Sense-Making in the Disciplines: Literacy Resource for Interrogating Past and Future As Teacher Pedagogical Tool

• In Event: Sense-Making in the Disciplines: Literacy Resource for Interrogating Past and Future As Teacher Pedagogical Tool

Abstract

In these turbulent times, civic reasoning requires dispositions to interrogate information to inform our efforts. Critically examining the past and present is a goal for both teachers and their students. Drawing on the NAEd report Educating for Civic Reasoning and Discourse, we report on the design and findings of use of the Sense-Making in the Disciplines (SMD) tool to support close reading and interrogation of texts in literature and history in grades 6-12. We focus on these disciplines because each offers unique opportunities for wrestling with complexity around political contestations in our current and past history and for wrestling with complexities of understanding diverse cultural communities in tandem with wrestling with the conundrums of our relationships with the self and others as humans. NAEP data, in civics and reading, consistently show low achievement across grades. We have insufficient practices in the teaching of critical reading comprehension within and across disciplines. Our practices and assessments typically focus on comprehension outcomes with insufficient attention to the processes of reasoning through texts, particularly disciplinary texts. The project is informed by findings from the science of learning and development, such that the design focused on not only cognitive comprehension skills, but equally important on the selection of texts and pedagogical practices supporting students in feeling efficacious, in perceiving the relevance of their analytic tasks, and in wrestling with both civic and personal meaning making, at this critical point in their development as adolescents. The tool acknowledges teacher autonomy in that it is a platform where teachers can input their own texts and use the project developed supports to design tasks that explicitly teach disciplinary comprehension strategies, and strategies to support disciplinary argumentation. We report on professional learning communities of teachers examining videos of their practice to empower students as readers and civic agents. We focus on the teacher learning opportunities and impacts on student learning.

The presentations address:
• The underlying pedagogical model of the tool supporting close reading and argumentation and the professional learning community of teachers learning together in support of wholistic development and civic reasoning
• Findings from longitudinal analyses of the outcomes of the multi-year project
• Findings from the analyses of student argumentation and videos of practice
• Teachers’ self-reflections on their learning journeys in this work.

Author

• Carol D. Lee, Northwestern University