reading is a powerful way of expanding and transforming our understanding, but only if we have the willingness and the tools to see other points of view, reconceptualize our understandings, and change our thinking and behavior” (p. 137). 

Wilhelm shares a letter from a teacher about her students working with reenactments and chemical reaction. This again speaks to the ability for these strategies to be utilized with any content area. On pages 146 through 150 there are different strategies that can be used which include: what if, alternative endings, game show, MTV videos, and others.  

One strategy I could see using with my students in the fall is called “trials,” which puts characters on the stand and allows students to play out prosecution and defense teams in order to explain the issues in the text (p. 150).  

I would recommend "Reading From Different Interpretive Stances: In Search of a Critical Perspective" by Liland, Ociepka, and Kuonen. What we learned from the Rosenblatt article connects well to this, and it will help seat whatever strategies you want to utilize in critical pedagogy. This article includes six stances (aesthetic is one) and a section on multimodal experiences.  

Thoughts on reading chapters three and four of Action Strategies for Deepening Comprehension by Jeffrey Wilhelm. 

I apologize. I have to jet through telling you about the rest of this book. Please consider the rest of my entries previews that will, hopefully, have you interested enough to check out this text on your own.  

I also wanted to share an article with you, that might help position culturally relevant teaching practices as you utilize some of the strategies from Wilhelm. Check out "Perspective – Taking as Transformative Practice in Teaching Multicultural Literature to White Students" by Thein, Beach , and Parks. This article is a case study.  

Chapter three, “Getting in Role, ” covers many different ways to structure role play “in keeping with the Vygotskian notion of moving from the easiest and safest roles to those that are more complex and ‘further from home’” (p. 61).  

Wilhelm includes mini lesson plans from science content – so readers get a really good idea of how to use his strategies as frameworks for any sort of content area. He says that “spontaneous dramatic play highlights that students must bring their own ‘funds of knowledge’ to bear on a situation that will be paralleled in the reading” (p.62). 

On page 69 there is a “role play planning sheet” for teacher and role player. Just think, this would be great for those gamers out there. They could become avatars – as teachers, we may be able to utilize this concept instead of character so that the student could keep a portion of their own identity while enacting their role.  

One strategy I would use is called the “dress-up book reports,” it comes with critical guideline and can be done as a group or as a single student (p. 77) and followed by a peer evaluation sheet on page 78. This would be a way for my students to explain how they understand the text, and could be utilized as an alternative method of assessment in writing coursework. I feel that, because a sizable portion of my students have an orally based language, they should be given opportunities to be assessed in an oral way. The guideline is basically a critical analysis of text in spoken word. 

Chapter four, “Sitting in the Hotseat,” sounds like a great way to prepare students for college and professional work where committees, public meetings, press conferences, and the like are common. Wilhelm explains “ hotseating is a family of enactment techniques that intensifies role playing by putting students ‘on the spot’ so they can be addressed, advised, questioned and so forth” and he qualifies some of the learning that they are doing during these activities as “hon[ing] their ability to analyze characters, infer, elaborate, and think on their feet” (p.82). 

There is a model for the hotseating strategy, a student planning guide so that they can prepare, and variations. One variation is a whole group model where students take on different roles such as advise giver, insider vs outsider, stranger, and so on. I have to share this whole quote with you because it is so awesome: 

when teaching math or science, I like to ask students to tale on the role of a mathematical or scientific concept – like commutability, inertia or symbiosis, or a force like an electrical charge. Students in the hotseat can be interviewed about their uses, relationship to other concepts, how there were discovered, are both applies and misapplied in the real world, and so forth. (p. 95) 

In terms of my writing class, I could use things like thesis, paragraph, sentence, and essay, as some of the concepts that students can address in this way. To me, this would be like a collaborative spoken quiz or like quiz quiz trade which students really enjoy and get to build shared knowledge from.   

Thoughts on reading chapter two of Action Strategies for Deepening Comprehension by Jeffrey Wilhelm. This chapter is called “Making the Connections” and it covers pre-reading strategies.

He talks about brainstorming with students prior to a social studies unit on colonization. They struggled to come up with anything relevant and he realized there was no prior knowledge of that topic. So he changed the topic to parents and teens and came up with a lot of relevant terms around freedom. This is something I will try when my students are not able to come to the topic with prior knowledge. For my students (I generally work with adult developmental writers) they typically struggle at reading and writing so for them to come to class with a tool kit of prior knowledge is unusual. They do typically know about such things as cooking, gardening, and hunting. I have never tried changing the topic during a brain storming session – usually it will turn into providing the terms they need to know as a lesson on how to structure an essay.

Wilhelm states when pre-reading exercise don’t work it is because of lack of framing. He says that to frame things for learners they need to know:

1. What they are learning about and why

2. What set of circumstances and context will motivate and support the learning

3. Who the students (and teacher) will be in the enactment [what are their roles]

4. The viewpoint or roll they will take

5. What is expected of them (p.33)

What follows is an entire lesson plan to take us through a short story as a model of how to use his strategies. Then he goes back to a specific pre-reading strategy that I think could really work with students. Wilhelm shares a formal letter written by a teacher to students as the mother of the female character in the short story. This strategy is called a “trigger letter” (p. 46).

This letter models formal letter writing, and creates a platform for discussing some of the key issues in the text. It also looks like a great way to invite students to start building questions from question stems so that they can read the text critically, like an investigator.

Following that there are 17 more pre-reading strategies to utilize with students. One is called maps. I want to use this with my students on a regular basis to geographically orient them to where the text plays out, maps can also be of buildings or floor plans.

In using strategies prior to reading students can orient their prior knowledge and feel like they have some type of connection with the text. There are so many techniques that I feel we could all pick three that we would be comfortable using tomorrow and two that we would need to do a little planning for and we might all utilize the different techniques.

I also like that, while there is a time investment in deciding what you want to do, there is not much of a monetary investment in extra things. Most things that need to be brought in to class could be brought in by the students, such as photographs, precious items, and totems. I think the more that students are involved in this process and can contribute to their classroom construction, the more they will value their learning experience.