Category Archives: Literacy

On Leveraging Technology: part one of several–some background

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Books, Education, Life in the Classroom, Literacy, Parent Involvment, Television, Web/Tech

This year I have more technology in my room than I have ever had in fifteen years of teaching. I don’t know how I feel about it. The phrase in my district is “leverage technology.” I like this quite a lot, especially in contrast to the experience my own children are having in a different district. My children’s district decided to go one-to-one. Technology immersion, seems to be the tactic. It has been a rough transition. As a parent who has used technology mindfully, and been very deliberate about my kid’s exposure to technology, seeing my child use it all the time because he “has to for school” is unnerving. I want to spend some time analyzing these two approaches, and see what I can figure out (if anything). But this post is just background, the setting of the stage.

My early mantra around technology for my personal life and for my classroom was: technology must enhance what I’m doing not distract me from it. I’m not convinced we’ve figured out how to do this in education, as a system. I’m mostly positive a few individuals have figured this out. I’m in the process.

I want to be clear: I am not anti-technology. I coupled my English major with a computer science minor and used contractor jobs building websites to help pay off my student loans. Though I write often in a notebook, all my writing eventually is on a computer. I did resist a cell phone for years, mostly because I didn’t want something else to carry. I teach and have taught hybrid and fully online classes for years. Though, my family hasn’t owned a television in fifteen years.

I am of an age where I can remember the world pre-internet, as I’m sure many readers of this blog are, but I mention it because watching the web come into being taught me something about how I would use it. I lost friends to computers. They just became more interested in the machine and then we spent less and less time together. Nothing too serious, or out of the ordinary coming-of-age stuff, but I noticed. Then, in college, I read Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, and, being the serious minded young person I was, I thought hard about both the messages I received and the medium through which I received them.

Then I started teaching. I’ve had varying access to technology over the years, and I’ve used much of it. I’ve had a bank of computers, a smartboard, a small cache of laptops (webbooks they were called). But as the technology wore out, I did not feel a pressing need to replace it. It provided a way to do things, not necessarily a better way—as far as I could tell. Besides, a computer lab full of students, oddly silent, staring at monitors creeped me out. I only did it when it made sense—typing final drafts, et. all. Continue reading →

Reading From the Ground Up

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Education, Elementary, Literacy, Science

Last year my district bought a brand-new ELA curriculum for the elementary grades. It has short stories, poems, and even a handful of class sets of novels for teachers to share. There are also nonfiction materials integrated into the standard social studies and science topics of the different grade levels. For example, since fourth graders across America often study Native cultures, the fourth grade ELA curriculum has booklets about Native tribal history and a traditional Native story. In addition, there are booklets about money management, economics, and innovation. For science, the booklets include topics ranging from earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, skeletons, and porpoises. There is also a short biography of an early paleontologist.

Our school day is scheduled around lunch, recesses, specialist time, a set period for math, a set period for reading, plus additional WIN times for math and reading—WIN standing for “What I Need,” whether it’s reteaching, extra support, or enrichment. Last year our fifth grade teachers complained that they had 20 minutes a day to fit in all the district-adopted science and social studies curriculum. “But you are teaching science and social studies in your ELA curriculum, right?” was the response they got.

Well yes. To a degree.

This week I attended a full-day curriculum workshop on the Next Generation Science Standards. The presenter at one point blurted out that he wished that one subject would be dropped from the school day altogether—reading.

Publishers would love to have you believe that they have provided the tools needed for integration by teaching science and social studies lessons within the ELA curriculum. But that’s exactly backwards for how true integration works.

In fact, this backwards system of integration may explain why reading scores have flatlined since 1998!

According to The Atlantic, “Daniel Willingham, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia … writes about the science behind reading comprehension. Willingham explained that whether or not readers understand a text depends far more on how much background knowledge and vocabulary they have relating to the topic than on how much they’ve practiced comprehension skills.”

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute says improving reading and writing instruction in America’s schools requires teachers taking the lead. “Teachers should tackle the content-knowledge deficit. In particular, they should take the lead in adopting content-rich curricula and organizing their lessons around well-constructed ‘text sets’ that help students build on their prior knowledge and learn new words more quickly.”

For real integration, I maintain that you need to start with your content-rich subject. Start with science. Or start with social studies. Figure out the main topics you will teach over the course of the year and decide how you will organize them. I teach either science or social studies, one at a time, alternating them. I am starting this year with Explorers and then Mixtures and Solutions. Next will be Colonies followed by Space. Finally we will study the Revolution and Constitution, and we will end the year with Living Systems.

