Noticing and Wondering #SOL2021

I’m noticing so many of the small moves that teachers make in virtual teaching and wondering which I will take with me into next year. I really want to document the moves that worked now, while they are still there in my thoughts, before I bounce back into more thoroughly engrained routines. I really need to create a space where I can refer back to these habits or practices or ways of teaching high school English now for use when I am back to the classroom, in person with the students. There were so many new ways of moving through material that I can see as transferable and I don’t want to lose these.

I’m noticing that there are parts of the year that I don’t want to let go and wondering what this means.

On Twitter, Shana V White (no relation) frequently posts an image or graphic and poses two questions:

These questions appear to be deceptively simple, but I learned that they can generate complex critical thinking and discussion. I’ve seen teachers who pose these questions with #pairedtexts which bring in the element of compare and contrast. I decided to experiment this year using these two questions often as ways to approach critical thinking – I thought this would prevent me from being prescriptive or guiding students to predict what the teacher wants as a response.

It took time to take root, but eventually, the students were able to respond openly, realizing there was no “wrong answer”. Surprisingly, there was tremendous diversity in what they noticed, and even when there was some commonality among groups of students, the wondering then took the discussion in different and unscripted directions. They wondered why only four students noticed the potentially harmful trope.

There was also a freedom in the simplicity of these questions and discussions sometimes ran beyond class time when the topic was in their news. They cared about the conversations and through my noticing and wondering what they were thinking, I was able to learn about them more deeply as individuals, to ask them why they noticed certain aspects of text and didn’t notice others. These interactions and explanations became reflective reading and a metacognitive practice. Simply noticing, and simply wondering.

Although it might seem repetitive to pose the same questions over and over, the power lay in the sharing. These questions became an exploration of shared understanding and meaning-making with a text. They analysed and explained how they were reading a video or an article or an infographic. These two simple questions gently opened a window to conversations which flowed as icons fluttered or the chat buzzed.

I’m wondering how I’ll let this way of teaching go and take what I noticed with me.