Student Blog Samples for Nonfiction Reading

image from kidblog.org website

We are entering our fourth and final week of the Nonfiction Reading unit, using blogs as a response tool. As I explained in my March 29 blog, Launching Blogging During Book Clubs, students are reading nonfiction social justice books in a book club structure, and responding through face-to-face discussions, Reading Notebook summaries and vocabulary work, and through our class blog using Kidblog. Students have used the blog in several different ways. Here are some samples at different levels of thinking:

Students started by doing some background research on the social justice issue reflected in their book: civil rights, Japanese internment, or child labor. They blogged about their learning, and then read and commented on the others in their same-text group. Below is a pretty average blog post (picture not shown, but there is a link included) about the civil rights issue with a better-than-average comment. I like how the blogger very succinctly summarizes the main idea of Nonviolent Social Change, and answers the prompted questions about public awareness and freedom of speech in a smooth way. I like how the commenter picks up on freedom of speech and pushes the blogger to think in a new way about the implications, linking it back to the Six Principles.

For our book club, we are reading a non-fiction books about black civil rights. I have researched about civil rights, to further understand the book. Mostly involving Dr. King Jr. Martin Luther King’s teaching on the theory of nonviolence, called the “Six Steps of Nonviolent Social Change.”  He shows, in these six steps, the way to protest for civil rights without violence. Instead of fighting violently, Martin Luther King Jr. instructed the blacks to fight mentally against the whites. Dr King states that one should not protest against the person doing evil, but the evil itself. Public awareness helps in the fight for their cause, because if more people hear about the protests than more people can share their thoughts on the subject. Luckily freedom of speech is one of the promises of America, because without freedom of speech all the blacks protesting would have been arrested and put in jail, or killed. In the photo shown under, the practice of nonviolence is shown. The blacks in the picture are shown holding up signs to protest against segregation, instead of physically fighting the whites.

I can see you understand the Six Principles of Nonviolence very clearly. However, you seem to think big of freedom of speech. If everyone should have equal freedom of speech, doesn’t that mean a white man could say anything to a black man? How would the black man respond, or react, to that? And how would that reaction fit the Six Principles of Nonviolence, which aspects specifically?

Once students got into their books, they broke it into four parts. For each part, they had to choose one of the thematic social justice questions and blog about how their book answers it. Below is a bare-minimum blog about child labor, answering the question: What allows some individuals to take a stand against prejudice/oppression while others choose to participate in it? The commenter, who is reading a different book about a different issue, gives a positive response but has a limited understanding of what "digging deep into the question" should look like.

In the book “Kids at Work”, the only person who took a stand against child labor was Lewis Hine. But many people participated in child labor because they were business owners who wanted profit for the kids working. Hine took the stand against child labor because he knew that is was wrong for children’s lives to be wasted away by work instead of a meaningful education.

good description and really good digging deep into the question

Students discussed their book and their responses to the social justice questions in same-text and mixed-text groups after each of the four parts. After reading their blogs on each of the three questions, I noticed a general trend that students did not answer the first part of one of the questions: What creates prejudice/ oppression, and what can an individual do to overcome it? Usually students explained what the prejudice/ oppression was in their books, and then talked about attempts to overcome it. This difficulty with cause-effect relationships is something I'd also noticed in Social Studies. I asked them to discuss the cause of their issue within their third same-text book club, and then blog about what they learned, wondered, or understood in a new way based on the discussion. The blog sample below is from a more advanced student who already had a good understanding of the cause of racism; however, I like how he showed his open-minded approach to his group members and added new thinking in his blog post. The commenter, a very advanced student who is reading a different book about the same civil rights issue, found a connection between their books, and added a provocative question to push the blogger even further into the issue of racism.

Today, in our discussion, we discussed the second essential question (What creates prejudice and what can an individual do to overcome it?) and what we wrote as a response to the question. At first, I said that segregation existed because of slavery and how the laws that supported were abolished but the idea of blacks being “lower” than whites never went away. After discussing that with my group they had similar ideas but I learned that it was also because mistreating blacks had almost become a way of life for the whites and it was how they were expected to act and it was also how they were raised, even though    this didn’t apply to all white, since some were more sympathetic than others.

