Stronger and Clearer ELD Strategy

 Video: Stronger and Clearer Each Time - Eunice Yoon - 5th - Greenleaf 

4 - MINUTE VERSION

12 - MINUTE VERSION 

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My experience teaching English Language Learners over the years has led me to conclude that when ELLs struggle in reading and writing, the root cause is actually underdeveloped speaking and listening skills. 

To me, the strategy called Stronger and Clearer Each Time, developed by Jeff Zweirs, seemed like a way to build up these skills and use speaking in support of writing because it gives students multiple opportunities to discuss their texts or topics taught in class with the help of their peers. Each time they talk, they are supposed to make their statement stronger, meaning more examples and details, and clearer, meaning better organized, beginning with a topic sentence statement and then listing supporting reasons. So, you are basically trying to get students to speak in paragraphs, with the paragraph getting better and better as they talk to more students. If they can speak in paragraphs, then they can write in paragraphs!

I feel as though many of my students have a lot of anxiety around being correct or right when completing tasks in class. This anxiety is lowered with the Stronger and Clearer Each Time as an Integrated ELD strategy since students are reassured that their ideas can be strengthened and improved with the help of their peers as they use conversation to learn in an authentic way.

Here are the steps of the strategy:

1. Pose a question about which students have prior knowledge that is aligned with what is currently being taught in class. Make sure the question is not a yes or no question, but one where students are asked to explain their thinking.
2. Give students time  to answer the same question independently in writing, using complete sentences (depending on the grade).
3. Partner students up. In my class, I allowed students to choose their partner.
4. Partner 1 shares their response while Partner 2 is actively listening and taking notes of any new ideas they hear to make their own response stronger and clearer.
5. Now Partner 2 shares while Partner 1 is listening and taking notes.
6. Students synthesize what they heard with their own ideas and get ready for their next partner. 
7. Repeat steps 4, 5 and 6 as many times as the teacher thinks. I kept it to 3 different partner talks for the sake of time and student engagement.
8. Students create a final written response which is stronger and clearer than their first one based on what they have listened and learned from their peers to.

Students used a Stronger and Clearer Each Time Note Catcher TEMPLATE like the one created by Jeff Zweirs to help them through the strategy.

Planning and Delivering the Introductory Lesson

While planning for my first Stronger and Clearer lesson, I wanted to teach the strategy explicitly in isolation with a familiar concept so students would be focused on how the strategy works rather than on learning new information. The video you see linked in the blog post shows this introductory lesson during Integrated ELD time. I chose a topic that all my students could get on board with: “What makes recess important?” My students’ eyes quickly lit up with ideas they wanted to share with their partners. Everyone was asked to write a short response to that question to help them process their thoughts.

Next, I demonstrated how the strategy of oral language exchange would work. Students were chosen as volunteers to play “mock” partners with myself and I had my partner student share her idea first. Once she was done sharing, I was able to orally tell her the ideas I had heard that could make my original response "stronger" by providing more and better examples. Then, I took notes into my template to include those better examples.

Next, vice versa, I shared my response and she listened and verbalized the ideas she thought she would “borrow” in order to make her idea stronger and clearer. Next, we took a minute to synthesize our ideas before talking to my next partner. This whole model with partners happened one more time but this time with different students  By the end of the demonstration students were able to understand the structure of the strategy as well as the benefits of talking to more than one peer in order to strengthening their own ideas. 

We then went through the whole process as a class and finished by writing a new response that combined their original response and any examples or ideas they had heard from others.

After the first lesson I debriefed with my TSA Maria Inglés, our school’s principal Romy Trig-Smith and staff from the ELL & Multilingual Office, Rita Pope and Mike Ray.

Follow-Up Lesson Related to Content

The intro lesson done, for the following day I chose a question that was related to the content we were learning in class: “Why are sports important.” Before students do the Stronger and Clearer strategy it is important that they have background knowledge on the topic so they can draw knowledge and evidence from those sources or experiences. After presenting the prompt, I reminded the students of the structure of the Stronger and Clearer strategy.

