"Where is there a place for students to choose their genres?"

Last spring, our school hosted literacy consultants Stevi Quate and Matt Glover to work with our staff for the same week. Stevi was focused on secondary literacy (MS/HS) while Matt worked with the elementary teams on their literacy units. Near the end of their week, they sat down with team leaders and the curriculum director to look over reading and writing units from K-12. A colorful matrix was created, color coding the different modes (narrative, informational, argument) and types of products (literary essay, realistic short story, etc.). 

When the dust settled, Stevi turned to me and asked this question of our middle school writing program, "Where is there a place for students to choose their genres?"

I looked her in the eye and answered, "No where." 

It's true, we have controlled every genre in every unit. We also control the type of product within that genre. We allow kids choice of topic within the structured genre and product type, but we don't have an "open" unit.  To make that happen, we would have to drop a unit, and the only one that is moderately "optional" is our poetry unit ("optional" because it doesn't neatly fit into the narrative/ informational/argument CCSS modes). 

I know my team feels strongly that the poetry unit is essential to our middle school writing program. Year after year, we see middle schoolers pouring out their hearts about big important issues in their poetry. Our struggling writers love the loose structure and low volume that poetry offers. Our strong writers embrace obscure references and hidden symbolism. Shy students perform proudly in front of audiences. Drama queens and kings slam their poems with gusto. 

And when we implemented the CCSS and revised our units to meet the standards, poetry worked for many of the language standards, especially those that addressed connotations and denotations of words, the power of strong verbs and nouns, and understanding and use of figurative language. So we felt good about keeping poetry in our year-long plan. 

But here's the thing: I still have Stevi's question in my head. If we want our kids to be motivated and self-directed writers, they should be able to choose a writing project at some point. 

So I offered a compromise: an after school creative writing club. Those writers that want a time and space and some feedback on their independent writing projects can join me an hour a week and get words on paper (or screens). Twelve enthusiastic writers signed up, most of whom had projects started or had an idea they've been waiting to write. One has already published her ongoing story on a fan fic site and gotten several hundred readers. All but one are in 6th and 7th graders (hmmm... what's up with the 8th graders?). 

I'm pleased there is interest out there for this open-ended writing club. I wish there were space in the year to extend it to all kids, but I just don't see how that will happen without a massive curriculum review/revision. For now, it's baby steps.

How do you balance the demands of the CCSS writing modes with open-genre writing units?

Deconstructing one CCSS Reading Information standard

My teaching partner and I are happily chugging our way through the social justice informational reading unit, spending quite a lot of energy on teaching summarizing in a way that "Determine(s) a central idea of a text" (RI 8.2) and "Cite(s) the textual evidence that most strongly supports an analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text." (RI 8.1). It surprises me how difficult it is for students to boil down details into a main idea, and then figure out which details to include in their summary paragraph. Then again, I have been practicing this for a lot of years, and this is our first year implementing the CCSS reading standards with students. I hope to see summarizing skills spiral up in the coming years. (see this blog post about breaking down summarizing skills)

Anyway, although we have our work cut out for us with summaries, we know how to tackle it. However, this new CCSS reading standard had us a little stumped: "Analyze how a text makes connections among and distinctions between individuals, ideas, or events (e.g., through comparisons, analogies, or categories)." (RI 8.3) At first glance, it seems fairly straightforward: students would find who is connected to whom, what events they participated in, what social justice ideas they were fighting for. A mind map, web, or graphic organizer could help students show those connections.

