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October 1, 2016
Vol. 74
No. 2

Of Swallowtails and Swallows

By choosing a strong topic and worthy tasks, teachers can plan inquiry units that lead to amazing learning.

Instructional StrategiesCurriculumAssessment
Of Swallowtails and Swallows thumbnail
Credit: Kevin Davis
I enter Katie Shenk's 2nd grade classroom at Rocky Mountain School of Expeditionary Learning, and the room is buzzing. I can almost see electricity crackling in the air. It takes me a minute to find Katie because she's crouched down next to Theo, who's carefully examining a page from the Smithsonian Guide to Butterflies.
Seven-year-old Theo says, "Here's a weird thing: The swallow, a bird, likes to eat swallowtail butterflies."
"Wow," Katie replies. "That's interesting—I wonder if the predator-prey relationship had anything to do with how they're named? That could get confusing! How do you think you might weave that fact into your story?"
Katie catches my eye, and we smile at each other. Katie's unit on butterflies is in full swing, and I've come to observe as her instructional coach. Students are deep into the final weeks of producing literary nonfiction books—showcasing themselves as the author-lepidopterists they've become over the past five weeks.
As Katie makes her way over to me, Aolani tugs at her sweater. "Katie, will you do another mini-lesson on vivid, precise words? I just reread my story, and I think I need to add more science vocabulary so my reader believes I'm an expert."
Now I'm about to fall over. Did a 7-year-old really just ask for a mini-lesson? Who is in charge here? Clearly, the learners—and their work—are at the center of this powerful learning space. How did this happen?

Planning with the 4 Ts in Mind

At the time of this unit, Katie had taught at Rocky Mountain School of Expeditionary Learning in Denver, Colorado (one of the original schools founded by the Expeditionary Learning Network) for six years. She had learned that for students to get better at anything, they need time to practice. They need large chunks of time every day—connected over a series of weeks—in which they're working independently, with agency and a bit of urgency. But anyone who's spent five minutes in a 2nd grade classroom knows it takes some fancy footwork to orchestrate this type of learning environment. What keys has Katie found to getting students to work independently on projects that engage them emotionally and cognitively?
One key lies in planning with long-term goals in mind and planning complex tasks that are worthy of students' time. When a teacher assigns tasks that respect the intellect, energy, and passions of 2nd graders, he or she needs to do very little daily wrangling.
In Transformational Literacy: Making the Common Core Shift with Work That Matters, Ron Berger and his coauthors assert that teachers can ensure the instruction they're planning will be worthy of students' time if they consider the "4 Ts": topic, tasks, texts, and targets. Let's see how Katie planned with these 4 Ts in mind.

Selecting a Topic

When planning this unit, Katie first thought about the "whole"—a compelling topic that would be worthy of an extended study. From her experience with 7-year-olds, she knew she couldn't go wrong if she dug into the natural world with them. She had heard a news report about butterflies' importance to pollination and how their fragility makes them quick to react to environmental changes. That sounded not only interesting, but also important. Katie also looked at the Next Generation Science Standards and saw that this topic would match key expectations for what 2nd graders should learn connected to the life sciences.

Choosing Tasks and Texts

The next questions Katie asked herself were, What tasks do lepidopterists (butterfly scientists) do? What do they make? What product could my students make that would showcase their learning about butterflies and increase their skills as readers and writers?
Katie immediately thought of a particular text, Firefly at Stonybrook Farm by Wendy Pfeffer and Larry Mikec (Soundprint, 2004), a 2nd grade favorite in the genre of literary nonfiction. The book presents information about fireflies through a story of one firefly. It begins,
At twilight in the backyard of the big white house on Stonybrook Farm, the gentle breeze blows across the water and cools the hot summer air. Underground, near the brook, a firefly chews his way through the damp soil. While the sun slowly sets, he inches along around tangled roots.
Katie was intrigued by the idea of having students share what they know about butterflies in a way that would interest readers—through a story. She knew many of her students would want to write this kind of "day in the life" story—but not all of them. So she searched for other mentor texts.
Stellaluna by Janell Cannon (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1993), the story of a bat that gets separated from its mother and is raised by birds, came to mind. Creating a work similar to Stellaluna would be a challenge for some of her students, and she could picture a few students who would relish that challenge. This more complex text weaves throughout the story not only bat facts, but also facts about the behavior of birds. Students who chose this model would need to share what they learned about butterflies in juxtaposition to another species.
Katie also knew she needed to differentiate both task and materials to ensure that all learners in her classroom could meet the learning targets. So, after a hunt at the library, she found a third mentor text, Are You a Dragonfly? by Judy Allen and Tudor Humphries (Kingfisher, 2004), which follows a simple but rich format of call and response ("Are you a dragonfly?" "You are if …."). She knew certain students would thrive within that patterned narrative structure.
Choosing mentor texts ahead of time is key because of the way they can influence the quantity and quality of student writing. As Ron Berger notes, when students and teachers have strong models to work toward, they can better visualize the next learning target or the next task each learner needs to grow, which helps with differentiation.

