November 15 Crumble - Active Engagement and Column-Notes

I spent some time this week collaborating with a colleague from another building.  The focus of our meeting was to discuss ways to support some of our content area teachers in providing students with organized information, yet keeping these same students actively and collaboratively engaged.  Tough order, but absolutely possible.

As we talked, the question arose about teaching students organization strategies for note-taking.  Too often in education we follow a trend to a fault, let the pendulum swing so quickly to one side, and neglect to see that we have abandoned things that are working.  Buzz words such as collaboration and active engagement have risen so high above anything else that many of us are starting to abandon key life-skills such as organization and summarization - skills that would be taught during more structured lecture-style lessons where students were expected to take notes. 

Don't get me wrong, friends.  I am absolutely not justifying making students sit for fifty-minute periods while they listen to an instructor drone on and on about a topic, ferociously jotting down copious notes.  What I am suggesting is that there are some beneficial skills that still need to be taught that may or may not be taught during a more engaging activity or collaboration.

In previous blogs I've discussed the power of note-taking, choosing what organization strategy works best for you, and organizing that information according to your strengths.  Some teachers are having a difficult time finding a happy medium between teacher-centered instruction and student-centered instruction, and that's where many of us are struggling.  We want our kiddos to be able to pull out important information from the text, but we don't trust them enough to be able to handle this task alone, so we spend time in the classroom asking them to copy down what we think is important. 

After my discussion last Tuesday, I was reminded of some ways that we can use an oldie-but-goodie and revamp it to be used in the classroom as a partner tool -- all the while allowing the teacher to still have some control over what students might be recording in their notes.

Project CRISS calls this strategy Two-Column Notes.  You might know it as Cornell Notes.  I'm going to take these notes a step further and move to three columns.  Below is what it could look like:

Main Topic   This is where the teacher might start students by giving them a purpose for reading and discussing.  Teachers can do either one of two things here: Provide students with main topics or broad questions Allow students to use text features to come up with their own main topics or broad questions. Whatever happens in this column, know that this is the purpose-setter, so if you want your students to explore specific topics, this is the place to do it!

Partner Discussion   In this column, students work with a partner or partners (no more than three to a group!) to decide together what goes here.  You may want to be specific about what you think should go here. For example, you might ask students to look in the text to find evidence that climate change is, indeed, happening on Earth.  This purpose should be stated in column one.    All group members need to agree on everything put into this column.    This is a great time to listen in on discussions and gage what will need to be addressed during the final large-group discussion.    Cris Tovani suggests during times of engagement to stop the class, state observations, redirect if the entire class seems perplexed by something significant, and send them off again.   Another idea here is to find one piece of information in each group that you ask the group to share with the class.  This validates their group work.

Additional Information   During the discussion, the teacher should have collected information about where students have missed chunks of important information.  As a wrap-up activity, point these things out and have students note them in this column.  If you choose to go over all information, students can even go back to column two and highlight information that was emphasized during this phase.   Students will not see value in the second column, however, if they end up copying down everything that you present, so be certain to have each group share something you felt was important and have students check their second column for that information.    I wouldn't even put up a three column note taking guide on a projector at this point here.  I would use a two column note or make a simple list.  This will get students out of the habit of copying down exactly what they see and get them into the habit of checking their previous work before adding to it.  This column is for additional information, not restating work they've already done.

I had another conversation this week with a valued colleague on her frustrations with her struggling readers - why do they struggle with things other than reading (like group work)?  You'd think that if you give a struggler the opportunity to work with a partner or small group that he would be more motivated by the social aspect of the activity, but the group-work that this teacher had planned dissolved before her eyes as these students completely resisted (kind of as a whole) and did not complete the activity effectively.  The teacher then expressed that she never revisited the idea of group-work again.  Don't fear - this is so common, so know you're not alone!

