TNCore Training July 2013
Supporting Rigorous Teaching and Learning
Participant Packet #2:
Grades 9-10 Texts
Table of Contents
Texts for Writing Research Simulation Task
Tim Cook’s Speech at Steve Jobs Memorial
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The Genius of Jobs
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The Steve Jobs Way
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Texts to be Used in Modules
Ain’t I a Woman?
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Pre-Reading or Not? On the Premature Demise of Background Discussions
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An Overview of Accountable Talk Practices
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Video Transcript: Significance StepBack: Ain’t I a Woman?
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Video Transcript: Interpretation: Ain’t I a Woman?
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Video Transcript: Comprehension Via Questioning the Author: Child Labor
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Video Transcript: Interpretation: Child Labor
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Insights From Teachers Who Analyzed Transcripts of Their Own Classroom
Discussions
63
Titanic Sinks Four Hours After…
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The Iceberg Was Only Part of It
79
The Sinking of the Titanic, 1912
85
Testing Shows Titanic Steel Was Brittle
91
© 2013 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH
Tim Cook’s Speech at Steve Jobs Memorial
Chloe Albanesius
Albanesius, C. “Tim Cook’s Speech at Steve Jobs Memorial.” PCMag
23 October 2011. Web. 20 February 2013.
Copyright laws may prohibit photocopying this document without express permission.
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Tim Cook’s Speech at Steve Jobs Memorial
by Chloe Albanesius
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Good morning. It’s so great to see so many of you here today and to have even more
joining us remotely around the world. We’ve closed all of the retail stores in the world right
now, and they are all with us as well.
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Before I get started, I’d like to recognize a very special guest. Steve’s wife, Laurene Powell
Jobs, has joined us today. Laurene not only brought Steve great strength, but all of us as
well, especially over the last couple of weeks. As I have, and I know many of you have,
we’ve been spending a lot of time mourning Steve’s passing. The last two weeks for me
have been the saddest of my life by far. But I know Steve, and Steve would have wanted
this cloud to lift for Apple, and our focus to return to the work that he loved so much. So it’s
with that spirit that we wanted to get the entire company together today to celebrate Steve’s
extraordinary life and the many accomplishments he had across his life.
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People all over the world have been deeply moved by his passing and many have spoke
about what he meant to them. You’ve probably seen characterizations; he’s been called a
visionary, a creative genius, a rebel, a non-conformist, an original, the greatest CEO ever,
the best innovator of all time. Steve’s legacy is to think about the way he lived and what he
left for us. He leaves with what he did, what he said, and what he stood for.
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He did some amazing things and he himself once said, "to get to work on one revolutionary
product in a career is extraordinary." By my count, he worked on six. The introduction of the
Macintosh in 1984 revolutionized personal computing and desktop publishing. And the ad
that ran during the Super Bowl, to launch the product, set a benchmark for advertising that
is still widely held today as the best ad of all time.
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With iPod and iTunes, Steve reminded all of us of our love for music, changed the way the
world listen to music, and along the way, changed the entire music industry.
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The iPhone revolutionized the mobile phone industry and redefined what a smartphone
should be. The iPhone would become the best-selling smartphone in the world and many
people around the world today can’t imagine their lives without it.
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And just last year, with the introduction of the iPad, Apple jumpstarted an entirely new
product category that no one thought they needed and now no one can live without.
Albanesius, Chloe. “Tim Cook’s Speech at Steve Jobs Memorial.” PCMag 23 October 2011. Web. 20
February 2013.
This material is copyrighted and therefore must be securely destroyed
immediately after use. DO NOT provide a copy of this material to anyone
(teacher, student, or otherwise) who is not directly involved with this test
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And along the way, he created the best animation studio called Pixar and taught us that
cartoons weren’t just for kids. And if that wasn’t enough, he initiated a retail strategy for
Apple that would set a benchmark for all retailers around the world to strive for.
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Throughout his life, he said truly profound things that have provided me and so many others
a guiding light. He said, "simple can be harder than complex; you have to work hard to get
your thinking clean to make it simple, but it’s worth it in the end because once you get
there, you can move mountains." He said, "Technology alone is not enough. It’s technology
married with liberal arts, married with the humanities that yields us the result that makes our
heart sing." He said, "If you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should just
do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long, just figure out what’s next." And
finally, he said, "My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each
others’ kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was
greater than the sum of the parts. That’s how I see business. Great things in business are
never done by one person, they’re done by a team of people."
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I personally admire Steve not most for what he did, or what he said, but for what he stood
for. The largest lesson I learned from Steve was that the joy in life is in the journey, and I
saw him live this every day. Steve never followed the herd. He thought deeply about almost
everything and was the most unconventional thinker I have ever known. He always did what
he thought was right, not what was easy. He never accepted the merely good. He would
only accept great—insanely great.
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He valued beauty in everything, and insisted that everything that Apple do be beautiful. He
believed the future does not belong to those who are content with today, and pushed
himself incredibly hard and those around him to achieve more. This is the way he lived, and
these are the things he leaves us. What he did, what he said, and what he stood for.
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But there is one more thing he leave us. He leaves us with each other because without him,
Apple would have died in the late ’90s and the vast majority of us would have never met.
Other than his family, Apple would be his finest creation. He thought about Apple until his
last day, and among his last advice he had for me and for all of you was to never ask what
he would do. "Just do what’s right," he said.
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He said he saw Disney paralyzed after Walt Disney’s passing as everyone spent all of their
time thinking and talking about what Walt would want, and he did not want this to occur at
Apple.
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When Steve came back to Apple, he wanted to create an ad that would re-establish and
remind us of our core values and beliefs and it was meant more for the employees of the
company than for the customers of the company. We didn’t have any great new products to
Albanesius, Chloe. “Tim Cook’s Speech at Steve Jobs Memorial.” PCMag 23 October 2011. Web. 20
February 2013.
This material is copyrighted and therefore must be securely destroyed
immediately after use. DO NOT provide a copy of this material to anyone
(teacher, student, or otherwise) who is not directly involved with this test
administration.
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talk about yet; those would come a year later with the iMac. So we worked with our ad
agency to create a campaign that featured some of his greatest heroes. Steve was involved
in carefully crafting every word of this ad and these words touched the bottom of his soul.
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The version that we all saw on TV was read by Richard Dreyfus, but what you may not
know is that Steve also read a version but chose not to run that version because he did not
want it to be about him. He wanted it to be about Apple. I personally heard this version for
the first time after he passed away and was very deeply moved by it, and I would like to
play the audio of The Crazy Ones, as read by Steve, so you can hear the words he wrote
and in his voice.
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Jobs Voiceover: Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the
round pegs in the square holes, the ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of
rules and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them,
glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change
things, they push the human race forward. While some may see them as the crazy ones,
we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the
world are the ones who do.
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Let’s join together for a moment of silence and reflect on what Steve meant to each of us
and to the world.
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Thank you. You know, looking out at everyone, Steve would’ve loved this, I can tell you
that.
Albanesius, Chloe. “Tim Cook’s Speech at Steve Jobs Memorial.” PCMag 23 October 2011. Web. 20
February 2013.
This material is copyrighted and therefore must be securely destroyed
immediately after use. DO NOT provide a copy of this material to anyone
(teacher, student, or otherwise) who is not directly involved with this test
administration.
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The Genius of Jobs
Walter Isaacson
Isaacson, Walter. “The Genius of Jobs.” New York Times. 29
October 2011. Web. 2 January 2013.
Copyright laws may prohibit photocopying this document without express permission.
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The Genius of Jobs
By Walter Isaacson
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One of the questions I wrestled with when writing about Steve Jobs was how smart he
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was. On the surface, this should not have been much of an issue. You’d assume the
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obvious answer was: he was really, really smart. Maybe even worth three or four
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reallys. After all, he was the most innovative and successful business leader of our era
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and embodied the Silicon Valley dream writ large: he created a start-up in his parents’
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garage and built it into the world’s most valuable company.
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But I remember having dinner with him a few months ago around his kitchen table, as
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he did almost every evening with his wife and kids. Someone brought up one of those
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brainteasers involving a monkey’s having to carry a load of bananas across a desert,
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with a set of restrictions about how far and how many he could carry at one time, and
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you were supposed to figure out how long it would take. Mr. Jobs tossed out a few
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intuitive guesses but showed no interest in grappling with the problem rigorously. I
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thought about how Bill Gates would have gone click-click-click and logically nailed the
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answer in 15 seconds, and also how Mr. Gates devoured science books as a vacation
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pleasure. But then something else occurred to me: Mr. Gates never made the iPod.
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Instead, he made the Zune.
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So was Mr. Jobs smart? Not conventionally. Instead, he was a genius. That may
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seem like a silly word game, but in fact his success dramatizes an interesting
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distinction between intelligence and genius. His imaginative leaps were instinctive,
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unexpected, and at times magical. They were sparked by intuition, not analytic rigor.
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Trained in Zen Buddhism, Mr. Jobs came to value experiential wisdom over empirical
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analysis. He didn’t study data or crunch numbers but like a pathfinder, he could sniff
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the winds and sense what lay ahead.
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He told me he began to appreciate the power of intuition, in contrast to what he called
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“Western rational thought,” when he wandered around India after dropping out of
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college. “The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do,” he
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said. “They use their intuition instead. . . . Intuition is a very powerful thing, more
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powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That’s had a big impact on my work.”
Isaacson, Walter. “The Genius of Jobs.” New York Times. 29 October 2011. Web. 2 January 2013.
This material is copyrighted and therefore must be securely destroyed
immediately after use. DO NOT provide a copy of this material to anyone
(teacher, student, or otherwise) who is not directly involved with this test
administration.
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Mr. Jobs’s intuition was based not on conventional learning but on experiential
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wisdom. He also had a lot of imagination and knew how to apply it. As Einstein said,
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“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
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Einstein is, of course, the true exemplar of genius. He had contemporaries who could
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probably match him in pure intellectual firepower when it came to mathematical and
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analytic processing. Henri Poincaré, for example, first came up with some of the
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components of special relativity, and David Hilbert was able to grind out equations for
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general relativity around the same time Einstein did. But neither had the imaginative
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genius to make the full creative leap at the core of their theories, namely that there is
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no such thing as absolute time and that gravity is a warping of the fabric of space-time.
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(O.K., it’s not that simple, but that’s why he was Einstein and we’re not.)
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Einstein had the elusive qualities of genius, which included that intuition and
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imagination that allowed him to think differently (or, as Mr. Jobs’s ads said, to Think
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Different.) Although he was not particularly religious, Einstein described this intuitive
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genius as the ability to read the mind of God. When assessing a theory, he would ask
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himself, Is this the way that God would design the universe? And he expressed his
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discomfort with quantum mechanics, which is based on the idea that probability plays
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a governing role in the universe by declaring that he could not believe God would play
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dice. (At one physics conference, Niels Bohr was prompted to urge Einstein to quit
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telling God what to do.)
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Both Einstein and Mr. Jobs were very visual thinkers. The road to relativity began when
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the teenage Einstein kept trying to picture what it would be like to ride alongside a light
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beam. Mr. Jobs spent time almost every afternoon walking around the studio of his
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brilliant design chief Jony Ive and fingering foam models of the products they were
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developing.
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Mr. Jobs’s genius wasn’t, as even his fanboys admit, in the same quantum orbit as
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Einstein’s. So it’s probably best to ratchet the rhetoric down a notch and call it ingenuity.
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Bill Gates is super-smart, but Steve Jobs was super-ingenious. The primary distinction, I
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think, is the ability to apply creativity and aesthetic sensibilities to a challenge.
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In the world of invention and innovation, that means combining an appreciation of the
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humanities with an understanding of science—connecting artistry to technology, poetry
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to processors. This was Mr. Jobs’s specialty. “I always thought of myself as a humanities
Isaacson, Walter. “The Genius of Jobs.” New York Times. 29 October 2011. Web. 2 January 2013.
This material is copyrighted and therefore must be securely destroyed
immediately after use. DO NOT provide a copy of this material to anyone
(teacher, student, or otherwise) who is not directly involved with this test
administration.
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person as a kid, but I liked electronics,” he said. “Then I read something that one of my
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heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at
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the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that’s what I wanted to do.”
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The ability to merge creativity with technology depends on one’s ability to be
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emotionally attuned to others. Mr. Jobs could be petulant and unkind in dealing with
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other people, which caused some to think he lacked basic emotional awareness. In
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fact, it was the opposite. He could size people up, understand their inner thoughts,
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cajole them, intimidate them, target their deepest vulnerabilities, and delight them at
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will. He knew, intuitively, how to create products that pleased, interfaces that were
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friendly, and marketing messages that were enticing.