Creating Learning Targets

With these mentor texts in mind, Katie crafted these learning targets connected to students creating their stories:
  • I can teach a reader about butterflies through a story.
  • I can use a mentor text to inspire and influence my writing.
  • I can use vivid, precise words to help my reader make meaning.
  • I can combine a variety of sentences to make my story more interesting and "musical."
  • I can use punctuation effectively and creatively to help my reader make meaning.
She also began brainstorming targets for students' science content learning.
Now that the topic, task, mentor texts, and learning targets were in place, Katie had clarity on the whole. Here is her description of the unit:
The Butterfly in the Ecosystem Unit Summary:
Students will learn about butterflies by doing what lepidopterists do. Students will conduct research about butterflies, their habitats, and the role they play within those habitats through fieldwork, experts, and texts. Students will engage in a series of Reader's Workshops to uncover information about butterflies, and discover the ways authors craft literary nonfiction stories to communicate scientific information. Students will then engage in a series of Writer's Workshops to craft their own piece of literary nonfiction about butterflies. An author's celebration at the Butterfly Pavilion/Natural History Museum will culminate the experience. Two essential questions will guide our inquiry: Why does the world need butterflies? What do lepidopterists do?

Envisioning Activities and Products

Once Katie had clarity on the whole, she could start to envision what activities would help students replicate the behaviors of lepidopterists, become knowledgeable about butterflies, and study the craft of literary nonfiction. For example, as Katie identified students' science content learning targets, she envisioned what students might create to show they had met that target. If she couldn't envision a "make" worthy of students' time, she knew the target was too small. She also wanted most of these products to support the knowledge and skills students needed for creating their stories.
Figure 1 [figure currently unavailable] shows Katie's long-term target for students' science learning during the immersion phase of the unit, the "supporting targets" she developed, and her plan for both what students would do during class time to work toward each target and what they would make to show they'd met that target.
Her first goal was to immerse the students in the daily work of lepidopterists. Fieldwork is an essential behavior and habit of these scientists. Fortunately, the class had access to the Butterfly Pavilion in Broomfield, Colorado—a "zoo of small wonders" that houses an indoor rainforest with more than 1,600 butterflies. During the immersion phase of this unit, students visited the Butterfly Pavilion, observed butterflies in their replicated habitat, and spoke with lepidopterists on staff.
Students filled their fieldwork journals with drawings, questions, and important information from these observations—just like professional scientists do when they study species in nature—and from the published texts of other scientists. When they were ready to write their stories, students drew from the information that they'd recorded about butterflies in general and about the specific butterfly they were writing about.

Using Student Work to Inform Instruction

By the end of the first week, Katie had plenty of information about students' learning from their fieldwork journals. From students' questions, she could see what additional texts might help them go deeper and how understanding terms like proboscis might deepen and showcase their understanding. From their "noticings," she could see how they were determining what was important, and from their drawings, she could tell if they needed more instruction on how to observe closely and draw precisely.
Katie used this information to plan further instruction. She kept the 3 Ts of task, texts, and targets in mind as she looked at student work, asking herself questions like:
  • Was the learning target connected to this work just right? What misconceptions do I notice in students' work? Do most students need a mini-lesson on a particular topic, or do I just need to confer with a few students?
  • Are the texts I'm giving students for their research just right—in topic and reading level? What do students' annotations on today's text show about what other kinds of texts they need to fuel their curiosity or build background knowledge?
  • Did the formative task we completed today (or this week) allow students to show what they know and can do? Do some students need a different or more scaffolded task to build toward the long-term target?

Seeing What They Can Do

Katie's careful choices of learning targets and products that would assess those targets let her see clearly what each child had mastered. This six-week unit included at least 25 different ways to assess learners.
Figure 2 [figure currently unavailable] shows Theo's completed story. Notice how it reflects his mastery of the learning targets Katie set. And remember that during Katie's mini-conference with Theo, he wondered how to work into his story the fact that swallows eat swallowtail butterflies; notice how he did so.
Katie planned in a way that gave students multiple, connected opportunities to build their background knowledge and skills over time while continually working toward the creation of a compelling product. Learning doesn't happen in isolated chunks of time, so the work we have students do shouldn't be separated into individual days or worksheets. When we frame a unit with a compelling topic at the beginning and a complex task at the end, it's clear to the teacher—and, more important, to students—just what they need to do to direct their own learning—and their own curiosity-filled lives.
Author's Note: For more detail on Katie's planning and instruction, see my book That Workshop Book: New Systems and Structures for Classrooms that Read, Write, and Think (Heinemann, 2007).
End Notes

1 Berger, R., Woodfin, L., Plaut, S. N., ∓ Dobbertin, C. B. (2014). Transformational literacy: Making the Common Core shift with work that matters. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

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