If you have a kiddo sitting in your class that is still struggling with reading at age eleven, twelve, or thirteen, know that your class is not the first class she has struggled in, and that the struggle with reading is no longer the issue.  She is now a struggling learner, not because she can't learn, but because she has faced failure enough times to understand that things are more likely to go down the tubes than to turn out positively.  Because of this, she resists any school work.  Your job is to create small successes.  My suggestion to this teacher was to break up that group work into smaller chunks, give specific guidelines, and redirect frequently (like every ten minutes or so).  And don't give up.  Giving up is one of the worst things a teacher can do when teaching students to work effectively in groups.  This is one of the reasons why so many of our struggling readers have no collaboration skills - once you face failure as a teacher (you see that group work is not working), you do not want to revisit that type of activity again.  Hmmmmm . . . ironic, isn't it?

If you've ever visited a Montessori classroom, you've seen that even five, six, and seven-year-old students can work collaboratively and effectively.  These students are taught from the beginning specific skills, and their teachers train and retrain them until they get it right.  This is what could be happening with our kiddos as well.  It's never too late to train them.

To bring this to a close - remember a few things:

1. Collaboration doesn't have to include building a house or  starting a business; it could be as simple as agreeing upon significant pieces of information in a text selection.
2. Validate group work by not making your kiddos re-do work they've already done.
3. Organizing information is important.
4. Group work comes after training and consistency.
5. Even struggling learners can do it.
6. Reflecting on what works and what doesn't is very important.  Let your students reflect also!

And most importantly, don't give up!

Who is the Expert?

I remember back in 2005 when I moved to my current school and was asked by my former principal to take on a building leadership role - Balanced Literacy Coordinator.  See, when I spent some time working near Chicago several years before this, I had a superintendent who felt that it was imperative that I take a class in teaching reading, even though my primary focus was social studies - so I did.  I should have thanked the man back then, because what I found was a new passion that eventually grew into a career path - content area reading, now known as content area literacy. So I became a trainer for Project CRISS and talked a good "content-area reading" talk, and before I knew it I was the . . . Balanced Literacy Coodinator.  Fancy title, right?

Well, it was not fancy.  It was aggravating, and here's why.  At that time I taught science (way too many endorsements on my certificate, apparently), and our department chair - a well-loved and vivacious eighth grade science teacher - fought with me over and over and over again that science did not involve reading.  Well, it wasn't really a fight.  It was more of a statement - with his fingers planted firmly in his ears.  He wanted nothing to do with my Balanced Literacy Coordinator job that I was taking so seriously.

I bring this story up because, when I went to hear Cris Tovani speak last week, she brought this question up to her listeners: with the new informational text CCSS standards, who is responsible? Tovani discusses the finger-pointing and the shoulder shrugging that goes on in schools.  CCSS pinpoints those standards as ELA standards, but her argument is so brilliantly legitimate - why would my amazing science-teaching colleague dispute it?

The ELA (English Language Arts, for those of you who are confused by this new acronym) department will absolutely continue to support all of our students with the informational text standards.  Part of our curriculum is non-fiction and informational text, but who is the real expert in reading a piece of text from your content area - either in the text book or found elsewhere?  Look around . . . I'll give you a hint.  It certainly isn't your favorite language arts colleague.  It's you!  You are the one who loves your content so much that you spent eighteen or more hours studying it so that you could teach it at the middle or high school level.  You took those classes.  You spend your time diving deeply into the text to pull out information and add it to your lessons.

Tovani says that thinking in a science, math, health, or music class requires completely different techniques and strategies that we, as highly educated professionals take for granted!  Some of you have one or more graduate degrees, which implies that you have done more than your fair share of informational reading - it's become like second nature.  But your students are being met with more and more complex text with the expectation of meeting higher and higher demands in both reading, writing, and thinking.  Not to mention the fact that you may have thirty (or more) students staring at you with any variation of learning styles, and you are expected to bring them all up to snuff this year.  Without your expertise, some of them will never make it through those difficult texts that our text book companies continue to publish.