In addition, I began to explicitly teach some of the language to connect ideas (ELD Standards Part II - C Connecting and Condensing Ideas) that I saw them trying to use on the first day, for example, “Another reason I think _______ is ________.” This helped them make their responses clearer.

Nearly all students were engaged and excited to again use this strategy that lowered the anxiety of having to speak to their peers about a complex topic. As I was facilitating and holding expectations of partner work and monitoring behaviors, I was pleasantly surprised how in-depth students were talking about their responses and the natural dialogue that was occurring across the room was wonderful. The positive impact on oral language development as well as teamwork and collaboration was very strong and evident.

Next Steps

Next time, I plan to use this strategy to improve not only my students’ oral language skills, but also their writing abilities. Since I teach the fifth grade I find it acceptable to require that their responses are formatted and structured in paragraph form with an expectation of transitional phrases, and I believe that this learning can move from the supported oral practice (speaking in paragraphs) to writing (writing in paragraphs). I also realized that this does not all have to be done in one day, and that their responses can be revisited and revised over multiple days.

Stronger and Clearer Each Time also makes for a great starter activity for the large writing projects I have planned this year. I would also love to see how this strategy unfolds in a small group setting. Small groups are a great opportunity for teachers to closely analyze students' mastery of learning targets and if this strategy was used in a formative way like an exit ticket, I would love to see what data I can pull from it.

In sum, Stronger and Clearer Each time has become a valuable tool in my teacher toolbox that equally supports my ELLs as well as all my students!

Unpacking Sentences, Packing in Learning

12-MINUTE VIDEO- Sentence Unpacking - Hugo Lawton - Greenleaf - 4th - 1.24.18

By Hugo Lawton, 
4th Grade Teacher at Greenleaf Elementary

One sentence. Fifty-three minutes. As an educator still developing his time management skills, I can usually rely on my students’ subtle hints telling me to move on, but not during this lesson, my first attempt at Sentence Unpacking, in which their engagement seemed as if it could sustain indefinitely. While academic discussions are commonplace in my classroom, they are usually centered around broad concepts and models, requiring students to utilize their background knowledge and problem-solving skills to talk about issues. Before putting the Sentence Unpacking ELD strategy into practice, I never would have considered the depth of conversation that can be prompted by a single sentence. Not only did the sentence unpacking strategy help to facilitate a meaningful, engaging discussion for my students, but it also helped them to interact with several ELD standards and language conventions through the lens of social studies content.

As a teacher in a classroom and community with a high number of English Language Learners, I am always looking for new ways to strengthen my students’ English skills and their comfort with using English in a variety of settings. This strategy helped students to analyze the language features found within a sentence from a complex text we read as a class. Not only this, but students were also able to practice using the language feature of focus in their own writing.

I first encountered the unpacking sentences ELD strategy in a meeting with the Instructional Leadership Team at my school, during which time I indicated interest in working with the ELLMA office to showcase my own learning of the strategy and how my students benefited from it. After reading through the description of this strategy, it was clear to me that the strategy had the potential to be a high leverage routine in my classroom. Not only does the sentence unpacking strategy help students to understand texts with complex sentences, it helps them to analyze the content and language contained within complex texts, so that they can draw deeper meaning from what they read. While the strategy scaffolds this process and provides a clear procedure for students to follow, it sets the groundwork for students to be more independent in tackling more challenging texts.

In preparation for my first sentence unpacking lesson, I first looked through complex texts that I had already planned on utilizing during shared reading time. While my students’ reading levels vary greatly, I chose a grade-level text to unpack and incorporated differentiation into the lesson plan to make sure the text was accessible to all of my students. The text I chose was adapted from a GLAD unit on the California gold rush. The unit is structured around expert groups, with each group learning about a certain population’s experience during the gold rush. The text that I utilized for this initial sentence unpacking lesson was about miners who traveled to California from Mexico in the hopes of striking it rich. Within this text, I first found a sentence to focus on in the lesson. I selected the following sentence:

Because of this, California passed a law that made foreign miners pay $20 a month, a lot of money in those days, in order to work.