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In the annals of ingenuity, new ideas are only part of the equation. Genius requires
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execution. When others produced boxy computers with intimidating interfaces that
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confronted users with unfriendly green prompts that said things like “C:\>,” Mr. Jobs saw
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there was a market for an interface like a sunny playroom. Hence, the Macintosh. Sure,
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Xerox came up with the graphical desktop metaphor, but the personal computer it built
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was a flop and it did not spark the home computer revolution. Between conception and
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creation, T. S. Eliot observed, there falls the shadow.
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In some ways, Mr. Jobs’s ingenuity reminds me of that of Benjamin Franklin, one
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of my other biography subjects. Among the founders, Franklin was not the most
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profound thinker—that distinction goes to Jefferson or Madison or Hamilton. But
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he was ingenious.
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This depended, in part, on his ability to intuit the relationships between different things.
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When he invented the battery, he experimented with it to produce sparks that he and
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his friends used to kill a turkey for their end of season feast. In his journal, he recorded
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all the similarities between such sparks and lightning during a thunderstorm, then
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declared “Let the experiment be made.” So he flew a kite in the rain, drew electricity
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from the heavens, and ended up inventing the lightning rod. Like Mr. Jobs, Franklin
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enjoyed the concept of applied creativity—taking clever ideas and smart designs and
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applying them to useful devices.
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China and India are likely to produce many rigorous analytical thinkers and
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knowledgeable technologists. But smart and educated people don’t always
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spawn innovation. America’s advantage, if it continues to have one, will be that
Isaacson, Walter. “The Genius of Jobs.” New York Times. 29 October 2011. Web. 2 January 2013.
This material is copyrighted and therefore must be securely destroyed
immediately after use. DO NOT provide a copy of this material to anyone
(teacher, student, or otherwise) who is not directly involved with this test
administration.
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it can produce people who are also more creative and imaginative, those who
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know how to stand at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences. That
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is the formula for true innovation, as Steve Jobs’s career showed.
Isaacson, Walter. “The Genius of Jobs.” New York Times. 29 October 2011. Web. 2 January 2013.
This material is copyrighted and therefore must be securely destroyed
immediately after use. DO NOT provide a copy of this material to anyone
(teacher, student, or otherwise) who is not directly involved with this test
administration.
12
The Steve Jobs Way
Jon Katzenbach
Adapted and reprinted with permission from “The Steve Jobs Way” by
Jon Katzenbach from the Summer 2012 issue of strategy + business
magazine, published by Booz & Company Inc. Copyright © 2012. All
rights reserved. www.strategy-business.com
Copyright laws may prohibit photocopying this document without express permission.
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The Steve Jobs Way
by Jon Katzenbach
Leaders can learn a lot from the late Apple CEO, but not all of it should be emulated.
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. . . Steve Jobs was certainly a willful and driven leader, and the products and
services he directed his companies to develop and commercialize changed the
way many of us live, as well as the course of a diverse set of industries, including
computing, publishing, movies, music, and mobile telephony.
At the same time, Jobs’s leadership style was complex. He was intensely
focused when committed, confident enough to take risky leaps, and charismatic
enough to enlist legions of employees and customers in the relentless pursuit of
his aspirations. He was also interpersonally immature well into his adult life:
impatient, stubborn, and hypercritical, if not downright cruel at times. Jobs may
have been, as [biographer, Walter] Isaacson says, “the greatest business
executive of our era,” but he was a mercurial 1, demanding, and tyrannical one.
All too often he was the antithesis2 of the “servant leader” model popularized in
the 1990s (the giving, caring organizational mentor who in many ways contrasted
with the hero model of a century prior).
However, Jobs’s seemingly destructive behaviors sparked peak performance as
much as they undermined it, depending on where and how he applied them.
They also helped shape the unique and powerful cultures Jobs seeded—twice at
Apple, as well as at NeXT and at Pixar. (And few would have predicted Pixar’s
runaway success in movie animation. Certainly not the Walt Disney Company,
which eventually bought Pixar to secure its hit-making abilities, an action that
made Jobs Disney’s largest shareholder.) Far better than most leaders, Jobs
intuitively understood the power of cultural influence in sustaining the strategic
capabilities implicit in his perpetual vision of creating, as he put it, “an enduring
company where people were motivated to make great products . . . a company
that will stand for something a generation or two from now.” It’s hard to argue
with that aspiration; time will tell whether Apple makes it happen.
Jobs’s volatile approach to leadership is both fascinating and perplexing. For
instance, Jobs had a fickle commitment construct—he fell in and out of love with
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mercurial: quick to change his mind or attitude
antithesis: opposite
Adapted and reprinted with permission from “The Steve Jobs Way” by Jon Katzenbach from the
Summer 2012 issue of strategy + business magazine, published by Booz & Company Inc.
Copyright © 2012. All rights reserved.
www.strategy-business.com
This material is copyrighted and therefore must be securely destroyed
immediately after use. DO NOT provide a copy of this material to
anyone (teacher, student, or otherwise) who is not directly involved
with this test administration.
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people much too easily, both personally and professionally. In his relentless
pursuit of top talent, he was able to create highly skilled organizations. But he
also missed the potential contribution of many people who were not yet (and
perhaps never would be) so-called A players. It is surprising, however, that many
of the people Jobs abandoned along the way retained a grudging respect for his
positive qualities—and a few even came back for more of his particular brand of
abuse.
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When it came to teamwork, Jobs had a highly effective modus operandi3 with a
dark side. He always challenged teams—from those involved in the early product
efforts led by Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak onward—to reach beyond the
possible. A few strong people thrived on this, rising to become top performers
who were highly motivated by the pride they derived from striving to meet the
challenge. But many others were needlessly frustrated. The price a leader pays
for such behavior is the loss of people who need more encouragement along the
way. Such an approach also undermines the emotional commitment of B players,
who in most enterprises constitute more than triple the organizational teaming
capacity of A players.
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If other leaders emulate these traits—the good and the bad—will they get Jobslike results? The short answer is no. Applied to the wrong strategy, market, or
product, his behaviors could sink a company. In the end, what made Jobs such a
successful leader was his much-lauded talent at envisioning and delivering
breakthrough products and services. His ability to innovate for his customers in a
way few leaders had done before served as a salve to his gruff personal style.
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Then there was Jobs’s habit of distorting reality to fit his purposes, coupled with
the impatience, criticism, and brusqueness that often accompanied it. On the one
hand, the “Jobs version” could create a compelling vision of what might be.
Witness the strong cultures that he fostered at his companies: Even through the
10 years he was exiled from Apple, the underlying essence of the culture he
established somehow stayed alive. On the other hand, Jobs’s reality distortion
could be extremely alienating, and it sapped his credibility, especially when he
used it to dismiss a promising idea or an effort as “a piece of crap.”
Very few top leaders pay as much attention to product and design detail as Jobs
did. He always considered simplicity, functionality, and consumer appeal before
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modus operandi: manner of working
Adapted and reprinted with permission from “The Steve Jobs Way” by Jon Katzenbach from the
Summer 2012 issue of strategy + business magazine, published by Booz & Company Inc.
Copyright © 2012. All rights reserved.
www.strategy-business.com
This material is copyrighted and therefore must be securely destroyed
immediately after use. DO NOT provide a copy of this material to
anyone (teacher, student, or otherwise) who is not directly involved
with this test administration.
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cost efficiency, sales volume, or even profit. That attention was integral to the
strategic and marketing capabilities of his companies. In these respects, Jobs
was an entrepreneurial leader in the mode of Walt Disney and Edwin Land, both
of whom he admired.
Jobs famously said that “customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown
them.” Indeed, he had a remarkable, but not infallible, ability to develop products
that consumers would buy and savor, as well as the confidence, courage, and
drive to bring them to life. Part and parcel of this appeal was Jobs’s remarkably
clean sense of design, which Isaacson traces back to his study of Zen Buddhism
and, further still, to his adoptive father, a blue-collar mechanic who rebuilt cars in
the family’s garage for extra income. Much of Jobs’s genius—and Isaacson
contends his genius was for “imaginative leaps [that] were instinctive,
unexpected, and at times magical”—stemmed from his ability to integrate diverse
disciplines, particularly the humanities and science, a sort of synthesis of artistry
and engineering.
With age and experience, Steve Jobs became a better leader of people.
Although Jobs was never one to dwell on his own shortcomings, Isaacson quotes
a statement he made during a 2007 conference in which he revealed a
somewhat reluctant, even latent sense of an important flaw. “Because Woz and I
started the company based on doing the whole banana, we weren’t so good at
partnering with people,” he said of Apple’s design philosophy. “I think if Apple
could have had a little more of that in its DNA, it would have served it extremely
well.” Jobs would have benefited from more of that in his leadership DNA, too.
Who knows—if he had had more time, he might have been able to close that gap
altogether.
Adapted and reprinted with permission from “The Steve Jobs Way” by Jon Katzenbach from the
Summer 2012 issue of strategy + business magazine, published by Booz & Company Inc.
Copyright © 2012. All rights reserved.
www.strategy-business.com
This material is copyrighted and therefore must be securely destroyed
immediately after use. DO NOT provide a copy of this material to
anyone (teacher, student, or otherwise) who is not directly involved
with this test administration.
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Ain’t I a Woman?
Sojourner Truth
Sojourner Truth, “Ain’t I a Woman?” Women’s Convention, Akron, Ohio, 28-29
May 1851.
Copyright laws may prohibit photocopying this document without express permission.
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Ain't I a Woman?
Sojourner Truth
May 28-29, 1851
"Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think
that 'twixt the negroes of the South and the women of the North, all talking about rights, the
white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what's all this here talking about?
That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages and lifted over
ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or
over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at
my arm! I could have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could
head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man- when I
could get it- and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children,
and seen them most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief,
none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?
Then they talk about this thing in the head; what's this they call it? [Intellect, somebody
whispers] That's it, honey. What's that got to do with women's rights or negro's rights? If
my cup won't hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn't you be mean not to let me
have my little half measure-full?
Then that little man in black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men,
'cause Christ wasn't a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ
come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.
If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all
alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again!
And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.
Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner ain't got nothing more to say."
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Pre-Reading or Not? On the Premature Demise of Background
Discussions
Tim Shanahan
www.shanahanonliteracy.com
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Pre-Reading or Not? On the Premature Demise of Background Discussions
Tim Shanahan/Tuesday, February 21, 2012
http://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/2012/02/pre-reading-or-not-on-premature-demise.html
Recently, there has been hubbub over whether we should spend time on pre-reading
activities. Pre-reading refers to the stage setting that typically precedes shared and
guided reading in elementary and secondary classrooms. David Coleman and Sue
Pimentel who ably spearheaded the English language arts common core have been
telling teachers not to engage in pre-reading activities and as a result some districts and
states have already started banning the practice.
Why is this such a big deal? The background reviews and purpose setting of prereading are truly mainstays of American reading education, and many teachers wonder
whether kids are going to be able to make sense of text without these supports. It’s
times like these when many teachers start grousing about whether these experts have
ever taught school (they have).
I disagree with the idea of banning pre-reading preparation, and I’ll continue to tell my
students and my publishers to stay with the practice, but I fully appreciate why David
and Sue would want to eradicate it. (I myself have occasionally thought about punching
out a teacher during picture walk.) Pre-reading is often so badly implemented that it
could not possibly have any good result. However, rather than ban a beneficial practice
badly used, I will argue for a sound implementation. (In fact, I received emails from
David and Sue just last week admitting that they have been, perhaps, too vociferous in
their opposition to what could be a good approach, and we will continue a conversation
towards giving my supportive counsel to teachers on this point in the future).
The idea of pre-reading has a long history in American education. In the first third of the
Twentieth Century, the reading of literature in the academy was rife with author study;
the idea being that one couldn’t read and appreciate fine works without a rich
awareness of the author’s biography. This approach dominated high school and college
classrooms and the publishing industry itself (the inclusion of extensive forewords,
introductory chapters, and other similar apparatus were the norm). The New Critics
bridled at this “read everything but the text itself” approach (which eventually imposed
its own over-bearing rules for reading—like the requirement of avoiding the “intentional
fallacy,” as if author’s don’t have intentions that can be considered interpretively by
readers).
In elementary classrooms, pre-reading became a touchstone upon the publication of the
teacher’s guide in basal readers. Previous to the 1930s, teachers were pretty much on
their own when it came to lesson support, but the basal reader teacher’s edition
changed all that. The directed reading activity (DRA), typically introduced the child to
some background information, pre-taught the hard vocabulary, and provided a specific
reason for reading the first page(s) of the selection. Of course, this scheme that started
with basal readers in the 1930s, is now the normative practice recommended in pretty
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much all textbooks for teaching anything at any grade level. (In many programs, the prereading steps were referred to as background and motivation).
In the 1960s, winds of change (sort of) began to blow with Russell Stauffer’s ideas on
prediction and anticipation as the basis of pre-reading. His directed reading-thinking
approach (DRTA) didn’t so much overturn the DRA as redirecting. Instead of the teacher
providing relevant background information and a reason to read, she would now guide
the students to preview the material and make predictions (the predictions being the
new purposes or motivation—read to find out if you were right).