"Okay," you say.  "So what can I do?"  Below are some ideas to get you thinking about ways you can support your learners in reading informational text in your classroom.  Tovani included some great content-specific strategy charts in her talk on November first, but before you can think strategy, you have to think philosophy.  How will you modify your already-fabulous teaching philosophy to reflect this addition of reading in your content area - not just content-area knowledge?

• Know your learners.  Know that you have a variety of students sitting there in front of you, and in order to reach them all, you need to vary your presentation-styles. Talk some, put some on the screen, stop and have students process through discussion strategies, expect them to write, and get them up and move them around.
• Know your text and how you attack it.  You are the expert in reading your content text.  Know how you approach it.  Science teachers and math teachers may rely more on the illustrations, graphs, charts, captions, and tables than a literature teacher would.  Social studies teachers may jump directly to illustrations or maps before trying to conquer a piece of text.  Literature teachers may do a quick once-over on the text to see how it is organized before making the jump into the text.  Whatever it is, watch yourself do it once and be sure to note how you do it!
• Demonstrate how you attack text.  Once you know how you approach a text task, demonstrate how you do it.  Over and over and over again.  Let your kiddos know that the way you do it may be specific to your content area.  You can even ask them how reading or thinking in your class might differ from another!
• Chunk the text.  This is especially important for your struggling readers (and you're all going to have them).  Break it down into manageable sections if it isn't already broken down for you.  Stop and have them process after each chunk so that your students get used to reading metacognitively.
• Give students specific purpose for reading.  Say things like, "Read the next three paragraphs to find out why . . . " or "After you predict how the main character will respond to X, read on to find out if you were right.  Stop when you can tell me, and write down what you learned."  Giving struggling readers (or any reader, for that matter) specific purpose for reading each small chunk of text not only shows them that purpose setting is important, but it makes larger pieces of text (even three pages can be daunting out of a social studies or health text book) not as overwhelming.

As you explore the idea of not just teaching students your content, but how to acquire more knowledge within your content by reading, you will find that you have questions that need to be answered.  There are no better professional developers than your own colleagues, so go to those within your department and start the conversations there.  From there, seek out language arts teachers, your reading specialist (yay!) or literacy coach, department chairs, and others who may be currently taking classes or have had experience.  You never know who may have just the tools you need to move forward and embrace our new informational text standards that are weighing so heavily on so many people. 

Mini-Vocabulary Unit on Current Events

So this year I have been working with a colleague to create short two-week units that introduce some Tier 2 academic vocabulary in a non-threatening way to students who need more exposure.  We are using the students' sixteen-minute SLC (Small Learning Community) period to do this, and it goes QUICKLY!  Below is an example of the next unit.  I feel like after working through four units, I'm ready to share with the world.  Feel free to use or lose, but please give feedback.  I can't make things better if I don't know what works and what does not.

Unit 5 plan
Band Made Instruments out of Junk
Mystery Word Bubbles
BINGO cards

Day of Reading Presentation

Thank you for coming to our presentation!  Ann and I are thrilled that you chose to come hear what we had to say.  Please feel free to email either of us if you have additional questions or comments.

Heather Lambert  @ hlambert@sd129.org
Ann Eifler @ aeifler@sd129.org

Day of Reading Presentation slide show

Save the Last Word for Me - The Teacher Toolkit

Predictogram

Proposition / Support

Sorts and Ranks

Metacognition (originally published in 2011)

Several years ago I wrote this article in lieu of a conference presentation.  Dr. Carol Santa actually enjoyed it so much that she recommended it get printed in the CRISS national newsletter after I revamped a few things.  The article below is the original article (before the Dr. Santa revamp - although it was good both ways!).  I was very proud of this research, and I am looking forward to using some of it this year at both the Day of Reading Conference and the IRC Conference as well.