I like how you explained that discrimination had become part of the lifestyle of white people. I agree as I have found in my own book, “The Voice That Changed a Nation”, that racial segregation in the United States had much to do with a sort of discriminatory tradition that ensured that blacks were always below whites in society. Do you think that earlier ideas of blacks being below whites by some natural order affected people even as recently as the 20th century?

Blogging during book clubs has had unexpected advantages for me as a teacher. Students' thinking is so very clearly visible, unlike a discussion where I miss 80% of what students say because I am bopping from group to group and their words disappear once they are spoken. I can access their thinking at any time from any place, and give them individual feedback via comments. It has also allowed an opportunity for differentiation, especially pushing my higher-level students to make new connections and dig deeper into issues. It supports lower-level students as well, because as they read the thinking of their peers, their comprehension is solidified and broadened.

Despite my earlier trepidations (see March 16th: Blogging in Book Clubs), I am pleased with the outcome of this technology integration. It has lifted the level of thinking, writing, collaboration, and my ability to give feedback beyond what was possible through talk and Reading Notebooks alone. Kidblog is easy to use and looks professional. This is definitely one technology integration plan that worked!

Bringing the Human Back to the Humanities

The topic of nonfiction reading has come up a lot in the professional articles I've been reading lately. This is in response to the-- shocking to some -- number the new Common Core State Standards (CCSS) used that 70% of all reading in High School should be nonfiction. Because many teachers believe that the CCSS is a path in the right direction, and because teachers usually do what they're told, we look for support to implement the new standards in a pedagogically sound way. The articles I've read describe primary source reading and vocabulary lessons and cross-curricular integration ideas and nonfiction back-up to novel studies.

It all makes sense to me, but last week as I was reading Forge by Laurie Halse Anderson, I was thinking: Why not read more fiction in Social Studies?

image from Amazon.com website

I had just finished teaching the American Revolutionary War during Social Studies before spring break. The students read the textbook, watched clips from The History Channel's series Revolution!, participated in role play, worked with maps, and took a test. It was a pretty good unit.  The video clips were, by far, the most popular and memorable part for the students: maybe because they like the mental break of receiving  information passively, maybe because more and more of their out of school information comes from video sources, or maybe because seeing the actors recreate the scenes helps the information come alive. Despite its popularity, however, there was a distance and objectivity to the video because it was a nonfiction explanatory text: the narrator told what happened and why without any emotional overlay.

Historical fiction adds an emotional overlay to the facts. Forge is the story of Curzon, a former slave who joined the Continental Army during the Battle of Bunker Hill (in the previous book Chains). In Forge, Curzon is part of the Battle of Saratoga and then winters at Valley Forge during that cold starving time of 1777-78. Anderson's description of the battle scene brings all the fear and confusion to the Battle of Saratoga:

"I poured the gunpowder, rammed home the bullet, primed the lock, and peered around my tree. The British were just within range of a musket such as mine, but the smoke made it hard to see anything. I shot, loaded and shot, loaded and shot, never knowing if I'd hit anyone. The soldiers around me worked as I did, some daring to stand in the open whilst loading. One fellow was shot through the leg as he reached for his powder horn. He screamed so loud, I could not hear the commands of our officer. The fellow behind the next tree threw an acorn at my head to get my attention: he was out of powder. I tossed him two cartridges and prayed the battle would soon end." (p. 24-25) 

Compare that to the description of the battle from the textbook: History Alive! The United States Through Industrialisation (Teacher's Curriculum Institute, 2011):

"Although the rebels outnumbered his army, Burgoyne ordered an attack. Again and again the rebels beat back Burgoyne’s troops. On October 17, 1777, Burgoyne accepted defeat." (Lesson 7, Section 6, online version)

As I read Forge during spring break, I thought how fiction adds the human perspective to historical events. Anderson's character, Curzon, shares his hopes, dreams, fears, frustrations, and agonies with the reader. His experience as a Continental soldier, a slave, a black man in a white man's army, and a young man who misses his first love brings emotional elements that are missing from the other nonfiction texts. His experience, as told through his first person narrative, becomes our experience as a reader because we connect, empathize, sympathize, and rejoice with him.

History classes need the human perspective to be part of the lesson. If our children are ever going to remember what we taught them in order to see patterns and avoid making the same mistakes in the future, they need to understand how actions impact people. Historical fiction can bring the human back into the Humanities.

