WK7 | Reading Reflection Response

“Reading, Writing, and Learning in ESL” by Suzanne F. Peregoy, Owen Boyle, and Steven Amendum”

Chapter 10 Pg 392

“Proficient readers are thoughtful about reading, using metacognitive processes before reading a text, during reading, or after reading.”

This quotation is from the Summary section of this chapter 10. It summarizes nicely what the overall focus of the chapter is.

This chapter, despite its title, is primarily focused on more complex reading comprehension for intermediate and advanced ELLs. Longer passages may require several cognitive and metacognitive processes in order for the reader to perceive and extract certain information from the text. This chapter focuses on the challenges that English learners face when reading trying to build inferences and decode meaning from longer passages.

There are a variety of solutions offered, most in the form of pre-reading. These strategies help build purpose and focus into the reading session which can help students engage with the text in the proper way to retrieve the necessary information from their reading.

There is a distinction made between afferent and aesthetic Reading, where efferent is reading for the purposes of acquiring information, and aesthetic is reading for the sake of reading. Efferent is most often associated with non-fiction texts read for a purpose, and aesthetic may be more often associated with fiction or narrative texts, read for leisure.

It is interesting to consider my own experience when I am reading a non-fiction text. Before I understand the overall gist of the text, I may find it more difficult to comprehend the individual sentences, especially if the writing is more technical. It is a lot easier to read a passage when you have a general idea of what is being discussed.

I can think of times where I would be reading an article on a news site where the writer begins the article with a series of references to things I know nothing about. When the lede is well-buried, it may be harder to read through an article in a way where you are correctly making the intended inferences based on the information being presented.

“50 Strategies for Teaching English Language Learners” by Adrienne Herrell and Michael Jordan

Chapter 47 - Pg 305

“If some students require further instruction, that instruction is provided, but only for those who need it. This form of grouping is effective because students receive lessons tailored to their needs and the other students in the class receive assignments that allow them to practice their skills at appropriate levels without being bored by instruction they do not need.”

This quotation is from the conclusion section of the Small Groups and Partners chapter. This chapter describes primarily the usefulness of skills groups, which is when students with a common instructional need are grouped together in a small group so that they can work on the area in which they are lacking. This helps the teacher tailor lessons to the needs of the individual students while maintaining the forward momentum of the unit or lesson for the rest of the class.

The book also clarifies on pg. 300 that the groups may not be homogenous in terms of overall academic skills:
“Skills groups tend to be heterogeneous as far as reading levels and overall academic functioning are concerned. A skills group might have students reading at a range of levels.”
It is not totally clear if this means that the groups should be heterogeneous or not, but this detail will certainly affect the success of the group. Of course, because it is a small group, the teacher would be able to tailor the lesson to accommodate whatever variety of students make up the group.

There is a fairly obvious question that doesn’t seem to be addressed specifically by the chapter. It is made clear that one of the purposes of this strategy is to maintain the momentum of learning with the main body of your classroom that do not need the skills group instruction, however, if you sequester some of your students into a skills group while moving along with the rest of the class, they are then falling behind in your class. The text does not offer a clear solution to this conundrum.

I would solve this problem by working on a supplemental piece of instruction that may be enriching for the main body of the class, but not considered to be a critical part of the curriculum. In the field of music, this is easy to do because there are so many related pieces of content and ideas for any lesson that might be planned. In this way, by the end of the skills group and the supplemental instruction, everyone can be on the same page when it comes to the critical material that is central to the lesson or unit.

For example, if I had a set of students that needed help with guitar technique for passage, while the rest of the class got it easy. I might have the rest of the class try a collaborative creative exercise while I focus on technique with the skills group. The skills group should require the bulk of my attention during this time, so that I can help get them caught up to the rest of the class, while the rest of the class can be free to explore creatively.

Depth-of-Knowledge in the Fine Arts
(From stancoe.org)

https://www.stancoe.org/divisions/instructional-support-services/langauge-and-literacy/state-standards
https://www.stancoe.org/fs/resource-manager/view/89d8a0e7-5041-48ad-872d-9836124e8494

“DOK 4 requires complex reasoning that includes planning, investigating, and/or analyzing results. Students compose in two or more voices, which requires the application of Harmony, voice leading, and chord progressions.”

This very useful resource was linked to within the article “Using Webb’s Depth of Knowledge to Increase Rigor” by Gerald Aungst. It is essentially an explanation of ways to apply the concepts outlined in the “Webb’s Depth of Knowledge” to the various fine arts disciplines.

Each discipline is listed separately and has its own set of examples for each of the 4 levels of DOK. There are explanations and examples for music, theatre, dance, and fine art.

I had never clicked a link so fast in my life when I saw this linked in the Aungst article. I was very eager to see what this PDF said about DOK as applied to the field of music. But now that I read it, I realize how debatable and context dependent all of this stuff can be.

The Fine arts document indicates for DOK2: “They apply correct fingerings, bowings and stickings, and interpret notation.”