Continue reading →

Find a Mirror, Peek Through a Window, & Open a Sliding Door

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Books, Literacy, Travel

For me, summertime = reading time.

During the school year, I can’t keep up with the growing stacks of books precariously balanced on my nightstand. So in the summer, I set a goal of reading 5-10 books. My pattern is consistent—usually some young adult fiction to add to my classroom library (All American Boys, Ms. Marvel Vol 1), something political (Evicted), something I meant to read ages ago (Crazy Rich Asians trilogy, Orange is the New Black), a friend recommendation (Number One Chinese Restaurant), a “teacher” book (I’ll read that one mid-August), a book I only half-finished years ago (Whistling Vivaldi) and a mindless beach read (Matchmaking for Beginners, Girl Logic).

Despite burying myself in non-school related books, I don’t stop thinking about the work. I know, I know. Like many teachers, even when I’m “off”, I’m still on. No matter how much I try to avoid thinking about my classroom and my students (even with my mindless, beach reads), my mind wanders back. When I read, I imagine faces of students who would ____. I mull over ways I could use a certain chapter in my unit on ___. After years, I’ve finally accepted that reading and reflecting during the summer is part of my “self-care” plan.

And so this summer, I met 2014 Ms. Marvel, a Pakistani-American, Muslim teenage girl struggling to balance faith, family, and friends. I deepened my understanding of the American housing crisis and how evictions disproportionately impact Black women. I ruminated on the meaning of love and how to express it to those closest to me. I reflected on the meaning of identity threat, and how stigmatization directly impacts student success in my classroom.

Summertime is also prime travel time. My husband and I make it a priority to grab our passports and get out of town. The magic of travel is that it literally transports you to a different world. Eating Korean BBQ on South Tacoma Way or ordering Tom Kha in East Tacoma is not quite enough to understand what it means to be Korean or Thai. Breathing Bangkok air, sitting in Kuala Lumper traffic, visiting the S-21  Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh puts you face-to-face with people, culture, and history in a new way.

Both the acts of reading about and physically traveling to another world, always refreshes my perspective. I might arrive with preconceived notions about a certain group or culture based on my previous experience or my hours scouring a Lonely Planet guidebook and TripAdvisor pages. But I always leave with a greater understanding of systems, an empathy for human struggle, and a realignment of my own values with what actually matters. Mark Twain once said, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” This is the main reason I continue to get out of dodge each summer and sweet-talk my friends into going abroad. For students, there are more complications than simply applying for a passport and buying a ticket to Beijing.

Literacy experts use the phrase Windows & Mirrors when referring to the way a reader engages with a book. This concept was actually developed by Dr. Rudine Bishop in her essay Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors. Essentially, a book can help you see yourself, your family, your community or your values (mirror). A text might serve as a window, peeking into someone else’s life and learning about another world. Finally, a novel could work as a sliding door–at first giving you a peak into another realm, then sliding open so you can walk through it (think Butler or Tolkien). I’ve made it a reading habit to ask myself is this text meant to be a mirror, a window, or a sliding glass door? For whom? As a reader, I want mirrors to feel a sense of personal validation (that’s easy for me to find since I’m a white female). As a reader and an educator I know I need more windows and sliding doors in my life to help me be a better teacher.

And so this summer, I once again remember that while I still believe everyone should travel abroad, I know not everyone can. As the new school year approaches, I accept my responsibility as a teacher to construct classroom experiences that transport students to new worlds, even for a few days. Besides showing pictures and sharing stories, I can make instructional choices such as incorporating more diverse texts as mainstream curriculum. We must intentionally find windows, mirrors, and sliding doors for each learner.

Thinking about Feedback

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Assessment, Life in the Classroom, Literacy

In the last few weeks of school I was admonished by two students from different classes, and different schools actually, about the feedback I’d given them on their writing. There was not enough, basically, is what they both said.

I don’t disagree with them.

I remember the power of teacher feedback when I was in high school, and college. In fact, my graduate program did not give out letter grades. Each semester our professor/mentor/writing guru would write a half-to-full page review of our work. I was not alone pacing in the vestibule before the wall of student boxes afraid to pick up that powerful envelope, open it, and read what those professors said about me and my writing.

And that was after a semester of generous feedback. My whole master’s degree program was modeled on writers in conversation about their work and the great writers of the world.

As a professional I have read Nancy Sommers’ Harvard study, Stanford’s information on how to improve student writing through feedback and many other sources.

I get it.

Currently I teach four different English courses across seven sections, and they are all writing intensive. I love it and I don’t want a different course load. But there are realities I must face with this course load, like the amount of hours I can remain awake. And I don’t need much sleep.

