Extended Analysis: RAFT Newspaper Article
ContextFor my 9th grade World History class I designed a new unit to help my students learn about “first encounters” between Europeans and Native Americans in Central and North America, with the goal of emphasizing the difference in perspectives from two different groups on the same event in history. I was explicit from the start of the unit that we were exploring the EQ: “How were Native American and European perspectives about the “first encounter” different?” Throughout the unit, students read excerpts of writings from and about each side of the debate, specifically the Spanish led by Hernán Cortes and the Aztecs under Montezuma. The final project for the unit asked students to write a newspaper article from the perspective of a fictitious journalist, alive and present at the time of the “first encounter,” about the difference in the way that Europeans and Native Americans perceived one another. Despite spending ample time on each phase of the assignment in class, fewer than a third of my students completed the final draft of the article. Many factors, such as truancy and behavioral disruptions to class, interfered with individual students’ ability to complete the project. The fact that some students were able to complete it shows me that the project was tenable, but I believe I will learn more now by limiting my focus to one phase of the project that the majority of the class completed, but not particularly well.
My analysis of this activity will draw on a selection of artifacts: I will cite my own observation notebook to analyze my thoughts on how I facilitated the project while it was underway; I will analyze select aspects of students’ products, focusing more on what they did rather than what they did not do; I will also look at the teaching tools I used to scaffold the project, such as the Reporter’s Notebook and the RAFT organizer where students constructed their rough drafts. My goal is to gain insight into how I can better facilitate students’ transition from their own perspective, in the present, to the perspective of a fictitious “reporter” in the past. Each perspective requires that students think critically about the evidence in front of them, and each requires that students suspend a certain amount of disbelief. Also, I aim to look into possible explanations for students’ failure to transfer ideas from the Reporter’s Notebook to their own narrative paragraphs. Connection to InquiryAs I proceed with my inquiry, I continue to ask myself if I am making clear to my students why I am asking them to pretend they are speaking in the first person for fictive or non-fictive historical figures—also, if I am making it possible to discern how to transition from one perspective to another. In the future, I imagine spending the first weeks of the school year constructing students’ understanding of what makes up their own perspectives, and testing their own “first person” selves in the class’s first endeavors on historical analysis. From there, I can better develop students’ understanding of perspective making with attention to historians, groups, and individuals in history.
I look again to my weekly reading notes to connect this artifact analysis to my inquiry question: Tara Boyer’s (2006) “Writing to Learn in Social Studies” indirectly addresses RAFT newspaper article writing assignment I used in this unit. Her article promotes the use of creative writing assignments to allow students to use their imaginations to narrate historical events and perspectives. Of her many suggested models, a Dialogue Journal and Diary best suit my goal for my students: to write in historical detail about events using the first person. But I want the first person to be purposeful: it does not necessitate that students write from their own perspectives, instead they could be writing from the perspective of an individual in history. The point is to emphasize the presence of “perspective” in historical thinking. I thought that Rénard Harris (2007) also offers some fantastic justification, in “Blending Narratives: A Storytelling Strategy for Social Studies,” about why to use semi-personal storytelling as a teaching tool for historical facts and concepts, particularly for “students who have difficulty recalling facts from text [but can] remember information from stories.” He writes, “Student empowerment comes from feeling in control of one’s options, and stories support that feeling.” As well as pointing out many other compelling reasons why first-person narratives are essential to engaging students who may not believe that historical information can connect to their lived experiences. And: In “Knowing the How and Why of History: Expectations for Secondary Students With and Without Learning Disabilities,” authors Susan De La Paz and Charles MacArthur (2003) list three significant hurdles to “strategy-supported project-based learning”: 1) students’ “bias of presentism;” 2) students’ “difficulty working with primary sources;” 3) students’ weak understanding of source bias “based on the perspective and motive of the persons who created them.” Upon reading this, I realized that evidence of #1 shows up in my class regularly, when students make evaluative statements about what people in the past did based on what they seem to believe about what’s possible given the resources they (my students) know in their own lives. Reading this also made me worry a bit about my inquiry question, which seeks to examine “first person reasoning in historical analysis.” Have I adequately prepared students to disentangle their present-day perspectives from the past events they analyze? Do they know enough about what was happening in a given moment of history to analyze a difference in perspective? Can they explain factors that influence differences in perspective, besides “time”? Students’ work on the project makes me believe that the premise of the project was sound, for they apply some historical understanding and compare two perspectives, but I believe that different teaching tools could have better facilitated the learning that took place. Tailoring my instructional language to an age-appropriate level of complexity is an ongoing goal for me, and something that emerged as a compelling explanation for students’ inability to transfer meaning across multiple organizers in the project. Thus, with my inquiry question so deeply situated in the curriculum and pedagogy that I implement in my classes, I must continue to examine the effect of my pedagogical practices on students’ ability to complete the learning tasks I assign. |
AnalysisTo introduce the final assignment, I used a framing technique called “RAFT,” which provides orientation and instruction to students when experimenting with a specific perspective. For this assignment, the RAFT follows:
Using the RAFT model worked well to clarify the assignment, because it made explicit the authorial perspective that the students needed to take. Following her observation on this teaching day, my Penn Mentor suggested that I made the mistake of not renaming “RAFT” to something more obviously descriptive for the students, and I also realized that I was too wordy in my instructions. I used the “Format” section to lay out a checklist for the project, to which I referred at various stages in the writing process (in lieu of a rubric). I made some critical mistakes in the way I facilitated the assignment, but laying out the RAFT on the assignment sheet was a great way to reinforce the instructions.
