The SMD Tool for Disciplinary Reasoning and Design for Identity Development: A Teachers View

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

Abstract

As a teacher who implemented use of the Sense-Making in the Disciplines tool in my middle grade classes in literature and social studies, this paper documents the pedagogical practices I designed to support close reading, argumentation (Goldman et al., 2016) and identity development (Spencer, 1987) along with the conceptual challenges posed considering the diversity of needs of my students, African-American from low-income communities. As an authoring tool, I and my colleagues selected texts and tasks for input into the tool. The affordances of the tool, unlike the commercial curricula that the school had been using, allowed me to provide resources that supported the diverse needs of my students: building background knowledge including building hyperlinks into texts, problem-solving organizers guiding students’ attention to text features, annotations categorized by type that supported students in metacognition and meaning making (Greenleaf, 2001).

Theoretical framing of both the teaching and analyses drew on Spencer’s PVEST (2006), identifying challenges faced by me and by students, the supports available through both the SMD tool, the Cultural Modeling Framework (C. D. Lee, 2007; C.D. Lee, 2014), and the collaborative design work with my colleagues; influencing both my conception of my pedagogical goals and my students’ epistemological dispositions with regard to reading in literature and social studies and their sense of self-efficacy and coping.

Data include field notes from department planning meetings, videos focusing on student discussions, student work, my own analyses of text challenges, and analyses of students’ work in the SMD tool from my classes. Data analyses entailed rubrics we designed to capture features of joint activity (in department planning, in student discussions) that we predicted would help shape outcomes for students and for me as a teacher; evidence of epistemological dispositions, ethics and civic reasoning for me as a teacher and my students.

Findings: Students, particularly those with struggles in fluency and decoding, demonstrated high levels of comprehension that outpaced what is predicted by their performance in fluency and decoding assessments. Students also demonstrated a deep engagement with complex conundrums of the human condition that are manifested in both their discussions in response to text and in their annotations on and writings about text. Moreover, students articulated concepts of identity that indicate strengthened self-concept. Also, students demonstrated strengthened capacity for written argumentation. Also, teacher self-concept also shifted in terms of the teacher’s power relations with the students, thinking about who directed the conversation, who initiated conversations, who had authority over decisions in the group, selected groups, who kept order - that shifted from me to the students over time. Analyses of planning meetings with my colleagues surfaced the conceptual challenges of integrating close reading and argumentation that was discipline specific to students with diverse needs while simultaneously focusing issues of identity development and social-emotional well being.

Author

• Leslie A. Russell, Northwestern University