I have rubrics designed to give as much feedback as a rubric can with the circling of a box. I hold individual student conferences, a few times a semester because I can say more than I can write, and I strive to, at bare minimum, note something working and something not working in a piece of writing so students can give it attention and amplify it or rework it. I think that works. And I know for a fact there are weeks and, sometimes months, where I do this really, really well, and there are weeks or months where I do not do this very well.

Here is what I am thinking about, offering up, and plan on working on next year: the way students ask questions about their writing. The students who questioned my level and quality of feedback had a legitimate concern. I looked back at their documents and remedied the problem by offering feedback and asking them multiple questions. I don’t mind doing that. But what has stuck with me most in the exchange is the fact that these writers (these student writers—though I’d argue we’re all student writers) did little more than complain about a lack of comments and never engaged with their own work at any level.

If a student won’t engage with their own work beyond, “is this good?” or “what’s wrong with this?” or “I need your feedback to reach my full potential,” then one problem in my classroom is not my feedback or lack of feedback, but the way these writers are engaging with their work. I have not taught them how to ask questions about their own writing. Good writers are good tinkerers. They always look at their work from one direction, then another direction, delete something, add it back in, re-arrange, etc. I need to find ways to foster that mentality in students. I never know if a piece of writing is “good,” and I know for sure I have nothing to do with a student’s “full potential.” Those, of course, are things they must work out for themselves.

I read interviews with writers obsessively, and can say with some confidence that the majority of great writers will acknowledge that the quality of a piece is ultimately measured by the writers’ internal satisfaction with it, with the knowledge they’ve done everything they can and it is time to abandon the work. What the world does or does not do with it is, well, up to the world. All artists know this.

Therefore, the writers I know and share my work with have conversations about our writing that center around language such as, “I’m having a problem with the ending….” Or “is the tone off in the third paragraph?” or “do you believe this character?” or “dear god, I can’t think about commas any longer, but I’m sure some of the commas are off in this, could you take a look?” The point is the questions are specific and come from a perspective of deep engagement with the piece of writing.

That is my new teaching focus in writing instruction. How do I foster attention (beyond telling them to pay attention to their language and to ask specific questions, which I’ve done for years) in a student writer?

Good thing I have some time to think about it.

Project, Products, and Publishing (or All’s Well That Ends Well)

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Assessment, Education, Life in the Classroom, Literacy, Parent Involvment

Assessment. That’s a loaded word these days, particularly in the last months of the school year. But, what is it, really? Is it the state test? Is it an essay? Is it multiple choice?

Of course, the answer is yes to all of that, but there is so much more. We could get into the semantics of what is summative or formative assessment, and what type/mode/format of assessment is more valid or reliable or necessary. However, today I am interested in discussing one particular sort of assessment: publishing.

What I mean by “publishing” is this particular definition: to make publicly or generally known.

The Washington State English Language Arts Standards reference it:

W.9-10.6 Production and Distribution of Writing

Use technology, including the internet, to produce, publish, and update individual or shared writing products, taking advantage of technology’s capacity to link to other information and to display information flexibly and dynamically.

Ooh…and “to display information flexibly and dynamically!” That really gets to the heart of the matter, there. How do we assess this? How do we teach our students to publish? to create products? to display information flexibly and dynamically? And then, once we do teach these skills, how do we assess them?

My answer to all these questions is project-based learning. This last week, while my seventh-graders were busy toiling over their answers on the Smarter Balanced Assessment, my ninth-graders were wowing the public with their “Shakesfair” projects. Both of these assessments are valid. Both give me information that informs my practice. Both can really stress a kid out if they don’t have the skills or support. And, both can bring a sense of pride and accomplishment.

Animatic Project for Shakesfair 2018

The difference is that one can also be an entertaining and educational way to connect with families and the community. It can inspire creativity, and it can celebrate individuality. It can encompass so many aspects of a child’s intelligence, skills, and talents. I can tell you without a doubt that the projects my students create prove their understanding of the material we cover in class. They also extend the learning, showing the reading, writing, communication, and research skills I am teaching them. These are valid assessments, and they also “display information flexibly and dynamically.”

On the down side, projects can be a royal pain. They are messy, hard to manage, and time-consuming. They require a teacher to set firm guidelines and offer support in ways he or she never imagined, like problem-solving last-minute tech issues for an Animatic animation, or finding creative ways to serve non-alcoholic English trifle to hundreds of guests. While projects bring out the most creative and imaginative attributes of most students, they bewilder and frustrate others, often those with special needs. To avoid these pitfalls, projects take tons of preparation, patience, and dedication.

