ELA Teachers, It's Our Time to Shine!

Albert Einstein said, "I never teach my pupils.  I only attempt to provide conditions in which they can learn."  Teachers, we are headed into a very peculiar time.  

Who would have thought a month ago we would be stuck in our homes trying to figure out how we can best teach our students remotely.  Not me! A few weeks ago, I was planning how to best prepare students for our upcoming state testing.  Now, that is no longer a priority.  Instead, we are presented with a unique opportunity: providing conditions in which our students can learn and grow... from a distance. 

Our challenge is this: how can we provide engaging ways for students to practice their literacy skills?  Also, even more challenging, it has to be attractive, meaning students have to want to participate in the activity because for most public schools like mine, learning during this time is voluntary because not all students have access to internet.

There is no substitute for a real live, breathing teacher.  However, with the use of eTools, we can provide optional activities to sidetrack our students' stressed and bored brains during this difficult time.  

This is our time to shine and show the awesomeness of our profession!   

Below, I have compiled a list of ideas for ELA teachers to use to during this time.  They are based on the published works of the masters in our profession.  

Google Students Way to Learning

Many teachers have already leveraged the G Suite as a workspace for their students.  Google has changed the face of education in ways few of us could have ever imagined.  If you haven't set up a google classroom for your students, now is the perfect time!  Google Classroom helps organize day-to-day tasks, communication, and foster greater collaboration and it's easy to use.  This tutorial can help you get started.  Google Docs is an easy way for students to create their writing.  Also, using Docs allows for easy collaboration between other students and the teacher.  Here is a quick tutorial for Google Docs.  

If you are considering using the G Suite for your virtual teaching, I recommend The Google Infused Classroom by Holly Clark and Tanya Avrith.  It includes easy-to-follow instructions to help you use online technology to engage your students. Google has the power to help our students visualize their thinking, give each them a voice, and allows them to share and publish their work.  Not only is this useful for our current times, but it will make you a more diverse teacher for the future. 

Poetry With Kwame Alexander

Poetry is a powerful method to engage students in writing that is meaningful.  Many teachers feel they aren't prepared to teach poetry, so they stay as far away from it as possible.  This is unfortunate because there is no better pathway to writing success for students.  Think about it: poetry uses word economy, meaning you can use fewer words to get a point across and it doesn't have to follow grammar rules.  I can't think of any other writing genre that would be more accessible for struggling learners.  

I know my students all love Kwame Alexander's verse novels.  Once they realize they can use poetry to tell a story like Kwame did in The Crossover, they're in!  The Write Thing by Kwame Alexander gives dozens of ideas for engaging students in poetry.  After students create their poems, you could have students publish their writing using Padlet.  Padlet is a website that allows you create a blank digital wall where you student work can be gathered.   Here is a Padlet Board I used last year to collect our poetry.  We even had many famous authors contribute to our board.  The key to getting students to write poetry is helping them realize poetry is already a part of their lives through the music they listen to, and that they, too, can use it as a way to tell a story.

Digital Writer's Notebooks

In Ralph Fletcher's book, The Writing Teacher's Companion, he describes components of a successful Writer's Workshop that help students find their voice.  He discusses the Writer's Notebook as a tool to do this:  "The Notebook is a high-comfort, low-risk place...that gives kids unparalleled space and time and freedom to find their stride and start living the writerly life."  He goes on to say, "play has been largely banished from the writing classroom.  That's unfortunate because children need to play with language in order to grow into strong, confident writers.  I think of the notebook as a playground, a place to play with language in countless ways.  Students can use their notebooks to experiment by writing notes, sketches, doodles, spoofs, jokes, poems, limericks, cartoons, songs, raps, plays, ads, memes, banners, or bumper stickers."  

Has there ever been a more perfect time to move students towards using the Writer's Notebook? You can do this in a variety of digital ways.  The easiest way is using Google Docs.   Encourage students to express their thoughts through their own Writer's Notebook.  Innovate ways for them to share their notebooks with each other and respond to the thoughts and feelings of their peers.

The Creativity Project

The Creativity Project by Colby Sharp is a favorite of mine!  It compiles more than forty children's authors and illustrators story starters using a variety of mediums, including photos, drawings, poems, prose, or anything they could dream up.  Each story starter has a response from another author or illustrator of a creative work they wanted to share.  Much of the book can be previewed on Amazon.  