The Epiphany

                Metacogntition  - a word that even Microsoft Word doesn’t recognize, and yet eighth graders in my language arts class can tell you that it means “thinking about your thinking”.  This year, however, I was compelled to step back and take a look at just how much I really knew about the word.  That one act opened up a flood-gate of research, ideas, and discoveries that I could not wait to share with anybody who would listen . . .

                My name is Heather Lambert.  I am a read/write learner.  Five learning-styles tests have proven that I am incapable of being a successful learner by kinesthetic means.  Teach me to play hockey by writing it out for me.  Teach me to fix a toilet or make a cake by giving me written directions.  Do not show me or tell me.  Let me read it. Interestingly, I am both intrapersonal and musical.  Put that together with read/write, and you get a poet.  Spiritual balancing has indicated that I am also a communicator.  I love words.  So what is the problem?

                The problem is sadly simple. 

                During our study of Flowers for Algernon in eighth grade, my student teacher drew attention to Howard Gardener’s theory of Multiple Intelligences.  She had students perform a self-assessment on themselves that ultimately indicated their highest intelligence.  Most of our students scored highest in kinesthetic, musical, and visual.  Not a match to their highly-wordy teacher. 

                Still don’t see the problem?  

                After assessing my own teaching, I discovered that most of my teaching methods, although highly engaging, were language-based.  I was comfortable with words, but I was not working with subjects who had the same strengths.  Without knowing it, I had clearly set up some of my students for failure because I had not reflected upon myself as a learner/teacher and allowed myself to see my students through my multiple-intelligence glasses.  Yikes!  Even scarier, I was so wrapped up in my intrapersonal-self that I didn’t take into account that many of the adults with whom I engage are not like me either! 

                In the six years that I have been training for CRISS, metacognition has always been a word that meant “reflection on act”.  But the idea that I was teaching toward my own learning style on a daily basis allowed much more than reflection on act.  It allowed understanding that my lessons needed to become more multi-modal if I am to reach all of my students.  But it was more than that.  It was not just about giving students multi-modal work, but about seeing them as learners who take in information in different modes.  Even one-on-one informal discussions take on new meaning when you think of it that way.  What an epiphany!  And what a heart-break.  To discover that the blood, sweat, and tears that I had put into my work was not enough was devastating to me!  And how was I going to sell this to our overworked, over scrutinized staff?

The Three-Tiers

                Upon attending a stirring talk by Dr. Carol Santa on what really works in education, I was inspired to move forward with my research, and I wanted to drag my colleague Pam McGreer along with me.  With one eyebrow up in curiosity for literally thirty minutes, she listened to me go on and on about Dr. Santa’s ideas in the three tiers of CRISS understanding.  The more I talked, the more it made sense to me.  Dr. Santa had hit the nail on the head for me.  We understand CRISS at three levels: by strategy, by principle, or by a deeper clinical psychological level. 

                Most teachers, having gone through their first level 1 training, are so overwhelmed by the strategies and how they can be tied together that often the metacognitive piece is overlooked.  Strategies are fun and engaging; they allow for differentiation by level and by learning style.  Reflection on a strategy takes time.  I don’t have it.  Done. 

                After four or five years of training, I finally was able to wrap my head around the second tier, principle, and it dawned on me that the P&P were a set of guidelines that, if followed daily, one can hit a variety of learners in a lesson with little major changes in those plans.  Discussion?  Check.  Writing? Check.  Explanation and modeling?  Check.  And so on.

                But to ask a teacher to know oneself as a learner before even evaluating oneself as a teacher?  Then to meet students head-on with your knowledge of self?  And to engage in activities that take student strengths/weaknesses into account all the while knowing where your strengths and weaknesses lie?  Well, that is the root of where communication lies, and that is where we must stoop to reach the kids who seem unreachable.  At the base. 