The by then shop-worn practice gained an important boost in the 1970s and 80s with
the research on schema theory which showed how important “prior knowledge” (that is
the information that someone has prior to reading). The idea was that the more relevant
knowledge you had, the better you would understand and remember the new
information (P. David Pearson’s “building bridges between the new and the known”).
Schema theory and prior knowledge research provided intellectual support for prereading instruction; research showed that previews could improve recall, inferencing,
disambiguation, and put readers in a better position to recognize problems in a text.
The practice gained even more adherents with the advent of “guided reading” (this is
where the “picture walk” comes in). Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell have pushed
hard for strong pre-reading preparation for young children. So, with such a venerable
history, why would Coleman and Pimentel (and Shanahan) be so disgusted with the
practice? Let me suggest five reasons.
1. Pre-reading takes too much time away from reading.
I recently watched a primary grade pre-reading that took 20 minutes—the reading itself
only took 5. I wish I could say that kind of thing was the exception, but I see many
instances of bloated, overly extended pre-reading sessions in classrooms at all grade
levels (pre through high).
2. Boring!
Much of the pre-reading set up that I see is deadly boring. The kids would get a good
laugh if they knew that these activities were meant to be “motivation.”
3. Pre-reading commonly focuses on the wrong information.
There is no question that some texts pre-suppose particular knowledge on the behalf of
the reader. A good preview or background session can make sure that kids have such
knowledge available so they can engage in a reasonably strong first reading of a text.
Unfortunately, teachers and publishers often provide background review focused on
information that doesn’t actually need to be reviewed. (My favorite example is having
middle school students read “The Old Man and the Sea.” That book is tough for 12year-olds as they lack the emotional experience of the old man. You can review deep
sea fishing, the Florida Keys, and Joe DiMaggio until the cow comes home and it won’t
improve their understanding of the old man and his human plight).
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4. Previews can ruin the reading experience.
A good background review can be motivational, creating a useful anticipatory set. Too
often, unfortunately, the background reviews that are provided just tell the student what
the text says (and sometimes even what it means). For too many kids, the challenge of
a reading lesson is trying to remember what the teacher told you the text said/meant all
the way to the end of the reading so they can tell the teacher back what she told them in
the first place. If the information is in the text, then let the kids read it in the text. Telling
them the information ahead does not increase motivation, but instead removes any
legitimate reason for reading the text at all.
5. Previews are rarely purposeful.
What you know before you read a text can have an important shaping influence on
where you put your mental attention. A good introduction can give kid valuable support
for engaging in a particular kind of reading (and remember we are trying to teach kids
how to read effectively, we are not just reading). Too often, the pre-reading activities are
generic, repetitive, and fail to provide students with any guidance that would increase
their power with text. Somebody has to read the text ahead of time and make a
determination of what is hard about it and why it needs to be read. That information
should guide the shape and focus of the pre-reading (should we tell students anything
about the author or should that be an outcome of the reading? Is it better to know the
genre or to try to describe the genre based on this specific instance? etc.).
Now that you see the problem, in my next blog entry I’ll try to give some positive
guidance for pre-reading lessons that I would encourage (and that I think David
Coleman and Sue Pimentel could support). No reason, in my opinion, to ban this
venerable practice, but there is much reason to try to sharpen and focus it to the benefit
of students.
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28
An Overview of Accountable Talk® Practices
An Overview of Accountable Talk® Practices. An excerpt from
IFL’s Accountable Talk® Sourcebook: For Classroom
Conversation That Works with updated sections by Sarah
Michaels and Mary Catherine O’Connor.
Copyright laws may prohibit photocopying this document without express permission.
An Overview of Accountable Talk® Practices
An excerpt from IFL’s Accountable Talk® Sourcebook: For Classroom
Conversation That Works with updated sections by Sarah Michaels and
Mary Catherine O’Connor.
1. Why Talk? How Might Talk Promote Learning?
We have achieved a national consensus regarding the importance of academically productive
talk in school. We are told it is important to promote talk in all instructional domains — at all
grade levels, across all subject areas. All of the major teacher organizations and all of the recent
National Research Council consensus reports highlight and emphasize the need to involve
students actively in “communication” about their thinking and investigations, encouraging
students to use evidence to support their claims, conjectures, predictions, and explanations
(reports from NCTM, NSTA, NRC). Why this emphasis on talk? How might talk promote
learning? What kind of talk might promote learning?
ACADEMIC BENEFITS OF TALK
There are many ways in which talk promotes learning in school. Some of the benefits relate
directly to learning academic content.
Talk—discussion, theorizing, student presentations, and argument—helps make
thinking visible and serves as a window on student understanding and learning.
If students talk about the content they're studying, teachers can see what they don't
understand…and what they do understand. And students, themselves, may realize what
they don't understand and what they do understand. In this way, talk about academic
content helps teachers and students “take stock” of where they are and assess on-going
learning, so that instruction can be tailored to build on students’ current understandings
and advance their thinking in productive ways.
Talk supports robust learning by boosting memory.
Talk is a rich source of information, and plays a part in developing almost every memory
we form. By hearing about (and talking about) concepts, procedures, representations, and
data, our memories have more to work with than from simply reading textbooks and
listening to lectures. Talk provides food for thought. Humans learn by observing, listening,
and doing. If students listen to other students talk about reasoning and problem solving, it
gives them more to think about. By hearing about how others think, and by listening to
what others say, our view of the problem at hand expands. By talking about and hearing
others talk about academic content, we begin to see these concepts, procedures, and
representations from more angles, and make links to other concepts and meanings we
already have. This helps us remember new ideas, terms, or concepts, and develop a
richer set of associations with them, so that we can remember and use them in new
contexts.
Talk supports language development.
When talk is used intensively in classes, students may get a richer sense of what words
and phrases mean, and when and how to use them. By using academic terminology,
Accountable Talk® is a registered trademark of the University of Pittsburgh.
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students build their own ability to remember new “ways with words” and to participate
actively and thoughtfully when others use them.
Productive talk helps students to develop their ability to reason well, using
evidence.
Children come to school as adept language users, able to think abstractly, and argue for
what they think is right. But not all children have been exposed to the kind of reasoning
and explaining that is valued in school and later in public life. This kind of talk requires that
speakers explicate their thinking clearly so that others can hear and understand their ideas
and that they use evidence that others have access to in order to support their claims.
Engaging in talk in school where students are encouraged to explain their ideas and
support their ideas with evidence gives students practice doing this: explicating claims,
providing evidence, and linking their claims and evidence so that others can see that their
evidence is relevant and credible. With guided practice, students’ logical and evidencebased reasoning improves. This improvement in reasoning with evidence is also reflected
in students’ writing and performance on standardized tests.
Productive talk apprentices students to practice in the disciplines.
Different disciplines have their own norms and valued forms of talk, presentation, and
writing. The disciplines differ with respect to what counts as evidence, and how to organize
an argument or procedure so that others in the discipline recognize it as cogent and
credible. Norms for evidence in history — for example, the importance of sourcing and
corroboration in evaluating primary source documents — differ from norms of evidence
and standards of reasoning in a Language Arts discussion about an interpretation in a
short story. Similarly, different kinds of evidence are required and valued in explaining a
conjecture, or generating a proof in mathematics as opposed to explaining a phenomenon
in science. Even though both mathematics and science require evidence and logical
reasoning, it is sometimes said that mathematics is about managing certainty while
science is about managing uncertainty! The point here is that all academic domains
require argument with warranted evidence, but the nature of the evidence and goals of
reasoning and forms of persuasion differ.
SOCIAL BENEFITS OF ACADEMICALLY PRODUCTIVE TALK
In addition to these academic or content-related learning benefits, talk is also important in
helping students develop socially, becoming productive and collaborative members of a
group.
Students learn to listen carefully to their peers, take their ideas seriously, and
challenge ideas respectfully and constructively.
As students participating in discussions are guided to listen attentively (indeed, listen hard
enough so that they could repeat what another classmate has just said), they learn the
practices and habits of mind of good “colleagues” and collaborators. They take one
another seriously as thinkers, and evaluate the content of others’ contributions,
challenging ideas not people. Students learn to take their turns, to wait patiently while
others work to explicate their ideas, and they learn to work hard at explaining their thinking
so that others can hear and understand what they’re saying. This takes time, practice, and
effort, but students become skilled at presenting complex ideas so that others can build on
them and improve them. These social skills are, of course, also intricately related to
learning. A group of skillful, engaged, and respectful communicators become better
learners over time. It takes time to induct students into this kind of “talk culture,” but once
developed, the entire group learns more effectively and efficiently.
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Students learn that thinking and talking about complex ideas takes time and effort,
but that they can do it.
Over time, this builds confidence in one’s ability to explain one’s ideas, to figure things out
with others, and a willingness to persist in the face of intellectual challenges. Students
learn that it pays to put in effort, to ask questions when something is unclear, and that
everyone can get smarter with effort and practice. These ideas about effort help them
become better learners over time.
Students learn to take risks and are motivated to go public with their ideas, even if
they are not sure that they are correct.
When students believe that others are interested in their ideas, and believe that reasoning
with evidence is more important than simply having the correct answer, they become
motivated to engage in exploratory reasoning talk. They are willing to try out ideas before
they are fully formed, so that others can hear them and think with them. They become
motivated to hear others’ views so that they can, in turn, think with them. This promotes a
classroom culture that values effort (over ability), and students come to feel as if they have
a stake in the conversation, and are legitimate contributors and “players” in the game.
Students begin to realize that everyone (they as well as their peers) can get smarter with
effort, and students begin to speak up when they don’t understand something. This, in
turn, motivates others to explain their thinking more clearly, so there is a spiraling effect in
which additional effort increases everyone’s motivation to participate, think hard, and take
risks. The group effect makes for productive learning and benefits individuals.
2.
What Talk Is Not Academically Productive?
All of the previous material on how talk supports learning assumes that the talk is what we call
“academically productive” talk or Accountable Talk practices. But what does that mean? What
are the characteristics of talk that promotes learning? Isn’t all talk academically productive?
Unfortunately there is a great deal of research on classroom talk that robustly and reliably
demonstrates that the answer to this question is no! Not all talk is academically productive.
There is an extensive research base on classroom discourse which examines the nature of
classroom talk and the relationship between talk and learning in school. Researchers and
experienced classroom teachers alike know that simply getting students to talk out loud or talk
to one another does not necessarily lead to learning. What matters is what students are talking
about and how they talk. When students are merely chatting about social events and personal
matters—or if they are simply going through the motions of discussion without really working on
a learning problem—the talk distracts from their learning rather than advancing it.
Teachers in the US, at all grade levels (Pre-K through university) have a hard time leading
productive discussions, in which students explicate their positions with evidence, and other
students build on or critique these ideas, and the group, together, develops complex conceptual
understanding, interpretations or explanations, bolstered with evidence. Teachers tend, instead,
to do something we might call “group recitation.” Extensive research shows that this is the most
common (default) pattern of talk in classrooms throughout the country, and it’s a very familiar
scene: The teacher asks a question, (typically a question the teacher knows the answer to), a
student replies (usually a short reply) and the teacher evaluates, (saying, “Right,” or “not quite,”
or “who else has an idea?”). Some people have talked about this as a teacher lecture elicited
out of the mouths of the students.
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This is often called the IRE pattern:
I – Initiation
R – Response
E – Evaluation
(Chances are great that this is the kind of classroom talk most teachers experienced when they
were students.) Many have noted that the recitation, or the IRE, can be very helpful for
reviewing material, or checking to see what the students recall, and it does give the teacher a
great deal of control over the topic and who speaks.
However, the IRE pattern does not support complex reasoning, or the building and weighing of
arguments. It emphasizes correctness over reasoning, and once the correct answer is offered,
the conversation is closed down, rather than opened up. The teacher then moves on to a
different question and a different student. The conversation proceeds with the teacher holding a
series of exchanges with individual students — Teacher-Student-Teacher-Student-TeacherStudent — without cross-talk among the students in which they consider others’ ideas, agree or
disagree, and explain their own reasoning. Indeed, in recitation, there is rarely any overt linkage
between the ideas or answers of different students. Moreover, within each IRE segment, the
teacher is always positioned as the final authority, the one who HAS the answer. The student is
positioned as the “getter” of the answer in the teacher’s head. Students are either correct or
incorrect and thus publicly shown to be either right or wrong (which often is interpreted as either
smart or not smart). Typically only a few students (and usually the same few) students volunteer
to take a turn. Because of the emphasis on correctness over reasoning, the IRE pattern has
been linked in research on student motivation to “performance goals” (whereby students act in
such a way as to look smart) rather than to “learning goals” (whereby students participate so as
to really understand and learn).