In preparation for this unit, I collected a total of seven sources (5 text and 2 visual) that students would read or observe and analyze in the context of full-class discussions. (I was optimistic that students would do some close reading independently, but that did not have much traction when I attempted it in class.) Students used a Taba Chart that I titled their “Reporter’s Notebook” to collect and reflect on quotes or observations from the various sources. The chart allowed students to compare a number of questions across multiple sources: a) Whose perspective? b) Quote from text; c) Why is it important? For visual sources, students used the same Media Analysis Worksheet (MAW) that they have used in many previous units, and did so independently. Close reading of the text sources was heavily facilitated by me—I asked students to offer suggestions for which lines to select, and why, and I modeled filling in the Reporter’s Notebook using a doc-cam and the classroom projector. In the end most students’ Reporter’s Notebooks looked pretty near identical, but for the written project they synthesized the information independently into a narrative. Students struggled to transfer their selected quotes and notes on “Why is it important?” from their Reporter’s Notebook to pg. 2 of the RAFT rough draft organizer. The instructions read: Only one student succeeded at transferring both a piece of evidence AND an explanation of that evidence in #4 and #5. Other students listed two pieces of evidence, with no explanations; one piece of evidence, with one explanation; or no evidence at all.
One interpretation is that my instructions were unclear. I purposefully had students writing in sentences, rather than simply entering the same information into another, smaller, table in this step. I could have drawn numbered lines for students to enter evidence #1, explanation #1, evidence #2, and explanation #2 for both #4 and #5. I could have done a better job modeling this step for the whole class. If I remember correctly, students arrived to this step at varying paces, so I ended up circulating the room to work individually with students as they started this step.
Another interpretation is that the authorial perspective students occupied when completing the Reporter’s notebook was different than the authorial perspective in which they were to situate themselves on the RAFT rough draft organizer. When responding to the question, “Why is this important?” in the Reporter’s Notebook, they were answering from their present stance as high school students in 2013. But when they were working on the rough draft of their article in #4 and #5, they should have been taking on the “Role” indicated in the RAFT. Could this explain why students struggled to build a narrative around the quotes they had already identified? Were they unclear about whose perspective THEY were writing from? Had the collection of quotes from in-class readings been so inauthentic due to my heavy facilitation, that students had not internalized their significance and thus couldn’t make use of the quotes on their own? A final interpretation of the incomplete nature of students’ work on this project is simpler: my instruction suffered from a lack of focus due to poor classroom management. See this excerpt from my weekly reading notes from EDUC657: Advanced Methods in Secondary Social Studies: This week’s readings forced me to rethink my scaffolding of the final project, to ensure that students both learn what I mean when I say “newspaper article”, and are thinking critically about the material they are quoting. I will borrow from the sample unit, “American Stories” (by Cheryl Becker Dobbertin) that we also discussed in TDL this week, to utilize another “concept attainment activity” to teach the basic structure of news writing. I think I will present my students with a few written examples of news stories and show a brief video of a journalist explaining how they write/structure a story. Then I will use a “reflective journal” activity to have students write about the procedures presented, decide what does/doesn’t make sense to them, and brainstorm how they will use their Reporter’s Notebook and select a “voice” to write the article. Additionally, I will create a Gallery Walk of the quotes that students will have accumulated in their Reporter’s Notebook, and have students have a “silent conversation” on big pieces of paper about what each quote tells us about that group’s perception of “the Other” in the first encounters. Reading these notes now, I realize that I did not use all of the scaffolding tools that I had intended to prepare students for the project. I sacrificed some thoroughness in my introduction to newspaper writing, my presentation of sample news articles and real newspapers that I brought to class, but didn’t build a lesson around, and I didn’t have students write the reflective journal. I deliberately excluded the gallery walk at the time of teaching, because students had indicated that they were growing tired of the small entries, and were ready to fit the pieces together into the rough draft without further exploration of their meaning. I see the result of my own hurriedness in the outcome of students’ work. If my students’ experience of my classroom environment is at all similar to my experience of my own classroom, then it makes good sense to me that my students’ work would reflect the challenges in classroom management that have emerged in this setting. For me, it is important to realize the positive and negative relationship between classroom climate and academic progress. I certainly don’t discount my students’ academic ability, given the possible explanations preceding, here. |