Implementation

                So what does this mean for us, as educators?  Throw up our hands and walk away – the task is too daunting?  Certainly it does not mean that we need to revamp our entire curriculum, does it?  The answer is no.  What is does mean is this:

•  Before you go any further, take a learning styles test (http://www.vark-learn.com/english/page.asp?p=questionnaire)and a multiple-intelligences test (http://www.businessballs.com/howardgardnermultipleintelligences.htm or http://www.thomasarmstrong.com/multiple_intelligences.php).  Reflect upon both and journal about parts of your life and your teaching that align with the results.  If you are not satisfied with your results, take another one somewhere else (I took five, remember?).  In your journal, take time to reflect upon your teaching – focus on strategies and activities that you do that align with your learning styles and your strengths.* After this, jot down things that you do already as a teacher to reach students who are of other intelligences and learning styles.  Visit some of those websites listed above to give you a thorough explanation of the types of intelligences you will encounter.  Make lists of things you can do as an educator to keep all intelligences in mind.    *I say “journal” because that is how I would do it – remember, I am a read/write/intrapersonal type.  If you have a better way of keeping track of yourself, use it!  But don’t let the information go away.  Save it somewhere so that you can reflect back upon it later. 
•  Give students a learning-styles and multiple-intelligences questionnaire and allow them to reflect upon themselves as learners as you did above.  Expect them to give examples from their lives that support their learning style.  Some will disagree with the outcome.  Have a second test handy for this reason.  Dive into what learning styles and multiple intelligences mean for them as learners so that they can carry this new knowledge with them from class to class.
• Make a CRISS P&P checklist and be sure to hit as many of the P&P as possible during each lesson.  Understand and accept that some activities will support some students better than others and that handfuls of students will be more comfortable with certain strategies more than others.
•  Teach strategies and directly relate them to students as learners.  Confess that some of the strategies just don’t work for you, and get excited when you, as a learner, benefit from a strategy.  Encourage your students to reflect upon their strategy usage in this way.
•  Use CRISS vocabulary and multiple intelligence/learning-styles vocabulary when introducing activities and strategies, not only for strategy-calling, but for principles.  For example, “To help you to build background knowledge we’re going to be using a discussion strategy called Mind Streaming.  Our interpersonal and verbal/linguistic students will love this activity because it involves discussion, and you love to connect with others and talk!” Build in reflection time and have students draw their strengths into their reflections to different activities and strategies.
•  Give students choices within the same activity.  In eighth grade, we spend time in language arts supporting our students with note-taking strategies so that they can take these skills into their content area courses and be more organized learners.  Modeling different note-taking strategies at the beginning of the year and pinpointing what types of learners may benefit from using the different types would be a great place to start!  When discussing learning styles, I often recommend that our verbal/linguistic students try power notes because we (the verbals) tend to be pretty wordy.  Power note taking gives students lots of room to reword and summarize.  Two column-notes might work better for those kids who are kinesthetic and aural because they don’t see much value in note taking.  Two-column notes are easy to organize and allow for very brief summaries to be written.  Webbing or mapping, although challenging for me, is really easy for a more visual learner because that type of learner can see relationships visually.  I am completely distracted by the lines and boxes, but then I would be.  I’m verbal.
• Get crazy.  Set up a portfolio system.  At the beginning of the quarter go over a list of the learning targets that students will hit by the end of the quarter.  As you hit each target in your lessons and assignments, direct students to this list and remind them that they need to be able to prove with physical evidence (ie. a piece of writing, test/quiz, assessed project, reading logs, journals, etc.) that they have been able to meet that goal.  At the end of the quarter, have students put their portfolios together.  Included should be a checklist of the targets and student-selected evidence along with a metacognitive reflection for each piece.  Reflections should indicate why the student feels that the evidence supports learning and how his/her learning style/intelligences fit into the equation.  Why not have students check off a list of the CRISS P&P and allow them to make connections with that as well?

Whew!  Talk about knowing oneself!

