They walked into class thinking they knew everything in the photograph on the screen. They yelled out, “Go Jays,” and one student said, “Why do you think this is a rich text?” It was like music to my ears as this was only our 4th Friday Photo lesson, and they are beginning to see that the selected picture must have layers. Earlier this week, Jose Bautista hit a home run that would become a legendary event in baseball. The now iconic photograph of his bat throw before advancing across home plate and adding 3 runs to the scoreboard is not a topic that lies in my comfort zone. I can’t talk baseball, but so many of my students can. What I can do is provide a platform for critically evaluating a photograph that is or becomes meaningful to my class and our unit of inquiry.
Sometimes, it isn’t until the words are coming out of your mouth that you know you are doing powerful work. On Friday, I led my Grade 7 class in their Friday Photo analysis of this aforementioned photograph. This activity begins with a picture followed by leading 4 stages of decoding the text. Choosing the text is one of my weekly critical thinking exercises. This week, the image was compelling me from the moment I watched it unfold on the television. The students entered my classroom and were immediately engaged.
The process of Friday Photo begins with describing. What’s so great about this initial stage is that it is so accessible. Students of all skills levels can easy describe what they see in the photograph: crowd standing on their feet, bat in the air, Jose Bautista etc. The next stage is analyzing where students ask pertinent questions about the text. While they have a handout in their Strategies Notebook on the types of questions/comments that can be added at each step of the process, I have my favourites which include: Why this angle? What is happening outside of the shot? What happened before/after? The next stage is about making inferences and beginning to deduce the purpose of the text. This is when I give context for why I chose the photo or tell them the relevant history of the picture after they try to put the pieces into a narrative. Finally, like the top of Bloom’s taxonomy, they create a title for the photograph. This is where the poetry comes in both really and figuratively with alliteration and metaphor among the devices used to name the photograph. The process of Friday Photo is modelled for two thirds of the year, and then it becomes theirs to lead.
For the three What’s Up assignments, which I use in my Grade 7 Individuals and Societies class (History/Geography), students report on and analyze a news story similar to Current Events projects. They sign up for their date among the choices provided by the teacher with no more than 3 presenters on a given day/week. This tri-BOB (3 part Building Outside the Blocks project) is about locating, highlighting, annotating, summarizing and analyzing a news article of their choice and goes through three iterations, with something new added at each revisit of the assignment. The second What’s Up, spirals to add locating bias by comparing and contrasting different articles on the same subject. The final spiral is the leading of a photo analysis using the photograph that is associated with their selected article and news story. This is where the modelling of Friday Photo is gradually released to be owned by the student.
On the photograph above, you can see each of this week’s process except the 3rd . The reason was I got carried away having the students fill in the baseball details to tell the story of this incredible photograph. All I had to say was, “It was the top of the seventh, and…” One by one, students filled in the play by play to tell the unlikely story of a contested run followed by a series of errors by the opposing team to reach the pivotal moment where a straight faced Bautista hit a three run homer and threw his bat. Whatever happens in the rest of the post season, this inning and this picture is, was and will be powerful. So much behind that photograph required the systematic analysis that Friday Photo can bring.
In my perfect world, all of my students discussed this lesson with their families as they ate their meals or prepared to watch the next Jays game that evening. In a more realistic version, my students experienced the power of connecting school to life, of making their world relevant in our classroom and of the saying a picture is worth a thousand words. I love ending their week of learning at school with a photograph that captures a current, historical or momentous event. This Friday Photo reflected all of that and so much more.
