Article of the Week - School Lunch - A comparison of viewpoints

What kid DOESN'T love discussing how much they hate, no, loathe school lunch? No matter what is served, the students find reason to complain, and why not? It's a rite of childhood.
That was the basis for using the Time For Kids article "What's Cookin'?" as our next Article of the Week.
Students received the article on the first day of the week and we immediately covered some of picked out vocabulary like "state health official" and "USDA" which would aid in their comprehension of the article. Students were then given the rest of the week to close-read, which to them means, pick apart, ask questions, and cite evidence for text-based questions.
Amazingly, as the week went on, some more recent news came out; schools across the nation were dropping out of the National School Lunch program because they were losing money. Articles like this one stated that the new healthier choices simply aren't passing the "kid test" and that kids are left hungry.
I used coh-metrix (my go-to for analyzing text complexity) and found that the stories were pretty high in reading level, but luckily some news segments began popping up on Youtube.

In this one, the anchors speak about why schools are opting out of the program and show a snippet of a video some high school students from Kansas did spoofing the video "We Are Young" called "We Are Hungry." The video was done by high school students waaay back in the beginning of the school year in 2012.

 
I showed students the newscasts and then the video spoof. We watched the song a few times through, once to listen to the gist of it then once to analyze the lyrics. Those high school students make some pretty hefty political statements!  "Set the policy on fire" is only one of them. Around 2:20 or so a  "lunch policy guy" comes in to educate the students on what should be eaten and how much should be eaten during lunch... the scenes later depict the students beating up on the policy guy further demonstrating their dislike for the whole business. I give props to the educators of these students and can only hope to encourage my students to make their own political statements with a chance for such viral popularity.

Our crowning activity, as always with Article of the Week, was the debate. Students were given two choices (The Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 is beneficial to schools or The Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 should be banned) to sit on either side of the room to debate Philosophical Chairs style. (If you aren't sure what that is, check out this post to learn more.) After a wild debate, students were given a prompt to write (the prompt was "Taking everything into account, how do you feel about the government mandates on school lunch and nutrition?") Students were reminded to cite evidence and examples from the article, the song, and the debate. My understanding of the CCSS for middle school is that lots of chances for argument and writing should take place so that students are getting ample opportunity to hone their ability to make and prove their point. The world is full of opinions and one cannot stand on the shoulders of giants without being able to prove their point using credible evidence.

Using Article of the Week for Close Reading Techniques

So I've been doing this thing in my classroom called Article of the Week. The brains behind it belong to Kelly Gallagher and I first read about it through the blog at Teaching the Core called A Non-Freaked Out, Focused Approach to the Common Core - Close Reading by Dave Stuart. It's been an amazing ride. We are in our fifth week of school and on our fourth article.
The basic idea behind it is to give kids an opportunity to close read on a regular basis, stay current with events and issues in our society, and best of all: express our opinions about something. Close reading is at the heart of the Common Core Reading standards and the activities that follow also hit some major CCSS standards, specifically in the Listening and Speaking zone.
We review the vocabulary for the article first, then the kids read the article on their own, annotating and answering text-based questions that will aid their comprehension of the article. In my version, which is meant for the social butterflies of Middle School, they use Question-Answer Relationships to ask four to eight questions about the article that they may discuss in groups during small group times in class. After all this, they write a simple argument paragraph expressing their views on something about the article. The prompts vary from "Did the author argue his point well?" to "Do YOU agree with the author?" to other various questions in which the students can use their analyzed article to cite evidence and back up their passionate response.
The really amazing thing about Article of the Weeks are the debates that happen afterwards. In the first weeks following the end of summer break, we focused on learning how to discuss things with each other. We are artsy, passionate, opinionated sixth graders. We have a LOT to say, about ourselves, things we like, and issues in our world. We also need to be able to paraphrase, ask probing questions, pay attention to each other, and think positive about each others' opinions.
These debates. Wow. Talk about deceptive! These students are learning how to prove their points without realizing what amazing learning they are doing, I have a really hard time, as mediator, keeping the smile off my face when a student pulls a really good piece of evidence out of the text to back up their opinion, and then the rebuttal is equally amazing from a student on the other "side."

We use the 7 Norms of Collaboration which my district adopted a few years back and the questions they write for discussion groups during small groups are written according to Question-Answer Relationships. Our articles are harvested from various sources that aren't too "newsy" for the kids, like Wired and Mental Floss, and the debates are framed around an AVID method called Philosophical Chairs, in which students are allowed to change sides if someone says something that sways their opinion.

I'll be writing more on how we integrate the arts into this later. Enjoy the possibilities!