Issue 130: Apr 04, 2011 Connections Newsletter

Ideas for Extending Thinking in World Languages Classroom

Toni Enloe
Apr 04, 2011

How can I challenge students to extend their thinking in the world languages classroom?

So much vocabulary and so little time!  This is the dilemma that many world language teachers face in first and second year language instruction. Adding the idea of extending thinking can become even more of a challenge for planning. 

Why extend thinking?

Extending Thinking questions, activities and tasks help move students beyond simple recall and identification. They should be structured in such a way that students have the opportunity to analyze situations, make comparisons, make predictions and inferences, and evaluate situations. It is important to always remember that students can’t extend something that they have not acquired.  Often times, there are missed opportunities to challenge thinking during the course of an Acquisition Lesson. 

Three Opportunities

1.  Assessment Prompts - During the course of instruction, Assessment Prompts may be designed to encourage students to push their thinking.  Example:  After a discussion of schools in the target culture, students compare target culture to United States schools.  Students are required to the vocabulary of the target language.

Question Stems for Assessment Prompts

  1. How does ____ affect ____?

  2. Explain why/ how ……?

  3. What would happen if…..?

  4. What is the difference between…..?

  5. How can I use….to……?

2.  Assignments -  Assignments should be used to reinforce student learning by having students “put it all together.”  Thoughtfully prepared assignments can provide a great opportunity for students to take their learning to the next level. Example: Study advertisements (clothing, cell phones, cars) from the target culture and the US. Based on your comparisons and the patterns that you see, make a generalization about what about the values of each culture. Make sure that you use the key vocabulary from the target language in your generalization.

3.  Summarizing Strategies - When Summarizing Strategies are purposefully planned, they allow students to move beyond simple facts toward application of the information. Example: After a lesson on words used for sequencing, determine what is out of sequence and tell how you know.

When do I extend thinking?

How do I know when to extend thinking? 

  1. A good place to begin is by looking at the standards.  What does the standard say?  What will students be expected to do?  Example: Standard Indicator Use the target language to exchange opinions and beliefs with others.  To show mastery of this performance indicator, students will need to know vocabulary used to exchange personal information (e.g., names, home addresses, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses) and be able to exchange information on topics of personal interest. 

  2. Use past performance data.  With what concepts or skills have students in the past, struggled? 

  3. Identify the top mistakes that foreign language students make and design questions, activities and tasks that scaffold and extend their learning. 

Example:  Assuming that Spanish words that look like English words mean the same thing

Ask students to create skits based on words on the false cognates list and the misunderstandings they might cause. The humor will help students remember the correct translation. (Sample from Teaching Activities and a Lesson Plan for False Cognates in Spanish, http://www.brighthub.com/education/languages/articles/37385.aspx)

REMEMBER:  70% of newly acquired information goes into short term memory unless we find a way to help students solidify the new learning.

Beyond Error Analysis: A Few More Ideas Worth Sharing

1.  Odd One Out (adapted from Thinking Through Modern Foreign Language)

 Why do we do it?   In this activity students are asked to look for relationships by comparing and contrasting and/or classifying and categorizing words, phrases, or sentences, focusing on the relationships that exist among them. How do we do it?  Identify the particular skills or concepts that you want students to develop. Select three or four words, phrases, sentences or pictures.  In pairs, students identify the “Odd One Out” and tell why and what the others have in common. What Outcome?  When selecting the three or four words, phrases, sentences or pictures there should be more than one correct answer.  This forces students to critically examine the attributes and look for relationships both among and between items. Example: Item Set – l’auberge di jeunesse, un terrain de camping, l’hôtel de ville

Once students have identified the pattern(s), they should add one more phrase, switch with another pair and ask which is the “Odd One Out” and why.

2.  Picture This  – Pairs of students create a visual representation of a topic or an idea.  Using the target language, discuss with another pair why the picture represents the topic or idea.

3.  Letter to a friend - In a friendly letter format, students paraphrase in the target language what they are learning by highlighting the relationships between the new information and their everyday activities.

4.  Classify This! – Students classify areas of language and explain the reasons for their categories.

5.  Unlocking the Mystery – Students underline the cognates in a piece of text in the target language.  They then predict what the story is about.

For more ideas on how to extend student thinking, check out the following Learning-Focused Solutions:
Learning-Focused Strategies Model: Connecting Extending Thinking book and flipchart
What Moves You: How to Get the Most From Planning for Instructing Higher Level Thinking
Unit and Lesson Planning Support Guide: Conferencing to Success
Differentiated Assignments K-5 or 6-12

Each solution offers suggestions for moving students toward higher level thinking.



The Secret Behind Increasing Learning and Achievement

Cindy Riedl
Apr 04, 2011

What is the Secret Behind Increasing Learning and Achievement?

Raising the standards for students means raising the standards for teachers. Raising the standards for teachers in turn means raising the standards for principals. To accomplish either of these, schools must focus on learning and have the goal of continuous improvement. The question now is – continuous improvement of what?

Although there are many factors influencing achievement, such as the fact that too many students are coming to school already behind, educators must deal with increasing student achievement and accountability to match increasing state and national standards. So what’s the secret? We know many schools are having success under some of the most challenging situations and we know there is no ‘silver bullet’ or canned program that works. It truly takes much more than that! It takes every educator in a school. The best place to begin is to examine and replicate the most effective instructional strategies that exemplary schools hold in common with a major focus on learning these strategies and applying them in a connected framework. Also, educators need to be more knowledgeable about and use the “Levels of Learning” as a guide to plan daily instruction.