But then we went back to "Analyze how a text..." Here the standard seems to be looking at author's craft rather than finding the connections. And then there's "...(e.g., through comparisons, analogies, or categories)" which seems to direct the reader to look for those particular author's craft moves. This could be a little trickier. First, what's the difference between "comparisons", "analogies", and "categories"? We'd need to teach that. Then, finding points in their texts where the author "make(s) connections among and distinctions between" so students can analyze how the author is doing that.

image from books-a-million website

What does this look like in practice? Time to turn to models and examples for help. I returned to the Grade 8 EngageNY units to see how they address this standard. In module 3B, The Civil Rights Movement and The Little Rock Nine, students read two texts: A Mighty Long Way by Carlotta Walls LaNier and Little Rock Girl 1957 by Shelley Tougas. Students have this learning target: "I can use items about the civil rights era to build background knowledge about A Mighty Long Way." This seems to be directly related to the schema research students did before they got their books. Check!

Next: "I can explain how the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court case connects to the Jim Crow laws." and "I can use evidence from Brown v. Board of Education to support my understanding of the text and the desegregation of schools in the South." OK, easy enough to ask students to find places in the book where they can connect what they learned from their social justice issue schema research to events in their book. So far so good!

image from Smithsonian APA website

At this point, students are just finding connections, but haven't yet done any author's craft work. Later in the unit, there is this learning target: "I can analyze the connection between Brown v. Board of Education and Carlotta’s experiences." At least this has the word "analyze" in it, but I still don't see where students are looking at how the author is making connections and distinctions via "comparisons, analogies, and categories".

Our Curriculum Coordinator gave each of us a "flip book" for the CCSS that breaks the standards down into learning targets (very handy! Unfortunately, I don't have it in front of me to cite right now, but will add it later). Here is what the flip book had for RI 8.3:

• I can explain how the individuals, events, and/or ideas in a text affect one another. 
• I can analyze connections and distinctions between individuals, events, and/or ideas in a text.
• I can analyze how an author makes connections and distinctions between individuals, ideas, or events through comparison (e.g., The Underground Railroad and the Jewish Resistance Movement), analogies (e.g., One-part-per-billion is equal to one sheet in a roll of toilet paper stretching from New York to London), or categories (e.g., Leaders of Change-- Rosa Parks, Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Henry Ford).

Once again, the first two bullets are easy enough to manage, especially with some kind of graphic organizer. I also like how there is an easy-to-hard progression with these bullets. The third one is helpful in the way it gave examples for what each of those craft moves could look like.

image from bibliolinks.com

I think what I will need to do in order to fully meet the standard is to teach the vocabulary (compare, analogy, and category), and then model, model, model. 

Our model text is We've Got a Job by Cynthia Levinson. I have been modeling summarizing and connecting to schema. Now I need to start modeling "connections and distinctions between individuals, ideas, or events" with some kind of graphic organizer. And finally, I need to go back into the text and look for places where the author compared, categorized, or used analogies in order to make those links.

I will ask students to do the same with their books. Perhaps the best place for them to work through this is during a book club discussion, so that they can get support from each other and build those ideas together. Periodic exit tickets to check their understanding, and perhaps an item on a summative assessment would show me how well students met the standard by the end of the unit. 

As I looked back at the CCSS document to write this blog post, I noticed that the grade 6 and 7 standards have students learning how to make connections within informational texts. I am pretty sure my grade 8 students will not have trouble with the first two bullet points from the flip book. 

But to lift their level of analysis to the grade 8 standard will take careful planning, modeling, and practice. It's easy enough to just do the parts of the CCSS that are familiar and comprehensible, but to really address the standards so that students reach the level of rigor intended, we teachers need to push ourselves out of our comfort zones. By deconstructing each standard, we can identify what the new learning is for our students and make sure we teach it in a way that makes sense to kids.

Using the Engage NY ELA Modules as Planning Models

This year we are implementing the CCSS reading standards in our units. Our upcoming reading unit is informational reading, using books that address social justice issues from 20th century U.S. history: civil rights, gender equality, Japanese internment, and child labor. I looked through the CCSS Informational Reading standards, and they seemed pretty do-able within the context of the unit. But like my students, I like to look at models of how other people have written units to get a sense of rigor and scope. I turned to Engage NY's Grade 8 English Language Arts units for guidance. 

image from goodreads.com

Right away I noticed that Engage NY's Modules include whole class texts, and that there is a mixture of genres within each Module. For example, Module 1 includes Inside Out & Back Again, by Thanhha Lai, as the core text (a novel written in verse), but students are also reading informational texts about the Vietnam War, the fall of Saigon, refugees' experiences, etc. Whereas our reading units are genre-based (short story, novel, poetry, informational, persuasive), the Engage NY Modules are thematic; Module 1's theme is "Finding Home: Refugees". 