October 18 Crumble - Power teaching and its alignment with the P&P of Project CRISS

My best planning times are usually the most inopportune times when its virtually impossible, dangerous, or ridiculous for me to write down my ideas.  I used to tell my former principal that I planned most of my PD while I was sleeping - which used to make him laugh, but this is a true statement!  Generally when he would spring a PD on me four days before the show was supposed to go on the road, I'd stress about it for a day, go to bed, and then wake up at 3 a.m. with a plan that I would have to get up and jot down so I could sleep again.  A few weeks ago, in the car on the way to work, I'd been stressing about a presentation that I had agreed to do with a colleague at the Day of Reading Conference on November 2, when I had a brilliant idea!  Of course, I was driving . . . so I did what any teacher would do, I grabbed my phone and hit the voice to text button and sent her the entire plan in a voice text, which came out sort of the way I had intended, but she got the idea (although apparently I thought that we should introduce whole GRAIN teaching instead of whole BRAIN teaching . . . ).

So yesterday during a working lunch with her, I embellished on my thought - which included the idea of introducing Power Teaching to our audience.  Not surprisingly, I had completely forgotten that I had even texted that to her.  I love technology for this reason - how many ideas of mine would have flown out my open car window that morning had I not had the option to voice text her?

I digress . . .

A little over a year ago, a respected colleague of mine introduced me to Power Teaching - one of the most engaging and entertaining ways to present, in my opinion.  This video is a brilliant illustration of a few of the fun and engaging strategies. 

Want more?  Just google Chris Biffle and whole brain teaching, and you'll get a ton of fantastic ideas as to how you can make these strategies work for you!

So after discussing the idea of power teaching with my colleague yesterday, I started to realize that the bits and pieces of information that were being "taught" by the students to each other were similar to what Project CRISS has called the 3-minute-pause.  The idea of this strategy is to break up a lesson into smaller, more manageable chunks so that our kiddos can process it and then reset for another stretch of learning.  I really wish I was better about writing down important research and backing it up with evidence like we expect our students to do because my rule of thumb has always been "one minute per grade-level" - so for a sixth grader, the manageable chunk of time they can "sit and get" is about six minutes, a seventh grader can sit for about seven, and so on.  I'm pretty sure I didn't just make this up, but I can't find the research to back it up.  In a behavior management document published by the University of Carolina, it is reported that kids can usually pay attention for their age +1, which would be about twelve minutes for a sixth grader, thirteen for a seventh grader, and so on.  My experience has been that it depends on the topic and the kids, and I'm sure that most of you would agree with me on this one.  Notice that for middle school, none of those numbers are even close to forty-nine, which is our current period length, so our job is to break up that time so that we can make the most of the instruction time we have with our kiddos.

CRISS's three-minute-pause is a longer time frame than the power teaching model with a more in-depth look at the content, but the idea of breaking up the content is the same.  CRISS values the idea that students should restate what they've learned, similar to Biffle's power teaching, but CRISS specifically asks students to make connections with the content, ask questions, or identify something that was particularly interesting to them.  Using a combination of power teaching and the three-minute-pause could be pretty powerful if planned and implemented well. 

Whatever your time specification - know that once your kiddos start to sign off, there is no more learning going on, so the more often you can get them to engage in the content, process it, discuss it, apply it, write about it, and reset - the more content they will internalize.  Biffle stops so often that my head starts to spin after about three minutes, but his illustration is one for teaching teachers how to use the strategies, and it is truly effective!  You have to make them your own.  What I love about his teaching method is the predictability of what is expected along with the validation that quick pace and discussion are important for learners at the middle and high school level.  Its classroom management and content management wrapped into one strategy, and it is beautiful.

October 11 Crumble - Using higher level questioning and the jigsaw to engage learners

I'm currently in the throws of planning an experience in a science classroom that includes close reading followed by several discussion strategies.  As I was flipping through my 4th edition CRISS manual tonight, searching for a crumble-worthy topic, I happened across the Question-Answer-Relationship (QAR).  I was then brought back to a conversation I had with the science teacher this last week who was pleased with a set of questions I had developed as the final discussion activity for our three-day experience, and my crumble was born!