I am committed to assessing my students with projects several times a year. Sometimes these are project-based learning activities, and sometimes they are just projects. To understand the difference, check out the handy table here. Some of my project-based assessments are small, such as one day tasks chosen from a menu to show understanding of a text through multiple pathways. These are simple and not too terribly messy or complicated to score. Each grade level gets a couple big projects, too. Some are group projects, some are individual, and some are flexible. They choose. Student choice is paramount for successful projects. For all projects, I have carefully crafted rubrics and timelines and rules established over time. Of course, that was all accomplished through trial and error, pursuing a good idea and learning how terribly complicated it really was!

That said, project-based learning is not for every teacher. It takes a willingness to face the issues head on. It takes a lot of patience to guide students through the discomfort they often experience when they actually have choices. It takes a lot of nerve.

Now the nerve is what you need when you get to the publishing part. That part requires the PUBLIC. The public is your audience. They see the whole big, beautiful mess, with all of its warts and all of its wackiness. You have to be willing to let your students shine or fizzle in a public format. And that is very, very hard.

Historical Recipe Project

At our 14th Annual Shakesfair, my students were shining. Well, mostly. We had Renaissance Era a slightly messy smorgasbord of food – trifle, roast chicken, meat pies – served by enthusiastic students. We had music researched and played heroically by young musicians, and there was a variety of artwork created by students who surprised their classmates with their hidden talents. Others shared creative writing based on Shakespeare- short stories, poetry, and songs. Several this year chose analytical writing, critiquing plays and films and examining themes. A select few gave slide show presentations, and there were the always popular models of the globe theater. Students from previous years came in and begged to show the films they produced when they were freshmen, and we all enjoyed seeing their first attempts at film-making once again.

I have thirty freshmen this year and well over a hundred visitors joined them. Parents, grandparents, staff, upperclassmen, and members of the community came and viewed their work, displayed “flexibly and dynamically.”

It was an exhausting time. The project overlaps with a full month of our Shakespeare unit, but the last week is a flurry of activity. And, to top it off, I was proctoring the 7th grade assessment for three hours on the day of the event, with no prep time. Luckily, my students in my afternoon classes chipped in to help set up, and clean up was well-managed and fast. I have a system.

To those brave and crazy enough to take on project-based learning, I am here to tell you that it is worth it. You will never forget the creativity and enthusiasm of your students, and the praise of their families. And, neither will they.

Ubiquitous Globe Theater Project

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Do you assess with projects? Tell me how your students publish their work and create products to share.

Failure and Its Uses Part Two

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Assessment, Education, Life in the Classroom, Literacy

I will pick up from my previous post by describing a recent assignment in my AP Language classroom, but first want to address a few things that have been brought up in the comments to the “Part One” post. A few people mentioned that one situation evolving out of the reaction to decrease failure is to homogenize, or lower standards in order to avoid failure and create one vision of success. I think this is true—to a point. I’m sure it happens, but I’m also leery of the tone of such an assumption. I’ve never met an educator who mindfully, consciously, and intentionally compromised their academic integrity and lowered standards for students to simply pass them along and avoid failure. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but I am saying I’ve not been party to it in fifteen years and working in three school districts. By-and-large teachers are an ethical bunch who care about learning. Even the system of second chances mentioned in my previous post, does not imply a lowering of standards. What it does is offer second chances in ways I’m concerned are unhealthy to the learning process.

The other comment from part one I would like to address coincides with a recent post by one of my colleagues here at “Stories from the Schools.” One problem with evaluation and pacing in the public schools is the arbitrary nature of batching students by age and assuming that they learn at the same pace. I agree this is problematic and worthy of long discussion. I also agree that this is one arbitrary choice among many. I admire the project of the Khan Academy, and also admire Sal Khan’s stance of working to support public schools and not as an active critic of them. I think this is something worth exploring, but it is also something that much change at the larger systemic level first, or alternatives must be put in place or we set students up for an unfair failure. If a college does not know how to read a high school graduate’s transcript because their school eschewed grades, how does that serve a student? How do we ensure a fair and rigorous statewide or nationwide curriculum without the traditional A-F grade system? How do we ensure another arbitrary system accomplishing the exact same thing does not replace the A-F system? Difficult and complex conversations. Personally, I am currently interested in approaching these problems within the classroom, and within our current structures. Mostly, because it will impact students immediately.

What follows is my personal attempt to create a situation where students can take academic risk, fail, and have authentic second chances that provide the opportunity to learn and succeed. It is an assignment still in progress so I don’t know if it works, but this is something I’m trying.