We have a theme for our informational reading unit too, Social Justice, but the issue looks a bit different depending on which book students are reading. We use thematic questions to guide students' thinking about the theme:

1. To what extent does power or the lack of power affect individuals?
2. What creates prejudice and what can an individual do to overcome it? 
3. What allows some individuals to take a stand against prejudice/ oppression while others choose to participate in it?

Having thematic questions also allows for students to think about bigger concepts when they cross from one book to the next. We have a couple of mixed-book discussions built into the unit so that students who are reading about civil rights can hear about prejudice and taking a stand within in the context of gender equality and Japanese internment (and vise versa). These discussions help students find common characteristics that lead to understanding how these concepts can be applied in many different contexts, not just the context their book is addressing.

I also noticed how short articles, speeches, poems, etc. supplement and deepen students' understanding of thematic concepts in the Engage NY Modules. We do some of this as well when we have students do a little research about their social justice issue before they start to read their book as a way to build schema. Since our students have not studied these periods of history, any background knowledge they have is usually spotty or nonexistent. However, we usually confine the genre to informational sites (for example, reading the Six Principles of Nonviolent Resistance on The King Center's website), visuals (for example, the photo gallery on the Manzanar Internment Camp site), or short informational videos (for example, Child Labor in the United States in the early 1900s on YouTube). These supplemental resources help students visualize the settings and contexts in their books, as well as gives them a better idea of the issue.

I do wonder, though, about why Engage NY Modules use whole class texts. I can see how whole class texts make things easier for the teacher, because s/he plans each day's lesson around that text. S/he gets to know those texts very well, and can guide students to build their skills and knowledge around the thematic concept. Having a unifying something has its advantages, which is why we have thematic questions and a model text we use to demonstrate strategies.

However, it has long been established that student choice is a strong motivator for middle school students, and taking away any choice of what to read seems de-motivating. I also have a wide range of readers in my class, and I want my students to read books that are slightly challenging for their reading levels. Even if the whole class texts used in the Engage NY Modules have a range of levels, it doesn't make sense that my struggling readers will have to muddle through a super challenging text and my high readers have to slowly make their way through a super easy text. 

So now I wonder if there is a compromise: could we change out a few of our texts so they are all centered on one issue (probably civil rights, since we have more books on that topic than any others)? This would allow for bringing in some of the supplemental texts from Engage NY's Module 2: Taking a Stand, such as Sojourner Truth's, “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech (1851), or poems that relate to the theme that broaden and challenge students' understanding of the issue. It would bring unity and a common issue to explore. But is it worth narrowing the focus to only that issue, and dropping the other three? Social injustice is not just racial injustice, and I wouldn't want students to think that is the only issue worth studying. Hmmm... something to keep thinking about.

By looking at the Engage NY Modules, I see a different way to organize a unit, ways to implement the CCSS Reading standards, and learn about resources that I can use to supplement my own unit. There are parts that validate what I am already doing (having a theme, bringing in schematic research), and parts that make me think through other choices (book choice vs. whole class texts). Using the Engage NY Modules as a model for my own planning helps me reach a level of rigor and consistency with the CCSS standards. Although I won't throw out the baby with the bathwater and wholesale switch to their units, I am glad I had (free) access to quality reading units while planning.

What other quality, CCSS-aligned reading units are worth looking at?

