Betty Jean Shoemaker and Larry Lewin, authors of the ASCD book Great Performances: Creating Classroom-Based Assessment Tasks, focused their session on a set of tools designed to help students process new content. The tools fit into a four-step process approach: Prepare, First Dare, Repair, and Share.
Betty Jean Shoemaker and Larry Lewin
The rhyming sequence helps students “actually memorize the steps in the process,” said Lewin, who teaches in Eugene Public Schools in Oregon. Shoemaker, a curriculum specialist in Eugene, said these tools can help lower-performing students practice learning strategies that higher-performing students often use intuitively.
The tools can be used in a wide range of classroom situations. “This is a universal, generic process approach that works for any process in any classroom regardless of the grade level, the subject matter, or the state that you teach in,” Lewin said.
This approach identifies each step in the process as a suit in a deck of playing cards. Together, the four steps help educators teach “with a full deck,” Shoemaker said. “We wanted something we could grab hold of and use in the classroom for one day or as a part of a unit but not some big elaborate instructional system. That's why we came up with these tools.” She and Lewin explained the steps and provided some example tools.
Prepare is the first suit in the deck. One of the preparatory tools Lewin and Shoemaker have collected is what they call a Mental Floppy Disk. Using a drawing of a disk, students can write down what they already know about a topic before the relevant instruction begins. “They download their knowledge from their mental hard drive to their floppy disk,” he said, acknowledging that his students renamed the tool The CD Burner to make it more up-to-date.
First Dare is “your initial approach to the material,” Lewin said. He provided an example of a note-taking tool suggested by Chet Skibinski, a teacher at Sunset High School in Beaverton, Oreg. The tool, called Snap Shots: A Photo Album, provides students with several picture frames and room for captions on photocopied paper.
Students “take mental pictures as they read,” and this tool enables them to translate that mental image into “a quick sketch—by writing or drawing,” Lewin added. Students can use sticky notes for their sketches and then attach them to the photo album page. “Kids will love you if they get stickies,” he commented.
Repair is the stage in which students “fix up their thinking,” Lewin said. “We'll go a little deeper to get kids to discern, analyze, and refine their thinking.” He and Shoemaker shared the Sort It and Store It tool, which uses an illustration of grain silos to help students analyze information and sort it into the fact or opinion silo.
“I'm not saying that every kid, in every class period, on every assignment needs to go back and repair,” Lewin cautioned. “But it's not likely you're going to nail understanding completely on your first try. So what do you do? You go back and do some fine tuning as a strategy.”
Share is the stage in which “kids reveal back to their teacher what they learned as a result of Prepare, First Dare, and Repair,” Lewin said. As an example of a sharing tool, Shoemaker and Lewin jointly read a dialogue poem with contrasting points of view.
Shoemaker also discussed a “wild card” tool called The Tip of the Iceberg. The tool is designed to help students explain their thinking about a topic. Our brains are like icebergs, she said. “What's exposed on the surface melts faster—it changes. What's under the surface is harder to change—it takes longer.” This tool helps students “dive deeply and take a look at what's way down there,” Shoemaker said. “One of the biggest challenges we have is getting kids to deal with their misconceptions. If we expose their thinking, we have the potential to improve what we're thinking about any given subject.”