In short, the IRE format doesn’t create a classroom culture that promotes risk-taking or effort,
where students work hard at explicating their ideas, at requesting clarification of others,
responding to or building upon the ideas of others, or building and weighing complex arguments
with evidence.
While the IRE is often used in reviewing material (such as what was done the day before) or
checking to see what students recall about a topic or remind them what they have already
learned it, is not the most effective way to do this. Students who do not feel confident do not
participate, so their understanding is not assessed. Students who give correct answers might
have serious misconceptions that are never voiced because their responses are not probed
more deeply. Students, especially older students, who are independent-minded and selfrespecting, often withdraw from talk in which they feel they are being “used” to make a teacher’s
point, or appear as “model students” in the eyes of the rest of the class. Finally, IRE talk reveals
answers but it does not reveal and recall students’ knowledge nearly as well as more openended talk in which students draw upon their prior knowledge to offer predictions or conclusions
about a new problem. As Bloom notes in his Taxonomy, lower-level factual knowledge is
involved in, and therefore revealed in, higher-level thinking activities.
Another common form of talk is “sharing” or collecting students’ evaluative opinions or personal
reminiscences related to a topic. Often the goal is the worthwhile one of helping students
connect with prior knowledge or promoting students’ understanding of each other’s background
and perspectives. While this kind of talk can be useful, it is not as academically productive as
the kinds of discussions featuring Accountable Talk practices that we will focus on here. This
kind of talk typically begins with teachers asking students what experience they have had with a
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topic in general. As students respond, the teacher simply encourages more responses, since
there is no logical reason to ask students to clarify or support their accounts of their own
opinions or experiences. Sharing is not really discussion, because there is no reasonable way
students can challenge, support, or build on each other’s opinions; each opinion is equally valid
as an expression of the individual’s perspective. Even when students go off topic, the teacher
can hardly focus the talk without contravening the basic premise, that whatever students say is
of value. The sharing session is used by many teachers to “get students talking,” but while
younger students often participate enthusiastically, older students may feel wary or dismissive
of this kind of talk.
As alternatives to whole group recitation or “sharing” of ideas, teachers rely heavily on group
work. In unsupervised groups, students are often off task, unproductive, or not nice to one
another. Many group tasks are not ideal for groups. The high status students often dominate.
3. What Are Accountable Talk Practices? What Do They Look And Sound
Like?
In contrast to the IRE recitation format, anything-goes “sharing ideas” talk, or unsupervised (and
often dysfunctional) group work, academically productive talk looks quite different. Academically
productive talk — or Accountable Talk practices — is talk in which students exert effort to
explain their thinking with evidence and to listen and respond constructively to others’ ideas, in
order to make progress in solving a challenging problem, interpreting a text, or conducting an
investigation. It is talk that promotes learning.
For classroom talk to promote learning it must be accountable: to the learning community, to
accurate and appropriate knowledge, and to rigorous thinking. Accountable Talk practices
involves talk that seriously responds to and further develops what others in the group have said.
It puts forth and demands knowledge that is accurate and relevant to the issue under
discussion. This kind of academically productive talk uses evidence appropriate to the discipline
(e.g., proofs in mathematics, data from investigations in science, textual references in literature,
documentary sources in history) and follows established norms of good reasoning. It sharpens
students' thinking by reinforcing their ability to use and create knowledge.
Accountable Talk conversations do not spring spontaneously from students' mouths. It takes
time and effort to create a classroom environment in which this kind of talk is a valued norm. It
requires teachers to guide and scaffold student participation. Teachers create the norms and
skills of academically productive talk in their classrooms by modeling appropriate forms of
discussion and by questioning, probing, and leading conversations. For example, teachers may
press for clarification and explanation, require justifications of proposals and challenges,
recognize and challenge misconceptions, demand evidence for claims and arguments, or
interpret and "revoice" students' statements. Over time, students are expected to carry out each
of these conversational "moves" themselves in peer discussions. Once the norms for
conversation within the classroom have been established, Accountable Talk practices are jointly
constructed by teachers and students, working together towards rigorous academic purposes in
a thinking curriculum.
Conversations in the classroom can take a wide variety of forms: whole class discussion, small
group work, partner talk, peer or teacher conferences. But regardless of which form is used, talk
should be accountable to the learning community, to knowledge and the standards of evidence
that are appropriate for the subject, and to generally accepted standards of reasoning. These
forms of accountability can be seen in what the students say and in what the teacher says. They
are supported by classroom norms and recurring activities as well as by carefully designed
tasks.
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All students have a right to engage in Accountable Talk practices, not just the "best and
brightest," nor only those who are struggling in school. It is not something that should be limited
to special times of the day, or to special groups of students. And we should expect to find
Accountable Talk practices across all grade levels and in all subject areas.
The process of Socializing Intelligence (one of the Institute for Learning’s nine Principles of
Learning) takes place in and through talk. Intelligence is much more than an innate ability to
think quickly and stockpile bits of information. Intelligence is a set of problem-solving and
reasoning capabilities along with the habits of mind that lead one to use those capabilities
regularly. It is also a set of beliefs about one’s right and obligation to understand and make
sense of the world and one’s capacity to figure things out over time. Intelligent habits of mind
are learned through daily expectations placed on the learner. By calling on students to use the
skills of intelligent thinking—and by holding them responsible for doing so—educators can teach
intelligence.
Accountability to the Learning Community
When classroom talk is accountable to the learning community, students listen to one
another, not just obediently keeping quiet until it is their turn to take the floor, but attending
carefully so that they can use and build on one another's ideas. Students and teachers
paraphrase and expand upon one another's contributions. If speakers aren't sure they
understood what someone else said, they make an effort to clarify. They disagree
respectfully, challenging a claim, not the person who made it. Students move the
argument forward, sometimes with the teacher's help, sometimes on their own.
Obviously, this kind of talk calls for a certain amount of patience, restraint, and focused
effort on the part of students and teachers alike. A youngster who experiences a blinding
insight in the middle of a discussion may need to be reminded not to trample all over her
classmates' talk in her eagerness to express her thoughts. An adolescent trying out a new
idea in front of his peers may need encouragement to articulate his position. And
educators, with limited time to help their students reach the standards, must skillfully
balance unwavering attention to their learning goals with moments where a discussion
“takes a detour.” There are times when something unplanned but significant happens: an
unusual comment by a student, evidence of divergent understandings of a particular term,
an unexpected outcome of an experiment. Teachers must make on-the-spot judgments
about whether to maintain the focus and coherence of the lesson as planned, or to take
advantage of a "teachable moment." They must weigh the costs and benefits of shifting
course in mid-stream. They must find ways to balance the challenge of keeping the talk
focused and academically rigorous with the challenge of including all members of the
classroom community as valued, engaged participants, attending to differences in
students’ cultural and linguistic backgrounds, previous academic preparation, and
interests. Often, those who do not teach fail to realize the complexity of what goes on in
the classroom, and thus underestimate the accomplishments of teachers who skillfully use
academically productive talk in their classrooms.
How can we tell whether the talk in a classroom is accountable to the community? There
are consistent signs in such classrooms that one can easily spot. Over the course of a few
classes we would see students actively participating in talk together. We would probably
notice that each student is able to participate in several different kinds of talk activities
using appropriate tone and content. We would notice students listening attentively to one
another, with a minimum of interruptions. While students would consistently pay attention
to other students' contributions, there would be a climate of respect, trust, and risk-taking,
with challenges, criticism, or disagreements directed at ideas, not at individuals. We would
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see students making sure that they understand the previous contributions, asking for
clarification where necessary, and willingly clarifying their own contributions for others,
building up an argument or complex idea together.
In classrooms where students engage in this kind of talk, we can be sure that we will find a
teacher who has carefully laid the groundwork for classroom norms that support it. We are
likely to observe a wide array of teacher moves that support accountability to the
community, moves that help students and teachers jointly create talk that is responsive to
the community.
Accountability to Accurate Knowledge
Accountability to accurate knowledge means that when speakers make an observation or
claim, they try to be as specific and accurate as possible, not just saying anything that
comes to mind. Speakers should be concerned that what they are saying is true or
supportable, that is, that they have their facts straight. If they make a statement or claim
based on a text they have read, their reference to the text must be accurate and
appropriate. In classrooms where accountability to accurate knowledge is the norm,
students expect to ask and answer challenging questions, to work hard at "getting it right":
Are those statistics accurate? Where did they come from? What is your basis for that
conclusion? Who said that? When did that event take place? Their responses to such
questions may cite a specific passage from a text that they are working with or refer to
knowledge built in the course of discussion. Or they might offer an explanation or example
grounded in knowledge from outside the classroom. But even this outside knowledge will
be accurate, relevant, and accessible to the whole group—that is, something that they can
refer to together. Students do not shut down discussion with emotive statements of
personal preference or opinion that defy challenge.
How can we tell whether the talk in a classroom is accountable to accurate knowledge?
There are consistent signs in such classrooms that both students and teacher consider
themselves responsible for the accuracy and truth of their claims. We would see many
instances in which students make specific reference to their classroom community's
previous "findings" to support their arguments and assertions. Topics they have studied
together in the past are referred to in later discussions, where relevant. The learning
community builds on the knowledge it has collectively acquired.
Whether in English language arts, mathematics, science or social studies, we will see
students make reference to specific information: the source might be textbooks, books
they have read inside or outside of class, or other sources including films, television and
personal experience. The information—used to support claims and to bolster argument—
will be specific and open for verification by others. In classrooms that are accountable to
knowledge, we see teachers and students questioning unsupported claims and asking for
information, facts or knowledge that could be used to strengthen those claims. Students
and teachers ask others to define terms. Finally, students and teachers will be on the
lookout for points where additional knowledge is necessary. They will seek to identify
factual evidence that is needed to address an issue. And they will frequently discuss how
one might find the knowledge needed to make progress in a particular enterprise or
problem.
Once again, in classrooms where students engage in this kind of talk, we can be sure that
we will find a teacher who has invested time and effort in making sure that students
develop and sustain the relevant values and habits. We are likely to observe a wide array
of teacher moves that support accountability to accurate knowledge, moves that will
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ensure that every discussion and instructional conversation foregrounds accurate and
relevant knowledge.
Accountability to Rigorous Thinking
If accountability to accurate knowledge can be thought of as getting the facts straight,
accountability to rigorous thinking has to do with building a line of argument. Making
cogent and compelling arguments requires linking together claims and evidence (facts) in
a logical, coherent, and rigorous manner. When classroom talk is held to rigorous thinking
standards, students and teachers consistently push for clear statements of claims
(positions, explanations, or predictions) and sound reasoning in backing up those claims
with evidence.
Teachers and students examine evidence critically, knowing that just having accurate facts
is not, in and of itself, enough. The evidence presented has to be "good" or what is often
called "warranted" evidence. Beyond merely being accurate, the evidence has to be
sufficient (e.g., a claim about people in North America vs. people in Europe needs to be
based on more than an informal survey of a few people from Chicago and an exchange
student from Paris). The facts must be credible (information quoted from the Washington
Post is more authoritative than information quoted from an unnamed source in the
National Enquirer or downloaded from an unrefereed bulletin board on the Web). The facts
must be relevant to the claim being made (information about Japan, however accurate and
authoritative, will probably not be germane to an argument about North Americans vs.
Europeans). And the claim must be appropriately qualified (if all the evidence for a
particular claim comes from interviewing people from New York City, it might not be fair to
generalize to the entire population of North America).
Distinguishing sharply between accountability to knowledge and accountability to rigorous
thinking is not easy because they so often go hand in hand. It is possible, of course, to
have rigorous and cogent reasoning, but with a factually false premise. It is possible to
have inadequate or incorrect evidence for one's claims. Similarly, it is possible to have
well- researched, factually accurate evidence that is not directly relevant to the claim one
is making. The evidence, while counting as accurate knowledge, simply does not warrant
the conclusion drawn. Thus it is possible to distinguish between factual knowledge and
standards of reasoning, but in practice, they are intertwined and both necessary.
Disciplines vary in the types of evidence they value.
When students are digging into a good poem or story, for instance, they might be trying to
sense how the words and rhythms create tension or convey emotions. No one expects a
student to provide a "proof" for her claim that a verse evoked a particular emotional
response. Within a social studies lesson, students may marshal historical facts to support
a position that begins as an "opinion." But if a student explaining his thinking about a
fractions problem were to say, "I think the 4 stays the same because it just feels right that
way," he is not being accountable to the standards of evidence that apply in the discipline
of mathematics. That it "feels right" might be recognized as an intuition and valued as such
as a starting point. But it would be appropriate to ask the student to examine this intuition
and push for a more mathematically relevant basis for it. There are thus different
standards of evidence in different fields, and students need to be inducted into those
different kinds of academic communities. As early as first grade, we can begin to socialize
students into those different worlds.