Using this book as a mentor, why not do something similar for your students? Email students asking them to submit story starters.  The story starters could be photographs, prompts, a short story that needs continued, a comic, a sketch, or anything else they can come up with.  Once you've compiled their submissions, create a Screencastify introducing your own Creativity Project or host a Zoom meeting, which is free to educators right now.  You could organize the story starters on a Hyperdoc.  A Hyperdoc is a student-facing online document that links a variety of resource links in one place.  There are a vast number of ways available to publish students' responses, including a Padlet board or a Google Folder.

Using Debate to Leverage Student Learning

Decades ago, if students wanted to learn, school was the only place to access learning resources.  This is no longer the case.  Now, students can access a wide assortment of knowledge from their devices.  Teachers are not the gatekeepers to learning, but rather the guides.  In Matt Miller's Ditch That Textbook, he provides endless ideas for guiding students thinking with digital experiences.  One of those ideas is through debates.  

We all know students love to debate, so why not provide them the opportunity?  Create a document of several debatable topics that would interest your students.  The New York Times has provided 100 debatable questions with texts to make it easier.  Present the choices to students through a Hyper Doc or Google Slide that presents the topics available for debate.  Allow students to sign up for debates through a Google Form or Slotted, which is an online signup tool.  Depending on your preference, you can use Google Hangouts or Zoom for virtual, live debates or create a chatroom in Backchannel for ongoing debate chats.  There is an endless number of digital tools available to provide a space for debate!

Now, more than ever, teachers play a vital role in providing some normalcy and routine in the lives of our students.  It requires us to be innovative as we provide learning opportunities that reinforce the skills our students acquired throughout the school year.  

If you have any ideas, please put them in the comments below.  After all, teachers are the best thieves around, so give us something to steal!  

Why Do I Have to Learn This?

My teacher brain is hardwired to think in terms of units. I recognize the possibility this compulsion may come from leftover remnants of my decades-ago college education where I spent hours creating unit binders.  Seriously, that's no joke! Anyone who graduated college with a teaching degree from "back then" knows I speak the truth.  I left college with dozens of those things! I am not even sure where they are now; probably adding to the girth of some landfill in West Tennessee.  

Maybe creating all those units planted a seed in my teacher soul that has sprouted into what I am today. The units I create today are not the same as they were back then, but they still honor the notion of cohesiveness.  

Last week, my sassy seventh-grade daughter was complaining about having to learn some skill in one of her classes.  She complained, "Why do we have to learn this anyway?"  We've all heard this, right?  It's not an uncommon phrase uttered by students.  They want meaning given to what they are learning.

So, what can you as a teacher do to give meaning to your daily reading instruction?  Think in terms of units.  They are an ideal way to help students make connections between daily engaging, rigorous texts and tasks.  They give students, regardless of grade, an opportunity to apply what they learn to a well-chosen culminating task that gives meaning to the whole unit.  

Let me give you an example of what I mean by explaining the process I went through to develop my most recent unit. 

Eighth-grade students at my school will be reading the graphic novel March Book One by John Lewis in a few weeks.  After I read this amazing book that depicted the struggles of ordinary people during the Civil Rights Movement, I knew our students needed to acquire some basic background knowledge of the this time period.  Without that knowledge, they would miss the meaning of the book.  You can probably already predict where my brain went: a Civil Rights Movement unit.

I began, as I always do, by deciding what the essential question and culminating tasks for this unit would be.  How can my students take what they learn about the Civil Rights Movement and apply it to their own lives?  How can learning about these events have meaning for them? How can I answer the question they most assuredly will ask: why are we learning this?  

The essential question for this unit is "Do you have the power to change America?"  I settled on this unit task: The Civil Rights Movement was a time of great turmoil in America.  Many brave men and women put themselves at risk for what they believed.  Write an essay explaining what you can learn from these men and women.  