In an attempt to shake students out of thinking like a student when writing in my class (and to get them thinking like a writer) I gave them the “read-it-like-a-reader-not-like-a-teacher assignment.” I told them they could write about anything they wanted, and that I would read until I lost interest—just as a general reader would. The point of the assignment is to make them stop playing the “game of school” and to find a more authentic academic voice. Most of my writing assignments read like letters so here is part of my intro:

“The challenge of writing compelling, analytical, academic essays is to merge two main things—thoughtful/provocative content and well-constructed prose. Substance and style. That’s what this class really is all about. We’ve been looking at what authors say and how they say it. I want you to pay more attention to what you have to say and how you say it. In other words, I want you to write like a champ. It will be hard, but I believe in you, as do your peers, your parents, and your dog/cat (take your pick).”

Then I gave them parameters regarding page lengths, etc., and I worked to define what would lose my interest—all based on work we’ve been doing in class via reading and writing assignments all year. This is key. The “read-it-like-a-reader-not-like-a-teacher assignment” came out of a specific class with a specific need, within a specific context. This is also why I am leery of technology based, independent learning platforms. Learning is dynamic in a human way, not a computerized logarithmic way. The assignment arose out of need, context, and the specific humans in the room. Here are my definitions from the assignment:

 

Definitions:

Lose interest: there are lots of reasons readers lose interest. For some, it is because there is a football game on. Or that it is raining outside. It is a relatively subjective thing, so I will attempt to put some parameters around this. I’m a forgiving reader (mostly). I’ve been a middle school or high school teacher for 14 years, so I’ve been trained to be a forgiving reader. I want my students to do well, and I want to be engaged in your writing. This is a good thing for you (a great thing actually). But I do lose interest when I run into the following:

  • Sentences that don’t say anything due to over use of abstractions, ambiguous syntax, or a general lack of clarity. (See Orwell revision sheet).
  • When people ignore the suggestions from George Orwell on the Orwell revision sheet (dead metaphors, pretentious language, jargon, etc.)
  • When arrogance seeps through the writing to the point the author appears not to care if other perspectives exist in the world.
  • When paragraphs or ideas within paragraphs appear unrelated (and I have an associative mind, so I can make some tenuous connections).
  • When writing feels formulaic, forced, or stylized inappropriately, and that there is not an authentic voice thinking through and communicating ideas.

What you are saying: equals the content of your piece. You can write about anything you like. Something connected to class or something that just matters to you. Technology, education, politics, a theme you wish had won in the class voting. Totally up to you. Note: I’m willing to read about any topic if the writing is strong enough.

How you are saying it: equals a conscious uses of grammar and rhetoric and style. You use devices we’ve discussed in class, you use sentence variety, fresh image or metaphor, your sentence mean something and flow together.

Are some of these subjective? Absolutely. But so is the attention span of any reader anywhere. In fact, I’d argue that my students have more information here about their reader than most writers. As the poet Antonio Porchia says in his book Voices, “I know what I have given you. I do not know what you have received.” I think teachers feel this way at times as well.

About half of the students earned an “F” on their first submission as I did not read past the first paragraph, or even the first sentence because the syntax was garbled or overly abstract or any other host of listed reasons. I drew the line, entered the score and told them, in proper Beckett style, to try again. They are trickling in (the deadline for the second submission is open), and some are improved. But the best part is the conversations have changed a bit. They are looking at their writing differently. They are not asking, “what do I need to fix?” but “how do I make this more engaging?” Which was the point. It’s not a perfect assignment, but I certainly feel it is one that fails better than most I’ve created this year. I also feel it is an assignment working to authentically engage students with both the course content and with their learning selves. They must face failure in a new way. I plan on adding a reflective letter assignment as the year ends asking them to discuss this assignment, the process for them, and the self-assess themselves as both writer and learner.

The Discomfort of Learning—Plagiarism and Consequences

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Life in the Classroom, Literacy, Social Issues, Teacher Leadership

Recently students in a non-English language arts class turned in research papers worth a high percentage of their grade. Scoring the papers, their teacher found rampant plagiarism ranging from improper citing of sources to blatantly copying and pasting paragraphs of text from online sources without any citation at all.

My colleague who I will dub—Attentive-Responsible-Teacher (or Art)—followed our school’s handbook in regards to plagiarism. Art gave each student a zero on their paper, wrote up disciplinary referrals, and set parameters for students to try again. Because no one blatantly took an entire paper from another source and attempted to pass said paper off as their own, this teacher wanted students to learn from their mistake and have a chance to try again (at a 30% reduction).

Some parents and students came unglued.

Around 25% of the class had plagiarized sections in their papers and, according to Art, the responses from students ranged from taking full responsibility; to acknowledging poor note-taking strategies which led to the problem passages; to I never learned this.