It takes effort and time to teach students to adhere to rigorous thinking standards. In a
classroom that is accountable to rigorous thinking, we may not always see perfectly
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structured arguments and reasoning. What we will see, however, is consistent attention to
the quality of claims and arguments: How well supported is a claim? Is the evidence good?
Sufficient? Authoritative? Relevant? Unbiased? In seeking to build sound and rigorous
arguments, students and teachers ask questions that test their own understanding of
concepts, redefine or change explanations as needed, and identify their own biases. They
draw comparisons and contrasts among the ideas presented as evidence and indicate to
what degree they accept the evidence and claims.
In classroom talk that is accountable to generally accepted standards of reasoning,
students use data, examples, analogies, and hypothetical "what-if" scenarios to make
arguments and support claims. Students are encouraged to seek out different kinds of
supporting evidence, strengthening an argument by using a variety of sources to support
it. Students and teachers assess and challenge the soundness of each other's evidence
and quality of reasoning, often posing counter-examples and extreme case comparisons
to illustrate a point. Hidden assumptions are uncovered and examined. Students and
teachers consistently ask one another to show why the evidence used to support a claim
is accountable to rigorous thinking.
In emphasizing accountability to rigorous thinking in classrooms, regardless of content
area, one central purpose is to create a public arena where arguments can be explicated
more fully and made public, looked at by others, interrogated, and developed further. We
want students to learn ways to expand and improve their reasoning, making their ideas
clear and compelling to others, in part by making their contributions elaborated and
explicit. We want students to dig deep, to question their underlying assumptions, to
evaluate the adequacy of their evidence, and to see things from a variety of perspectives.
Explicating one's reasoning in words or in writing makes it public and available for others
(or oneself) to assess, critique, question, or challenge.
4. How Does An Understanding Of Accountability To The Learning
Community, Accurate Knowledge, And Rigorous Thinking Help
Practitioners Institute Or Improve Accountable Talk Practices?
Think of the accountabilities to the learning community, to accurate knowledge, and to rigorous
thinking as the conceptual underpinning or framework for what Accountable Talk practices look
like in the classroom. Determining the extent to which each of these are visible in any classroom
will help a practitioner take the “talk temperature” of a classroom. But these different kinds of
accountability are not the most useful tools for changing practice. It is often difficult to
distinguish between talk that is accountable to knowledge and talk that is accountable to
rigorous reasoning, because they are so often intertwined. And some talk moves can support
accountability to community, knowledge, and reasoning all at the same time. Thus the
accountabilities are often hard to keep separate in one’s mind in the fast pace of classroom talk,
and are not the best level to concentrate on in action.
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Setting the Stage for Accountable Talk® Practices:
Norms for Equitable and Respectful Participation
Combined excerpts from the IFL’s Accountable Talk®
Sourcebook: For Classroom Conversation That Works and
Talking Point Primer: An Overview of Academically Productive
Talk by Sarah Michaels and Mary Catherine O’Connor.
Copyright laws may prohibit photocopying this document without express permission.
Setting the Stage for Accountable Talk® Practices:
Norms for Equitable and Respectful Participation
This reading combines excerpts from the IFL’s Accountable Talk
Sourcebook®:: For Classroom Conversation That Works and Talking Point
Primer: An Overview of Academically Productive Talk by Sarah Michaels and
Mary Catherine O’Connor.
Although academically productive conversations are valuable for promoting student learning, at
first these classroom conversations may be frightening or uncomfortable for students. In
academically productive conversations, we ask students to expose their thinking to all of their
student colleagues and to make themselves vulnerable to disagreement, challenge, or criticism.
We ask students to put their best thinking on the line, before they are expert in a domain or
certain they are correct. We ask them to respond to fellow students and challenge their ideas in
ways that might be construed as critical or unfriendly. We pose challenging problems, with no
obvious or simple answer. We ask students to offer multiple solutions, to develop alternative
approaches, and to argue with one another and with text. This kind of "exploratory" talk requires
trust and respect.
How does one go about setting up the conditions for trust and respect? How does one make the
classroom a safe place for students to tackle complex problems through Accountable
Talk conversations? To establish a "trusting culture," the teacher must put in place certain
norms and practices to ensure that students allow others to speak without interruption and that
they will treat each contribution as important: No one can ridicule or attack another student’s
contribution. The focus must be on the ideas, not the person articulating them. In addition to
injunctions against disrespectful talk, positive examples of respectful ways of talking must be
explicitly modeled and practiced by the teacher.
Establishing Ground Rules
How do teachers succeed in creating a classroom culture that supports productive talk and
reasoning? Not everyone’s classroom looks the same. Successful teachers respond to the
unique needs of their classes and schools, and establish norms and ground rules in a wide
variety of ways. However, all successful classrooms share two common elements: (1) teachers
convey clear expectations, and (2) students share an understanding about why these rules are
important. Teachers who are successful thus work hard to make the rules for talk explicit and
public. But beyond establishing the rules (and charting them or handing them out to students),
they take ample time to make sure that the students themselves can articulate what the rules
mean, getting the students themselves to explain why these are reasonable, good rules for
everyone.
What does this look like in practice? Some teachers give a speech of some sort – laying out the
rules and justifying them. Other teachers opt to create a class chart together, allowing students
to propose rules and discuss among themselves which ones they want and why. Some teachers
develop a handout of rules, pass them out to the students and go over them, asking the
students to provide reasons that these rules are important. Whichever method a teacher
chooses, it is important that great care is taken to make the norms clear, public, and collectively
“owned.”
Accountable Talk® is a registered trademark of the University of Pittsburgh.
 2013 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH
What will work best for a particular teacher will likely depend on a number of things: the age of the
students, their previous experiences with talk (from earlier grades), the time of the year (i.e., how
socialized the students already are to certain ways of talking), and the general climate of the classroom
(i.e., how respectful the students normally are in discussions with one another). Teachers need to think
carefully about their own group or groups of students.
Questions and suggestions teachers might consider: Do you want your students to participate in
generating the rules? If you teach a number of sections of the same class, do you want to create a
common list so that each group is held to the same standards? In some cases, it is helpful to meet with
colleagues and talk about establishing a shared set of ground rules for all students at that grade level or
even across the entire school so that students encounter the same expectations throughout the day
and from teacher to teacher. In these cases, it is important to take the time to make these “common
rules” clear and applicable to your particular situation.
As with most things, there are trade-offs with each option—having the rules come from the teacher or
from the students. Teacher-generated rules may create more overall consistency for students from
class to class, and be more quickly internalized by students who move around from class to class (in
middle and high school). Student-generated rules may create more of a sense of involvement, buy-in,
and agency on the part of the students in creating a positive classroom culture for talk.
Establishing reasonable and realistic consequences for breaking the rules
In all classrooms – in even the most cooperative and well-behaved of groups – there will be occasional
violations of the rules. What teachers do in the face of a violation, whether major or minor, is critical to
the success of your efforts to establish a culture conducive to academically productive talk. For this
reason, from the outset, teachers need to think carefully about the consequences for any instance of
breaking the rules.
This may sound obvious and easy, but in practice it is a complex undertaking. Various conditions need
to be met. The consequences should be logical and appropriate to the seriousness of violation
and they should make sense to the students. The consequences must be made explicit in advance
of sanctions; they must be understood and agreed upon collectively. When a violation occurs, the
violation should be obvious to all. Consequences must be enforced consistently so that students do not
perceive the teacher as selective (picking favorites) or as mercurial (sometimes strict, sometimes
“nice”). Finally, the consequences should be clear and understood by all so that the teacher will know
precisely what to do, as she is thinking on her feet, on the fly, in the midst of a discussion of complex
ideas. This is indeed a tall order!
When these criteria are met, the students will know exactly what to expect. They will see that their
teacher is fair and that all students are held to the same standard. By invoking the rules consistently, a
teacher makes it clear that he is creating a safe and predictable environment for the free flow of ideas.
All students will have the right to be heard, the right to be listened to, and the right to be responded to
respectfully. By the same token, all students will have the obligation to not interrupt classmates, to
listen hard and build on one another’s ideas, and to challenge or critique ideas rather than an individual
person.
Because establishing consequences for breaking the rules is both difficult AND critical to your
success, it is helpful to unpack the crucial components that make for reasonable and realistic
consequences.
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•
Consequences should be compatible with the behavioral system
that is already in place in a classroom or school.
Many schools and classrooms already have in place a system for dealing with
behavioral infractions. Whether this is called a classroom management system,
a behavioral system, or a code of conduct, it contains a series of steps, some
minor and some more serious, for dealing with various kinds of infractions.
When you institute explicit classroom norms for classroom talk, it will be very
helpful to use the same system.
•
If students are new to this kind of talk, bear in mind that early on,
they will need reminders, clarifications, and encouragement.
It is important to let students know from the beginning that their teacher will hold
them accountable to listen to others, to make themselves heard, to address one
another respectfully, and so on. However, if this is the first time that students
have encountered such rules, it may be very difficult for them to adhere to
Accountable Talk practices. Good humor and persistence will be needed by the
teacher to bring things along in a friendly and positive manner.
•
Be prepared to continue reinforcing the new norms consistently
throughout the school year.
Every teacher we know says that although many students take to these
discourse norms enthusiastically, the teacher must remain vigilant throughout
the year. Even if it is February or March, an increase in disrespect may have a
negative impact on classroom work throughout the rest of the school year.
Turn-Taking Norms
In order for everyone to have a turn to speak, there must be orderly and equitable norms for
getting a turn at talk. Different teachers handle this in different ways. Some teachers call on
students themselves, so as to be able to control the distribution of turns at talk, strategically
calling on quiet students or students they know have something important to contribute. They
can make sure that both boys and girls participate equally. Other teachers set up different turntaking norms, such as "handing off" (where the last student to speak selects the next speaker)
or rely on a student moderator (who selects student speakers). These latter approaches give
students more control over speaker rights to the floor. Others will institute (when needed) the
"gender rule," requiring boys and girls to alternate speaking turns.
There are positive and negative aspects to all of these approaches and teachers must decide
for themselves which ones will work best in their classrooms, given their students and their
particular academic purposes. All of these means and methods are merely tools for teachers;
they should be used strategically and thoughtfully.
Of course, turn-taking norms and rules do exist in most classrooms, but orderly turn-taking is
only the first step. The eventual goal is for students to incorporate and build upon the previous
turns of other students, to actually carry out a dialogue with the other members of their learning
community. This requires planning and routines that go beyond the ordinary turn-taking
conventions.
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Using Wait Time
In most classrooms, teacher and student exchanges take place at an “astonishing speed”
according to Mary Budd Rowe (1986). When she studied classroom conversations, she
discovered that teachers typically wait less than a second for a student response. Increased
wait time of at least 2.7, and preferably at least 3, seconds can have these effects on students:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
The length of student responses increases between 300% and 700%.
More inferences are supported by evidence and logical argument.
The incidence of speculative thinking increases.
The number of questions asked by students increases.
Student-student exchanges increase; teacher-centered “show and tell” behavior
decreases.
6. Failures to respond decrease.
7. Disciplinary moves decrease.
8. The variety of students participating voluntarily increases. Also the number of
unsolicited, but appropriate, contributions by students increases.
9. Student confidence, as reflected in few inflected responses, increases.
10. Achievement improves on written measures where the items are cognitively complex.
Effects on teachers are equally important:
1. Teachers’ responses exhibit greater flexibility. This is indicated by the occurrence of
fewer discourse errors and greater continuity in the development of ideas.
2. The number and kind of questions asked by teachers changes. There are fewer
questions, but more of them entail asking for clarification or inviting elaboration or
contrary positions.
3. Expectations for the performance of certain students seems to improve. This effect was
especially pronounced where minority students were concerned.
The effects have been observed with all kinds of students from elementary school to college
and including special needs students, talented and gifted students, and English language
learners. Beginning effects can be almost instantaneous, often detectable in the first hour!
Getting going on this change to classroom practice would seem to be a “no-brainer.” But it turns
out that what appears to be a simple technique is, in fact, difficult to learn.
Wait Time after Posing a Question
When the teacher asks a question, not all students will process that question at the same rate.
English language learners, students with less background knowledge, students with processing
difficulties, all may be left behind if the teacher too quickly to chooses a student to answer her
question. It may feel strange to ignore the student with the quickly raised hand and wait for
others to respond. But consciously waiting before calling on anyone gives more students a
chance to think and formulate a response. This technique has another, equally important effect.
In many classrooms, students know that all of the teacher's questions will be answered by a few
"star students." The "silent majority" feel no obligation to try and answer a question because
they know that before they can formulate a response, one of the stars will beat them to it. Over
time, this has a demoralizing effect on students and on the teacher. In such classrooms, it is
difficult to sustain a discussion in which all students participate, and more importantly, students
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do not have the sense that they have an obligation to think about the problem or question along
with everyone else. If a teacher uses wait time consistently and varies the choice of students
she calls on, a change will take place in the classroom. Students who formerly never
volunteered an answer will begin to realize that the teacher's questions are also for them.
