- You know when I first started talking to Heinemann about
the idea for this book I realized that I just didn't know
enough.
So, I started contacting colleagues and
getting into classrooms and just co-teaching, co-thinking
through, how we can do this and what emerged,
particularly, my friend, Nicole Bluth's classroom,
was we have to do it on a regular basis.
Cause if we only do it once a year or twice a year or once
a unit, they're not going to master, thinking across sources.
We also realized that we had to make the sources manageable
for kids, so it can't be that you're going to compare
an article and a book, cause what you're going to get is
they're both about simple machines.
But instead its let's look at this author's description of
a wedge and this author's description of a wedge.
How do those come together to build your knowledge?
Or let's look at just this infographic
and this 30 seconds of this video clip.
Or let's look at a paragraph from a text and a video clip
and an infographic, so what we decided was or what we
found was that it can't be a bunch of entire sources
and a million sources.
It needs to be a really tight set of sources
that we've vetted, while they start to become familiar
with what it is they need to look for
when they're searching for sources on their own.
And I think one more thing,
sorry, I have so much to say about this,
we also found that students need a guiding question.
They need to know what they're looking for across sources.
So, it's not enough to just say,
oh, I'm going to research hedgehogs.
So I remember I was talking to these two students and they
were so excited, because they had read a whole book on
hedgehogs, and when I asked them, "well what are you going
to write about hedgehogs?"
They were like, "the whole book of hedgehogs",
you know on hedgehogs.
So, what Nicole and my colleagues and I found was that we
have to give them clear guiding questions like "what are
the types of details the author is using to describe
a simple machine?"
"What are the problems and solutions being shared in this
video?"
"What is the author or narrator's viewpoint at Columbus
in this video clip?"
Helping them develop really clear, guiding purposes
for reading across sources.