Activity for a Community of Teachers: Focus on a Benchmark

by Carol Brown Dodson

So you don’t have a literacy coach at your school? Not to worry! Here’s a quick “how to survive without a literacy coach and still prepare for the OGT” activity. In an ideal world, every school would have a literacy coach, but in the practical world of budgets and staff reductions, you and your colleagues may need to be both teacher and literacy coach. By working with your peers to improve instruction and student performance, you will engage in meaningful professional development that you design in a community of teachers.

Start with the Test

When you review your students’ test results, do you ever wonder why they performed so poorly on the questions linked to a particular benchmark? You know that you taught everything included in the benchmark. You even covered the related grade-level indicators, and the students did well. Classroom assessments indicated that your classes knew and were able to do all that is required by the benchmark and indicators.

So what happened when they took the OGT? Your students very likely do understand the benchmark, but the way a question is framed on the test is sometimes confusing for the students, and they might not recognize what the test item demands from them. A periodic review of released OGT items reveals how a particular benchmark is assessed. By targeting a specific benchmark when you do a periodic review, you can turn your review of the OGT items into a good activity to delve into with your peers who also teach reading or language arts.

Creating a Community of Learners

You and your colleagues might begin by identifying a benchmark where student performance is weak. If your school doesn’t have a literacy coach, you and your fellow teachers, forming a community of learners, can identify a benchmark and continue this activity without a coach. With or without a coach, the benchmark and guiding questions should be shared a few days before you meet.

The following benchmark appears frequently on the OGT. Let’s review the benchmark along with the varied types of questions designed to assess student performance on the benchmark.

Discuss with your peers the meaning of the benchmark and how you presently teach it. In this discussion, you’ll find it helpful to refer to a particular work of nonfiction or other informational text you have asked students to analyze. Some of the guiding questions that follow will help frame your discussion.

1. How did you select the nonfiction text for this lesson/unit?
2. What key points did you ask students to look for as they read the assigned text?
3. What prereading, during-reading, and post-reading strategies were most effective in promoting student comprehension?
4. Did you focus on additional benchmarks? If so, what were they?
5. How did you weave in the additional information from the grade-level indicators?

For the next meeting, you might choose to move into a discussion of released OGT items that assess the benchmark you’ve selected.

Let’s examine some of the OGT questions which assess Benchmark D for the informational text standard. One question that assesses student achievement of the benchmark is based on the passage “Interpreting the Theater Without Speaking a Word,” an informational text about interpreted performances for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. The question asks students to select the response that best describes the writer’s argument.

Only 59 percent of students responding to the question correctly selected answer choice D, “praising the efforts of those who help the deaf and hard of hearing appreciate the theater.” (To read the entire passage and scoring comments, go to the Ohio Department of Education’s IMS website.) To answer this question correctly, students should be able to “analyze an author's implicit and explicit argument, perspective or viewpoint in text.” Although the analysis of the argument is not specified by the benchmark, the grade-level indicator tells us that this is exactly what students should be able to do.

Discuss with your community of teachers how you might guide students through a discussion of the passage that leads to an analysis of the author’s argument. Your students will likely look for an explicit thesis that is supported by examples or details; however, they will not find a carefully stated thesis. Instead, they have to read the selection closely to determine the author’s argument because the argument is implied by the examples and selection of details presented.

One way to direct students’ attention to the implicit argument is to give each student a copy of the passage. Divide the students into groups of three, and give a piece of chart paper to each group. Each group then finds examples or details that reveal the author’s argument. After the students list everything they find, each group should look over the details to try to determine the argument or viewpoint. Remind the students that the author’s argument or viewpoint is a synthesis of all the details, not just one example. When they think they know the argument, they should write it on the chart paper. After they determine the argument or viewpoint, each group should star or highlight the details that support the argument. The groups should report out (two to three minutes for each group), with one member identifying the argument and explaining how the group justified the conclusion. During the reporting out, you may need to comment on a group’s conclusions, reminding the students that they should look at the entire passage, not just part of it.

At the conclusion of the activity, distribute multiple-choice question 29 from the March 2008 OGT, and ask the students to mark the correct answer. Tally the correct answers, and continue the discussion about the implied argument. Some students will argue about the correct answer, but you’ll need to guide the discussion to show how answer D is the only answer broad enough to take in all the details and examples the author has presented. A similar but more extensive activity can be found in the lesson plan “Introducing the Essay: Twain, Douglass, and American Non-Fiction.” This extensive lesson includes links and reference materials where students can access additional essays.