After I decided on the end-of-unit task, I searched for informational texts that would help my students get the full meaning of March Book One.  CommonLit is always my go-to site.  It is chocked full of rigorous texts on a variety of topics.  I found five text on this site that would meet my need: 

• The Sit-In Movement - lexile 1020
• Scottsboro Boys - lexile 1190
• Emmett Till - lexile 1070
• Showdown in Little Rock - lexile 1060
• Youngest of the Little Rock Nine Speaks Out - lexile 1150

Next, I searched YouTube for video clips that would help engage students in reading these texts, as well as March Book One.  There are so many to choose from, but I try to keep clips 2-4 minutes long because they are just a springboard to launch students into reading the texts.  I settled on these clip:

• Emmett Till - Legacy (2:16)
• Little Rock Nine (3:41)
• John Lewis Gets in the Way
• Scottsborro Boys   (1:46)
• Rep. John Lewis’ Civil Rights Story Comes to Life in Comics 4:33
• Congressman John Lewis on Civil Rights Movement 3:39

After I gathered all my materials, I reviewed them and decided which ELA standards would be most appropriate to teach these texts. Obviously, a successful ELA classroom incorporates numerous standards a day through discussion, but it's important to have a focus standard that drives your daily assignment. Our daily target for week one of this unit is I can analyze how the author makes connections between events in the Civil Rights Movement.

The next step takes some work. You have to develop daily tasks. It is important to make sure the artifacts of learning from that day show students have achieved the standard. If not, you don't have alignment between your text, task, and standard. I developed 5 different tasks, one for each day, that measured students mastery of the standard as they read the text.

Finally, I focused on one of the most important aspects of teaching: the questions. Questioning is how we push students thinking. Teachers need to put thought into the questions they will use and be intentional about who and when they ask those questions. I always include questions with every plan I create. They focus on helping students make meaning of the text, while giving them practice in applying the standards to the text they are reading. Here are some of the questions I created for this unit:

1. What can we learn about the Civil Rights Movement from this text/section?
2. What challenges do social movements, such as the Civil Rights Movement, face internally and externally?
3. What connections can you make between the events of the Sit-Ins and other things we’ve learned about this week?
4. What is the connection between all the details in the section about ____?
5. How is this text similar from the text we read yesterday?
6. How is this text different from this text we read yesterday?

Taking unit planning step-by-step removes the difficulty and ensures you have standards-aligned instruction taking place everyday in your classroom.  It takes work, but it is time well spent because it give students the answer to "Why do I have to learn this?"

The two-week Civil Rights Movement Unit Plan can be found at my TPT store.  It doesn't have the cutesy clip art that many TPT items include because that's not me.  I believe my time is better spent creating rigorous materials, not cute materials.   It is a google doc that will link you to a plethora of materials in a google drive.

Writers' Workshop Improves Students' Writing

Funny story.  My daughter asked me to edit her literary analysis of Romeo and Juliet for her A.P. Freshman English class.  Noticing she put two spaces after every word, I asked her reasoning for doing this.  Her response: "My teacher told me to double space."   After I took a moment to laugh (okay, more than a moment), I informed her what double spacing meant.  Her response: "Well, my teacher should have told me that from the start."

This conversation got me to thinking, how many times do we assume our students know how to do something?  Take writing as an example.  As I travel around the state of Tennessee and speak with teachers, there is a common concern.  Educators do not feel comfortable teaching writing. Most indicate they hate teaching writing.  Why?  I would argue it's because they've never been taught how to do it.  Think about teacher prep programs or professional development on the subject.  Does any of it successfully prepare you for teaching writing in your classroom? 

Teaching writing is a skill teachers are expected to figure out on their own, without much support.  I know this was the case for me.  

Every year, I pick an area to study to improve my craft.  Six years ago, I chose writing. I researched best practices, implemented them in my classroom, and revised those implementations based on the needs of my classroom.  I involved my 5th grade ELA team in the process.  Together, it took us two years to perfect the routines we followed to teach writing.  

Now, that I am a literacy coach at a Jr. High, I am helping teachers implement those same routines in 7th and 8th grade classrooms.   The results are encouraging.  The majority of students are writing at or above our high expectations.  

Establishing a routine for teaching writing is important at every level.  If most teachers feel inadequate in their abilities to teach writing, we cannot take for granted students come to us knowing how to write.  As a matter of fact, we probably should assume they don't. Whether you teach 2nd grade, Jr. High, or High School, the workshop model provides teachers with a routine to help their students become successful writers. 

The Mentor Text

The mentor text, or interactive writing, is the process a teacher and student goes through to write a class essay.  It involves sharing the pen.  During this process, the teacher explicitly teaches mini-lessons on tearing apart a prompt, planning, organizing, and writing an essay.  Teacher and student write together, sharing in the thinking that is involved in creating an essay.  Writing is thinking on paper and that part cannot be overlooked.  Depending on the level and needs of your students, the mentor essay may be a complete essay or just pieces of an essay.  You can't expect your students to do something they've never been taught to do.  Time spent writing interactively provides explicit instruction in how to write.    

