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.

Whole Group Systematic ELD --Kindergarten at Garfield with Merce Guixa

Video: Merce Sys ELD B-EI lesson 11-13-15 (15 min.)

After teaching systematic ELD in Kindergarten for a few years as a classroom teacher, I am now a TSA at Garfield Elementary, where we also use systematic ELD during Designated ELD. The video captures a lesson I did in Kindergarten with a group of 22 students who represent different language needs. In this group, 14 out of 22 students are English Language Learners; eight are at a beginning English proficiency level and six are at an early-intermediate level. The remaining eight students are English-only students who participate in ELD with their peers during the first trimester of the year to provide a strong language model and support their peers with English language acquisition.

In Kindergarten, we have a 30 minute Designated ELD block that takes place five times a week. In contrast with other sites, we do not switch for ELD instruction and students stay with their homeroom teacher. From August to December, ELD is taught to the whole group and all students receive the same instruction, as most of our students are ELLs at early stages of English language development. In addition, many English only kindergarten students benefit from the general language development offered by the Systematic ELD kits. Then, in December, we move to a small group instructional model where students receive ELD instruction at their proficiency level based on ADEPT and CELDT.  

The lesson in the video is from lesson 2, week 3 of the The Art of Getting Along. The objective of the lesson was for students to tell what they want to do in class (and what they need to do it) using I, present tense verbs, and classroom objects. Previous to this lesson, students had already learned the vocabulary associated with classroom objects and the activities (action verbs) they do in the classroom such as play, paint and cut.

I planned the lesson to include and practice all the elements described in the learning objective, as well as all five parts of the lesson flow -- the opening, the I do, the we do, the you do and the closing. However, while teaching the lesson, I realized that students needed extra practice with the questions and, therefore, I spent more time on the Practice the New Language in Context (We Do) section. Typically, I ask for just one or two students to model the language for the whole group but, in this case, I invited more students to model and asked them to repeat the sentences as many times as they needed until each was able to ask and answer the questions individually.

As a result of the above modification, I made the “off the cuff” decision to cut the Close of the Lesson but still made sure to allocate at least eight minutes for the Language Application (You Do) section of the lesson, since providing the time to practice the language on their own is the most important piece of the lesson. I modified this part by asking students to practice with a partner using the cards and the baggies rather than using the board game suggested in the curriculum guide because it is more time efficient. Moreover, instead of using A/B partners, as also suggested in the curriculum guide for this lesson, I chose the inside/outside circle speaking protocol because students had previously used it during ELD with their teacher and they really enjoy it.

"Stretched Language" D4L 4th Grade Carpenter Measuring--Level C-Week 4-Lesson 2

Videos:

• The Full Sweep of the Lesson (13 min.)
• “Progressive Chunking” for student repetition of the bold sentences (4 min.)
• Think-Pair-Share, Academic Discussion and Writing (8 min.)

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Introduction 
As Gail Gibbons points out in her book Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning, one way to accelerate language learning is to create opportunities for "stretched language," i.e. "...when the situation you face requires you to use language that is beyond what you know how to do. You are pushed to go beyond the language you can control well and to try out ways of saying something that requires you to use language you are still unsure of, probably using faulty grammar or inaccurate vocabulary." (pp. 26-27)

One way to approach this lesson is to ask to what extent it creates chances for students to use "stretched language."

Time, Place and Group
In October of 2017, Ms. Martin and Mike Ray met to plan a D4L lesson for her 4th grade class at Fruitvale, and she then taught the lesson a couple days later with Mr. Ray jumping in now and then. This is a diverse group in terms of proficiency level, from high CELDT 2s to English-only students. The lesson was about 40 minutes long.

Things We Wanted to Try

1. As we planned, we were looking for places in the two-page lesson where Think-Pair-Share would give students a chance to extend the vocabulary concept they were studying as they reached for language. We were looking for "open-ended" questions that students might find interesting so that they would really WANT to talk together.

2. We used "Progressive Chunking" to help students reproduce the bolded, complex sentences in the lesson plan. "Progressive Chunking" is a sort of highly-scaffolded "stretched language" in which students repeat more and more of the sentence, adding chunks as they go: 

T: "The carpenter marks."
SS: "The carpenter marks."

T: "The carpenter marks her measurement."

SS: "The carpenter marks her measurement."

T: "The carpenter marks her measurement on the board."

SS: "The carpenter marks her measurement on the board."