After a flurry of emails, meetings, conferences and phone calls Art contacted me, as the English Department Chair, to clarify a few things.

Some students and parents argued their miss-cited papers landed in a gray area. That miss-citing sources is not the same as plagiarism. This is euphemism. Plagiarism, defined, is representing someone else’s words, image, etc. as one’s own. If a student includes a quote verbatim from a text without quote marks, they are graphically indicating those words are their own. Plagiarism.

It might be an honest mistake without mal-intent, but it is nonetheless a serious error deserving consequences. I spoke with a parent who felt the students should get to re-write the paper and still earn 100%, claiming that would make it a learning opportunity and not punishment. This contributed to an over-arching theme emerging from the conversations with parents and administrators: the students didn’t know they were plagiarizing so they can’t be punished for plagiarizing.

Of course they can. Just as I can get a speeding ticket when unaware of how fast I was driving, inadvertent plagiarism is not really a thing, but a rhetorical nicety created by parents and students to avoid the feeling of shame being called out as plagiarizers.  A natural human reaction.

Then it hit me, this situation was less about academic integrity than it was about failure. They failed something in such a way as to tarnish both their academic record (temporarily) and their personal integrity (also temporary, but I suspect it does not feel temporary).

From my teacher’s perspective, the academic learning opportunity is pretty clear. I hope they have a clearer sense of what constitutes academic plagiarism, and acts of academic plagiarism carry serious consequences (here a slight grade reduction, at University expulsion is on the list).

I also understand students and parents reacting to the culturally inherent fear of failure. The fact is, for learning to take place it must be uncomfortable and we must fail. As teachers, our job is not to make it more comfortable, but to respect students enough to walk them into discomfort, and not leave them there completely alone.

One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever come across for education, or for life, is from Samuel Beckett’s enigmatic story Worstward Ho! where his characters face continual abstract struggle: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

This advice applies to teachers and students alike. There are all kinds of failure, and when it comes to learning, it is necessary. The reality is teachers and students (and even parents) sometimes have to sit in discomfort for any development to take place. We all have to try again and continually attempt to fail better.

 

Right Book. Right Group. Right Time

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Books, Education Policy, Life in the Classroom, Literacy

I’d had my heart set on reading To Kill a Mockingbird to my current eighth graders since last spring. Thanks largely to Nancie Atwell’s influence (see The Reading Zone, 2007), I no longer assign whole class novels. Instead, read-alouds allow for an accessible whole class experience that supplements students’ independent reading. I know I am lucky to teach at a school where I am trusted to make such pedagogical and curricular decisions.

Although it had been a long time since I’d read it, I was confident that To Kill a Mockingbird would be a valuable literary experience. It would also offer opportunities to connect to and discuss current issues of racism and the justice system. When I revisited it, however, I noticed several challenges. There’s the matter of the narrator’s southern accent, which I knew I could not pull off. There is also dialect and the N-word. I prepped the kids for it, gave them a lot of contextual information, and decided to use an audio recording. Despite those efforts, the kids were disengaged. Whenever I paused for discussion, my usually opinionated and insightful students remained silent. After a couple of days, they asked me to abandon the audio recording and read it aloud myself. I tried, but they were still disengaged. At that point, Anisa said, “Jessie, we know this is a book you really like, but do you think you could choose a book that we would like?”

I grappled with that question for the rest of the day. Did we just need to give the book more time, or was it truly not the right book?

I remember the year I used David James Duncan’s The River Why with ninth graders. I had loved that book, and I was certain that everyone in a pre-Advanced Placement English class would love it too.  After all, what adolescents wouldn’t love a coming-of-age story full of humor, self-discovery, and romance? I could not have been more wrong. The kids hated it. They did not connect with the main character; the humor was too sophisticated. There was a near revolt.

My selection of Angela’s Ashes, on the other hand, was transformative for my juniors and seniors, who could both appreciate the humor and empathize with the depictions of extreme poverty. What had been a disconnected, disengaged group of students developed community and confidence. That was when I learned the power of the right book for the right group at the right time.

Are there some books that are universally the right book? Maybe. It seems that every group of seventh graders loves The Outsiders. But most of the time, I have to start with my group of students in mind, and search for the book that will be the right match. I had forgotten to do that when I selected To Kill a Mockingbird, and then, against my better judgment, I continued to put the curriculum ahead of the students. Anisa’s question gave me the jolt I needed to change course. The next morning, I told the kids that I valued To Kill a Mockingbird and hoped they would each choose to read it at some point, but I could see that it was not the right book for the class at this time.