Most educators are aware of the five basic strategies that most impact achievement as identified by the research accomplished by Robert Marzano in 2001 and the US Department of Education in 2002. But many don’t realize that success relies on how you plan and implement these strategies in a connected approach across lessons and units in an appropriate sequence. Instead of simply focusing on these top 5, let’s take a look at the top eleven!

TOP ELEVEN STRATEGIES:

  1. Extending Thinking Strategies (with an emphasis on similarities/differences and causes/effects) such as:

    • Abstracting where student find, identify and explain patterns in specific information or situations.

    • Compare and Contrasting where students identify and articulate similarities and differences among items.

    • Classifying and Categorizing where students group items into definable categories on the basis of their attributes.

    • Constructing Support where students provide support or proof of statements and can differentiate between fact and opinion.

    • Analyzing Perspectives where students describe reasons for our viewpoint as well as the viewpoint of others.

    • Inductive Reasoning where students infer unknown generalizations from information or observations.

    • Deductive Reasoning where students identify specific examples to support a general statement, rule or principle.

    • Error Analysis where students find and describe errors in their own thinking or performance or in those of others.

      Note that to be effective with the above Extending Thinking Strategies, you need to be specifically trained on the strategy to obtain a depth of knowledge of the steps in each process, the signal words and how to implement them in the lesson. Each strategy must be taught with intensive modeling and guided practice before students can apply the steps in a learning activity that deepens their understanding of the content.

  2. Summarizing Strategies - both distributed summarizing, which occurs throughout the lesson to check for understanding, and final summarizing at the end of the lesson. Keep in mind that every student is involved whether they discuss what they have learned with a partner or have written to a prompt to show their depth of understanding. Regardless of how it is done – it is done by the students.

  3. Vocabulary Taught in Context - Key vocabulary and concepts identified in the content being taught require explicit instruction. Do not give 12 words in isolation at the beginning of the week and expect students to learn them by the end of the week for a test. Research has proven that there is NO BENEFIT to this practice.

  4. Acceleration with Scaffolding Grade Level learning and Advance Organizers - background knowledge is built and key vocabulary is previewed before the lesson, thus setting up initial successful learning and prerequisites that ensure success.

  5. Non-Verbal Representations - graphic organizers that are explicitly taught and used while students identify and organize essential information. The end product of a completed graphic organizer is some form of written response, whether a summary or responses to prompts.

  6. Product-Based and Effort-Based Feedback  - feedback is connected to effort and product, not just product. An exchange of feedback between you and the student helps deepen their understanding and corrects misconceptions. Teacher/student conferences are powerful but do not occur with enough frequency. Therefore, plan for distributed summarizing at strategic points in the lesson to modify and adjust instruction to meet the needs of students.

  7. Distributed Guided Practice - during the lessons in school and homework.

  8. Socially Active Learning - collaborative pairs are used during brainstorming and discussion of key points in the lesson. Numbered-Heads, Think-Ink-Pair-Share and Think-Pair-Share are three techniques that allow students to work cooperatively during learning, especially when evaluating what they think they know.

  9. Setting Focus and Objectives for Learning - using Essential Questions with students at the beginning of the lesson and referring to them to guide instruction and learning. Students are expected to respond to the essential question at the end of the lesson to demonstrate their depth of understanding of the content.
  10. Questioning Strategies - move beyond recall to higher level responses such as: 

    • Application Questions that ask students to apply essential knowledge, facts, techniques and rules to new settings and contexts in a different way.  For example: How could you demonstrate the use of this concept? How could you illustrate this process in action? What can we generalize from these facts?

    • Analytical Questions that ask students to examine and break key information into parts by identifying motives or causes and to analyze essential concepts, themes and processes. Then they can make inferences and find evidence to support generalizations. For example: What is an analogy that might represent this situation? How would you classify these literary works? What are the major elements that comprise this sequence of events?

    • Synthesis Questions require students to formulate a holistic summary of key ideas, make inferences, or create new scenarios. They must compile information together in a different way by combining elements in a new pattern or proposing an alternative solution. For example: What would you hypothesize about these unusual events? What do you estimate will be the costs for the project? How might you invent a solution to this ecological problem?

    • Interpretive and Evaluative Questions are open-ended questions that require students to formulate opinions in response to ideas presented in a print or non-print (i.e. art work, audio-visual) medium. Students must support their opinions with direct textual evidence. For example: What did Frost mean when he said, “I have miles to go before I sleep?” Why does the photographer emphasize only his subject’s eyes? How would you defend the character’s actions?


      Keep in mind that any of the above types of questions are powerful tools to utilize as Assessment Prompts to determine the level of student understanding and to challenge higher-level thinking throughout the lesson. Be prepared to deal with the challenge presented by responses to your questions!

  11. Differentiated Assignments - across multiple levels, not just making them easy or hard.

There are many other teaching strategies, but after these, the achievement effects are substantially less. These eleven have the strongest research base and evidence base. Layered above all these strategies is how and when you apply them in lessons, along with how the strategies are sequenced and connected. The focus of planning should not be simply choosing which strategy to use in a particular lesson, but how to connect and sequence strategies across lessons in order to generate achievement gains well above teachers who randomly choose strategies or teachers who tend to use only 2 or 3 strategies.

For more information about instructional practices critical to achievement and reducing the Achievement Gap visit the Learning-Focused Strategies Model.