The “m1-slide_19_dok_wheel_slide.pdf” says the following about DOK1: “Perform routine procedures like measuring length or using punctuation marks correctly.”

These might seem like they are in contradiction to one another, because applying correct fingerings and bowings is a bit like knowing how to measure something or use appropriate punctuation. These are simple pieces of knowledge that can be easily regurgitated once fully learned. However, there is a distinction between just being able to know something, and to demonstrate it in a musical performance. The complexity of reproducing a knowledge of technique inside of a stream of time that is associated with a piece of music is not the same as doing this outside of time. In fact, this is so different that I would use this as a technique to help chunk my material for my lessons. (first teaching a passage outside of time, and then after everyone has mastered it out of time, I will add the complexity of the time stream). At the very least you could argue that you are doing 2 DOK levels at once. You are recalling at the same time as you are leveraging a skill.

The differences between DOK3 and DOK4 become even more intricate and tricky. The boundary between the 2 DOKs is murky, and you could make an argument for either side. For example, the “CSS_dok_arts.pdf” mentions composition in 2 places:

DOK3: “They can compose a simple melody in a given key...”
DOK4: “Students compose in two or more voices…”

The “m1-slide_19_dok_wheel_slide.pdf” has “Construct” in DOK3 and “Create” in DOK4.

The differences between all of these ideas are subtle at best. In order to defend composition as a DOK3 level one might say: “well, a simple act of composition is basically the same as improvising an idea and just remembering what you had improvised.” But this logic can easily apply to almost any kind of composition, even one that uses “2 or more voices”, as the fine arts document mentions.

These questions about composition essentially boil down to this essential question: ‘What is creativity?’, which is a rather difficult question to answer. While the “m1-slide_19_dok_wheel_slide.pdf” makes the level of thinking pretty clear between DOK3 and DOK4, and the Aungst article explains it even better. I would argue that the distinction between create and construct is entirely subjective, or context dependent. I would argue that the recent explosion of AI has shown us that it does not necessarily take much higher order thinking to be creative, but it can under certain circumstances. For example, AI cannot generate incredible amounts of content that is quite good based on whatever parameters, but it cannot select from its output what is of greater value. I think this is a key element of creativity and higher order thinking that is unique to humans. Level four in the “m1-slide_19_dok_wheel_slide.pdf” has the words ‘Synthesize’ and ‘Critique’. I think these are key concepts when used in conjunction with one another that can explain human creativity at its highest levels of achievement.

Using Webb’s Depth of Knowledge to Increase Rigor
https://www.edutopia.org/blog/webbs-depth-knowledge-increase-rigor-gerald-aungst

“The word rigor is hard to avoid today, and it provokes strong reactions from educators. Policy makers tout its importance. Publishers promote it as a feature of their materials.

But some teachers share the view of Joanne Yatvin, past president of the National Council for Teachers of English. To them, rigor simply means more work, harder books, and longer school days. “None of these things is what I want for students at any level,” Yatvin says.”

This quotation is from a very interesting article about interpreting Webb’s depth of knowledge properly. The article states that ‘Rigor’ implies unnecessary work. “...rigor simply means more work, harder books, and longer school days”.

The article goes on to state that Webb’s depth of knowledge is the answer to pushing students to the next level, as opposed to this idea of ‘Rigor’. Students can have rich learning experiences that occur at different levels of DOK, and that the DOK model is designed to be enriching:

“DOK levels are not sequential. Students need not fully master content with Level 1 tasks before doing Level 2 tasks. In fact, giving students an intriguing Level 3 task can provide context and motivation for engaging in the more routine learning at Levels 1 and 2.”

The DOK levels are not like a ladder that a student would climb, successfully completing each rung before moving on to the next level. DOK is a list of different perspectives from which to engage with learning.

There are so many cultural issues that stem from a disagreement about the definition of a word.
There are a number of definitions of the word rigor. Synonyms of rigor may include: rigidness, strictness, inflexibility - but also, challenging, exact, discomfort, etc. One definition of rigor from Merriam-Webster: “something that is a cause for suffering or special effort especially in the attainment of a goal”. It is clear that rigor could be thought of in a positive or negative context, therefore it is not clear that ‘rigor’ would necessarily mean more work, harder books, and longer school days.

What the article is arguing against essentially, is busy work that is not entirely effective. I don't think there is anybody anywhere that likes excessive, unnecessary, and unproductive work, nor would anyone want such a thing for their children or students. All that people are hoping for from the idea of rigor, is a positive outcome.

Students do need to be challenged, and that is precisely what the DOK levels are all about - how to create effective challenge. If a teacher expects students to merely memorize content from a textbook, that is only accessing DOK level 1. This may be difficult to accomplish but it is not fruitful, and the cost of the frustration for students is too great even if they do manage to learn the content in this way. The DOK model helps teachers push for higher order thinking in their lessons, which will provide a better outcome for students.