Tea Party Strategy

I really enjoyed chapter 6 of When Kids Can't Read What Teachers Can Do by Kylene Beers. Chapter 6, "Frontloading Meaning: Pre-Reading Strategies," explains activities that can prepare and engage students in new reading material. This is extremely important since many teachers simply assign the first chapter of a book without providing students key background knowledge that they will need to be engaged with the new text. My favorite activity in chapter 6 is the Tea Party.

Beers introduces the Tea Party strategy on page 94. During the Tea Party, students are all given different quotes or words on a card from the text that they will read. Then, students walk around the room and share their quotes with one another. After all students have shared their the cards, students meet in small groups to discuss what they think the story is about and then write joint "we think this section is about..." statements. The last step before reading the text is for each small group to share their "we think" statements. Beers explains how this activity models what strong independent readers do when they start a new piece of reading: "This pre-reading strategy allows students to predict what they think will happen in the text as they make inferences, see causal relationships, compare and contrast, and draw on their prior experiences. " (Beers, 2003, p. 94-95).

I like the Tea Party strategy for a variety of reasons. First of all, it gets adolescents up and moving around the classroom, which they are often anxious to do, especially in middle school. I think it's important to remember the need to vary classroom activities and movement to keep adolescents from getting bored or disengaged. This is extremely important in schools when ELA is in 90 minute blocks. I also like the Tea Party strategy because dependent readers are able to work with their peers to make predictions and connections that will give them something to look for when they read. Dependent readers are not always able to make inferences on their own, so it is extremely important for them to practice this strategy with the help of their classmates. Further, dependent readers usually don't start reading with any idea of what the reading is about. This makes comprehension extremely difficult as the readers don't know what to keep an eye out for and aren't motivated to keep reading to see if their predictions are accurate.

I wanted to add a twist on the Tea Party strategy that I've seen described in Teaching for Joy and Justice by Linda Christensen. Christensen also uses the Tea Party as a pre-reading strategy to engage her students, but she gives each student a different character name and description on the card as opposed to a portion of the text. Students perform the Tea Party as a "meet and greet" where they need to introduce themselves based on the provided description and then figure out how everyone in the room is related. This is extremely helpful in introducing a novel with multiple characters. It can often take even a strong independent reader time to get all of the characters straight in a book, so students of all reading levels would benefit from this activity. After completing the character Tea Party, students begin the text having already been "introduced" to the characters. And finally, students will have visualized and made a personal connection to the characters based on how they chose to interpret and description and interact with their fellow characters.

Beers, K. (2003). When Kids Can't Read What Teachers Can Do. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.