Tackling the beast: Examining text complexity through the departmental PLC

I have just finished five days of pre-service teacher work days, and kids start after the weekend. My room is organized, my posters are up, my plans for the first units are ready. I am good to go. And then the massive classroom library book order arrived just as I was walking out.

This caused me both great excitement and great anxiety. I am excited about all the new books that will go on our classroom library shelves, but anxious about getting them all processed and organized before the kids walk in. I guess I have some work to do this weekend!

On July 7, I posted about my plan for using my newly expanded library as a tool to support and track text complexity (see "CCSS Reading Literature Standards: How My Classroom LIbrary Supports Text Complexity"). As I was writing up the plan, I realized how much work was embedded there, from the clerical hours of inventorying and leveling the books themselves, to understanding and training in reading assessment, to developing book ladders, to getting comfortable with guided reading levels and Lexiles, to reading lots and lots of the young adult literature that's on the shelves. I realized that this could be a hard sell to my department, a great group of teachers who work hard and already have a lot on their plates.

But I knew those books were arriving, and although we could just celebrate our newly expanded libraries and carry on with our teaching, I knew this was our golden opportunity to tackle this beast. Two years ago, when four of the six of us returned from the Teacher's College Reading Institute, we put aside text complexity and book ladders, knowing we needed to wrap our heads around Reading Workshop and reading notebooks. One year ago, the other two attended the Reading Workshop, and then joined our school. As new teachers, they were definitely not ready for this work. Now that we are feeling more comfortable, we can add on this new text complexity piece.

At our first department meeting on Wednesday, I started by pitching the inventory and leveling part. Although there were some skeptical looks around the leveling-- not why but how-- everyone agreed. It certainly helps that we have a full-time Teaching Assistant assigned to the six of us, and we knew we could pass the bulk of this clerical work onto her. It also helps that at each of the three grade levels there is an experienced and confident teacher who immediately bought into the value of it. The three of us can help support our less experienced and tentative partners.

At our follow-up meeting on Thursday, we agreed on the eight major genres we'd all use when categorizing the books, and what color "dot" we want to affix on the spine to indicate each. We decided that having a consistent labeling system from grades 6 through 8 will help kids get their hands on the books they want more quickly.

I then launched into the rest of the plan, the assessing/planning/book ladder/tracking part. I began with, "Let me share with you some of my thinking about where we could go with this. It could be fairly complex or fairly simple, depending on what we decide we want to do. We have all year to work on this, and it will take time to get everything in place. But mostly I want to know if you think this is work that you want to tackle this year." After I walked through it quickly, the discussion turned into a sharing of "We could do it like this..." and "What if we used this data and did this with it...". No one rejected the plan, condemned it as unworkable, or complained about the amount of work it would take. They agreed that they wanted to do this work.

I am excited about this plan. I know that without the group behind it, I could do a mediocre job in my classroom with my kids. But with everyone behind it, all kids will benefit from it, and our middle school will become a more data-driven, reading centered, student learning centered place.

Native American Text Set

Airports are full of surprises, some not-so-good-- like a cancelled flight, and some good-- like the Smithsonian Museum store in the Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C. I discovered this store as I was looking for the nearest Starbucks, or any coffee shop really, of which there was only one, tucked in the back of a news stand (really?). The Smithsonian Museum store drew me in like a moth to a flame, flaunting interesting and fun displays with geodes, solar system models, brightly colored books, and things with feathers. One area in particular featured items from the National Museum of the American Indian. Since the Native American unit is the first Social Studies unit I teach in the year, I naturally approached the merchandise with my classroom in mind.

I bought two books to add to  my classroom library: Do All Indians Live in Tipis? (National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian, 2007) and American Indian Myths and Legends (Richard Erdoes & Alfonso Ortiz, Ed., Pantheon, 1984). As I read the former, I keep finding connections to the information that is presented in the course textbook, and I am noticing how the same information is presented differently because the author is writing from the Native American perspective. I am also noticing that each question and answer takes up between one to three pages, and is very readable for middle school students. These noticings make me wonder how I can use these texts to enrich and enhance my Native American unit.

My answer is text sets, a set of materials from different genres, at different levels, and from different sources that all address the same topic. Text sets allow students to read a multitude of perspectives and ideas around topics, which enriches and extends the information. Pulling a text set together about Native Americans could include the following resources available in my classroom and on the web:

• The United States through Industrialisation (TCI, 2011)-- our Grade 8 SS textbook-- nonfiction
• Do All Indians Live in Tipis?--Question and Answer format-- nonfiction
• American Indian Myths and Legends-- folktales-- fiction
• Caleb's Crossing (Geraldine Brooks)-- historical fiction about the first Native American boy who attended Harvard University in the 1600s
• I Heard the Owl Call My Name (Margaret Craven)-- realistic fiction about modern Canadian Native Americans and their struggle to balance modern and traditional cultures.
• Julie of the Wolves (Jean Craighead George)-- realistic fiction about an Eskimo girl who is adopted by a pack of wolves in the Alaskan wilderness
• Guns, Germs, & Steel DVD (Jared Diamond)-- a documentary that presents a geographical theory for how Europeans conquered the Native Americans in the 16th century
• Columbus Digital Text Set (Teacher's College Reading and Writing Project)-- a list of informational and opinionated digital texts that explore Christopher Columbus as a hero or a villain. Although the resources focus mostly on Columbus, his impact on Native American populations makes this issue part of the topic to be explored.