This sentence is an ideal one for the sentence unpacking strategy because it contains several chunks that provide opportunities for discussions about both content and language.

Once I had chosen the sentence, I then chunked the sentence for myself into sections that had the potential to provide meaningful discussion. I chunked the sentence based on meaning and language features, in this way:

Because of this, California passed a law that made foreign miners pay $20 a month, a lot of money in those days, in order to work.

Each of the chunks chosen contribute to the overall meaning of the sentence. To be able to unpack the sentence in a thorough way, students need to analyze these individual chunks, determine their meanings, and evaluate how those meanings contribute to the sentence as a whole.

In order for me to help students to be able to do this, I recorded all of the meanings of these chunks as simple sentences. There were countless simple sentences that I determined from these chunks, some of which were:

All foreign miners couldn’t work without paying $20.

$20 was a lot of money in those days.

(Inference) White lawmakers and miners wanted to discourage people from other countries coming to CA.

(Inference) White miners were racist.

Mapping out all of the simple sentences found within the chunks, including inferences I drew from those chunks, helped me to predict and prepare for my work with students on these chunks.

All of these simple sentences helped to unpack the meanings found within the sentence, but I then needed to identify the language features that this sentence contained in order to teach their purposes and to help students identify the features in other contexts and use them in their own writing. Note that, in this first sentence unpacking lesson, I chose a sentence that was rich with language and then unpacked the language features inside the sentence, but this strategy is also effective when the sentence chosen has specific language features that you are looking to target based on the ELD standards or areas in which students need support. In this sentence, I chose to focus on the introductory clause, “Because of this,” and the explanatory phrase, “a lot of money in those days.”

See OUSD Sentence Unpacking - 4th Grade  Mexican Immigrants - Gold Rush lesson plan for reference.

While this planning process may seem substantial, it is similar to the work I would have done when preparing for any close reading of a complex text, and helped me to more closely understand the text and its chunks myself, helping to prepare me to guide students through the process. As I implement the sentence unpacking strategy more and the routines solidify, this planning process will become more manageable. When it came time to teach the lesson, it was clear how this meaningful, thorough planning process placed me in a strong position to help my students unpack the sentence and analyze its meaning and structure.

During my first implementation of the sentence unpacking strategy, I was impressed by how smoothly and effectively the procedure facilitated my students’ thinking and understanding of the sentence. As captured in the video, my students began with an accurate but basic understanding of what the sentence meant, drawing largely on their prior knowledge of the gold rush. As we progressed through the chunks and they had opportunities to discuss their ideas about the meanings, I was pleased with how visibly their understandings were deepening - not only of the content and ideas expressed within the sentence, but also with how those ideas were communicated. Particularly, students’ abilities to identify the value of explanatory phrases, and use them, were clearly strengthened throughout the lesson. At the conclusion of the lesson, students were able to reflect on how this strategy helped them understand the gold rush more deeply, and they indicated their surprise at how much meaning could be obtained from a single sentence that they may have just brushed over otherwise.

As I move forward with this strategy, I am excited by the many possibilities for extension and adaptation in my classroom. Already, I have facilitated the use of the sentence unpacking strategy in small groups, with students analyzing sentences from their own expert group articles. I also see the possibility for supporting my students in using the strategy independently, stopping to unpack and analyze sentences that they find challenging in books they read or on passages on tests. As my students and I gain fluency using the strategy, I have been able to get the time spent going through the process down to 25 minutes, or half of what it took us the first time. This has been accomplished because I have focused the discussions of the sentence on fewer, higher leverage chunks and limited the number of objectives for the lesson, going deeper into fewer elements rather than rushing through several. Ultimately, I hope that sentence unpacking can become a valuable and accessible strategy for students to use in comprehending and evaluating any text they encounter.