T: Great. Now each person take a turn saying that to your partner (T circulates to listen).

3. We added an open-ended academic discussion question at the end where students could apply the language learned in their own way. We thought this would give them a motivating context for stretching: "What things do you think you might like to make out of wood? What might be challenging?"

4. We also planned for students to take this prompt directly into writing, with the academic discussion supporting the writing that followed.

What Happened

1. The Think-Pair-Shares worked well, with students sometimes stretching to express their ideas, and motivation remained high, with one student spontaneously suggesting in a quiet voice, "Can we talk together again?"

2. The progressive chunking worked well, and as we watched the video, we noticed that even when the students could not repeat one of the bold sentences, they were stretching for meaning. Ms. Martín moved on from bold sentences before repeating them became a boring chore, and this seemed to help keep student engagement up over time. 

3. Students were very engaged in the open-ended academic discussion at the end. We noticed students explaining WHY they would want to make something even though we didn't ask them to (which perhaps we should have). We noticed students encouraging elaboration less by stock prompts such as, "Can you tell me more about that?" and more just out of a passion to say more and to explain more.

4. The writing was fairly high volume, with most students writing several sentences directly related to what they had discussed with their partner and using at least a couple of the words we studied that day.

Conclusions

You can get students to produce "stretched language" if the learning context is engaging, relevant and challenging at the same time. Overall, we felt we created various opportunities for stretched language, and that students enjoyed the activities and the challenge.

• We concluded that fumbling the bold complex sentences is OK--it means students are being pushed and entering the territory of "stretched language." We thought the progressive chunking maintained the focus on meaning, with each progressive chunk causing the sentence to mean more. 

• We thought three Think Pair Shares per lesson worked well, because, again, it gave them a chance to try out language and express new ideas. However, we didn't always choose the best question from the manual.

• The academic discussion and writing worked well, and we thought we should have students read their pieces to each other as well. This could be a nice way to open the next lesson.

• Finally, we noticed as we watched the video that we very rarely pushed students to further elaborate their answers or provide evidence for their ideas. This is a growth area for our teaching, and it would have provided more opportunities for "stretched language."

---Mike Ray, OUSD ELD Coordinator, with Lilia Martín, 4th grade at Fruitvale

D4L Pablo Picasso "Head" Video-1st Grade

Video: D4L 1st Grade Box A theme 1 week 3 lesson 1
Time: 7 minutes

In OUSD, Discussions4Learning is most often used as a supplementary Designated ELD material in grades 2nd to 5th. However, some sites are trying the Box A, the first of the four, in 1st grade, and an introductory video provided on the D4L website from Worcester MA actually features a 1st grade class.

Time, Place and Group
In May of 2017, Ms. Blossom at New Highland Academy graciously allowed me into her classroom during her Designated ELD time to try the lesson. This group had a fairly high proficiency level, from high CELDT 2s to English-only students.

Things I Wanted to Try
1. Teach the students the Think-Pair-Share protocol. TPS encourages me to include Think or wait time, and allows all students oral practice during the Pair while I circulate to check for understanding. During the Share I can either just take some answers, or, if the prompt is open-ended and rich enough, have a full academic discussion.

2. A lesson prep procedure that included several planning moves which I think are applicable to many lessons, especially b, c and d.
a. Adding a very open introductory question: "Look at this image, what do you notice?" which I had seen other teachers use. It allows students to try out all kinds of language and make a personal connection to the details of the image. This comes in handy for developing language later in the lesson.
     
b. Reading through the whole script and deciding where I could put the Think-Pair-Share opportunities. I wanted to pick questions from the script that were fairly open ended and that kids might feel comfortable discussing independently.

c. Using a different "progressive repetition" procedure for repeating the black bold sentences. First, the teacher says the first logical chunk of the sentence and has students repeat it. Then s/he says that first chunk but adds on the next as well, and has students repeat that. The teacher keeps going until s/he gets to the last chunk, and then s/he has the students repeat the sentence to partners:
          T: He transformed
          SS: He transformed
          T: He transformed things we see and use
          SS: He transformed things we see and use
          T: He transformed things we see and use into art.
          SS: He transformed things we see and use into art.
          T: Great, now say, "He transformed things we see and 
          use into art" once to your partners.
          SS taking turns in Pairs: He transformed things we               see and use into art.

