Think Like A Psychologist
Looking to help your students go deeper into literature? One technique is to teach your GATE students to “Think Like A Disciplinarian.” This idea, developed by Dr. Sandra Kaplan at USC, teaches students to analyze ideas from the point of view of a specific profession or discipline.
Think Like A Psychologist
This week my class thought from the point of view of a psychologist to analyze a character from their reading literature.
I asked my students to consider these four questions:
- What behavior is interesting about this character (good or bad)?
- What is the origin of this behavior? When did it start? Why did it start?
- What factors contribute to the behavior? What is making the behavior continue? What is making it worse?
- How do the character’s thoughts and actions form a parallel or a paradox? Does the character mean to do what he does or does it go against his thoughts?
More Resources
- Students organized this information using a graphic organizer called a Frame (here’s a whole book about Frames).
- David Chung uses Think Like A Disciplinarian as a part of his literature circles and has gobs of useful information.
- Long Beach Unified has some great resources related to Thinking Like A Disciplinarian.