Considering the Connotations of Word Choice in Media

CC photo by J. Pohl

My family just returned from a winter break trip to Vietnam. One of our first stops was the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. It's called "War Remnants" because it is filled with the flotsam and jetsam the American military left behind when they retreated, including tanks, helicopters, boats, bombs, shells, and the long-term effects from Agent Orange. The big vehicles fill the outdoor courtyard, while inside the Museum building photographs document the horrors of war. It was very disturbing.

CC photo by J. Pohl

But I'm writing about it here on my blog because it was fascinating to view a world event from the opposite perspective from the one I grew up with. I was a child when the Vietnam War was happening, so it was background noise in my happy-go-lucky existence. I have vague memories, reinforced by movie images no doubt, of soldiers in muddy tropical jungles, of drawing the line between the "good guys" (South Vietnamese) and the "bad guys" (North Vietnamese), and of feeling sad for those families who lost a son to the war. The Museum had American journalists' articles and photographs displayed, with headlines like, "Terrorists captured..." accompanying an image of a small shirtless man with his hands tied behind his back being guided into an open jeep. In my memories, Americans were helping the good guys to defend their country from the bad guys and our soldiers were "heroes", but despite our noble aspirations, we "lost" the war.

photo by peregringo.com

In Vietnam, I heard the war called "The American War," a title that jarred me a little (all "our" wars are named for other places: Iraq War, the War in Afghanistan, the Korean War). At the Museum, I read signs that called the Americans "the Imperialists" who fought against the "will of the people". The Vietnamese soldiers were "martyrs". An international war crimes committee declared that the U.S. had committed "genocide" against the Vietnamese people. 

Wow, that was so totally different than what I had been fed as a child.

It made me think about the power of words, the connotations behind the words we hear in the media and how they can so strongly spin an event to be one way or another. The "terrorist" the Americans captured was the "martyr" to the Vietnamese cause. Of course I know that governments and media show bias through their word choice, but it takes a certain amount of cognitive effort to stop and analyze that bias. How often do our students make that effort? Probably close to never.

As we move into the second semester and closer to the U.S. Presidential elections, it seems ever more urgent to teach students to notice bias-laden language in the media. The CCSS includes reading and language standards (R8.4, L8.5, H/SS6-8.6) that specifically address understanding the connotative meanings of words and how they affect meaning. It will mean drawing students' attention to word choice options, the subtleties of meaning behind synonyms, and considering the perspectives of the author and audience. 

Pretty abstract stuff. I'm hoping that with consistent practice, students will begin to internalize this process so that they take their critical lens to any reading or viewing, so that they don't just take things like "good guys" and "bad guys" to heart without considering the spin behind it.

Just the Right Mentor Text: Bringing the CCSS to Life

As I wrote last week, we changed our novel reading unit into a fantasy unit in order to more neatly implement the Common Core Reading Standards. We are now about half way through it, and I am noticing something big: my kids are finding the ideas in the more rigorous standards to be understandable and applicable to their own novels. Whew! In fact, they are kind-of looking at me like, "What's the big deal?"

Which brought me to another realization: With the right mentor text, complex ideas become comprehensible. OK, this idea is not entirely new to me, but as I venture into these new standards that I have to wrestle with first before I can expect my eighth graders to grasp, having the right text in hand has made a huge difference. 

cover from Amazon.com

We are using Rodman Philbrick's The Last Book in the Universe as our mentor text. Originally, I chose it because: 1) I'd read it a couple of years before and remembered that I enjoyed it, 2) it is a fairly slim novel compared to most YA fantasy and dystopian books these days, and 3) the chapters are short-- between 3 and 6 pages usually, which makes for about a 10-minute read aloud. Then I reread it once we had planned out the revised unit, and all of a sudden, examples of the standards were popping out everywhere! As long as the students found the story engaging, I thought I was golden.

