2018 Wednesday — Show & Tell

My students have just read a 9-page article about the importance of reading to children and they had also answered an extensive questionnaire about the article. So when class started this morning I asked each of them to look through the article and find one sentence that was meaningful to them. After a few minutes, each one had found something of importance, I asked them to bring the article to the whiteboard to write the sentence they had selected.

As each of the 19 students was almost finished, I went to the whiteboard and wrote the sentence I had selected. So after everyone was seated, I explained that this would be something like "Show & Tell" and that I would go first. So I told why the sentence I selected was so meaningful to me. When I finished, I explained that it was their turn and that whoever wanted could do the next sharing. I told them they could share from the front of the room, they could stand and share right from their desk, or they could remain seated and share if they would use their big voices.

What happened next was one of the golden moments in teaching. First, my drama student, who is actually still in high school, stood and walked to the whiteboard read his sentence and then talked and talked. Then one-by-one each student took a turn reading the sentence he or she had written on the board and told us the page and paragraph to find it in the article, and then began elaborating why that sentence was meaningful. Not once did I have to coax a student to take his or her turn and when each student had finished, they would put a check mark on the whiteboard next to their sentence.

Not one student stuttered or stammered or begged not to have a turn. They seemed genuinely engaged in the topic and in the classroom moment of collectively telling all the others about the intersection of their lives and the article. One young student told that she has a 3-year-old son and has been reading to him since he was in the womb. One reentry student stood, walked to the whiteboard, pointed to her writing and then began explaining in very broken English that her first language is Mandarin and her home had been in Taiwan. Now that her family has moved to America, she realizes that she is having difficulty talking with her children's teachers, so she is in our class to learn to communicate effectively. She spoke about her desire to help her children to be bilingual, so she reads to them in both languages. Other students spoke about having never been read to when they were young and the difficulty of reading college-level material. Very few had the privilege of growing-up in a home where reading aloud to the children was a priority. Each of their stories and all of their lives brought a dynamic to the classroom today that was significant.

Rosie (& Mr. Fun), aka Carol