Wait Time after Calling on a Student
A second kind of wait time can be seen after the teacher has called on a student. Many students
will take quite a while to answer. They may sit silently, staring at the teacher. They may begin to
formulate an answer, stumbling and stopping in a way that is difficult to follow. It sometimes
feels very uncomfortable to wait silently as a student struggles to formulate an answer. Most of
us naturally want to jump in and rescue the student by offering to let them pass or soliciting
another student's help. Yet teachers who have gritted their teeth and remained silent, waiting for
an answer of some kind, have come to see significant changes among their students.
Many more students are willing to engage in the conversation. Teachers who use this kind of
wait time effectively often explicitly tell the students that they are, in fact, waiting. As a student
struggles to answer, they will say to other students things like, "That's OK, give her time." Or,
"That's OK, we'll wait." This kind of behavior models accountability to the community.
Wait Time after a Student Gives a Response
A third kind of wait time emerges after the student has given a response. It is easy to forget that
when a student produces an answer, not all of the other students will be able to process that
answer equally quickly. The teacher may find ways, in addition to silence, to extend the time
that the student's answer "hangs in the air." For example, the teacher can thoughtfully repeat
the student's answer: "Hmmm, the fractions with odd denominators." Some teachers take the
step of writing an answer on the board, or slowly clarifying it in a revoicing move: "So, you're
saying that the fractions with odd denominators will be the ones that create repeating decimals.
So Anna's conjecture is that repeating decimals will result for all fractions with odd
denominators. Is that right Anna?" Other teachers may ask another student to repeat what Anna
has said. Although none of these moves involve silence, all are a form of "wait time," because
all give the students additional time to process what has been said.
Rowe, M.B (1986). Wait time: Slowing down may be a way of speeding up! Journal of Teacher Education, 3,
43-50.
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TRANSCRIPT
Accountable Talk in Action: Grade 10
Interpretation: “Ain’t I a Woman?”
Lesson Questions: Why does Sojourner Truth repeat the phrase “Ain’t I a Woman?”?
Pedagogical Routines: Quick writes, charting, whole group discussion
Length: 9:40 minutes
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Teacher:
The other part of the question. Why does Sojourner Truth repeat it, and
this time you don't have to raise your hands. You're going to make a
point, anyone else wants to jump in and add to it or disagree or explain,
you just wait until no one is speaking and then say what you have to say.
So that's why you needed your notes.
Why – and one person will start us off and then you all will talk and I will
just step back. Okay? Why does she repeat it?
Student 9:
I think she repeats it because it's the topic of her speech and she doesn't
want the audience to lose focus.
Student 10: I think she repeats it not only for emphasis, but I think that her point in
saying it in the first place was to basically abolish all the standards that
men and everybody else had put upon women. And they say that women
can't do this, and women have to be helped doing this, and blah, blah,
blah. But she's saying, "I can do all this work, I can plow, I can do
probably more work than you can and you're sitting here telling me that I
can't do something and that I have to be helped into carriages."
She says, "Ain't I a Woman?" she's breaking their standards. "I'm a
woman, I'm doing things that you said I couldn't do. So you must be
wrong."
Student 8:
I think that she's actually repeating it for the audience to think to
themselves, "Why does she keep repeating it?" And she – like we said,
she's not repeating it for an answer, she's repeating it because it's a
deeper meaning to that question.
Student 11: I agree with Taylor and Shamiah, the reason why she keeps repeating,
"Ain't I a Woman?" I think it's also because she wants to make the
audience think. Here she says she can do many things and she keeps
repeating the phrase, "Ain't I a Woman?" We're clearly aware that you are
a woman and a lady, but yet you can do all these things that the average
woman may not be able to do.
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Student 12: I think she asks, "Ain't I a Woman?", also because she wants the people in
her audience maybe if they never had the thought of like they can be
equal to men, she wants them to have that perspective in their mind that
they can be equal as she is, or what she's trying to portray herself as. So I
think the purpose is like to show them that she can do it. Anyone else can
do it if she can do it as well.
Student 3:
I think that she's trying to change the other –
[Laughter]
Student 3:
I think that she's trying to change the audience's mentality. The people in
the audience were so used to being pampered and treated all helplessly
and stuff where she had to do everything on her own. So I guess she's
trying to make them see like she – basically she's trying to say, "Oh, you
can't do it, I can do it," so they go, "Oh, I can do it, too."
Student 10
Well, it was a feminist convention. They already felt like that. But I see
what you mean, just saying that she – I see.
Student 3:
To break what they're used to.
Student 10: Right.
Student 3:
So they can –
Student 13: I agree with Taylor and Niah, I think that she was really saying, "Ain't I a
Woman?" but it meant different things. Like she wasn't just asking, "Ain't I
a Woman?" she was trying to break all the standards. Like Taylor said,
she was saying that I'm a woman but I can eat all this and I can work this
way and I can do all this. But then she said, "I'm a woman and how come
nobody ever helps me into carriages or over mud puddles?"
She's saying, "I can do all this stuff, but if I'm a woman, if I'm dainty and
lady, how come nobody ever did this stuff for me, or didn't do that for me?
How come if I'm a woman I was treated differently than all the rest of the
women?"
Student 14: I think she's trying to express the contradiction, this main contradiction in
the speech. I really don't think she's speaking for herself, but for the
variety of African-American women during this time. And well, something
– well, a quote that she said is, she points out that man over there who is
probably in the crowd. And he says, "Women need to be helped into
carriages and lifted over ditches and to have the best place everywhere."
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And she expresses this contradiction by stating, "Nobody ever helps me
into carriages or over mud puddles." So that's what – she's speaking for
the black women.
Student 1:
I was going to say that, too. I think she was trying to bring, like, a
contradiction of what society was, like, was going on in society. Because
she said, like, as I was saying before, she had – there were certain
definitions of what a woman was supposed to be or how they were
supposed to act or, you know?
And so basically she didn't have all that. She was basically as a slave she
was like – she had the title of a man and she did the work of a man. So
basically it brings up like how their philosophies contradict themselves
because they say a woman's supposed to be feminine and this and that,
but she was doing – playing the role of the male.
Student 14: Also, with that, women should be, dah, dah, dah, all this. She isn't
expressing a specific type of woman, she's saying, "women," period. So
just with that contradiction, it should be fair for all races of women during
this time.
Student 15: And I think that she said this for respect, because as Niah said, that she's
talking to these women that are helped over mud puddles and lifted up to
carriages and stuff that – and she's asking the question, "Ain't I a Woman?
Don't I deserve this respect, too, and don't I deserve to get helped and
don't I deserve all this stuff?"
[Crosstalk]
Student:
Would you repeat what you just said? You said that she wasn't –
Student 14: She isn't expressing a specific type of woman, she's saying women.
Student 9:
I think she is because she's talking about, "Shouldn't I get helped over
carriages?" She's referring to white women. So I think this is addressing
– well, it's addressing white women – I mean, it's addressing men, I guess,
but I think it's about white – I think it's about how black women should be
treated like the white women. I think she's –
Student 3:
I disagree.
Student 10: I think it was just – like I said before, I think that there were standards and
I think by saying that the same people who said that the white women
should be helped into carriages and digging ditches are the same people
who said that women can't work as hard as she does. And so it was there
– they were the same people who said that and they were the same
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people who said that women can't have rights, and she's proven their
other standards wrong so that means that women should have rights.
Student 3:
I don't think she was there just for the rights of African-Americans or
African-American women. I think what she was trying to say is that all
these – how women are being helped is basically a crutch for them not to
be able to do it on their own and do for themselves. She – I think she was
there for everybody as a whole. All women, black, white, whatever you
are, to be able to do for themselves and not be looked at as little as like
being less than a man, that you can do equally as anybody else. And she
was not only there for herself, she was there for every woman, not for only
African-American women.
Student 13: I kind of agree with what Niah said. I think that she was trying to stand up
for women who were known as less because she was like, "that little man
over there said that women can't have as much rights as men because
Christ wasn't a woman." So she's referring to any women that men have
told are less than them or are weaker than them or can't do as much as
them.
She's saying that you can, because of this, you can because I can. You
can because of all these facts that she stated in the text. But I don't think
she's not necessarily like – I don't know. I don't think she ever said there
was a bad thing about being helped over ditches. I don't think she ever
meant that, like, she shouldn't have a man's help. I just think that she
didn't want to be considered less than a man. She wanted to be equal
with men. She didn't necessarily want to be more, or less, she wanted to
be just equal.
Teacher:
Let's just kind of look at the thoughts that you all have come up with, really
great thoughts. And you started out talking about feminism, then you
started talking about rights of African-Americans, so human rights, civil
rights, and then you ended up saying maybe she was just talking about
the rights of all people, all women. So just take a few minutes and write
down your ideas, bring everything to a close. Maybe just a couple of
sentences to kind of close out why you think she continued to repeat.
Maybe you've changed your minds, maybe you haven't. But maybe you
heard something today that caught your interest. Just drop down a line or
two and just bring closure and we'll pick it up again tomorrow and finish it.
Tenth Grade
Teacher: Patricia Bradford
Principal: Fletcher James III
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Central High School, Prince George’s County Public Schools, Maryland
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TRANSCRIPT
Accountable Talk in Action: Grade 5
Comprehension Via Questioning the Author: “Child Labor”
Lesson Questions: What main ideas does the author want us to understand about child labor?
What key details support the author’s main ideas?.
Pedagogical Routines: Shared reading, charting, whole group discussion
Length: 4:12 minutes
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T1
T1
(Reading text) Usually these workers work tirelessly long hours under
dangerous conditions, for inadequate or no payment. In many cases, workers
suffer physical and psychological abuse and are forced to work under conditions
similar to slavery. Okay. Boys and girls … first of all … do we have to clarify, uh
I know inadequate is a cognate. Do we know… do we understand inadequate
payment?
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T2
Translate it to Spanish. What does it sound like?
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Ss
Inadecuado.
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(Students talking all at once.)
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S2
They don’t get the payment that they are supposed to get.
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S3
Low payment.
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T2
Okay, so… No reciben el pago que ellos están supuesto a ganar-- a recibir.
Good.
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T1
Like Valerie said low, okay… low payment. Okay so boys and girls let’s look at
the query. How does this information connect to what we already read in other
articles. Well gosh we’ve been actually covering that.
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T2
Good. ¿Cómo esta información se puede conectar con la información que
hemos aprendido en los otros artículos que hemos leído?
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T1
So, we just read about the workers working long hours, dangerous conditions,
physical and psychological abuse. How does this connect to other articles we’ve
read?
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S7
Like the other articles said that there are false statements. So they forced them
to work but they abuse them instead. So, that’s like uh they don’t tell them they
are going to abuse them.
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S8
Here it says that um, workers suffer physical and psycho...
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T2
Psychological.
 2012 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH
Clip ID 1997
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S8
Psychological abuse. It’s like about their health.
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T1
Can I ask you … do you understand what psychological means? Or do we
understand … are we clear about psychological abuse?
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(Students talk at same time: Yeah… no.)
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T1
Because I heard her say it in Spanish, the Spanish way… and isn’t that a
cognate?
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T2
Right. We have physical and we have psychological. Physical is…..
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(All students talking at once, yell out Spanish words) fisical… (corrected by another
student) fisiológico.
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T2
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(Students call out) Yeah!
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T1
If someone is abusing you physically, it means they’re, they’re hurting your body.
Okay. They are hurting you. If they are abusing you psychologically…
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S3
Oh, in their mind.
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T1
Exactly, okay.
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T1
(reading) In India, as many as 15 million child agricultural workers are bonded.
Bonded labor takes place when a family receives money to hand over a child,
boy or girl, to an employer. In most cases, the child can never work off the debt
or raise enough money for the family to buy the child back.
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T1
Now boys and girls … bonded labor this is new. This is a new term for us. We
have not read about that before. What is the author talking about here? Explain
what the author means by bonded labor.
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What do you think is the motivation for a family, wanting to give up a child.
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S2
Survival, they want to survive. They don’t want to die, they need food to survive.
Like we do.
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Okay, just to define it in English. Both words are cognates in Spanish, both
words are cognates in Spanish. But, physical, do you know what physical, do
you know what physical means?
(All talking)
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S9
I would like to say my point, like, he said that the family doesn’t have the money
to buy them back. So, if they, if they, they give, they sell their sons, and the
money go to … ¿Cómo se dice gastar?
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Ss
Waste.
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S9
Waste, faster, they only send their sons to work for many hours…
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T1
Is it just their sons?
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Ss
No.
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T2
You know that was a good point. Just to say this in Spanish…. Lo que esta
pasando es que los padres y los abuelos estan vendiendo a los niños y Carlos
dijo o so ellos no tienen otra alternativa ellos siempre van a estar trabajando en
esta en esta … en clase de cosa. ¿Por qué es que estan vendiendo y despues
Ms. Riley hizo una pregunta ¿Por qué los padres estan vendiendo a estos
niños? again Carlos dijo porque tienen que vivir y por la falta de porque
necesitan comida.
