Worksheets!? Say it's not so . . .

My clinical placement is in a 12th grade English class at Huntington High School. During the first two class periods that I observed, my teacher covered “The Pardoner’s Tale” and “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales – not my literary preference necessarily – but then, horror of horrors, she assigned the questions at the end of the stories. Gasp! Not textbook questions! Surely not! But as the days passed, I learned that this was just part of an overall strategy. After speaking with her today, I came to realize that textbook questions and worksheets (double gasp!) are not necessarily bad in and of themselves; it is how they are (over)used. She uses the textbook questions more as “exit slips” to insure the students are getting an understanding of the material, and they simply receive points for attempting to answer them. In later class periods, she used audio recordings, a PowerPoint presentation, and a video to supplement these same tales. So she is differentiating her instruction in the sense that she’s trying to expose the students to these tales in as many different forms as possible. After Canterbury Tales came Ivanhoe. For this assignment they actually watched a film adaptation of the novel, but ahead of time they received a list of questions to answer while they watched the film. The questions actually made the students pay attention to the film and not just fall asleep. Again, she used these questions as a measure of student understanding. After reviewing the questions with them, she then held a class discussion about Ivanhoe, and the students were more involved than if they had just read the story. In terms of Marzno, I would suggest that the teacher is attempting to differentiate her instruction in terms of how the students are exposed to the material through recordings, film, and class discussion and interaction. Also, in terms of Marzano’s ideas about “providing recognition,” even though the students simply “get points” for certain assignments, she does make brief comments on each assignment either clarifying a point for a student or just writing “Good job!” if they have a particular insight.