A Reformulation Rationale

 Welcome back, fellow educators.  I hope my blog finds you well.  Happy Independence Day.

     It is the time of year when we say, “Happy Birthday, America!”  And chant “USA!  USA!”  In our home, my step daughter, who I will from now on refer to as my daughter in my blog until the day I die, and my wife, who I will from now on refer to as “my wife,” will be spontaneously shouting, “America!” throughout the day.

         

          I am a Southern boy at heart so I think about a field in Pennsylvania and a river town in Mississippi on this day as much as I think about 1776.  The field, of course, is Gettysburg and the river town is Vicksburg.

I memorized the Gettysburg address a long time ago.  I taught it once for an American literature class.  The way I taught it was the traditional way:  assign it to read, discuss the difficult language, recite it if the students feel up to some showing off--at least as many lines as they would allow--and then pass out an assessment.

 The assessment largely consisted of the so-called QAR or Question Answer Relationships: 

Right there

Think and search

Author and me

On my own

They were terrific questions, and required class time to teach each one, but my students were not impressed.  I, however, felt I was being rigorous by using that format.

          In Leslie’s book The Write to Read she discusses the traditional attitude of reading pedagogy as being gladness that our darlings actually read the text.  They read the words, right?  They answer the questions we give them, right?  There’s a problem.

          All of us who teach reading know of students who answered the questions, got an A for the assignment, yet did not read the text.  In most cases, these students did not copy another student’s work. 

          Leslie modeled the Reader Response theory in the Coastal Savannah Writing Project.  Students respond to what they read.  They create their own meaning. 

It is, however, required that their response be valid:  “an interpretation (that) is not contradicted by an element of the text, and…nothing projected for which there is no verbal basis (page 2).”

The trick is to get our students to return to the text after they read it.  One good strategy for returning to the text is called a Reformulation.  A student returns to the text in order to put it into another form such as a play, a poem, a cartoon, a series of memos, etc.

Next, I will post a Reformulation of the Gettysburg Address as an I do, We do, You do strategy.  

Thanks for visiting.  I wish you all a most satisfying and meaningful Independence Day celebration.