Students can read some of the texts on their own, some we could read/view and discuss together, some could be required, and some optional (especially the fiction books, of which I only have single copies). Going back to my previous musings on text annotations (see my August 8 post), students could easily read and annotate one of the question/answer pages from Do All Indians Live in Tipis? within 15 minutes of a class period. The annotations could be good formative assessment to learn what connections they are making between texts and how the texts are deepening their understanding. I could read aloud a few myths and legends to increase engagement and cultural understanding. Together, these texts provide a much more realistic and broader view of Native American civilizations.

Annotations as Assessment

It is very refreshing to read a professional book about teaching reading through the workshop approach at the secondary level. Cris Tovani, in So What Do They Really Know? Assessment That Informs Teaching and Learning (Stenhouse, 2011), describes her practice with high school students, and most examples are from ninth graders. Her students are diverse, some reading as much as six years below grade level and some several years above, and they are from varied cultural backgrounds. She teaches in the block schedule, with 100-minute classes. She has five sections with twenty to thirty students in each class. Knowing that Tovani is a full-time teacher with a normal teaching load adds weight to her information. I appreciate it when she says things like, "I probably should do it this way, but I don't have time, so I do it that way instead, and I still get the data I need." Instead of advice from researchers or literacy coaches or professors or full-time think-tankers, this is advice from the trenches. That adds credibility to her words of wisdom.

One suggestion Tovani makes is to use text annotations as assessment data. This is the second thing I've read in as many days about the value of annotating texts for both the student and the teacher. The other was from Smokey Daniels and Nancy Steineke's Texts and Lessons for Teaching Literature with 65 Fresh Mentor Texts (Heinemann, 2013). These authors insist that annotation is critical for showing thinking while reading. Daniels and Steineke provide a lesson specifically for teaching annotation, while Tovani provides examples of her own model and student samples to show the kinds of information a teacher can glean from annotated texts. Both books are very clear about how to teach annotation and what can be expected from students.

I know my high school expects students to annotate texts extensively from the tenth grade onward. However, in my eighth grade class, I have students use sticky notes or their Reading Notebook for responses instead of writing directly on or near the text. This has been somewhat successful, but only for students who are already comfortable responding with stickies. Most of my students avoid jotting notes while they read because they say it slows them down too much and they lose the flow of the story when they stop so often. I have accepted that as long as they stop periodically to respond in their Reading Notebook in a longer entry. Maybe I need to re-think this.

I was impressed with how easily Tovani was able to pull information from the annotations about where students struggled, where they got stuck, where they lost comprehension which then affected the rest of the piece, and where students were spot-on in their thinking. I got the impression that Tovani knew her students as readers much better than I know mine, despite my ernest attempts at reading conferences and comprehension spot-checks. I also marvelled at how quickly she could pull out these little gems from a few quickly jotted notes, and then spot a trend or gap or next step to address in the next lesson.

I think I will expect more annotations this year, probably still on sticky notes because students don't buy their texts. I will gather them more frequently, instead of only mid-way and unit end. I know I will need practice to see where students are successful and where they need support. All this will take time, but I think having visual evidence of their thinking will help students see their growth as thinkers, help me to give just-in-time instruction during conferences, and help parents to understand the kind of reading work we are doing in class. That's a lot of bang for one small change.

Re-reading is Comfort Food

This summer has been filled with touching the past. I attended two family reunions: one for my husband's parents' 60th anniversary, and one with my side of the family. I got together with friends from previous schools, some I hadn't been with for seven years, and some I'd met with quite recently. And I had a meal with friends from high school who I hadn't seen for more than 25 years. Each encounter was filled with talk of childhood memories, shared moments, and filling in recent news.

Thinking through these get-togethers made me realize the comfort of keeping in touch with my past, whether it was remembering the wildness of my youth, or celebrating how much my children have changed, or swapping stories about places we visited together. All of these layers make up who I am today. Sometimes I forget about those layers, but seeing people from my past helps me remember, and that's comforting. I can relax into these encounters knowing that the people around me accept me for who I am, the good the bad and the ugly as it were. Touching the past with them is like comfort food.

On my walk this morning, I listened to Text Messages: Recommendations for Adolescent Readers, a podcast on ReadWriteThink.org sponsored by NCTE and IRA. In episode 62, the host, Jennifer Buehler, talked with teen librarians about how they encouraged reading with teens. One of the points they all agreed upon was that re-reading a book is OK. With all the chaos going on in a teen's life, reading an old favorite is a way to de-stress and stay in touch with something familiar and constant.

In other words, re-reading is comfort food.

As I get ready to launch the Independent Reading Program in a couple of weeks, I need to remember that there is a place for re-reading old favorites. I believe re-reading needs to be balanced with new reads, titles that stretch and challenge. But coming back to a book read a year or two ago keeps kids feeling comfortable, successful, and safe. They often find new layers the second (or third) time around, seeing characters more fully or identifying motivations they hadn't thought of before. They find foreshadowing and symbols. The work they do is deeper when re-reading, and they do it willingly because they already know they love the book.

I confess. I have books I re-read too. So I know how they feel. Just like meeting up with friends and family comforts me, connects me and deepens my understanding of who I am, re-reading a book takes me deeper into my understanding of the story. It's comforting to go back there.