Introducing the Essay: Twain, Douglass, and American Non-Fiction (ORC #8686)
This lesson plan introduces American literary non-fiction writing and emphasizes the recognition of rhetorical strategies used for persuasion in essays and other non-fiction. Students will discover many ways in which writers approach an essay topic: by telling a story (Narrative), by making comparisons (Compare/Contrast), by defining (Definition) or categorizing (Division and Classification). Emphasis is placed on essays that are specifically written for persuasion, like Martin Luther King, Jr.'s famous ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, and others that make an argument or debate a point more subtly, through the description of a scene or a review of an event. The lesson illustrates how some essays make use of satire and how others rely on deductive and inductive reasoning. Students explore various types of essays and read excerpts from the writings of Mark Twain and Frederick Douglass. The lesson plan concludes with students writing their own essays or critiquing a well-known essay based on their new knowledge of rhetorical strategies. Links are provided to additional lesson plans, websites, and tutorials for essay writing as well as to well-known essays and speeches by famous Americans

After your students engage in the OGT activity and complete the essay lesson, it’s time for another collaborative session with your colleagues in the community of teachers you have started. Bring in the chart paper from the activity, and share stories with each other about the successes of the activity. Look at the data you collected from your students after they responded to the OGT question. Bring in sample essays that students wrote for the lesson you used, and talk about what the students learned. Some guiding questions for this meeting might include the following:

1. Did students perform well on the OGT question? What helped them? If they performed poorly, what else can you do to help them improve their performance on a similar question? If results from various teachers are mixed, share collaboratively and in a nonjudgmental fashion what each of you did, and consider what worked and what didn’t work.
2. Consider establishing criteria and scoring holistically some of the essays written by the students. How did the students appeal to their audience? How did they develop their argument or viewpoint?
3. How can you help each other improve the lessons and strategies you’re using?

You might conclude that you need to observe each other’s classes so you can see how your colleagues teach the same lesson you’re teaching. Before this session ends, determine a schedule for observing each other’s classes. The next OGT item and accompanying lessons that your group chooses to tackle will provide an opportunity to observe each other.

 A Different Approach

A different approach to assessing the benchmark is found in the next two released OGT questions. You’ll notice that both questions focus attention on the use of a single word and the writer’s purpose for selecting that particular word or for calling attention to a word in the passage. Before sharing this item with students, you may want to emphasize the importance of every word and discuss how a writer selects words carefully to enhance an argument or viewpoint.

The following multiple-choice item was based on this paragraph from “The Sweat Soaked Life of a Glamorous Rockette.”

Ohio students responding to this question did quite well—82 percent answered it correctly. A look back at the paragraph where the word is found suggests that the placement of “gruelingly” in front of “hard work” and the context of the rest of paragraph 5 combined to make the item fairly easy for students.

Student performance on the next question was lower, with only 64 percent of students who responded to the question correctly selecting answer choice B. The question was based on the following paragraph from “Living Treasure.”

In answering this question, students had to discover how the word known that they are familiar with is used ironically to indicate that very little is known—nearly the opposite of the meaning of the word itself.

A lesson from the ORC website provides teachers with a way to teach the benchmark by presenting the students with political cartoons for analysis. Because cartoons use only a few words, the words are chosen carefully, and each word carries meaning. “Analyzing the Stylistic Choices of Political Cartoonists” is extremely useful for helping students understand the use of words as satire and as irony and simply for their actual meaning. Links to websites rich with political cartoons are included in the lesson, but students and teachers have access to an even broader collection by using news magazines such as Time and Newsweek as well as local and national newspapers found on the Internet or in the library media center.

Analyzing the Stylistic Choices of Political Cartoonists (ORC #6409)
Students learn terminology that describes comics and political (or editorial) cartoons and discuss how the cartoonists’ choices influence the messages that they communicate. After discussing several cartoons as a full class, each student analyzes the techniques that the same cartoonist uses in five or more cartoons. Students consider text, layout and design, and angles. They compare the techniques in the group of cartoons and draw conclusions about why the cartoonist chose the specific techniques to communicate their messages.

This lesson points to contemporary political cartoons but can also be completed with historical political cartoons. Resources for historical cartoons are included in the Web Resources section.

Community of Teachers

By now, you and your colleagues are likely to be comfortable enough with each other to discuss freely the successes and failures you are having in teaching these lessons and in leading students through a discussion of OGT items. You can share your peer observations with each other and look for additional ways to work together to improve instruction and student performance. For additional suggestions, you’ll want to read the other articles in this (March 2009) issue of In Perspective and learn about some of the strategies literacy coaches use in their work with teachers. You’ll find that you can adapt most of these strategies to your community of teachers as you continue your work together.

Carol Brown Dodson is the outreach specialist for the Ohio Resource Center. Dodson was an English language arts consultant for the Ohio Department of Education and is past president of OCTELA (Ohio Council of Teachers of English Language Arts). Dodson, formerly a high school English teacher, department chair, and supervisor of English language arts in Columbus Public Schools, serves on the Ohio Graduation Test Reading Content Committee.

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