Category: Strategies

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Selling Sleeping Pills – Common Core and Close Reading

intermezzo-featured

I was streaming a show on Hulu last night and saw this ad for Intermezzo sleep medication. (Video below)

I was amused by the disparity between the cute animation and the ominous narration of the mandated health warning. I thought this would make a good exercise to illustrate techniques in “close reading” and demonstrate the approach advocated by William Kist’s in New Literacies and the Common Core Educational Leadership ASCD March 2013.

Close reading requires students to consider text (in it’s different forms) through three lenses: what does it say, how does it say it, and what does it mean to me?

Here’s the steps to follow:

  1. Visual elements: Turn the sound off on your computer and watch the Intermezzo commercial (below). Make a list of visual details you observe – character, mood, lighting, editing, set design, shot composition. 
  2. Narration: Now turn the sound on and listen to the soundtrack without looking at the screen. Outline the verbal information given about the product in a T-chart. List benefits on one side and possible adverse effects on the other.
  3. Musical soundtrack: Listen to the ad without watching the screen again. This time focus on the musical soundtrack – instrumentation, tempo, mood. Write some adjectives that come to mind while listening to the ad (ignoring the narration.)

Compare your three lists – visual elements, narration and musical soundtrack. Be ready to use specific textual evidence to defend the observations in your lists. Here’s a few guiding questions to consider:

  • How do your three lists compare? To what extent do the visual elements, narration and musical soundtrack reinforce (or contradict) each other?
  • What do you think the ad’s creators were trying to communicate?
  • What artistic and narrative choices did the creators make to communicate their message?
  • How successfully did the ad sell the product? Would you consider using this product? Why?
  • Drug companies are required by the FDA to list all a drug’s possible risks. What impact does that requirement have on the content of this ad?

Congratulations – you’ve been exploring Common Core:  Reading Standards for Literature, Integration of Knowledge and Ideas, Standard 7, Grade 7. Compare and contrast a written story, drama, or poem to its audio, filmed, staged, or multimedia version, analyzing the effects of techniques unique to each medium (for example, lighting, sound, color, or camera focus and angles in a film).

Reading Standards for Informational Text, Integration of Knowledge and Ideas, Standard 7, Grades 11–12. Evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of using different mediums (for example, print or digital text, video, multimedia) to present a particular topic or idea.

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Master Common Core Skills with Free DBQ iBook

Progress and poverty

My latest multi-touch iBook, Progress and Poverty in Industrial America, is available for your iPad - free / iTunes. It’s a great resource for use in the classroom, and serves as a model for teacher or student curation of historic content into interactive digital DBQ’s. (More of my posts on publishing with iBooks Author.)

This 18-page document-based question guides students through the historian’s process with an investigation of the essential question, “How do we evaluate the social costs 
and benefits of technological innovations?” To make the question relevant to students, it begins with a brief examination of the impact of 21st c technologies / global economy on progress and poverty in contemporary America.

superba

Next the iBook turns to historic content set in late 19th century America. “Stop and think” prompts encourage a deep reading of many notables of the “Gilded Age” – including Russell Conwell, Henry George, Andrew Carnegie and Stephen Crane. Visual source material includes posters, 1908 Sears Catalogue, a gallery of photographs by Lewis Hine and video of one of Edison’s early Vitascope films. Guiding questions help students think more deeply about each document:

What does the document tell you about America at the turn of the 20th century?

How do these historic themes of “progress and poverty” relate to issues in America today?

How do we evaluate the social costs 
and benefits of technological innovations?

Hine gallery

Students are guided through the historian’s process with a focus on the contrast between historic perspectives.

For example, students can compare how industrialization impacted children in different ways in the stark contrast of a young girl demonstrating the use of Sears Superba Washing Machine (“mother’s little helper finds it easy to swing the Superba to and fro…
”) and a gallery of Lewis Hine’s child labor photographs.

Can the cannery worker really take advantage of the new libraries that Carnegie has so generously donated to the city?

timecardfull

Another document is from records of the NYS Factory Investigating Commission- Time card dated June 26, 1911. “She was employed in a fruit cannery. She worked 166 hours for the two weeks, earning $16.60.” Student can contrast that with an excerpt from Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth  – “the millionaire will be but a trustee for the poor; entrusted [with wealth] … administering it for the community far better than it could have done for itself.”

Critical thinking questions based on Common Core skills are embedded throughout the text and help students “think like a historian.”

  • Who created the document?
  • What was the creator’s goal?
  • How does the document reflect its historic time period?
  • How do multiple documents support or contradict one 
another?
  • What historic “voices” are missing from this collection – women, immigrants, minorities, workers?

Finally student are invited to share what they’ve learned in writing and a variety of other products:

  • Compose an essay or blog post
  • Draw an illustration, create an infogram, post a video
  • Role-play a debate – Hine vs Carnegie? or 
Conwell vs a supporter of the Occupy Movement?
  • Start a discussion on Facebook, curate a photo gallery on Flickr, create a new Twitter hashtag
  • Research the world around you and leave a document for a future historian
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How to Integrate Document-Based History with the Common Core

CCSS offers an incentive for teachers to use historic documents to build literacy skills in a content area while empowering students to be the historian in the classroom. But document-based (DBQ) instruction in this context requires four key elements to be successful:

  1. The right documents.
  2. Knowing how to look at them.
  3. Letting students discover their own patterns, then asking students to describe, compare and defend what they found.
  4. Basing the task on enduring questions, the kind that students might actually want to answer.