Fifth Grade
Teacher 1: Elizabeth Reilly, Literacy Coach
Teacher 2: Marie Torres, Teacher
Carl G. Lauro Elementary School, Providence Public School District
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TRANSCRIPT
Accountable Talk in Action: Grade 5
Interpretation: “Child Labor”
Lesson Questions: What are the similarities and differences between the two texts in
the facts that they provide about the reasons child labor exists? What are the similarities
and differences between these two texts in the facts that they provide about the types of
child labor that exist?
Length: 4:00 minutes
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Teacher:
So Teddy, I like the way that you were thinking now about all
the information we’ve read as a whole because if we think
about our guiding questions today, we’re thinking about the
similarities and the differences about in the facts about
reasons and types of child labor and we’ve looked at one
text now and we’ve coded it with types and causes. So what
you’re going to do with your partner today is to take a
second text and do the same thing that you just saw me do
and that we did together.
You’re going to take the global sweatshop article that you
have out on your binder and with your partner, I would like
you to go through and code, underline and code the causes
and the types of child labor you see and the facts presented.
Keep in mind that our guiding questions are going to ask us
about similarities and differences. So be thinking about that
while you do this. Are the facts in this second article similar
or different from these facts? We’ll discover that more later
on. Okay, go ahead with your partner.
Student:
So ___ union –
Student:
So should we put that down?
Student:
Yeah. I would put that as like a cause. Almost all the former
or eastern block nations had to come to sweatshop making
goods with the rest of Europe. I don’t see anything else in
that.
Student:
No, me neither.
Student:
Here, let me put this in my words and what you’re trying to
say. Are you trying to say that if say a you and I both do
©2013 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH
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child labor together and then like you would both earn
enough money so that only one person would be able to
choose child labor. You earn more money and then none of
you’d do child labor.
Student:
Yeah.
Student:
Well I kind of disagree with that because, you do child labor
‘cause you’re bonded with it. So you have to do child labor
no matter, but even with the wages –
Student:
But not all child labor is bonded.
Student:
I know.
Student:
Some of it.
Student:
Yeah, but like, you know, like what I’m talking about-
Student:
It’s kind of like ‘cause maybe – because what’s surprising to
me is that Asia is like- 20 percent down from Africa.
Student:
Wait, you mean some 61 percent – 32 – that’s like almost
double. That’s like almost double than what’s in ____.
Student:
Yeah and you would think it’d actually be pretty close ‘cause
Asia and Africa are both pretty big countries.
Student:
Yeah. And like yeah, that’s just like – that’s surprising. Like,
people – almost double the amount of child workers are in
Asia than in Africa and I thought it would be the opposite. I
thought double would be in Africa than in Asia. I feel like
that’s what we’ve been hearing more than the other.
Student:
This is kind of summing – this stuff seems like all of these
paragraphs that we had support; tell us about, like causes
and –
Student:
We didn’t learn much about the causes except for the
fireworks. All of these, like it might seem like they were
causes in here. There were very few, but these were like
backing up
Student:
Backing up the types, like what happened and then the
concluding paragraph has a lot.
©2013 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH
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Student:
A couple causes, yeah.
Student:
Yeah, so –
Student:
Hey, remember that thing about bonded labor, about if it –
about agriculture -
Student:
No, bonded labor could be anyone. Agriculture, --- bonded
to any type of child labor.
Student:
I notice you did this.
Student:
You know what I'm saying? They didn’t have to just be
agriculture. It could just be any type of labor.
Teacher: Lindsay Fiorentino
Principal: Paula McCarthy
Melissa Jones Elementary School, Guilford Public Schools
©2013 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH
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Insights from Teachers Who Analyzed Transcripts of Their
Own Classroom Discussions
Linda Kucan
Insights from Teachers who Analyzed Transcripts of their own Classroom
Discussions by Linda Kucan. Copyright © 2007 Linda Kucan. Reprinted
with permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 63
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Titanic Sinks Four Hours After Iceberg; 866 Rescued By Carpathia,
Probably 1,250 Perish; Ismay Safe, Mrs. Astor Maybe, Noted
Names Missing
The New York Times
The New York Times. (2010). Titanic sinks four hours after iceberg; 866
rescued by Carpathia, probably 1,250 perish; Ismay safe, Mrs. Astor
maybe, noted names missing. Retrieved from
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0415.html#article
Copyright laws may prohibit photocopying this document without express permission.
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Titanic Sinks Four Hours After Hitting Iceberg; 866 Rescued By
Carpathia, Probably 1,250 Perish; Ismay Safe, Mrs. Astor Maybe,
Noted Names Missing
Special to The New York Times
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CAPE RACE, N.F., April 15. -- The White Star
liner Olympic reports by wireless this evening
that the Cunarder Carpathia reached, at
daybreak this morning, the position from
which wireless calls for help were sent out last
night by the Titanic after her collision with an
iceberg. The Carpathia found only the lifeboats
and the wreckage of what had been the biggest
steamship afloat.
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The Titanic had foundered at about 2:20 A.M.,
in latitude 41:46 north and longitude 50:14
west. This is about 30 minutes of latitude, or
about 34 miles, due south of the position at
which she struck the iceberg. All her boats are
accounted for and about 655 souls have been
saved of the crew and passengers, most of the
latter presumably women and children. There
were about 1,200 persons aboard the Titanic.
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The Leyland liner California is remaining and
searching the position of the disaster, while the
Carpathia is returning to New York with the
survivors.
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It can be positively stated that up to 11 o'clock
to-night nothing whatever had been received at
or heard by the Marconi station here to the
effect that the Parisian, Virginian or any other
ships had picked up any survivors, other than
those picked up by the Carpathia.
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First News of the Disaster.
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The first news of the disaster to the Titanic was
received by the Marconi wireless station here
at 10:25 o'clock last night (as told in
yesterday's New York Times.) The Titanic was
New York Times.Titanic sinks four hours after hitting iceberg; 866 rescued by Carpathia, probably 1,250
perish; Ismay safe, Mrs. Astor maybe, noted names m issing
Module 3/Grade band 9-10
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first heard giving the distress signal "C. Q. D.,"
which was answered by a number of ships,
including the Carpathia, the Baltic and the
Olympic. The Titanic said she had struck an
iceberg and was in immediate need of
assistance, giving her position as latitude 41:46
north and longitude 50:14 west.
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At 10:55 o'clock the Titanic reported she was sinking by the head,
and at 11:25 o'clock the station here established communication
with the Allan liner Virginian, from Halifax to Liverpool, and notified
her of the Titanic's urgent need of assistance and gave her the
Titanic's position.
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The Virginian advised the Marconi station almost immediately that
she was proceeding toward the scene of the disaster.
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At 11:36 o'clock the Titanic informed the Olympic that they were
putting the women off in boats and instructed the Olympic to have
her boats read to transfer the passangers.
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The Titanic, during all this time, continued to give distress signals
and to announce her position.
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The wireless operator seemed absolutely cool and clear-headed,
his sending throughout being steady and perfectly formed, and the
judgment used by him was of the best.
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The last signals heard from the Titanic were received at 12:27 A.M.,
when the Virginian reported having heard a few blurred signals which
ended abruptly.
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
New York Times.Titanic sinks four hours after hitting iceberg; 866 rescued by Carpathia, probably 1,250
perish; Ismay safe, Mrs. Astor maybe, noted names m issing
Module 3/Grade band 9-10
78
The Iceberg Was Only Part of It
William J. Broad
From The New York Times, 4-10-2012 © 2012 The New York Times. All rights reserved.
Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The
printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written
consent is prohibited. [NOTE: for on line use, a link to nytimes.com is required]
Copyright laws may prohibit photocopying this document without express permission.
79
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The Iceberg Was Only Part of It
By William J. Broad
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What doomed the Titanic is well known, at least in outline. On a moonless night
in the North Atlantic, the liner hit an iceberg and disaster ensued, with 1,500 lives
lost.
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Hundreds of books, studies and official inquiries have addressed the deeper
question of how a ship that was so costly and so well built — a ship declared to be
unsinkable — could have ended so terribly. The theories vary widely, placing the
blame on everything from inept sailors to flawed rivets.
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Now, a century after the liner went down in the early hours of April 15, 1912, two
new studies argue that rare states of nature played major roles in the
catastrophe.
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The first says Earth’s nearness to the Moon and the Sun — a proximity not
matched in more than 1,000 years — resulted in record tides that help explain why
the Titanic encountered so much ice, including the fatal iceberg.
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And a second, put forward by a Titanic historian from Britain, contends that the
icy waters created ideal conditions for an unusual type of mirage that hid
icebergs from lookouts and confused a nearby ship as to the liner’s identity,
delaying rescue efforts for hours.
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The author, Tim Maltin, said his explanation helps remove the stain of blunder from
what he regards as a tragedy.
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“There were no heroes, no villains,” Mr. Maltin said in an interview. “Instead, there
were a lot of human beings trying to do their best in the situation as they saw it.”
The title of his new book, “Titanic: A Very Deceiving Night,” being published this
week as an e - book, alludes to how mirages could have wrought havoc with human
observations.
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Scholars of the Titanic, as well as scientists, are debating the new theories.
Some question whether natural factors can outweigh the significance of
ineptitude. Others find the mirage explanation plausible — but only in limited
scenarios. Over all, though, many experts are applauding the fresh perspectives.
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“It’s important new information that can help explain some of the old mysteries,” said
George M. Behe, author of “On Board R.M.S. Titanic,” a 2010 book that chronicles the
letters, postcards and accounts of the ship’s crew and passengers.
From The New York Times, 4-10-2012 © 2012 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by
permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying,
redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written consent is prohibited.
[NOTE: for on line use, a link to nytimes.com is required]
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The Titanic was the largest and most luxurious ship of its time, a glittering icon of
the good life. It carried 10 millionaires, including Isidor Straus of Macy’s, then the
world’s largest department store. Like hundreds of other passengers, he perished
when the ship went down — the water calm and the sky luminous with stars.
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From the start, news reports and inquiries said that the ice in the North Atlantic
was unusually bad that year. The New York Times, in an article shortly after the
sinking, quoted United States officials as saying that the winter had produced “an
enormously large crop of icebergs.”
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Recently, a team of researchers from Texas State University- San Marcos and Sky
& Telescope magazine found an apparent explanation in the heavens. They
published their findings in the magazine’s April issue.
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The team discovered that Earth had come unusually close to the Sun and Moon
that winter, enhancing their gravitational pulls on the ocean and producing record
tides. The rare orbits took place between December 1911 and February 1912 —
about two months before the disaster.
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The researchers suggest that the high tides refloated masses of icebergs
traditionally stuck along the coastlines of Labrador and Newfoundland and sent
them adrift into the North Atlantic shipping lanes.
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“We don’t claim that our idea is conclusive,” Donald Olson, a physicist at Texas
State, said in an interview. But, he added, the team continues to gather new
supporting evidence.
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Dr. Olson said that after the study’s publication, “we found there had been remarkable
tidal events around the globe — in England and New Zealand.” A Sydney newspaper,
he noted, had a headline that told of “record tides.”
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The icy waters that night created ideal conditions for an unusual kind of mirage,
according to Mr. Maltin, who owns a public relations firm in London and has written
three books on the Titanic. Andrew T. Young, an astronomer and mirage specialist
at San Diego State University, helped him refine his theory.
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Most people know mirages as natural phenomena caused when hot air near the
Earth’s surface bends light rays upward. In a desert, the effect prompts lost
travelers to mistake patches of blue sky for pools of water.
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But another kind of mirage occurs when cold air bends light rays downward. In
that case, observers can see objects and settings far over the horizon. The
From The New York Times, 4-10-2012 © 2012 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by
permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying,
redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written consent is prohibited.
[NOTE: for on line use, a link to nytimes.com is required]
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images often undergo quick distortions — not unlike the wavy reflections in a
funhouse mirror.
In an interview, Mr. Maltin said he first learned of the possibility of cold mirages
when reading a 1992 British inquiry on the Titanic’s sinking. It suggested that the
icy waters could have cooled the adjacent air and warped images that confused the
Californian, a ship nearby that could have rushed to the Titanic’s aid but instead did
nothing.
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Fascinated, Mr. Maltin, who sailed boats in his youth, dug into navigational records
and found that both the Californian and the Titanic had moved into the icy
Labrador Current that night and had encountered conditions ideal for cold mirages.
He then hunted through reams of official and unofficial testimony to see what
people saw — or what they thought they saw.
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A drama of misperceptions ensues. Mr. Maltin’s book shows how mirages could
have created false horizons that hid the iceberg from the Titanic’s lookouts. By this
theory, the intersection of dark sea and starry sky would have looked blurry,
reducing the contrast with the looming iceberg.
