08: Exploring the Challenge Zone

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  • Characteristics of Activities with High Intellectual Quality:
    • Higher order thinking
    • Disciplined inquiry
    • Construction of knowledge
    • Deeper knowledge & understanding
    • Transfer of knowledge to novel contexts
    • Analyze & synthesize information
    • Explaining ideas
    • Asking questions
    • Thinking creatively and critically
    • Designing and planning
    • Self assessing and reflecting
    • Cross curricular connections
    • Adult-like roles and tasks
    • Connect concrete and abstract knowledge
  • 7 Intellectual Practices
    1. Mimic thinking and reasoning patterns of content experts
    2. Transform learning for different audiences and contexts
    3. Sustained academic conversations
    4. Connect concrete and abstract knowledge
    5. Connect written, spoken and other forms of communication to make meaning
    6. Critique knowledge and information
    7. Use meta-language while learning (talking about language)
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.Characteristics of high intellectual quality and 7 intellectual practices can be used to create checklists to evaluate and revise a portfolio of scaffolding activities associated with a project.  The characteristics of high intellectual quality describe components of a good PBL unit.  This validates the work that goes into designing and implementing projects.

 

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Preparation Steps
  • Develop checklists based on the characteristics of high intellectual quality and the 7 intellectual practices to evaluate groupings of scaffolding activities
  • Use checklists to identify what characteristics and practices are critical to scaffolding specific project products
  • Research strategies that relate to specific intellectual characteristics and practices
  • Design scaffolding that aligns to identified intellectual characteristics and practices
  • Design assessments that provide evidence that students are developing critical intellectual skills
Early Implementation Steps
  • Implement scaffolding activities that demonstrate intellectual characteristics and utilize intellectual practices that support specific project products
  • Use assessments to determine whether or not students are learning targeted intellectual skills
Advanced Implementation Steps
  • Identify key characteristics and practices that need to be spiraled throughout the curriculum because they are vital to the discipline
  • Develop standardized routines and checklists that describe the critical skills and characteristics identified in previous bullet point
  • Use prompts to get students to reflect on the development of key intellectual skills over several projects
  • Create student friendly learning targets that describe various levels of intellectual skills
  • Communicate learning targets and use prompts to have students provide evidence that they are progressing towards the learning targets

 

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01: Why teach in the Challenge Zone?

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Chapter 1 in Gibbons, Pauline. English Learners, Academic Literacy, and Thinking: Learning in the Challenge Zone. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2009. Print.

 

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  • Raising Expectations:  Despite research that correlates high student achievement with intellectually challenging curricula, many ELL programs focus on low-level activities.  Instead of lowering the level of activities, programs that develop academic literacy should maintain high levels of expectations and support learners to achieve these high expectations with high levels of academic support.
  • Literacy in the Middle Years: In middle school, literacy demands ramp up.  In upper elementary to middle school, students experience an abrupt shift from “learning to read” to “reading to learn”.
  • What is Academic Literacy: Academic literacy means learning to read, write, and think using the vocabulary and thinking processes unique to each discipline.  Different subjects have different genres because they evolved different thinking patterns.
  • Implications for Teaching Subject Literacy: A first step for scaffolding academic literacy is understanding the specific literacy demands of the subject one is teaching.
  • Who are EL Learners? ELLs come from varying language backgrounds and socioeconomic statuses.  Lack of explicit literacy instruction creates an achievement gap between EL and non-EL students.
  • EL Learners in Content Classrooms: EL learners develop academic literacy slower than conversational fluency.  Language-only classes lack lessons in subject-specific academic literacies.  Content and content-specific literacy must be developed and taught simultaneously.
  • Some Current Perspectives on Intellectual Quality: Intellectually challenging curricula is needed to develop understanding and literacy skills.  These curricula include: language learning, explicit teaching, real-life relevance, language-based collaboration work, and learning standards-based goals.
  • An Approach to Teaching & Learning: High Challenge & High Support Classrooms: Learning is a collaborative activity (Vgostsky).  Use scaffolding to facilitate activities that help learners do more than they can do on their own (Vgotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development).  Engage in many academic conversations because outer conversations can become inner speech or thinking patterns over time.  High support & high challenge classrooms live in the challenge zone.

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Teaching literacy is not limited to English Language Arts classrooms because different subjects speak and think in different academic genres.  Understanding the specific literacy load of the content one teaches is a first step in developing scaffolding that supports EL and non-EL learners who are developing fluency in one’s content genre(s).  Lowering academic expectations has been proven to have negative effects on student achievement.  Instead of lowering standards, one can better support students by maintaining high levels of challenge AND support.  The chart that connects student emotions to levels of support and challenge can be used to decode students’ responses to various learning activities so that appropriate adjustments can be made to keep students engaged in learning.

 

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Preparation Steps
  • Identify the new vocabulary and thinking patterns that are critical to being successful in specific units or projects
  • Research strategies for teaching vocabulary and for managing academic conversations.  See Literacy articles for ideas.
  • Develop scaffolding activities that teach both content and language/thinking.  See Literacy articles for ideas.
  • Use challenge vs. support chart to categorize scaffolding activities and insure quality control
Early Implementation steps
  • Observe student emotional responses to scaffolding activities and use challenge vs support chart to hypothesize their perception of challenge and support levels of activities
  • Use explicit strategies for teaching vocabulary and specific critical ways of thinking
  • Facilitate fréquent academic conversations that have high levels of student participation to scaffold development of language and thinking
  • Scaffold how students write in content-specific genres
 
Advanced Implementation steps
  • Have students reflect on the development of their language and thinking skills
  • Use multiple strategies to develop content and literacy knowledge
  • Have students self-assess their perception of activities in terms of their level of challenge and support and offer up suggestions to bring activities into the challenge zone (high level,high support zone)
  • Develop routines that lead to deliberate practice of key patterns of thinking, writing, and speaking within content-specific genres
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