Wanting to get us back into our read-aloud groove, I pivoted to Wonder by R.J. Palacio. It is engaging, but lacks the literary heft I know my students are ready for and need. During a discussion about what makes a book interesting, Yasmin mentioned Of Mice and Men as an example of a book that had a powerful emotional impact. Isaac and Steven agreed. Yasmin then bounced out of her seat, saying Of Mice and Men should be our next read aloud book. I looked at Isaac and Steven who nodded vigorously. I’d been considering Of Mice and Men. The students’ enthusiastic endorsement settled the matter.

I imagine that there are individuals who would see this course of events as a reason not to trust teachers’ professional judgment, and instead to centralize all decisions about instructional materials at the district or school board level. For me it has the opposite effect. It makes me think about the absurdity of individuals far removed from classrooms making decisions about text selections. If I, who know my students deeply, can occasionally make the wrong choice, how could it be alright to leave the decision making to individuals who don’t know my students at all?

In this age of teacher-proofing and mandated curricula, I am curious about other teachers’ experiences. Are you able to make decisions about what will be the right book for the group in front of you? How do top-down decisions about curricula affect your and your students’ experiences?

Oh, and if you have any middle school read-aloud recommendations, please pass those along too.

Studio Teaching: A Luxurious and Effective Practice

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Education, Literacy

Eight teachers and three district instructional coaches cram into the meeting room of a local coffee shop, the table full of laptops, large sticky notes, smelly markers, lattes and cell phones.  They pore over documents: teacher plans, student work, excerpts from educational articles.  The facilitator draws out ideas, pushes back when needed, and propels the conversation forward for more than two hours.  The coffee shop owner, familiar with many of these teachers’ faces, asks, “Are you guys working today?”  Yep. Six of these teachers already met the previous week after school in order to create the plans that this group is now tweaking.  So far: 2370 minutes of brain work in order to plan one 50-minute lesson.  Worth it?  Definitely. 

This past month, my co-teacher, an Exceptional Needs Specialist, and I were the “enactment teachers” for our English department’s “Studio” cycle:  teachers within each department take turns hosting other teachers from the department and district instructional coaches for a process that takes several days.  The enactment teacher begins by meeting with a coach to dissect his or her “problem of practice” or “problem of student learning,” a challenge that is almost always evident in the other teachers’ classrooms.  Later the whole team meets to plan a lesson that will address the stated problem, and finally, over an entire school day, the team finalizes the plan, digs deeper into learning about the problem of practice, observes the enactment teacher teach the lesson to one class, debriefs, watches as the lesson is taught once more, and then, after a long day, shares out in a final debrief. 

For this round of Studio, my co-teacher and I identified a problem of practice concerning students working in their “zone of proximal development,” a term defined by psychologist Lev Vygotsky, where students are appropriately challenged and supported at their current level of understanding. We had found that more struggling students often did not take advantage of the supports that we offered, including modified instruction in small-group settings, graphic organizers, one-on-one support, etc.; for students who needed more challenge, we realized that we didn’t always create opportunities for them to go further and deeper, and when we did, sometimes these students either did not realize they were ready for that level of instruction or they didn’t take advantage of the opportunities presented to them. 

Through the Studio planning cycle, our group of educators planned a lesson where students identified their current level of understanding of our learning target for the day, and then based on that self-assessment, chose from a menu of options of how they wanted to learn that day, including one that was more supported and one that was more independent.  The group also encouraged us to choose a more complex text than the one we had originally planned, arguing that with students being more aware of their current skill level and choosing an appropriate level of support, they could be successful at understanding this level of reading. 

My co-teacher and I stand in front of our classroom with 28 pairs of student eyes on us and 11 pairs of adult eyes on them.  The students start off stone cold – no one cracks a smile at my corny jokes.  But they slowly warm up, forgetting about the adults there with their clipboards, marking down their every comment and our every movement.  They tentatively raise their hands as they catch on to the lesson that these 11 people had a part in planning for them.  I smile, impressed with how my students are taking on this complex text, really understanding the heart of the argument. The adults keep their poker faces on, but they are silently cheering students on as they make sense of the reading before them, and quietly jotting down notes for later as they see us make teacher moves that both help and hinder the lesson.   

Studio feels a bit luxurious to me.  All of these brains helping us with one lesson.  All of this energy – and money! – spent to help our department gain a deeper understanding of a problem of student learning that affects us all.  All of the details in the lesson plan, the stuff that I rarely have time to think about, let alone write into a formal template.  All of the debriefing, refining, and reteaching.   