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Mr. Maltin cites three lookouts on the Titanic who, despite the night’s remarkable
clarity, testified to seeing an unusual haze on the horizon. George Symons
described the distant view as “rather hazy .” Frederick Fleet told an official inquiry
of a “slight haze” on the horizon before the Titanic struck the iceberg. He said it
was significant enough to have discussed with a colleague.
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Reginald Lee, his shipmate, described the iceberg as “a dark mass that came through
that haze.”
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Mr. Maltin suggests that the speeding Titanic would have slowed down if its crew
and officers had understood how the cold night was bending light in confusing
ways.
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As for the failed rescue, Mr. Maltin cites testimony that he sees as revealing the
role of natural trickery. The Californian — a modest steamer with a small
smokestack — knew the luxury liner was nearby but wrote off sightings of its lights
and distress rockets.
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Mr. Maltin calculates that the two ships were about 10 miles apart when both
stopped and began drifting in the Labrador Current. But cold mirages, he says, let
the crews see the vessels as much closer — on the order of five miles. One
Titanic officer said he could see the Californian’s porthole lights.
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This sense of closeness — as well as the funhouse distortions inherent in the
From The New York Times, 4-10-2012 © 2012 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by
permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying,
redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written consent is prohibited.
[NOTE: for on line use, a link to nytimes.com is required]
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play of mirages — helped create a disastrous series of false impressions, Mr.
Maltin argues.
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For instance, he says the mirages probably would have altered the Californian’s
view of the Titanic’s overall shape, and illustrates his point with photographs of
modern ships seen in mirage distortions. One series reveals a ship’s hull to be
greatly expanded while its masts and superstructure are collapsed to near
invisibility.
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He also cites supporting evidence from the inquiries.
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“There was nothing at all about it to resemble a passenger boat,” James Gibson of the
Californian testified.
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The Californian’s captain, Stanley Lord, said the nearby ship seemed to be a
medium- size steamer rather than a giant passenger liner bearing four huge
smokestacks. “I am positive,” he testified, “it was not the Titanic.”
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Some historians have gone so far as to posit the presence of a mystery ship — a
needless claim, according to Mr. Maltin and his mirage theory. He says optic trickery
also confused the Californian’s view of the Titanic’s distress rockets. Ships of the day
often used company rockets for identification and signaling. Some of the Californian’s
crew testified that the flares of the nearby ship looked odd.
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“These rockets did not appear to go very high,” recalled Herbert Stone, the ship’s
second officer. “They were only about half the height of the steamer’s masthead
light.”
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But those perceptions, Mr. Maltin says, could have been caused by a mirage: The
Titanic’s rockets might have indeed soared high but simply appeared low
compared with the looming vessel.
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The Californian’s captain is often vilified as irresponsible and criminally
negligent. But Mr. Maltin says Captain Lord may have genuinely mistaken the
giant liner for a small ship.
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The title for Mr. Maltin’s book comes from the concluding remarks the captain
made when asked by an inquiry about the causes of the disaster.
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“It was,” he replied, “a very deceiving night.”
From The New York Times, 4-10-2012 © 2012 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by
permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying,
redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written consent is prohibited.
[NOTE: for on line use, a link to nytimes.com is required]
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The Sinking of the Titanic, 1912
www.EyeWitnessToHistory.com. Used by permission of Ibis
Communications, Inc..
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The Sinking of the Titanic, 1912
EyeWitnesstoHistory.com
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On April 10, 1912, the Titanic, largest ship afloat, left Southampton,
England on her maiden voyage to New York City. The White Star Line
had spared no expense in assuring her luxury. A legend even before she
sailed, her passengers were a mixture of the world's wealthiest basking
in the elegance of first class accommodations and immigrants packed
into steerage.
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She was touted as the safest ship ever built, so safe that she carried
only 20 lifeboats - enough to provide accommodation for only half her
2,200 passengers and crew. This discrepancy rested on the belief that
since the ship's construction made her 'unsinkable,' her lifeboats were
necessary only to rescue survivors of other sinking ships. Additionally,
lifeboats took up valuable deck space.
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Four days into her journey, at 11:40 P.M. on the night of April 14, she
struck an iceberg. Her fireman compared the sound of the impact to
'the tearing of calico, nothing more.' However, the collision was fatal
and the icy water soon poured through the ship.
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It became obvious that many would not find safety in a lifeboat. Each
passenger was issued a life jacket but life expectancy would be short
when exposed to water four degrees below freezing. As the forward
portion of the ship sank deeper, passengers scrambled to the stern.
John Thayer witnessed the sinking from a lifeboat. 'We could see groups
of the almost fifteen hundred people still aboard, clinging in clusters or
bunches, like swarming bees; only to fall in masses, pairs or singly, as
the great after part of the ship, two hundred and fifty feet of it, rose
into the sky, till it reached a sixty-five or seventy degree angle.' The
great ship slowly slid beneath the waters two hours and forty minutes
after the collision.
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The next morning, the liner Carpathia rescued 705 survivors. One
thousand five hundred twenty-two passengers and crew were lost.
Subsequent inquiries attributed the high loss of life to an insufficient
number of lifeboats and inadequate training in their use.
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End of a Splendid Journey
Elizabeth Shutes, aged 40, was governess to nineteen-year-old
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www.EyeWitnessToHistory.com. Used by permission of Ibis Communications, Inc..
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Margaret Graham who was traveling with her parents. As Shutes and
her charge sit in their First Class cabin they feel a shudder travel
through the ship. At first comforted by her belief in the safety of the
ship, Elizabeth's composure is soon shattered by the realization of the
imminent tragedy:
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"Suddenly a queer quivering ran under me, apparently the whole length
of the ship. Startled by the very strangeness of the shivering motion, I
sprang to the floor. With too perfect a trust in that mighty vessel I
again lay down. Someone knocked at my door, and the voice of a
friend said: 'Come quickly to my cabin; an iceberg has just passed our
window; I know we have just struck one.'
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No confusion, no noise of any kind, one could believe no danger
imminent. Our stewardess came and said she could learn nothing.
Looking out into the companionway I saw heads appearing asking
questions from half-closed doors. All sepulchrally still, no excitement. I
sat down again. My friend was by this time dressed; still her daughter
and I talked on, Margaret pretending to eat a sandwich. Her hand shook
so that the bread kept parting company from the chicken. Then I saw
she was frightened, and for the first time I was too, but why get
dressed, as no one had given the slightest hint of any possible danger?
An officer's cap passed the door. I asked: 'Is there an accident or
danger of any kind? 'None, so far as I know', was his courteous answer,
spoken quietly and most kindly. This same officer then entered a cabin a little
distance down the companionway and, by this time distrustful of
everything, I listened intently, and distinctly heard, 'We can keep the
water out for a while.' Then, and not until then, did I realize the horror
of an accident at sea. Now it was too late to dress; no time for a waist,
but a coat and skirt were soon on; slippers were quicker than shoes;
the stewardess put on our life-preservers, and we were just ready when Mr
Roebling came to tell us he would take us to our friend's mother,
who was waiting above ...
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No laughing throng, but on either side [of the staircases] stand quietly,
bravely, the stewards, all equipped with the white, ghostly lifepreservers. Always the thing one tries not to see even crossing a ferry.
Now only pale faces, each form strapped about with those white bars.
So gruesome a scene. We passed on. The awful good-byes. The quiet
look of hope in the brave men's eyes as the wives were put into the
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lifeboats. Nothing escaped one at this fearful moment. We left from the
sun deck, seventy-five feet above the water. Mr. Case and Mr. Roebling,
brave American men, saw us to the lifeboat, made no effort to save
themselves, but stepped back on deck. Later they went to an honoured
grave.
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Our lifeboat, with thirty-six in it, began lowering to the sea. This was
done amid the greatest confusion. Rough seamen all giving different
orders. No officer aboard. As only one side of the ropes worked, the
lifeboat at one time was in such a position that it seemed we must
capsize in mid-air. At last the ropes worked together, and we drew
nearer and nearer the black, oily water. The first touch of our lifeboat on
that black sea came to me as a last good-bye to life, and so we put off
- a tiny boat on a great sea - rowed away from what had been a safe
home for five days.
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The first wish on the part of all was to stay near the Titanic. We all felt
so much safer near the ship. Surely such a vessel could not sink. I
thought the danger must be exaggerated, and we could all be taken
aboard again. But surely the outline of that great, good ship was
growing less. The bow of the boat was getting black. Light after light
was disappearing, and now those rough seamen put to their oars and
we were told to hunt under seats, any place, anywhere, for a lantern, a
light of any kind. Every place was empty. There was no water - no
stimulant of any kind. Not a biscuit - nothing to keep us alive had we drifted long...
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Sitting by me in the lifeboat were a mother and daughter. The mother
had left a husband on the Titanic, and the daughter a father and
husband, and while we were near the other boats those two stricken
women would call out a name and ask, 'Are you there?' 'No,'would come
back the awful answer, but these brave women never lost courage,
forgot their own sorrow, telling me to sit close to them to keep warm...
The life-preservers helped to keep us warm, but the night was bitter
cold, and it grew colder and colder, and just before dawn, the coldest,
darkest hour of all, no help seemed possible...
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...The stars slowly disappeared, and in their place came the faint pink
glow of another day. Then I heard, 'A light, a ship.' I could not, would
not, look while there was a bit of doubt, but kept my eyes away. All
night long I had heard, 'A light!' Each time it proved to be one of our
other lifeboats, someone lighting a piece of paper, anything they could
find to burn, and now I could not believe. Someone found a newspaper;
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it was lighted and held up. Then I looked and saw a ship. A ship bright
with lights; strong and steady she waited, and we were to be saved. A
straw hat was offered it would burn longer. That same ship that had
come to save us might run us down. But no; she is still. The two,
the ship and the dawn, came together, a living painting."
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Testing Shows Titanic Steel Was Brittle
Science Dailey
“News release courtesy of Missouri University of Science and
Technology, formerly the University of Missouri-Rolla.”
Copyright laws may prohibit photocopying this document without express permission.
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Testing Shows Titanic Steel Was Brittle
Science Daily
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1997/12/971227000141.htm
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Dec. 27, 1997 — Recent tests of steel from the Titanic reveal that the metal
was much more brittle than modern steel but the best available at the time, a
metallurgical engineering professor at the University of Missouri-Rolla says in a
paper to be published in the January 1998 issue of Journal of Metals.
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The steel used to build the Titanic was not as "impact-resistant" as modern
steel, according to Dr. H.P. Leighly, a professor emeritus of metallurgical
engineering at UMR. But it was the best steel available at the time, says
Leighly, who studied some 200 pounds of steel from the wreckage.
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Leighly's paper, co-authored by UMR metallurgical engineering student
Katie Felkins, will appear in the January 1998 issue of Journal of Metals, the
publication of the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical and Petroleum
Engineers.
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Inferior steel wasn't the only reason the luxury ocean liner Titanic sank in the
early morning hours of April 15, 1912. Other factors -- such as flaws in the
ship's design, the crew's negligence and the lack of lifeboats - also contributed to the disaster, Leighly says.
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"The naval architects can point their fingers and say, 'It was bad steel'" that
caused the Titanic to sink, Leighly says. "It's easy to point a finger and say,
'Bad steel.' But it's uncomfortable to point at yourself and say, 'Bad design.'"
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More than 1,500 of the liner's 2,227 passengers died after the Titanic
struck an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean, some 350 miles off the coast of
Newfoundland, Canada. The ship struck the iceberg at 11:40 p.m. April 14
and sank at 2:20 a.m. April 15.
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In 1996 and early 1997, Leighly, Felkins and one other undergraduate
student tested steel from the ship's hull and bulkhead in an attempt to
figure out why the steel-hulled ship cracked. The UMR analysis is the
second -- and most comprehensive -- ever conducted on steel from the
Titanic. The only other test was conducted by the Canadian government
“News release courtesy of Missouri University of Science and Technology, formerly the University of
Missouri-Rolla.”
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and involved a Frisbee- sized piece of steel, in which researchers
concluded that the ship's hull fractured when it met the iceberg.
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At UMR, chemical and stress tests of metal samples from the Titanic's hull
and bulkhead show that the steel used to build the ship was very inferior to
modern steel. Impact tests conducted by Felkins show that the
steel from the Titanic was about 10 times more brittle than modern steel when
tested at freezing temperature -- the estimated temperature of the water at the
time the Titanic struck the iceberg.
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Tests of the steel's chemical composition also showed a high content of
sulfur, oxygen and phosphorus. High levels of those elements cause
steel to be more brittle, Leighly says.
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The chemical analysis also revealed a low level of manganese -- another
symptom of brittle steel. Steel with a higher level of manganese is more
ductile and less likely to break.
“News release courtesy of Missouri University of Science and Technology, formerly the University of
Missouri-Rolla.”
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