Yes, we need to read primary source material and nonfiction texts in content classes. The facts are important. And if the nonfiction text happens to be an auto-/biography, so much the better. But let's not forget to bring in the emotional impact of horrific events such as war or segregation or colonisation. Our students need to know the human consequences of such actions.

Everyone Is a Literacy Teacher

Image from Literacy in Learning Exchange website

On Wednesday, the National Center for Literacy Education, a consortium of organizations dedicated to raising the level of literacy, released the results of a recent survey called Remodeling Literacy Learning: Making Room for What Works. They boiled the data down to five key findings:

1. "Literacy is not just the English teacher's job anymore.
2. Working together is working smarter.
3. But schools aren't structured to facilitate educators working together.
4. Many of the building blocks for remodeling literacy learning are in place.
5. Effective collaboration needs systemic support."

The first finding, that all teachers are literacy teachers, is not a new idea. For years, writing across the curriculum has been a goal in many schools. Research skills, including understanding and paraphrasing during note-taking, and digital literacy lessons show up in a variety of classrooms. Reading primary sources and authentic works has been encouraged in Social Studies, Science, and Math classes. 

So what are the take-aways from this data? That schools need to do a better job of cross-curricular collaboration. That's what I understand from "Working together is working smarter." 

Take my eighth grade team, for example. Due to space issues, there is only one classroom for the four of us core teachers to work in during our common planning time. Therefore, the math/science teachers plan, prep, and grade together in the same room with us English language arts/social studies teachers. Fortunately, this makes the third finding, "But schools aren't structured to facilitate educators working together" untrue for us. We have both the common planning time and the common planning space laid out for us.

Because of this shared space, we overhear their conversations about their units, how students are doing, and adjustments they make in response to student needs. And they, in turn, hear our conversations as well. More and more I find we are having one big conversation about issues we see in all classes, usually centered around following directions, classroom management, and adjusting instruction to scaffold areas such as critical thinking. Finding four, "Many of the building blocks for remodeling literacy learning are in place," fits exactly this situation. We have already established not only the space and time, but the trust and open communication needed for remodeling cross-curricular literacy education.

What seems to be lacking is the fifth finding: "Effective collaboration needs systemic support." The math/science teachers do not think of themselves as literacy teachers. It's easy for us ELA/SS teachers to find cross-curricular literacy connections, to teach reading in the context of primary sources, to teach writing like a historian, to teach vocabulary in targeted ways. And to their credit, the math/science teachers tackle note-taking and organized writing within their big science research unit. But we are not collaborating around literacy learning just yet; we are sharing what we do in our own classes as an "FYI" to the other team. In order to "effectively collaborate", we need the big guns of the curriculum coordinator and/or principal to help us understand why (by looking at MAP reading data), what (by identifying standards and benchmarks within our curricular areas), and how (through professional development) to teach literacy within each course, as well as seeing how we can support each other with this common goal.

In fact, this is just what the NCLE recommended in its Policy Recommendations:

1. Provide the necessary support to ensure that educators know how to teach the elements of literacy pertinent to their content areas.
2. Embed the collaboration of educators in the school day. This is critical for deep student learning and is a necessary prerequisite to the success of other school reforms.
3. Fund professional learning that is ongoing, job-embedded, and collaborative; educators who engage in this kind of learning are better able to engage and advance literacy learning across grades and subjects.
4. Structure the use of educator time to maximize the development of collective capacity for improving literacy learning across a school or school system.
5. Promote accountability by encouraging educators in a school or system to reach shared agreements about successful literacy learning and the steps they will take together to fulfill these agreements.

Collaborative literacy learning is not a priority at my school this year. It would be bad timing to try to jump into this project during the fourth quarter. However, I would like to try to plant some seeds within the eighth grade team, with the curriculum coordinator, and with the principal, and see if we can move a little closer to a collaborative model next year. Perhaps it starts with vocabulary, including academic words like the difference between "explain" and "describe", and content words that have a root or stem that can be applied across many words. Perhaps it starts with research skills, which we do in three of the four classes already (not math yet), using common rubrics to grade note-taking, common outline structures, or common vocabulary to discuss essay parts like "thesis statement". Or perhaps it starts with more sharing of student samples, explaining our goals while looking at the kinds of reading and writing work they produced for the different subjects. The main thing is that collaborative literacy learning needs to start.