And yet the luxury is worth it.  Definitely.  That day, 84 students went home after reading a text that I had thought would be too much for them. Those 11 teachers went home with new ideas of what to do – and not do – in their own practice to increase student understanding.  And this one teacher, me, left feeling both challenged and affirmed, with new habits of mind and refined practice to take to the next lesson.   

For English Language Learners, Intentional Collaboration is Key

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Education, Education Policy, Elementary, Life in the Classroom, Literacy, Professional Development, Teacher Leadership

Tamar Krames

Guest blogger Tamar Krames is a NBCT in English as a New Language, a certified GLAD trainer, and an ELL instructional coach currently working with OSPI. Prior to her work at OSPI, Tamar worked as a district GLAD trainer and coach, taught ELL classes and co-taught sheltered ELL content classes. 

I recently sat at a table in a windowless conference room with a 3rd grade team of teachers. As you might expect, the table was covered with grade-level ELA curriculum materials, open laptops, and copies of Common Core Standards. Far less common were the open and highlighted English Language Proficiency Standards (ELP), Tier 2 vocabulary lists, and the laminated pictures piled on the table. Two teachers were pulling up engaging image files related to an upcoming unit on their personal tablets and one was searching her phone for affixes and Latin roots to support their vocabulary mini-lesson. While the driving force of the co-planning session was ELA content and standards, addressing the profound language needs of their dynamic students was inspired. This is it, I thought, this is what best practice for ELLs looks like. These teachers were clearly committed to their craft and to their multilingual students. But what made that collaborative moment so powerful was the shared focus of the whole building to best meet the needs of their particular student body. The teachers had common understanding of second language acquisition and ELP standards because a team of teachers had requested ELL training for the whole staff. The planning session had the full support of the building’s leadership. Collaboration was not happening on the fly. It was intentional and deliberately supported.

As a traveling ELL instructional coach, I visit diverse school communities across WA State. The geographic context and demographic mix varies greatly. One school community is comprised of Spanish-speaking migrant families living in a small town surrounded by orchards and mountains. Another school has no clear ethnic majority, the students speaking 15 different languages in one urban classroom. Regardless of setting, I walk into my first building visits with one central question; What might best practice for ELLs look like in this unique school community? I ask this question to school leadership right off the bat.

More often than not, the answer to this question disappoints me. Consistently the first answer points to a single focal point. “ We are so lucky to have a wonderful ELL teacher named A” or “ We just purchased this amazing online language program called B”, or “ our ELL Para has attended a training called C!”. Clearly this singular view of best practice begs the question – What happens when A, B, or C leaves the building?

As far as I can tell, there is no right answer to this question of best practice for ELLs. The learning needs of multilingual students are complex and always changing. A linguistics professor once said to my class, “ if you remember one thing about second language acquisition, remember this – language acquisition is without fail developmental”. For teachers this means that the ELLs support structures (scaffolding) must change and flex as their students’ English proficiency and content mastery develops. On top of that, the rate at which ELLs develop proficiency and mastery varies drastically in relation to a seemingly endless set of factors (literacy in first language, status of first language in the dominant culture, educational background, poverty, learning disabilities, access to quality instruction…)

If you need further proof of the complex and ever-changing learning needs of ELLs, try navigating though the English Language Proficiency (ELP) standards (An amazingly thorough matrix that outlines language development by grade level in relation to common core standards). Best practice for ELLs is truly a moving target as students trudge through the stages of second language development and academic literacy at their own unique pace.

More than a “right” answer to this question of best practice for ELLs, what I hope to hear is a plural answer that points to shared ownership instead of pointing towards one program or person. Whatever the site-based vision for ELL support entails, it must involve intentional and ongoing collaborative structures. Collaborative structure is different from collaboration as it is proactive and systematic – it implies a deeper commitment than amazing content teacher, X, that collaborates with one-of-a-kind ELL specialist, Y. Intentional collaborative structures answer questions such as, How and when do counselors, administrators, content teachers and ELL specialists work together to best schedule ELLs according to their developing proficiency level? How and when do content teachers investigate and integrate ELP standards into their grade-level planning? If the ELL specialist is ‘pushing in’ to core instruction – how and when do teachers learn about, experiment with, and reflect on co-teaching models?

Ultimately, the goal of any ELL program model is to expedite the academic English language/ literacy development of multilingual students so that they can meet grade-level standards and breeze through any gatekeepers they encounter on their path towards earning a diploma. Supporting ELLs through the K-12 system is not about finding the right teacher, program, or PD session. It is about shared ownership and commitment to refining best-practice, uniquely designed for each community, together.

TamarArt

The above drawing is an original piece done by Tamar Krames.