The Independent Project  

Practice is important.  So is choice.  If students are going to learn the lessons taught during the mentor essay, they must implement what they learn in their own writing.  Offer students 3-4 high-interest writing project choices that mimic your state assessment.  As you model appropriate writing with the mentor text, give students time to practice those lessons in their own writing.  During this writing time, conference with students.  Conferencing is where the growth takes place.  It can be one-on-one or in small groups.  Push students to improve their writing by questioning their choices and moving them towards improving their writing.  Do not grade the independent project, as a grade is not the purpose of this part of Writers' Workshop. The purpose is growth.  Offer feedback that moves students to improve their writing.  This is what makes the independent project an invaluable part of Writers' Workshop.

The Assessment

Assessment is a necessary part of determining if a student has mastered writing.  After writing has been taught through the mentor text and practiced during the independent writing project, students show their proficiency during the assessment.  In Tennessee, teachers should use the state writing rubrics to grade the assessment, as this is the measure that will be used for our state assessment.  Be careful when grading.  If you intend to allow students to redo essay assessments, don't correct every mistake.  Offer students feedback to help them improve and strengthen their essays, but don't do the work for them.  Writing is always an area I allow students to redo because writing is about revising. 

Teaching writing is not easy.  To become an expert teacher of writing, it takes study, practice, and reflection.  Our students deserve a process that will grow them as writers; a process that teaches them how, offers them practice, and determines if they've mastered the skill.  I encourage you to try Writers' Workshop.

Are you interested in Writers' Workshop training?  Contact me at christy.mcmanus@chestercountyschools.org.

 

Articles of the Week May Be For You

Are you looking for a routine to incorporate into your ELA block next year?  Articles of the Week may be for you and the last month of school is the perfect opportunity to give them a try.

I discovered Articles of the Week while reading Kelly Gallagher’s book Deep Reading.  I knew this concept was a strategy I could use in my social studies classroom because the best social studies instruction is a balance of content instruction and reading strategy instruction.  Unfortunately, social studies is a subject that often gets placed on the back burner as teachers strive to catch students up in reading and math.  Well-meaning teachers are actually hurting students.  In "Why American Students Haven't Gotten Better at Reading in 20 Years," Natalie Wexler summarizes the implications of current research on the subject: "The best way to boost students’ reading comprehension is to expand their knowledge and vocabulary by teaching them history, science, literature, and the arts, using curricula that that guide kids through a logical sequence from one year to the next."

Articles of the Week give students an opportunity to work with informational texts daily.   The daily exercises students complete are designed not only to improve students' comprehension of the text, but also to aid them in retaining that information.  For teachers who teach both ELA and Social Studies, they accomplish two goals at once!

My Articles of the Week are used for a variety of purposes, including:

·  Increasing comprehension and retention of content related texts.

·  Add rigor and depth to content related reading.

·   Require students to actively engage in learning content presented.

·  Make challenging texts more accessible.

·  Improve thinking through written responses.

The procedure for Articles of the week is simple.  Students read the article on Monday and answer comprehension questions.  On Tuesday, they read another short related article and edit it for grammar mistakes.  On Wednesday, they answer questions related to finding evidence in the text.  On Thursday, the focus is on main idea and summarizing.  Finally, on Friday, students must write a short response using the A.C.E. strategy.  An A.C.E. helper is available to help students with the short response.  

AOWs are a vital part of my classroom.  I encourage you to give them a try in your classroom. Articles of the Week are a great routine to incorporate a variety of literacy skills across the content areas.



Want to create your own AoW?  Go to this Padlet for resources to get started!   

We Are Teachers of Thinking!

Thinking is invisible.  Thank goodness, right?  Sometimes, the thoughts that are inside my head belong there, tucked deep where no one can see them.  This does create a problem, though. When considering our students, we can't see their thinking.  Even worse, we can't know by looking at them if they have the tools to think about what they are learning. Unfortunately, many don't. 

Attention: I want you to stop reading for just a moment and ask yourself this question: What do you do to help your students to be thinkers?

If you have a large list, kudos.  Please, tell us in the comments below what you do.  If your list is small, then the good news is, you have the power to change that.  You have the power to change your students' lives and help them to be thinkers!        