My just-published, second iBook – Workers Win the War: Toil and Sacrifice on the US Homefront – embodies that approach. Free at iTunes. It features:

Engaging source material that can be easily interpreted by students. Too often, DBQs use documents that require too much background knowledge to “interpret.” This collection offers over 60 pages of easy-to-intrepret media, much of it visual –  including 80 posters, 18 films, cartoons, radio broadcast, recording and sheet music and a dozen rarely-seen pamphlets.

Why should I work any harder

An interactive primary source analysis tool developed by the Library of Congress. Poster and film analysis is modeled in an multi-touch widget. Students can use an iPad-friendly historic document guide to analyze all the source material and share their observations with peers and teachers.

All across the curriculum, students are told to “analyze” material, but their thinking is constrained by the mandated Venn diagram or T-chart. Developing a comparative schema is messy work – but that’s where the learning takes place. To scaffold student analysis, “Workers Win the War” features CCSS-based prompts that ask students to stop and think more deeply about the content.

any-bonds-today

Essential questions that make an examination of the US homefront in WWII relevant to students’ lives today. Students experience first-hand how the government mobilized public support for the war through higher taxes, hard work and sacrifice.

Contrast that era with our “homefront” experience today, when only our troops and their families have been asked to make sacrifices for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Today many see “big government” as an intrusion in their lives. In contrast, during WWII Washington played a very active role shaping American behavior and attitudes in support of hard work and sacrifice in support of the war effort.

Workers Win the War examines the themes of hard work and sacrifice through a variety of perspectives – increasing industrial production, food as weapon, worker health and safety, making do with less, scrap drives, rationing, price controls, and financing the war with higher taxes and bond drives.

Have you really tried

Students will enjoy the content: Cartoons featuring Bugs Bunny, Donald Duck and Daffy. Films and posters that equated sick days and long work breaks as near treason. Long-forgotten pamphlets that coached volunteer bond salesmen or advised school principals on how to organize a paper scrap drive – “turn your students into Paper Troopers!” Posters that chided “foolish women” who ignored price ceilings – “Why Shouldn’t I Buy it? I’ve got the Money!”

My favorite is a short film that features two spunky young working women who set out to buy some steak in violation of rationing limits. It turns into a nightmare sequence that demonstrates “rationing means a fair share for all.”

Prices Unlimited

Rationing_means_a_fair_share

To deepen their understanding of the historic content and hone their Common Core skills, students need a chance to create a unique product to demonstrate their learning. With that goal in mind, Workers Win the War has been designed to leverage the content-production capacity of the iPad.

All of the historic content in the iBook is in the public domain. Each source document is hyperlinked back to archives that provide access to the digital content. Students can easily remix the historic documents into their own galleries and projects.

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Why Do Teachers Ask Questions They Know the Answers To?

The Future will not be multiple choice
The Future will not be multiple choice

A while back I posed 13 Subversive Questions for the Classroom. Here’s the first five:

  1. If a question has a correct answer, is it worth asking?
  2. If something is “Googleable” why would we spend precious class time teaching it?
  3. When we ask students to summarize, do we actually want to know what’s important to them?
  4. What do you suppose students think they are supposed to be doing when we ask them to analyze?
  5. Do you ever ask your students questions you don’t know the answer to? Why not?

Here’s a TEDxCreativeCoast video – The Future Will Not Be Multiple Choice – that answers those questions and showcases the power of a PBL / design-based approach to learning. Turn curricula into design challenges, classrooms into workshops and teach students to think like designers.

While you watch it, try to think of a meaningful career that looks like filling out a worksheet.

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Innovation Challenge – 22 PBL Mind Workouts for Teams

There’s a great new iBook that I highly recommend as a source for project based learning and team building activities for middle school students through adults. “Innovation Challenges – Mind Workouts for Teams” is available free at iTunes. 

It tells the story of a great program at Saint Louis University, designed to promote creativity, innovation, and the entrepreneurial mindset through novel challenges. The book is a detailed how to for 22 challenges – team supplies, facilitator supplies, tips, learning outcomes and variations. It’s a treasure trove lavishly illustrated with photos and videos. Challenges run the gamut from STEM to marketing and sustainability. The iBook also details how to replicate the competition at your institution.

The books notes :

The goal of the innovation challenges is to promote the entrepreneurial mindset through multiple exposures to innovation process in a competitive, multidisciplinary, team-based, creative environment. Just as everyone is encouraged to exercise everyday to keep the body fit, innovation challenges are designed to keep the mind fit. It’s a mind workout. The Innovation Challenges help participants to exercise their creative side, work in multidisciplinary teams, and experience the team dynamics. They learn to tackle a novel situation under intense competitive time pressure, while networking with others outside their disciplines, and most importantly, fine-tuning their entrepreneurial skills.

Here’s more about the Weekly Innovation Challenge at Saint Louis University from their website:

Every Wednesday, Saint Louis University students have a chance to compete in the Weekly Innovation Challenge from 12-1pm in the Rotunda at Parks College. Students must form teams of three—these teams must include at least one engineering student and up to one faculty member. Most importantly, all participants must be from different majors/disciplines. The students are given an impromptu challenge and have one hour to compete. Whichever team completes the challenge successfully first wins $300 ($100 per teammate). Additionally, participants are asked to submit a weekly reflection on the challenge and one winner will be rewarded an additional $100.

The events are sponsored by the Kern Entrepreneurship Education Network, the Coleman Foundation and Saint Louis University. The goal of the competitions is for students to exercise their minds and creativity, just as they would their bodies. Challenges have included a wide variety of topics—from designing the tallest free-standing structure using spaghetti sticks to creating a “green” toaster box design. Winning teams have been from all sorts of disciplines. The first team to win was three female sophomores, including an aerospace engineering, political science and investigative medicine major.

Image credits: iBook / Innovation Challenges – Mind Workouts for Teams