Last year, as I was finishing up my graduate work for University of Nebraska, I was assigned some article readings geared toward problem-based learning.  If you've never run across the term problem-based learning, it's the idea that students learn through solving real-world problems - which, theoretically is a genius idea, but in practice takes either a miracle from God (a problem just happens to present itself that meets every CCSS target needed for the unit) or an ungodly amount of planning and finger-crossing.  Either way, I love the philosophy but am completely and utterly intimidated by it. 

So to bridge the gap between a daunting task of creating a problem-based learning experience and a completely un-engaging lesson, try using Bloom's Taxonomy to create questions that mimic problem-based learning or have students create questions for discussion.  Even better, try doing it using the jigsaw strategy. 

How can this work with a jigsaw?  Well, the first thing you have to do is fully understand what a jigsaw is supposed to look like.  Our plan for the students in science is to give them four parts of an article on climate change and allow them to choose which part they'd prefer to close read (see my previous blog on close reads or another recent blog by my colleague Jen White on the topic as well).  Once they've read and discussed their part of the article with a group of students who have read the same part, we plan to number the students in each group to create new groups where there will be four people in each group (one of each part of the article).  If there are seven students reading each article part, then we number the students off by seven in each group and then put all of they students with the same number together for their jigsaw. 

But instead of giving students direction to simply share information from their part with the rest of the group (as is typical in a jigsaw), our plan is to give the students a set of higher level questions to answer as a group.  Examples of the questions are:

• What one part of human life contributes to climate change more than any other?
• What is the single most piece of evidence that tells us that climate change is happening?
• Can we stop climate change?  Why or why not?
• Should human beings be required to do certain things to stop climate change from happening?

Our goal here with the set of questions is to spur discussion between group members who have all read a different part of an article or piece of text.  It works even better when group members have read entire pieces written from different perspectives.  Do you see how your students will have to use their speaking and listening skills carefully to communicate effectively and how they will learn from each other without just listing off a string of information they read in their part of the selection (that will either be ignored by group members or will superficially be copied down only to be shoved away in a notebook or tossed in the trash later on)? 

If you know anything about Bloom's Taxonomy, you may have identified most of the questions above as evaluation questions (second to highest step on the taxonomy).  We could have taken the discussion questions one step higher, but much of the final step in the taxonomy are more individual and reflective questions, and the goal at this point of the lesson is to get the students to collaborate, not self-reflect.  A few of the questions could actually fall between the final two steps of the Taxonomy - evaluating and creating.

So consider using some of the following question starters when presenting questions for group collaboration.  This table is adapted directly from page 104 of the fourth edition CRISS manual.

Bloom’s Taxonomy	Question starters
Creating	How can you adapt this information to __________? How can you apply _______ to your own life? Reinterpret _________ to fit with a different point of view. The author has changed my understanding of _____ by _____.
Evaluating	What is your opinion of _____? What is the best solution to the problem of _____? Defend your opinion about _______. Evaluate the writing of ________.
Analyzing	Compare ____ to _____.  In what ways are they the same? How are they different? Categorize the important ideas in ______________. What connections can you make to ____________.
Applying	What is one way to illustrate _______? How can you apply _____ to ______? How can you relate ______ to ______?
Understanding	What will happen next in ______? What is the main idea about ______? Predict what ______. How is this similar to or different from ______? Explain what is meant by ______.

The jigsaw strategy sounds complicated, and, in fact, on paper it seems to require a lot of organization, but honestly - our biggest task was choosing the text selections.  Once you wrap your head around the jigsaw organization and create a set of four to five questions, you're really all good!  You shouldn't have to teach anything - just demonstrate the close reading (which was described in the close reading blog) and mix up your kiddos.  They get to do the rest, and all you do is facilitate - which is good teaching, friends.  And because of the discussion and high level of engagement build into the lesson, your students are more likely to get involved and stay involved -- meaning fewer behavior issues and more learning!