It’s just so very easy, if you don’t like the nervousness of stories, to teach from a novel using the Read and Discuss Technique. If you are feeling the stress of stories, read on:
I suggest five stages in R and D:
Stage 1 – translate a paragraph with the kids. This is straight CHORAL translation. Never translate for them and be very strict (i.e. tie it to their jGR grade) about insisting on hearing their voices during the choral translation. You do not read to them, you all read together and you enforce that. That is what the Reader Leader job is for – very important job.
Stage 2 – talk about the specific content of the text you just read in the TL. Here we just ask simple yes/no questions while insisting on a strong choral response from anyone. You can do that on one paragraph for the rest of the period, or you could spend just a few minutes on it. How long to go is up to you.
Stage 3 – PQA the text whose facts you were just discussing. If Brandon got Marianne’s attention by driving the blue T-Bird of his father in the novel, you ask one of your students if he has a T-Bird. If he doesn’t want or know how to play the game by telling you that he has, for example, a red T-Bird then what I do is stop and give them the instructions (they are children and need to be told) as to how to play the game by making up cute answers to my questions and so Edward ends up telling you that he drives a red T-Bird and off you go into some PQA.
Stage 4 – do a dictée on the paragraph. You already have the text so no need to put it up for group reading, they correct from the book. For details on dictée, see the resources/workshop handouts page of this site.
Stage 5 – do a Quick Quiz. (your Quiz Writer could have written the quiz from the chapter by now, just as she does during a story. If you don’t have a quiz, you can just ask them all yes or all no questions and then you know what the key is, and you don’t even have to remember the questions. Quick Quizzes are also described on the resources/workshop handouts page of this site.
All of the above would work great in a 90 minute class. R and D is a major TEA – Time Eater Upper.
Two other points about R and D:
I suggest that we spin personalized discussion of a text in this way:
a) for level 1 classes we just ask facts, spinning into our students’ ages if we just read that Anne is 16, keeping it simple for them.
b) for level 2 classes we can move the level of the spinouts a bit up the taxonomy but not too far. If Anne wants to go to Belgium, we ask where our kids want to go, keeping the responses from them to one or two words since in level 2 they are not ready and should never be forced to speak unless they want to.
c) for level 3 classes we can move the discussion further up the taxonomy to ask questions like “Who would like to go out with a beautiful 22 year old from Martinique?” or “Who would you like to go out with from what country?” But only kids who have heard 95% CI over the first two years can do this.
2. I would also suggest that we only go to spin some discussion from the reading when the text has energy. If it’s boring we should just keep doing R, the aural translating. But if it’s interesting, we can then spin some D. This reflects what Sean said about a week ago here after reading Robert’s summary of RT – that we only do short RT scenes that are charged with potential for a good high energy scene. We should do the same for the D part of R and D.