I love using the GIST with students because we can take all kinds of information and condense it rather quickly. Also, we can take reading materials that are difficult and work to create understanding as a group.
I recently used this strategy with a group of juniors who are moving into an immigration unit where we'll study Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier as our primary text. This text is going to challenge a lot of the readers in my classroom because it is a more adult read than some are sued to. Also, the setting of the text is totally unfamiliar to this audience. Most of my students had no idea where Sierra Leone is located. Knowing that I needed to create a basic understanding of the issues and conflicts that are taking place in Sierra Leone before we read, I used the GIST to discuss a variety of issues with students.
This activity took most of one class, bit has proven to be a valuable tool in creating a large pool of knowledge about the issues facing Sierra Leone right now. All of our news sources are current and we discussed a variety of issues, from rape to agriculture, all within the space of an hour and a half of class time. There is no way that my students would have been able to enter this text without knowing anything about Sierra Leone.
Here's a link to my classroom blog post about the use of this strategy in connection with this text.
Showing posts with label GIST. Show all posts
Showing posts with label GIST. Show all posts
GIST
Of all the strategies I learned about this year, the GIST has probably been the most effective in my classes. I've struggled for YEARS to try to get students to summarize nonfiction rather than repeat absolutely everything that they've read. I've not yet had a clear method to help students summarize what they've read, so this easy-to-use and easy-to-understand strategy has been a great tool for my students.
At the beginning of the school year, I have always attempted to teach students to use a highlighter to separate out key phrases, definitions, and important ideas in what they've read. What I've found is that students cannot reliably pick out this information from nonfiction articles. They tend to highlight the ENTIRE text or not highlight enough material.
I plan to use the GIST right off next year. Rather than giving tips and hints about locating and highlighting the important info in a text, I'll use the GIST to give students a concrete strategy that they can use throughout the year in all of their classes. I am excited to see how far students progress when this strategy becomes a tool that they can use in the content areas and not a strategy that they need to think about and explicitly learn every time they use it. We did not have enough practice with it this year so that they could use the strategy without thinking about the process; however, I am confident that we'll be able to use it in multiple situations next year.
I used the GIST to teach a book called Harvest Gypsies by John Steinbeck. I've taught this nonfiction text in the past and have experimented with a variety of techniques to do so. The GIST worked better than any other method I'd used to teach this text. Students built a solid base of learning from which they made connections while reading Of Mice and Men by the same author. I'll definitely use this strategy next year with this text.
I also used the GIST to lead into the reading of The Crucible by Arthur Miller. To read this play with an understanding of the characters and the world of the Puritans, it is essential to understand the historical context in which they lived. The hard part of introducing this subject matter to heterogeneously grouped students is that some of the readings can be very wordy and lengthy, while others may be too simplistic for a more advanced reader. The beauty of the GIST is that it can easily be used as a differentiation strategy for students at various reading levels. I picked out readings for each student and grouped them by subject matter in a way that allowed for the various abilities in my classroom to shine. Students built a base of knowledge about the Puritan religion, Puritan children, and the expectations for women and men during this time. We created a chart of our findings that we referred back to as we read the text. This definitely helped us to understand the motivations of the characters and their decision-making process.
At the beginning of the school year, I have always attempted to teach students to use a highlighter to separate out key phrases, definitions, and important ideas in what they've read. What I've found is that students cannot reliably pick out this information from nonfiction articles. They tend to highlight the ENTIRE text or not highlight enough material.
I plan to use the GIST right off next year. Rather than giving tips and hints about locating and highlighting the important info in a text, I'll use the GIST to give students a concrete strategy that they can use throughout the year in all of their classes. I am excited to see how far students progress when this strategy becomes a tool that they can use in the content areas and not a strategy that they need to think about and explicitly learn every time they use it. We did not have enough practice with it this year so that they could use the strategy without thinking about the process; however, I am confident that we'll be able to use it in multiple situations next year.
I used the GIST to teach a book called Harvest Gypsies by John Steinbeck. I've taught this nonfiction text in the past and have experimented with a variety of techniques to do so. The GIST worked better than any other method I'd used to teach this text. Students built a solid base of learning from which they made connections while reading Of Mice and Men by the same author. I'll definitely use this strategy next year with this text.
I also used the GIST to lead into the reading of The Crucible by Arthur Miller. To read this play with an understanding of the characters and the world of the Puritans, it is essential to understand the historical context in which they lived. The hard part of introducing this subject matter to heterogeneously grouped students is that some of the readings can be very wordy and lengthy, while others may be too simplistic for a more advanced reader. The beauty of the GIST is that it can easily be used as a differentiation strategy for students at various reading levels. I picked out readings for each student and grouped them by subject matter in a way that allowed for the various abilities in my classroom to shine. Students built a base of knowledge about the Puritan religion, Puritan children, and the expectations for women and men during this time. We created a chart of our findings that we referred back to as we read the text. This definitely helped us to understand the motivations of the characters and their decision-making process.
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