Academic Moves for College and Career Readiness, Grades 6-12. Jim Burke

      Acknowledgments

      A book such as this is the result of many people sharing with us their own ideas and discussing openly and in some detail their teaching practices to help us understand just what these essential academic moves are and how people teach them. We are particularly grateful to those teachers and colleagues who were willing to share and respond to our ideas from the earliest stages. These include Steve Mills, Di Yim, Melissa Murphy, and Morgan Hallabrin from Jim’s school, as well as Corey Brown and all the teachers with whom Jim worked in the Fremont Unified School District.

      Special thanks to the many teachers at Hutchison School and elsewhere who contributed to this work, including, in particular, Jennifer Futrell, Ivy Phillips, Donna Budynas, John Reynolds, Becky Deehr, and Sue Gilmore. These teachers shared not only their own ideas, but also provided offered the examples of student work used throughout the book to illustrate the ideas in practice. In addition, we thank the host of current and former students who allowed us to showcase particular assignments and products here.

      Collaborations always come with challenges unique to the work and those involved in doing it. Yet on this project, the usual obstacles of time, distance, and differences of opinion were never anything but opportunities for us to dig deeper into our own experiences and learning. Throughout our efforts to write the book, people at Corwin were remarkable in their insights and support. Lisa Luedeke, our editor, “got it” from the moment we discussed the idea for the book with her; her guidance from the beginning helped to improve the book and our own understanding of what we were creating, and we’re grateful for the help from Maura Sullivan, marketing manager; Julie Nemer, editorial development manager; Emeli Warren, editorial assistant; Melanie Birdsall, production editor; Rose Storey, cover designer; and Gail Buschman, interior designer.

      As with any book we write, our deepest gratitude is always for our students, who remain our most important teachers when it comes to what is possible, and our families, who inevitably are called on to support us and make sacrifices of their own during the time we wrote this book.

      Jim: As ever, my sincere gratitude to my wife Susan and daughter Nora for their patient support while I worked on the book. Most of all, however, this time around my deepest thanks must go to Barry Gilmore for agreeing to work with me on this project, and to Lisa Luedeke for bringing us together. I have long respected and admired Barry’s work, and after working with him on this book, that regard has only deepened and matured.

      Barry: My first thanks are extended to Katy and Zoe, my daughters, who not only show remarkable patience while I write but are sometimes even forced to test out ideas as well. I am also deeply grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with Jim, an educator whom I’ve considered a model of insight, thoughtfulness, and expertise for many years, and once again with Lisa, the best editor in this business.

      1 Analyze break something down methodically into its parts

       break down • deconstruct • examine

       The Main Idea

      Analysis is such a pervasive goal of teachers in all disciplines that it may even seem difficult, at first, to define the concept or to frame it as a clear process. Indeed, the term analyze appears so often in prompts and academic instructions that it’s easy to assume that this is a skill students already possess. Yet whether students analyze a painting, a current event, a passage of text, or a conversation, they must use similar steps that may not be intuitive.

      Underlying Skills:

       Understand genres and conventions. What comprises a novel? What are the elements of a science experiment, a primary source, or a poem?

       Recognize tools or elements. In order to analyze, students must be able to pick out pieces of a text such as rhetorical devices, elements of design, or types of argument.

       Recognize patterns and structures. Students must develop the habit of watching for repetition or other structural elements.

      Analyze: break something down methodically into its parts to understand how it is made, what it is, how it works; look at something critically in order to grasp its essence

       CORE CONNECTIONS

       Determine central ideas or themes of a text and analyze their development (R2)

       Analyze how and why individuals, events, and ideas develop and interact over the course of a text (R3)

       Analyze how specific word choices shape meaning or tone (R4)

       Analyze the structure of texts (R5)

       Analyze how two or more texts address similar themes or topics (R9)

       Analyze and interpret data to determine similarities and differences in findings (NGSS, MS-PS1–2)

      Before: Preparing Students to Analyze

      Students may bring misconceptions to the task of analysis. As you practice analysis for your subject area, be sure to clarify the need for the following with your students:

       Before you teach students to analyze a text, issue, situation, or work, try these four things:

       Model: Save student work so that you can show a class a successful example of a piece broken down into its component parts (see example, page 9). Have students practice the task of analysis on the piece in pairs or groups.

       Define Expectations: What does a successful analysis in your discipline look like? If it’s presented in an essay, do you expect to see specific types of evidence, a particular type of thesis statement, or a particular conclusion?

       Build Content Knowledge: Give students the academic language and understanding they need to look for evidence effectively. Do they need to understand terms such as diction or tone? Do they need to know how to read a political cartoon or a data chart? Prepare students for success by giving them the tools to analyze in your content area.

       Practice Mental Moves: Assign short texts to small groups or pairs and have students practice making the mental moves and answering the questions described in the Mental Moves feature in the sidebar. As you introduce skills such as analyzing, post the moves on the wall and keep circling back to them so that students internalize them and transfer them to new learning situations.

      Obstacles to the Moves

      When teaching students to analyze, watch out for these areas of difficulty:

       Projection. Students sometimes create an analysis based on what they want a work to say rather than on what the evidence supports.

       A Point, but Not the Point. In some cases, it’s fine to analyze a minor theme or aspect of a work, but make sure students do this on purpose and not because they’re missing core ideas.

       Incorrect Inferences. By nature, inference is tricky. When students get symbolic or inferential thinking wrong, their analysis can go downhill quickly.

      Mental Moves

      Analyze

      1 Look CloselyHow is it made? What are the key elements?

      2 Select DetailsWhich elements contribute most to overall meaning?

      3 Find PatternsWhat repeats? What is the structure and how does it support key ideas?

      4 InferWhat is going on beneath the surface? What is implied, symbolic, or metaphorical?

      5 Draw