The first chapters of the book take a lot of work. This surprised me because it is leveled at a guided reading level W and a Lexile of 740-- for our kids, this indicated a pretty easy read. But what neither of those levels reflect is all the contextualizing students have to do with both setting and dialect. Told from the main character, Spaz's, first person point of view, Philbrick uses a lot of slang terms as he describes his dystopian world: he lives in the "Urb" which is ruled by "Bangers" and people escape from reality by "probing", but there is another utopian place called "Eden" where the "prooves" live. Hoo boy! Fortunately, Philbrick is very good about explaining new words through context or direct definitions. And fortunately for teaching the CCSS literature and language standards, this is the exact kind of work we need to be doing: analyzing the author's use of word choice, including connotations, allusions, and figurative language, to create meaning and tone.

The Last Book in the Universe focuses on two main characters: Spaz, a 14-year-old homeless orphan living under the protection of one of the ruling gangs, and Ryter, an old "gummy" who lives near "the Edge" and owns nothing but a stack of papers that constitute the book he is writing. They strike a classic friendship of mentor and mentee as they go on a quest to visit Spaz's foster sister before she dies. Philbrick writes the dialogue for these two characters in contrasting ways; while Spaz uses a lot of street slang and short sentences, Ryter uses complete, complex sentences with academic words and literary allusions. This is perfect for the CCSS standard for examining how dialogue reveals characters, moves the plot forward, and provokes decisions. Their roles and the plot structure also fit nicely into the standard that examines how contemporary literature uses archetypes from traditional literature and "renders them new." We had a lively discussion yesterday about who the hero, mentor, innocent youth, and villain were in the story, as well as the archetype of situations such as The Fall and The Quest. 

But the best part of using this book as the mentor text? "Are we going to have read aloud today, Ms. Pohl?" "Can we gather in the reading corner?" "Will we finish this book? Please?" And when my answer is "Yes" to any and all of those, I hear a resounding, "Yessssssss!!!" back. 

Despite my interruptions for think alouds and turn-and-talks, my students are hanging on every word, analyzing as well as enjoying, empathizing for the characters and making predictions. Through modeling and active engagement using The Last Book in the Universe, students are seeing how the abstract ideas of purposeful author's craft and language analysis work, and then they apply them to their own fantasy novels. Having just the right mentor text has brought the standards to life!

Re-visioning the Novel Unit for CCSS Implementation

We are implementing the Common Core Reading Standards this year, which has caused some major revision of units—and not just revision as in add a bit of this here and a bit of that there, but re-vision as in totally re-thinking how to approach our units. We rewrote our novel unit so that it shifted from a social justice theme inquiry to a fantasy genre focus. We are basing the fantasy unit on the Teacher’s College Grade 8 Reading Units of Study from 2011 (still hoping new reading units will come out for middle school this year).

There are some major shifts in our new unit because of the CCSS Reading standards, many more shifts than we had to make in our writing units last year. Here are a few that stand out and how we dealt with them.

R.8.2 Determine a theme or central idea of a text and analyze its development over the course of the text, including its relationship to the characters, setting, and plot; provide an objective summary of the text.

            We decided to keep the social justice thematic questions from the previous unit, because they work with fantasy as well: 

• To what extent does power or the lack of power affect an individual? 
• When should an individual stand up for what s/he believes in and what is the best way to do this? 
• How do subtle issues of gender, race, class, and power function in society? 

These questions analyzing “power and resistance” became the theme to track. We introduced a new technology tool, Lucidcharts, as a way to track characters, setting, and plot across the book. Lucidcharts is part of the Google suite of applications, so the flowcharts and other graphic organizers that students develop can be shared with others in their Book Club. As the group moves through the book, they can collaboratively add on to their Charts and use them as talking points during their discussions.

R.8.5 Compare and contrast the structure of two or more texts and analyze how the differing structure of each text contributes to its meaning and style.

