TEACHING CHANNEL / INTERACTIVE STATIONS
INTERVIEW WITH DANIEL WALLACE

DANIEL WALLACE:
My name is Daniel Wallace. I’m a 12th grade English teacher at the High School for Arts, Imagination and Inquiry, and my lesson idea is Interactive Stations. It's a way to scaffold back one of the Common Core standards, which is that students will be able to explain how a central idea develops over the course of the text. Students struggle with that. That’s a difficult thing to be asked to do. I like interactive stations because it allows me to build them up to the place where they're able to then write about how this one idea develops over the course of the text. With just a five-minute station, they're engaging the ideas in extremely different ways. Silently, through writing on the Wall of Silence; they interact with each other verbally, through dialog; and then additionally they engage these ideas with their bodies, through the Power Tableau. Before this particular interactive station's lesson happens, students had read a nonfiction memoir called No-Name Woman. It’s a story about silence and the pressure that family and community can exert on a female when she comes of age and she's able to get pregnant and have children. The idea behind Wall of Silence is that, students first of all understand what it's like to remain silent, which is a major part of this text. They’ve come in with a prepared quote that they've found to be important, about this central idea of silence. They start by putting that quote on the wall. Then they take a minute to read other quotes and start to interact with them, making connections, asking questions, or simply reacting emotionally. So it's a conversation that unfolds in written form on the wall. The Power Tableau activity really allows students to embody ideas within a text. In this case, ideas of power and silence. And for them to experience it physically, it really can become emotional by having to become that.
(classroom)
I love the way you show male and female power, silence. It’s pretty intense.
(interview)
Each station takes five minutes. After the time is up, we, as a class, look at the two power tableaus that happen. And then they begin the next station.
(classroom)
OK, good. Ladies and gentlemen, you move clockwise. You move clockwise.
(interview)
The Circle Discussion gives students a chance to encounter ideas of silence by sort of flipping the script on the text. The question that they focus on is, how would this story change if the characters in it weren't so silent, if there characters were more upfront.
STUDENT 1:
If the characters were more open to each other, i believe there wouldn't be as much conflict. There wouldn't be no control with people. Everybody will know what's going on.
DANIEL WALLACE:
The idea behind this is, students will be able to explain how central silence is by discussing how much the text would change if it everybody weren't so silent.
STUDENT 2:
They would know what each other, what each individual in this house would be thinking about, and that would be the barrier between the two sexes.
DANIEL WALLACE:
During the Circle Discussion station, they're being asked to jot down what other people said that's reasonable, that makes sense to them, and references that were made to the book. They can then use those references later in their writing. After each student has completed each of the three stations, the idea is that they're then more prepared to write independently an analytical paragraph.
(classroom)
I need for you to respond to this question: how do ideas of silence develop over the course of No-Name Woman? This is a lot like when we respond in a full essay, the question of how do these things contribute to the overall meaning of the story?
(interview)
And by offering them different opportunities to engage with similar ideas, it really allows more students the opportunity to be successful.
STUDENT 3:
I said the no-name woman became the source of the silence, because the pressure not to speak about her caused the family to, like, try to forget her and, it just pushed silence onto the narrator herself.
DANIEL WALLACE:
If they're able to engage with one idea in so many different ways in one class period, they're then much more prepared to write about the many ways that one idea develops.
STUDENT 4:
You’re not only just reading, you're breaking it down through different forms. You’re going through imagination, you're building it with your body.
STUDENT 5:
I get to argue my point, which i like a lot.
STUDENT 4:
You go through so many different things in, like, one lesson, and it goes by so quick, and by the time you're done, writing the paragraph that we did, it was like, OK, I know what I'm doing.
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