Tag Archives: questioning/inquiry

Sitting Bull

For the penultimate blog post of 2018, here is a reading on Sioux warrior and chieftain Sitting Bull along with the comprehension worksheet that accompanies it.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Cultural Literacy: Have an Ax to Grind

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the idiom “Have an ax to grind.” This seems like a term that users of social media ought to have at their disposal–you know? But this is also a term used often in educated and even scholarly discourse to describe tendentiousness in inquiry.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Independent Practice: The Battle of Tours-Poitiers

You know, despite the fact that it is a turning point in global history, I can’t even remember why I wrote this independent practice worksheet on the Battle of Tours-Poitiers. In the freshman global studies classes I co-taught in New York, I don’t recall ever–aside from a cursory mention of Charles Martel somewhere in the mix–covering this explicitly.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Prohibition

Lately, I’ve worked to create a broad spectrum literacy course that will appeal to or reach as many students as possible. This reading on Prohibition and the comprehension worksheet are part of this endeavor.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

A Lesson Plan on the Crime and Puzzlement Case “Fragment”

Here is a lesson plan on the Crime and Puzzlement case “Fragment.” Suffice it to say that this is the first of many of these.

I’ve put up a couple of these before, and traffic to them is consistent. For this one, here is the Cultural Literacy do-now exercise on the idiom “An Ounce of Prevention Is Worth a Pound of Cure.” From the book itself, here is a PDF of the illustration of the evidence with the questions students will consider in analysis and contemplation as they resolve the crime. Finally, here is teacher’s answer key to this case.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

A Student Self-Assessment and Reflection Tool

This student self-assessment and reflection form has been kicking around my to-do folder for a couple of years now for a couple of reasons. The first is that I could never determine the best way to categorize and tag it (and I post it now because I have decided to take a much more casual attitude toward categories and gags, mostly because I realized this blog has a search function); the second is that this material, I am confident, remains solidly in the authors’ copyright.

Who are, to wit, Jay McTighe and Carol Ann Tomlinson. The book is Integrating Differentiated Instruction & Understanding by Design (Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2006). If you’re interested in curriculum design in general and in particular, in this case differentiating for struggling or idiosyncratic learners (or both), you probably know the names of these two distinguished experts. The book is excellent: I read it twice, taking extensive notes both times. Then I passed it along to assistant principal under whom I served. Every time I visited his office, I noticed that the book was close at hand.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Beatlemania

That the students I serve took the interest they did in this reading on Beatlemania came as a surprise to me. Here also is a worksheet to aid comprehension.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Cultural Literacy: Archetype

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on archetype as it is generally conceptualized; it’s nice to see–however brief–the excursus on Carl Jung’s psychology in this passage.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Nineteenth Amendment

Here is a reading on the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution as well as a comprehension worksheet to use with it. This amendment, you will recall, enfranchised women.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

The Weekly Text, December 21, 2018: A Literacy Lesson on the Word and Concept Factor

Today is the Winter Solstice, so the days now begin to lengthen. Spring is on the horizon.

This week’s Text is a complete lesson plan on the word factor that I developed on the fly (which shows, I fear) three years ago. The purpose of the lesson is to help students understand this complicated, polysemous word so that could use it in all the settings where it becomes, well, a factor.

For reasons I don’t entirely recall, I conceived of this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the noun axiom as the do-now, or opener of this lesson. I suspect I sought merely to introduce another concept from mathematics for the sake of consistency. The first worksheet for this lesson is three context clues worksheets on factor: in the first instance students will identify it as a noun, in the second as a verb, and in the third and final worksheet, it is once again used as a noun. To support this activity, here is a learning support in the form of definitions of factor in the order it appears on the context clues worksheets; this can be distributed to students as appropriate, or to your class linguist. Because I wasn’t sure how long any of this would take (the institute class for which it was written was a little over an hour long), I threw in this reading and comprehension worksheet on factorials as a complement. Parenthetically, I’ll just say that I think this lesson is incomplete; in fact, before I could consider it complete, I would want to run it by a math teacher or two.

And that’s it. This is the final Weekly Text from Mark’s Text Terminal for 2018. I plan to spend the next week doing just about anything but looking at a computer screen.

Happy Holidays to you and yours!

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.