R.8.9 Analyze how a modern work of fiction draws on themes, patterns of events, or character types from myths, traditional stories, or religious works such as the Bible, including describing how the material is rendered new.

image from amazon.com

image from Gareth Hines wesbiste

            We are working with these two standards together. Fantasy novels, including science fiction dystopian stories, draw upon a long literary tradition. We are using a model text, The Last Book in the Universe by Rodman Philbrick, to introduce these ideas. This book has classic literary character types: hero, mentor, sidekick, damsel in distress, as well as structure: a quest. We will have students look for similar character types and plot structures in their books. The model text also draws upon The Odyssey for some of its plot events: people who escape into a dream world (Lotus Eaters), a character who is “blinded” in his one “eye” (Cyclops), a band of boys who act like animals (Circe’s Island), a gang of beautiful women who are merciless (the Furies), a journey via a Pipe that used to carry water (Odysseus’ journey across the sea).  Over the course of the unit, we will present other traditional stories, such as Hercules, and ask students to compare their stories to the characters and structures of the traditional ones. Rich discussions in Book Clubs will bring forth the analysis portions of these standards as students make connections between their book and the traditional tales.

R.8.7 Analyze the extent to which a filmed or live production of a story or drama stays faithful to or departs from the text or script, evaluating the choices made by the director or actors.

            This seems like a “stand-alone” standard to me, and I question why the authors of the CCSS deemed this important enough to include in its “top 10” reading standards. All of the other reading standards are applicable to a variety of texts and genres, and in multiple units and  lessons. I supposed it’s a nod to the importance of media literacy in the 21st century; however, it still seems like a “one off” lesson to me.  Nevertheless, it is a reading standard and so we must address it. While planning, I drew heavily upon Christy Rush-Levine's article on the Choice Literacy site, "Embracing Standards in Creative Ways."

movie produced by Learning Corporation of America, 1982

Since our novel unit uses a Book Club structure, we have six different books going, and not all of them have a film version. Neither does our model text, so we needed to approach this one a little differently (see—one-off!). We decided to linger with the model text we used in our recently completed Literary Essay unit: “All Summer in a Day” by Ray Bradbury. Fortunately, there was an old film version of the story made in the 1980s. It deviated quite a bit from the plot of the original story, including extending the ending, which shifted the theme. Before watching the film, we did a quick look at some of the “director’s choices” available while making a film. Using A Quick Guide for Beginners: Movie Aesthetics by StopMo Wiki, we went over some film-making moves like focus, frame, flux, and sound, and thought about how authors also try to use those same moves but with words. Next, students made a quick t-chart with Same and Different so they could take notes as they watched the movie. They also pulled out the story so it was in front of them.

As we watched the movie, I stopped at the end of the exposition--which was very different, and we discussed why the directed added so many school scenes and whether the essence of the story was still coming through.  I stopped at the climax, and we discussed how the addition of a character allowed for the main character to say all that “inner thinking” aloud. And at the end, I asked whether students felt the film version, which was very different than the written version, stayed true to the story and why.

It was a rich lesson, and fun for the students. And now I can “tick” it off my standards list.

The other five reading standards are also being addressed, but they didn't take too much shifting. Of course we are asking for text evidence to support their interpretations. Of course we are looking at author's craft and noticing things like allusions, irony, and suspense. Of course we are noticing how dialogue and plot events move the story forward. These are things that we addressed, maybe not to this level or specificity, in past reading units. But the four above took a lot of thinking and rewriting to incorporate into our novel unit. The unit is more rigorous because of these, and it is exciting to read fantasy with new eyes. 

Does anyone else think the text vs. film standard is a stand-alone standard? Are there good resources to draw on for explaining "themes, patterns of events, or character types" from traditional literature? I'm in new territory here, and any suggestions are welcome!

Disciplinary Literacy in History: Thinking Like a Historian

There has been a lot of buzz in the education community over the past year or two about "disciplinary literacy" as distinct from "content literacy". In a nutshell, disciplinary literacy is doing the work of the discipline, and teaching students explicitly how to do that work. By contrast, content literacy is learning how to read and write in the content areas-- a valuable skill, but not the whole package.

