Prof Prax 2007

Slide 1: Rhythm & Flow Performance Reading with Garage Band Brock Dubbels Minneapolis Public Schools The University of Minnesota Center for Cognitive Sciences

Slide 2: • Many students have expertise in the new media. • Connecting with new media might create motivation • Also creates new skill sets – Autonomy – Tech – Construct & Create – Work in teams – Network

Slide 3: Alignment Generating Engagement Purpose Interest Connection Identity

Slide 4: roles image beliefs language writing public perception Are you on your way up? producing performing making the band

Slide 5: Design Deliver content Student Motivate Learning Content & Play Frame Engage Apply & Reflect

Slide 6: Play? • What is it? • Why do it? • In school? • What about work? • Game elements.

Slide 7: Invoking play

Slide 8: Towards top sight

Slide 9: Amazing Reading Systems Top Sight

Slide 10: Built like a game

Slide 11: Non-traditional Narrative for Assessment

Slide 12: Decision Trees • For a decision tree to work, it must have the following qualities: – Time in the game takes place in turns or other discrete units. – Players make certain number of finite decisions that have knowable outcomes – The game is finite, it cannot go on forever. – Different, but just as good

Slide 13: Why are they important? • Because a decision tree is also a diagram of the formal space of possibility in a game. • Games represent the same design elements as research and curriculum design.

Slide 14: How about Chutes and ladders? Describe the game play mechanics

Slide 15: What are the elements of this game? What makes the play emergent? Is it non-linear? Games as a metaphor for instructional design

Slide 16: Discussion • Based upon these concepts in game design and the literacies and habits of mind supported by them, how can we use these design elements to construct curriculum for our classroom? • Do we need computers to do this?

Slide 17: • Engagement • Bootstrap • Embodiment • Performance as assessment • Coach vs Broadcast • More feedback • Autonomy • Built in performance Assessment • Valid & Reliable • Incidental Learning • Outside of class

Slide 19: Clapping Academy

Slide 20: You’re the jury • Thumbs up / Thumbs down • Qualities • Quality gradient / rubric • Builds engagement • RFOL • Continuous improvement • Cooperative Learning

Slide 21: Instructional Framework Pre-reading During Post Relate to prior Guidance knowledge Review Establish Purpose Synthesis Interaction Clear up misconceptions Assessment Monitoring Pre-teach Link to DR-TA Link to Three-level guides vocabulary

Slide 22: Characteristics of readers + Low comp 1 High comp High High fluency fluency L ev el of flu e nc Y High comp Low comp Low fluency Low fluency ability to comprehend in dialogic method /create a model

Slide 23: Psycholinguistics & Comprehension • A key component of the higher cognition is the ability to reason by manipulation of complex symbolic expressions according to logic like rules. – Smolensky and Legendre 2006; Newell and Simon 1963; Pylyshyn 1984; Fodor and Pylyshyn 1988

Slide 24: Elements of comprehension • Attention • Prior Knowledge • Content, Structure, Genre, Categories, Concepts • Situation Model – spatial locations, time frames, people, objects, ideas, color, emotions, goals, shape, spatial, temporal, causal, ownership, kinship, social, etc. • Composition of Comprehension

Slide 25: Building comprehension process A ge/time B asic reading skills Comprehension S kills Decoding Reading Comprehension

Slide 26: How do we build a comprehension model? Literary Elements Comprehension Model • Character/ • A spatial-temporal framework Characterization – spatial locations, time frames • diction • Entities • Plot – people, objects, ideas, • Properties of entities • Setting – color, emotions, goals, shape, • Point of View etc. • Relational information • Theme – spatial, temporal, causal, • Tone ownership, kinship, social, etc. • Voice • Word choice

Slide 27: Fluency 1. Reading is done word by word, rather than in larger phrases. There is no \"flow\" in the reading. Words are read telegraphically. The reader demonstrates only word-by-word reading. Used generally when the reader is new to the text and the words are very challenging or the content is very complicated—like a research article where there are many new ideas and new complicated words. 5. Performance is characterized by reading that generally \"flows.\" The student's voice changes to reflect meaning changes in the passage. Ending inflections are consistently appropriate. Reading is fluent and smooth, generally easy to listen to and understood.This type of reading is used for performance. Think of an actor interpreting the voice of the character and bringing the text into living voice. Adapted from Table 1. from Marston, Mansfield, cited in (pg. 81 Heineman, in Fountas and Pinnell, 1996) by Dubbels (2003)

Slide 28: Middle fluency 1. The reading is done with two to three word phrasing. Reading is very hesitant. The reader displays considerable pausing and drawn out connecting between words, and attempts to decode the words. Reading is more of word calling than fluent, comprehensive reading. 2. The reader pauses for ending punctuation. Inflection changes may not be present as the student reads from sentence to sentence. The student reads in phrases but misses the tone considered necessary in fluent understandable reading. This is generally the voice the reader uses when reading to themselves. The silent voice that is used for gathering information or non-fiction. 3. Most of the time, the student has appropriate reading, \"flow\" and phrasing. The voice of the character/narrator comes out. This prosody score also indicates attention to punctuation with pauses and appropriate inflection.

