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.