Judie Segal
REED Summer 2010
Explicit teaching – A Riddle
What am I thinking of?
whiskers
ears
4 legs
a nose
a tongue
a tail
hairy horns
hooves
a short mane
lives mostly in Africa
a long neck
 Looking
at only some of the parts will not
allow us to be able to discern the real whole
entity.
 Some of the parts are more significant and
will lead us to the outcome almost
immediately.
 Some parts are more tenuous and make it
more difficult to guess their part in the
whole.
For example: If I had begun with the clues
mammal and long neck – the answer would
have been obvious from the outset.
Application to your life
 In
our lives, sometimes we only see part of
the whole
 It helps if we can see all of the parts, or at
least more than just one of them
 Examples
Application to Literature
In literature each composition has parts which
create the whole piece of work:
 Title
 Scenes
 Stanzas
 The characters
 Change in settings
 Other
All of the parts together comprise the whole –
and as in the explicit HOTS teaching above,
some parts are more significant than others.
Thinking Skill
Identifying parts
and whole
Students will
be able to:
Sample Tasks/Questions
explain how the
parts function
together within
the whole text.
How does one part of the story
contribute to your understanding of
the whole text?
How does the title/ending relate to
different parts of the
story/poem/play?
What does the rhyme scheme of the
poem contribute to the whole
poem?
 The
title of a piece of literature may give us
information about the text. However it may
also confuse us.
 There are explicit titles and implicit titles.
Let’s look at the following poem called
The Loser.
Let’s look at the dictionary definition for the word:
loser: definition –

–noun
A person, team, nation that loses/doesn’t win.
The visiting team was the loser in the series.

Someone or something that is marked by
consistently bad quality performance.
Don’t bother to see that film, it’s a real loser.

Slang: a misfit, especially someone who has
never been successful at a job, personal
relationship, etc.
My old school chum has always been a loser.
Mama said I'd lose my head
if it wasn't fastened on.
Today I guess it wasn't
'cause while playing with my cousin
it fell off and rolled away
and now it's gone.
And I can't look for it
'cause my eyes are in it,
and I can't call to it
'cause my mouth is on it
(couldn't hear me anyway
'cause my ears are on it),
can't even think about it
'cause my brain is in it.
So I guess I'll sit down
on this rock
and rest for just a minute...
By Shel Silverstein
Never in the definition we found earlier, did
we actually see the definition:
Someone who no longer has something that
they were previously in possession of.
So that didn’t really help us.
What is the role of the title in this poem?
 How
does the scene between Keller and the
neighborhood boy (their game of cops and
jail) add to our understanding of Joe Keller?
What is Arthur Miller trying to say with that
scene?
 How does the fact that The Road Not Taken
takes place in a forest, add to our
interpretation of the poem and its metaphor?
 How does the title Genesis and Catastrophe
make sense before and after reading the
story?

Let’s look at Module G from Summer 2009:
Will Grass Become a Thing of the Past?
Identifying parts in the text:
Giving the example of Clarence Ridgely is a part




In the 1ST paragraph we learn that he grows his own
vegetables instead of a lawn around his home.
We only know in the 2ND paragraph that he is part of
a bigger project.
We only know in the 3RD paragraph that he is part of
an even bigger organization
We find out in the 5TH paragraph that Ridgely has
taken his part in the whole which we identified above
even farther by added a new element of community
to his gardening.
We have identified the parts in the text –
 Ridgely, Edible Estates, National Gardener’s
Association, the American government, and
maybe something more
 It may look something like this:

RIDGELY
Edible Estates
National Gardener’s Association
American
Government
 Let’s
look at the kinds of questions the
Bagrut asks and how we can use the skill of
Identifying Parts and Whole to answer some
of them:
 Which questions use the thinking skill of
Identifying parts and whole?
1
3
5
6
8
Explicit
teaching of the thinking
skill
Application to your life
Application to the text at hand