Education has a thinking problem.  It's not all our fault.  As educators, we understand the pressure to teach standards.  We have to prepare students for the end-of-the-year state assessments, right?  We all know, if our students don't perform well, we will be judged by our administrators and colleagues as "that teacher" who just can't cut it.  As a result, sometimes our classrooms become places that are teacher-centered and focus on work completion by students.  In the process, we forgot that we aren't just teaching standards.  We are doing something so much more important.  We are teaching thinking.  

I spend a lot of time contemplating thinking.  Does Colton understand the connections between WWI and WWII?  Can Aidan analyze both sides of the Confederate monument controversy objectively?  Is Lily reflecting on the paradox that there are all these rules for poetry that you don't even have to follow if you don't want to!? Ultimately, the question I ponder every day is how do I help my student be better thinkers?  And it has made all the difference.

I heard a teacher once complain that "these kids today can't think."  She went on to talk about how Playstations, Xboxes, cell phones, and iPads were the bane of education.  She blamed them for her students' lack of ability to think.  I was itching to ask her what she had done in her classroom to help her students be thinkers.  Had she asked questions to help them make connections to other learning? Had she included engaging discussions and writing activities that would make students' thinking visible? Had she thought about how she could get her students to be better thinkers?

We need to flip our priority.  Instead of teaching the standards to help our students think, we need to teach our students to think so they can master the standards.  This change in priority will affect every facet of our classrooms from the activities we plan, to the discussions that occur, to the products our students produce.

Teaching thinking has to be intentional.  It has to be something we mean to do.  Today's post is the first in a four-part series about intentionally teaching thinking.  The remaining posts will include:

• Essential Questions Drive Thinking
• Discussion Models To Promote Thinking
• Visible Thinking Through Writing

I hope you join me on this journey as we think about thinking.

This is the first installment of a four-part series on teaching thinking in the classroom.

The Dynamic Duo: Writing and Social Studies

Duos are familiar to us.  Batman and Robin. Burger and Fries.  Bonnie and Clyde.  Peanut Butter and Jelly.  

Certain things just go together.  This is not just true of foods and people.  It's also true of the subjects we teach.  

Writing and social studies are like Mac and Cheese; it makes sense to pair them and when you do, you get something good!  Writing improves thinking and facilitates learning.  What teacher wouldn't want that?  When students write they explore, clarify, justify, reason, explain, and internalize.  

After five years of integrating writing and social studies, I can attest to its success.  The wonderful part is the options are endless for integrating writing and social studies effectively.  

Here are my top five favorites.

1. Short Response Writing

My work routine, or protocol, is to have students respond to reading by writing.  Writing is the only way I can truly know if they understand.  A multiple choice activity will not conclusively tell me if they comprehend the material I want them to understand.  Week one of each school year, I explicitly teach A.C.E. to students.  From that week on, they are always required to respond to discussion questions in A.C.E. format.  The helper is provided to them for support, but the majority of students no longer require it after a few months.  It becomes how they are conditioned to write.

2. Essay Writing

In grades 3-12, students are expected to master writing explanatory, opinion/argumentative, and narrative essays.  The prompt that directs their writing typically will ask for a response to two texts.  This is the perfect situation to integrate social studies and get the most bang for your buck!  Whether we are studying the courageous feats of Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, the heartbreaking events of the Holocaust, or the inspiring speeches of George W. Bush and Ronald Regan, my ELA writing activities always tie to what we are currently learning.  

I once had a teacher tell me she wanted to develop writing assignments that integrated with her social studies, but she couldn't find any texts.  I told her, they were all around.  They are in the magazines in your your school library, the books your students are reading, and the primary sources that are included in your state standards.  Here are some of the texts I use when creating writing tasks for my students:

• informational texts I've gathered from Scholastic magazines, like Scope, Storyworks, or Action   
• fictional excerpts from books that are popular with my students, like Grandmere's Story in Wonder or excerpts from Refugee and I Survived the Nazi Invasion  
• primary sources of the famous speeches of Sojourner Truth, Chief Joseph, and Martin Luther King Jr.  

3. Historical Poems

When my students came to me, they hated poetry.  They considered it something only smart people read, not students in a fifth grade classroom.  After introducing them to poets like Kwame Alexander, Jaqueline Woodson, and Nikki Grimes, they think otherwise.  Now, not only are they reading poetry, but they are creating it.  

Recently, a poetry assignment required my students to write a poem about a historical figure.  After they wrote their poems, they published them on Padlet.  This activity has become a class favorite.

