SPAWN strategy

contributed by Jennifer Farrell

Rationale:

SPAWN is an acronym taken from the 5 categories of writing options originally introduced by Martin, Martin, and O'Brien in 1984 and reintroduced in 2003 by Brozo. SPAWN is a literacy strategy best employed during reading to allow students to respond to text, taking into account their own experiences. It is especially useful for engaging struggling readers and English language learners.

SPAWN stands for:

S- Special Powers: Students are given the power to change some aspect of the text or topic. Their writing should explain what was changed, why, and the effects of the change.

P- Problem Solving: Students are asked to write possible solutions to problems posed or suggested by the books being read or material being studied.

A- Alternative Viewpoints: Students write about a topic or retell a story from a unique perspective.

W- What If?: Students are asked to respond to a change the teacher has introduced in some aspect of the topic or story. (Similar to Special Powers)

N- Next:Students are asked to write in anticipation of what the author will discuss next, explaining the logic behind their conjecture.

Alvermann, D.E., S.E. Phelps, & V.G. Ridgeway (2007). Content area reading and literacy: Succeeding in today's diverse classrooms. Boston, MA: Pearson.

Procedure:

Background: My example for using this strategy will use the novel The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd as the text to which the students will respond. To learn more about the novel, click here.

Resources: Text, paper, pen or pencil

1. As students read the text, I will ask them to stop at predetermined points in the text to respond.

2.  I can ask students to respond to a particular event, character, or quote (Let's look at the scene where Rosaleen pours her snuff juice on the three racist men's shoes), or I may encourage students to select an event or character on their own (Choose a character or event from the past 2 chapters that caught your attention).

3. I will introduce the 5 SPAWN writing prompts to the students and briefly explain what each prompt is asking.

4. I will give students 5-10 minutes to choose a prompt and respond to it in writing.

5. After time is up, students will share their responses with the class.

Variation: This could easily be done as a group writing task, where students get into groups based on their SPAWN writing prompt choice and work as a group to construct a response. For struggling readers, it may be beneficial to begin with group work and then gradually move to individual writing.

Other Procedures

I think SPAWN could be adapted to a Math classroom.  Specifically, the Problem-solving component of SPAWN seems to work well with many math texts and word problems.  Alternative viewpoints and What if? could also have applications.  Maybe the math acronym should be PAW.

One example of PAW in action in a math classroom:

1) A math teacher could select a short math text that describes a situation where data analysis needs to take place (for example, home values could be looked by mean, median, or range calculations).

2) Students would come up with different Problem-solving strategies for analyzing the data, and possibly different ways to calculate their answers (e.g., for the mean and median).

3) Students could describe the advantages and disadvantages for Alternately viewing the data with the different measures (i.e., how can mean be misleading if there is a few really expensive houses in a neighborhood, etc.).

4) Students could hypothesize What if? different houses were foreclosed, or torn down and turned into mansions (what would happen to the mean, median, and range).

I guess the starategy could be called PAWN if students do the Next step by explaining their logic.  I just don't see how Special Powers would be relevant for a math classroom (maybe if you had the Special power to change one math rule...but that's pretty complex thinking).

** Contributed by Matthew Streit

-----------------------