Slide 29: Reading in schools • is more unlike the reading students are doing outside of school than at any point in the recent history of secondary schools, and high stakes, print-based assessments are tapping skills and strategies that are increasingly unlike those that adolescents use from day to day. – O’Brien & Dubbels (NCREL, in press)

Slide 30: Part of the problem • Texts are becoming increasingly more complex • Low academic literacy is not restricted to poor performing students. • Students who do well in school have developed strategies for being successful without engaging in reading of academic texts • Teachers may have created work-arounds for students to avoid reading the text through frustration, lack of instructional knowledge, or apathy. • We may need to wade into the New Media. • Performance is the best medicine.

Slide 31: A dolescents who struggle to read in subject area classrooms are positioned as unmotivated, and lacking in requisite skills and strategies needed to succeed in their content classrooms. They could benefit from instruction that is developmentally, culturally, and linguistically responsive to their needs. Y et. . . – S uch instruction is seldom embedded in the regular curriculum. – Instruction is seldom tailored to their range of abilities with a range of texts and tasks. » (M oore & Hinchman, 2003; M oje & O’B rien, 2001)

Slide 32: Reading, Agency, and Confidence • Adolescents’ perceptions of their competence may be a more important predictor of whether they will engage with difficult texts across the disciplines than their past reading performance. » (Alvermann, 2001; Anderman et al., 2001; Bean, 2000; Guthrie & Wigfield, 2000)

Slide 33: The Digital Divide • How do we connect with these students • How do we train students without this kind of knowledge and know-how? • How can we teach them? • How do we reach them?

Slide 34: Literacy? • \"One's ability to extract information from coded messages and to express ideas, feelings, and thoughts through them in accepted ways; the mastery of specific mental skills that become cultivated as a response to the specific functional demands of a symbol system\" (S alomon, 1982, p. 7).

Slide 35: Literacy to Multiple Literacies • Our personal, public and working lives are changing in some dramatic ways, and these changes are transforming our cultures and the ways we communicate. This means that the way we have taught literacy, and what counts for literacy, will also have to change.

Slide 36: Engagement is Key – Struggling adolescent readers have disengaged from reading and choosing to read early in their academic careers and are unlikely to re-engage with strategies instruction alone (Guthrie & Wigfield, 2000; Alvermann, 2001)

Slide 37: Aspects of Agency Self-determination theory posits that three needs for Agency: 1. Competence: the need to successfully engage, manipulate, and negotiate the environment. 2. Relatedness: emotional bonds and feelings of connectedness to others socially. 3. Autonomy: the degree to which one’s actions are precipitated by the self. The quality of owning one’s actions. Not out of compliance.

Slide 38: Key habits of good readers: traditional • Mentally engaged • Motivated to read and to learn • Socially active around reading tasks, • Strategic in monitoring the interactive processes that assist comprehension. Setting goals that shape their reading processes, • Monitoring their emerging understanding of a text, and • Coordinating a variety of comprehension strategies to control the reading process. • This is Agency

Slide 39: Elements of Student 2.0 • Has multiple tools available for learning available 24/7 • Who doesn’t just consume knowledge, but produces knowledge products (e.g., digital video) and does so with reference to high professional standards. • Who is able to innovate, not just replicate. • Who sees knowledge not just as facts and information, but as designed into tools, technologies, virtual worlds, and systems. • Who sees knowledge not as resident just in heads, but as distributed across-- and sharable with--various tools, technologies, other people, social networks, and social interactions. • Who thinks in terms of complex systems and their interactions and not just in terms of isolated facts and events? • Who makes decisions based upon experience. • Respects demonstrable expertise. • Does not respect rank or privilege not based upon merit. • May join a community knowing that they are joining to build expertise, and that they move to new communities to further their own agenda and interests.

Slide 40: Teacher Expectations • We need to ask ourselves a number of questions: – How do I teach reading? – What does a good reader do? – What are our reading expectations? – What do I want students to read? – What is the role of the text? – Are there texts that might be of higher interest? • Are we including the new media?

Slide 41: Rhythm & Flow • High interest • Role Playing • Performance • Technology • RFOL • Writing • Video • Music

Slide 42: Making the grades • Character/ Characterization • diction • Plot/ story grammar • Setting • Point of View • Theme • Tone • Voice • Word choice

Slide 43: How about the cover art? Creating a web presence? Press kits? A band itinerary? A band identity and branding? Video? MAKING THE BAND

Slide 44: Skee Lo -- I Wish What some of the kids did. Popular music

Slide 45: Leveraging other literacies • Depiction Represents Ideas • What does this depiction of the house say to you?

Slide 46: How about movement?

Slide 47: Discussion Thank you. For a copy of this presentation along with other topics similar to this, go to