This is a teacher evaluation year for me, and so I enlisted and peer pressured a friend and colleague, Jen Fong at one of my high schools to let me deliver information literacy to a couple of her English classes. At first, I thought I was going to just co-teach her class of Emerging English Learners, but not wanting to juggle too many different lesson plans, we included all her college preparatory freshmen English classes too. What was interesting about this undertaking were ALL our competing goals--Jen's to teach English-Language Arts and integrate technology into her instruction AND mine to engage students in some critical thinking by having them craft their own open-ended research questions as well as "replace patch writing and plagiarism with synthesis." All students were reading A House on Mango Street, and so with protocols I learned from the Question Institute, I navigated students through writing their own close- and open-ended questions to the chapter "My Name" in Cisneros' novel. Once they practiced some convergent, divergent thinking and metacognition, I gave them a new question focus based on Jen's overarching question, How does race, culture, family and/or ethnicity impact who I am as an individual? We teachers really wanted our students' learning to be personalized and for them to research something they were really curious about. Below is my model.
