In following the Deming wheel, we created a premise. Our premise was that in David’s class these students rarely responded positively to instruction that seemed typical to the type of instruction they had experienced in previous years. So, we predicted they might respond positively to a co-teaching situation that would allow the three of us to support them differently and engage them in lessons we created collaboratively and co-taught. In particular, we predicted we could mitigate students’ struggles with text by implementing visual components into our instruction including art, advertisements, and other posters.
With this premise and prediction, we began to create lessons that would allow the students to learn to distinguish an author’s intended audience and purpose in texts, how they could make changes to the text and message in order to achieve those purposes for other audiences, and to create their own message with text and visual components for a specific, self-selected audience and purpose.
Do, Study, Act
As with any cycle, we moved through the Deming wheel multiple times during our collaboration. With our plan created, we designed and co-taught several lessons across approximately ten class sessions, studied the results of our collaboration and then acted on what we learned. While the focus of this article is not to provide a detailed picture of the unit of study, we will include highlights of several lessons/class sessions in order to illuminate how we used the Deming wheel to guide our collaboration.
Two sets of lessons, in particular, highlight our work to collaborate and to move students closer to understanding how to use text and visuals for specific audiences for specific purposes. One lesson involved students working with magazine advertisements. For this lesson, students were guided to identify the audience for the advertisement and infer the creators’ purposes for the advertisements. Additionally, small groups of students worked with David, Sharon, and Jenny to discuss how the advertisements could be changed if the intended audience was changed. The students indicated they understood the focus for this particular lesson by explaining the purpose of the magazine advertisement. One student commented on the use of magazine advertisements to help students understand the importance of audience. The student stated, “We did this magazine thing where we had to say who it [the advertisement] would really be for.” This same student indicated that learning about audience impacted his own writing stating, “After I learned about audience I got to spread my writing farther. I never really thought about audience [when I wrote] until then.”
In a similar lesson, the students examined animal shelter flyers created by fourth graders and were first asked to identify the intended audience and purpose for the flyers and then to work in pairs to make changes to the flyers that would more effectively address the purpose. Pairs of students sketched new versions of the flyers, and based on other lessons, took font, graphics, color, and photographs into consideration based on the purpose of persuading a person to make a donation to the animal shelter.
Following those two lessons the students were then asked to consider a piece of art and a poem in terms of the creators’ intended audience and purpose. We incorporated “The Wounded Deer” (1946) by Farida Kahlo and “Golf Links” (1916) by Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn into these lessons. Our lesson using “The Wounded Deer” focused on how to determine the audience and purpose for a piece of art both when you were able to incorporate background knowledge about art and the artist and when you did not have much background knowledge upon which you could draw. First, Author 2 used a think aloud technique to demonstrate to the students how a novice could still draw meaning from and infer the intended audience for the piece of art. Author 2 had limited background knowledge about Kahlo to draw on when attempting to consider the artist’s purpose for creating a painting of a deer, bearing the artist’s own face, struck by many arrows and standing in a forest clearing. While the attempt was unsophisticated, she was able to make sense of some of the artist’s messages to the audience.
Following that attempt, Author 1, who is knowledgeable about Kahlo’s life story and “The Wounded Deer” (1946) in particular, used the same think aloud technique to share his own interpretation of the painting. Author 1 was also able to draw on his extensive knowledge of and experience with art and art history. Students were then asked to respond to both Author 2 and Author 1’s thoughts while including information about how each person’s experiences and
29