I like the way this technique provides a high level of scaffolding but keeps students at all levels engaged as they attend to how the sentence gradually unpacks, similar to the way students follow the gradual creation of a pictorial input chart. The procedure thus makes repetition of key vocabulary and sentence structure a bit interesting, helping students get "miles on the tongue" during Designated ELD time.
    
d. Making sure there was a bigger open ended question that I could use after the lesson to drive a more open academic discussion. I decided to add, "Do you think this sculpture is funny? Why or why not?" after the vocabulary review at the end of the lesson.

What Happened
When you watch the video, maybe you'll see that some things worked and some didn't.

What I see at times is that I have some very short wait times after I ask a question, and that I talk quickly. If I could have allowed more wait times and spoken at a fast walking speed, rather than a run, it probably would have been more comprehensible. That said, I think the gestures and repetition of key words allowed students to understand what was going on. That "message abundancy" is something that Gibbons talks about in her amazing book, Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning, so I always try to include strategic repetition of important language when I teach.

I made the decision, after the lesson, to cut out the word "transport." This is not something I did lightly, partly because the 4 to 6 words taught in each lesson intentionally spiral over time, so leaving one out could cause difficulty later. 

I took the the word out because it breaks up the theme and meaning of the lesson. All the other words and conversation nicely center around the theme of Picasso transforming the everyday into art, while transport is completely disconnected from this theme. Notice how transform and transport are also very similar in sound, something which also confused many students.

Conclusions
Overall, I felt that it worked well for first grade. The students were interested in the image, and I could see them stretching to find language to talk about the image. That kind of supported language stretch is just what is called for in the CA ELA/ELD Framework. 

The technique of "progressive repetition" (let me know if you have a better name for this technique) also worked well. 

I only wish I could have had the academic discussion at the end because I wanted to see how students talked about the image, and whether any of the vocabulary learned would come up, or whether they could be nudged into using it. In the end, difficulties with the word "transport" with this group took up too much time.

Finally, I think a slower pace for me would be better, with a bit more listening and pausing to really see and hear what is going on.

Below I include the pages of the lesson, which I like to photocopy and mark up before I do a lesson. 

---Mike Ray, OUSD ELD Coordinator

Small Group Systematic ELD-- 1st Grade B/EI at Garfield Elementary with Merce Guixa

Video: Mercè Guixà-11-15-15-Art of Getting Along 1st-B-EI--Prepositions

00:00 Intro

00:30  Open the Lesson

2:34:   Model and Practice - I Do / We Do

16:47  Practice the Language - You Do

25:09  Close the Lesson

26:06  Comments from Mercè - Chunking the lesson on the fly

I taught systematic ELD at the Kindergarten, 1st and 2nd grade levels when I was a classroom teacher. I am now a TSA at Garfield Elementary, where we use systematic ELD in Kindergarten, 1st and 2nd grade during Designated ELD. We use ADEPT as an internal assessment to group students based on their proficiency level for ELD. For 1st and 2nd grade we teach ELD in small groups, as you can see in the video, which shows a group of 1st graders at a beginning/early intermediate level.

The lesson in the video is from lesson 3, week 2 of the The Art of Getting Along. The objective of the lesson was for students to use I need with classroom vocabulary to make requests, pronouns it’s or they’re, and prepositions in, on, next to and under to tell where something is located. Previous to this lesson, students had already learned the prepositions in and on, and were asked for object locations using where is and are with associated classroom vocabulary.  

The systematic ELD lessons are designed for 40 minutes of instruction but our Designated ELD time in small groups is for a shorter amount of time. I planned the lesson to include and practice all the elements described in the learning objective and including all five parts of the lesson flow--the opening, the I do, the we do, the you do and the closing, but in this short amount of time.

However, while teaching the lesson, I realized that students were struggling using all the prepositions together so I made the decision to just practice sentences with the plural form of the verb and the pronoun they and leave the singular and the pronoun it for another day. This is an example of “chunking” the objective into smaller pieces and taking two days to do one lesson. It is often necessary with Systematic ELD lessons and it is also common for the chunking ideas to occur to me as I am teaching a lesson which is when  the needs of students become clearer. This is often true even when I have planned well.

Even though it might seem that this chunking is slowing down the pacing, I believe it is about the “quality” time to practice over the “quantity” of the lessons being taught. And again, providing students with multiple opportunities to practice the language will only help and reinforce their learning.

As I explained at the end of the video, the follow up for this lesson would be to review and practice the same language and with the added singular form of the verb to be with it. This would provide students with more opportunities to practice the language and grammar with a special emphasis on the prepositions.