4. Biopoems

Since my students have grown to love poetry, I had to search for

other poetry assignments to keep it fresh.  Biopoems are perfect.  They allow students to reflect on the material they've learned in social stuides and put it in poetic form.  I use the format in this picture.  The pattern enables the student to synthesize what they've learned about a person, place, thing, concept, or event.  This lets me know if they understand what it is I want them to know.

5. RAFTing Activities

To spice up your normal writing routine, try this strategy.  RAFT is an acronym that stands for role, audience, form, and topic.  RAFT allow teachers to create writing prompts that situates a student in the writing task.  They must look at an event in a nontraditional way.  They have to apply what they've learned about that person and then "become" them.  Not only does this show if they understand important details about their person's part in history, it's fun!

Those are some of my favorite ways to integrate writing and social studies.  I am always on the lookout for other awesome ideas.  What are some ways you integrate in your classroom?  

Pop-Up Debates and Writing

I love my PLN on Twitter.  I pick up so many useful strategies and ideas. The first time I heard about Pop-Up Debates was in a tweet by David Stuart Jr. about his blog post.  This discussion strategy immediately appealed to me because it incorporated the use of interesting texts in an activity that utilized thinking, listening, and speaking.  Being a writing teacher, I adapted his standard procedure to incorporate writing.  I believe this to be one of the best new strategies I've tried this year.

Pop-Up Debate Norms

Before you begin anything new, you must set norms. I have three norms:

1. Every student must speak at least one time, at most two times. We will use popsicle sticks to keep up with this.
2. To speak, simply stand up and speak. The first person to do so has the floor; when more than one person stands up, cordially and smoothly yield the floor. The teacher doesn’t serve as “Who gets to speak” referee.  On a side note, one of my classes needed a little help "yielding" the floor.  They are stubborn.  If no one sits down within 30 seconds, they all must sit down and loose the opportunity to speak next.  Turn-taking is not easy for all students.
3. For the sake of keeping the debate as lively as possible, the teacher may, at any point in the debate, call upon students who haven’t spoken yet or open the floor up to all students, even those who have already maxed out their speaking turns.

Pop-Up Debate Steps 

The debates are easy to prepare.  The hardest part is finding an interesting article that will spur discussion.  Find a 1-3 page article of a debatable issue.  The length depends on how much time you have to devote to the debate.  It's best if the article includes evidence for both sides.  I've started a google drive that includes some articles that are perfect for grades 5-12.  Many have different lexile levels for one article.  Also, New York Times has a post linking 100 different debatable topics.

Follow these steps for easy Pop-Up Debate implementation:

1. Introduce the Pop-Up Debate to your students.  The powerpoint I use is in the google drive. 
2. Students vote for what they believe about the topic.  This week our topic was: Should countries be able to ban the wearing of a veil in public places.
3. Give students the article to read.  I encourage my students to "read with their pencil" or "mark up" their text, locating evidence to support their opinion.   
4. After they've read the text, they write a short response in their journals to organize their thinking.  I use a short response format called A.C.E. Our students use this framework for all short response writing.
5. Once they've organized their thinking, they are ready to debate.  All students receive 1+ popsicle sticks.  To speak, they must "pop-up" to talk.  Every time they make a claim, they must give me a stick.  This ensures all students participate and no one dominates the conversation.  The number of sticks a student receives depends on the amount of time you wish to spend on the debate.  I typically use two, however if I want a quick discussion, I will use one. 
6. The teacher acts as mediator, only getting involved when necessary.  The majority of the discussion takes place between the students.  
7. When we are finished, students get out their journals.  They write a short response, in A.C.E. format, about one of two topics:
1. They explain what they have learned during the debate.  
2. They expand on the opinion they already wrote.  This is their chance to say points they didn't get a chance to verbalize during the debate. 
8. Finally, students may vote again on the issue.  In my class, if they change their mind they go and move their name from one side to the other.
9. After the debate is over, I select a few students to create a poster of our debate.  They include the text, steps, best quotes from the debate, and some pictures.  I plan to display all our Pop-Ups in the hall to encourage other teachers to try this strategy.
   
   

Pop-Up debates allow students to read an article, process the information, and debate the topic using evidence.  This strategy encourages students to use evidence when discussing important topics and allows all students to verbalize their thinking. It is the perfect strategy to reinforce multiple ELA standards.