The Making Visible Project at Chabot College: This documentary was created as part of SPECC (Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges), a joint project of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of teaching, and the WIlliam and Flora Hewlett Foundation.The Anatomy of a Classroom
This video, produced by a student research assistant at Chabot College, provides a window into a Spring 2007 developmental English class taught by Dr. Katie Hern. The class, "Reading, Reasoning, and Writing I," is two levels below college-level composition. The footage shows the in-class activities Hern uses to guide students in critically engaging a chapter from the nonfiction book Fast Food Nation. Students work in small groups to respond to questions about the chapter, then each group leads the whole-class discussion of their issue. During the class session depicted, students start with comprehension-related discussion, then move on to articulate their own higher-order questions and comments about the reading. The video was originally created to illustrate active-learning strategies for helping students become stronger readers, but it also documents how even lower-level basic skills students are capable of comprehending and critically engaging complex ideas from assigned reading, if they have good guidance and support for the process. A power point movie created by Katie Hern that offers further context to this film has also been uploaded to the Internet Archive. It can be accessed by clicking on the 1.7 mb Quicktime movie in the left-hand menu. (It plays fast so you may want to pause it to read the slides.)
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