The Micro Lab Protocol

For students to learn life's big ideas (key and related concepts), they must be engaged in thinking that allows them to construct meaning. In order for kids to be engaged and thinking, they must be participating in the learning engagements we have set up for them.

Students must be actively writing, conversing, manipulating, explaining, using, doing, reading, asking, sharing, listening, discussing, investigating, demonstrating, problem-solving, searching, finding, taking charge, THINKING, discovering, challenging, connecting, and synthesizing.

All too often though, many of our students do not engage in the kinds of behaviors that they need to for deep thinking and thus true learning to occur. Instead, those with high status tend to dominate groupwork activities and leave those with lower status to take on a more passive role. (To learn more about status in the classroom, see Elizabeth Cohen's book Designing Groupwork: Strategies for the Heterogeneous Classroom).

The Micro Lab Protocol (p. 147-151 of Making Thinking Visible by Ritchhart, Church, and Morrison) is "a simple structure for ensuring that all voices are heard and ideas attended to before the topic of focus is discussed." The authors point out that this strategy isn't a thinking routine per se, but it is a powerful tool for making students' thinking visible and assuring that everyone is engaged, thinking, and learning.

This summer, I had the fortune of working with a small group of 6th graders. We were working hard on adopting a growth mindset (for more on mindset, check out Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck or this blog post from July 18, 2014) as well as providing feedback to others in a constructive manner.

After watching a video that one of their classmates had created to explain a math concept, students worked in triads to share their thoughts on the video. They took one minute each to share what they thought the video's creator did well and what he could improve on in the future. While each student shared, the other members listened attentively without comment or interruption. After 30 seconds of silence, the routine was repeated for the second and third members of the group. After everyone had a chance to individually share uninterrupted, the group of three was invited to discuss freely and collectively come up with the feedback they would eventually share with the math video's creator. 

To reflect on the Micro Lab Protocol, I asked the students what went well during their sharing and subsequent discussions and what they could get better at. The t-chart below shows their reflections.

After reading about how 6th graders used The Micro Lab Protocol to ensure that everyone was engaged and thinking, how could you or have you used a similar equity strategy to guarantee that all students, regardless of status, are able to participate fully? 

Learning about key concepts during guided reading

In the Primary Years Program (PYP), like in all elementary schools, much importance is placed on learning how to read and write. Learning these essential skills, along with other literacy skills of speaking, listening, viewing, presenting, and non-verbally communicating, is absolutely necessary. However, sometimes we forget why students must learn about, with, from, and through literacy.

Preparing our students for high-stakes, mandatory, standardized testing sometimes distracts us from providing students with literacy learning that is engaging, relevant, challenging, and significant. In reality though, the best literacy "test-prep" we can provide our students is meaningful literacy instruction that is learned in the context of life's biggest ideas; in the PYP, we call these big ideas key and related concepts.

Recently, in fifth grade, students were reading the guided reading book "Clean Up City Park!" (a leveled text from Benchmark Literacy).

The text is written as a persuasive letter, written from the perspective of a child to the mayor, urging the mayor to get the city park cleaned up.

The fifth graders read through the text under the guidance of their teacher during guided reading, focusing on the development of particular comprehension and metacognitive reading strategies. Afterward, the teacher encouraged the students to enter into the PYP Action Cycle: reflect-choose-act.

As students reflected on their learning, they were able to make a connection to their own lives: they too had been around green spaces that needed to be cleaned up; in particular, the school grounds. Once they had chosen their action, the students identified key concepts that would help them organize their action plan. The teacher recorded the students' thinking about the key concepts as the students came up with them.

Using their collectively-identified key concepts as a guide, students began to independently plan their action. They used the key concepts of causation, connection, function and change as a framework to think about and plan their action.

 

The students enlisted the help of second graders, telling them about their plan which allowed the fifth graders to develop their literacy skills of presenting. Together the second graders and this small, guided-reading group of fifth graders plan on cleaning up the green space around their school. Most importantly though, working with the key concepts in a meaningful context allowed students to develop a better understanding of these big ideas.

Giving time and space for students to engage in relevant, challenging, and significant learning, is the best way to develop deep thinkers and thus raise reading test scores. Many reading researchers, including Knapp (1995), Taylor, Pearson, Peterson, & Rodriguez (2003; 2005), and Taylor & Peterson (2008) have found that when teachers encourage students to think about texts at a higher level more than other teachers, they see more growth in their students' reading scores (as cited in Peterson & Taylor, 2012, p. 297).

After reading about how 5th graders developed a better conceptual understanding about life's big ideas - the PYP key concepts - during meaningful literacy instruction, how could you or have you incorporated learning about key and related concepts into your literacy instruction?

Works cited: Peterson, D.S. & Taylor, B.M. (2012). Using higher order questioning to accelerate students' growth in reading. The Reading Teacher, 65(5), p. 295-304.

Teaching comprehension strategies to students using engaging and challenging texts

One morning, an elementary teacher casually asked the students if they had heard about an event currently in the news: the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 that had gone missing. The students started to share the bits and pieces of information that they had heard from various sources and instinctively, the teacher started to make the students’ thinking visible by writing down on the board what the students were saying, under the heading: “What we think we know”. Sensing that some of the information on their list was faulty, the teacher instructed the students to do a little research on their Chromebooks to either confirm or debunk the ‘facts’ that they had amassed.

The students took to the internet, searching for news stories and articles that would give them the information they needed. Students also wrote down questions that came up as they read further about the current event. Moving around the room of engaged students, the teacher realized that what had started as a ‘mini-inquiry’ (Daniels, H. & Harvey, S. (2009).Comprehension and Collaboration: Inquiry Circles in Action, Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.) could easily be turned into a whole-group mini reading lesson.

Following the scope and sequence of the reading curriculum, students had been learning the comprehension strategy of comparing. Learning this particular strategy allowed students to meet the Minnesota ELA Reading Benchmark: “Compare and contrast texts in different forms ... in terms of their approaches to similar themes and topics.” Over a break, the teacher designed a learning experience for the students that would allow them to apply the comprehension strategy of comparing, while still motivating them with their interest in the missing plane.

To support the students’ learning, the teacher identified three different articles about the missing plane: one from CNN, one from Al Jazeera, and one from Fox News. (NOTE: the texts were complex, but the students were capable of reading and understanding the articles selected with appropriate support. To find a general reading level of texts online try these resources: http://read-able.com or https://readability-score.com). The students were to compare the texts, noting important similarities and differences. Through the structure of this purposeful inquiry, the students were able to extract meaning from the texts they read and come to the conceptual understanding that news articles are written from the unique perspective of the journalist (and the journalist’s organization) and it is the responsibility of readers to synthesize what they read and make judgements for themselves.

After reading about teaching comprehension strategies to students using engaging, relevant, challenging, and significant texts, what is:

• An instructional practice you’ll continue to use because of the story.
• An instructional practice you currently use that you’ll reexamine in light of the story.
• An instructional practice you don’t currently use, but will try because of what you read in the story.