I am an English Language Arts teacher by passion and training, and a Social Studies teacher by default. I understand teaching reading and writing. I understand how to teach reading and writing in Social Studies. What I haven't understood is what historians actually do when they read and write (beyond what I was already teaching). I decided I needed to find out.

CC0 by shotput on pixabay

Just as I was starting to poke around last spring for a workshop to take over the summer that focused on disciplinary literacy, I saw an announcement by NCSS for a MOOC they sponsored called "Improving Historical Reading and Writing." Ta da! Just the ticket (and it was FREE!). This 15-module course opened up the world of historical thinking to me. Here are some big "ah ha's":

Historians gather multiple pieces of evidence about a historical question they have. If they don't know anything about the historical question, they start with a general secondary source to get a sense of the event. Next, they try to find several primary sources (journal entries, newspaper accounts, photographs or paintings, maps, inventories, etc.) that can dig down into the details from people who were there at the time. Historians want to piece together the puzzle and find their own interpretation of what happened in the past.

• Historians do a lot of work before they even start reading-- a lot more work than ELA readers do. Historians consider the source: they search out the author, publisher, and date of the document first and consider questions of reliability: Who wrote it? Who published it? When and where was it published? Are these people biased or coming from a particular perspective? Can I trust this to be a reliable source? If not, can I use this source to gain an understanding of one particular point of view?
• Historians also access all the background knowledge they have about the context in which the document was published before they start reading. What was going on during that time? What background knowledge do I already have about this event or person that will help me understand the information? Adding this layer of thinking about contextualization also helps readers think about reliability, bias, and perspective.
• Historians do a lot of work while they read-- this is most like the work that ELA readers do. These days we call it "close reading." Historians are reading for the main idea and supporting details, but they are also watching the use of language to clue them into bias and perspective. They try to put themselves into the author's shoes to really dig into the human reality behind the writing.
• Historians do a lot of work after they read, comparing and contrasting the information they just encountered with what they already know. Is the author adding to or confirming what I already know? Is this information different than what I already know? If so, how does it differ, and why would it differ? Can I find any other sources of evidence that can help confirm or deny this information? This act of corroboration ensures historians are looking at the full story, not just the single story which can be distorted by time, selective reporting, or bias. 
• Historians tell other people what they found out so that their voice can add to the collective understanding of history. There are many ways to do this; book publishing is just one way. For students, this can mean debating issues, writing editorials, making public service announcements, starting or contributing to a social justice campaign, blogging, etc. 

image found on Wikipedia website

The Stanford History Education Group website has a lot of great resources aligned to this thinking process. I used their 5-lesson Introduction to History series last week, and my 8th graders loved it! Keeping my historical thinking hat on while I teach Social Studies this year will ensure that I am not relying on the textbook as my sole resource, and it will (hopefully) develop the critical thinking stance that students should take when encountering any source of information-- from the internet, the newspaper, advertisements, or even their friends. That is a valuable life skill!

Moving into Standards-based Grading and Reporting

Our school took the plunge into standards-based grading and reporting this year. Oh, we've had standards for years, and our UbD unit planning has ensured that we at least knew which standards connected to the unit. But until the grade book and report card demanded that we specifically connect a grade to a standard, we continued on our merry way hoping our assessments captured at least some of the standards, much like flinging a handful of pebbles at a target, hoping some will hit.

We took a middle road, though: we don't have to report on every standard, just on "strands". For English Language Arts, we settled on Reading, Writing, and Listening & Speaking. They make sense to us and how our standards are organized... until we get to those units where we are using our reading to inform our writing content (e.g., literary essay and research reports), or have cross-disciplinary projects (e.g., investigative journalism about environmental issues).

cc 2.0 by Colin_K on Flickr

So this is our first Professional Learning Team (PLT) investigation: How can you use one assessment to grade and report on more than one standard strand?

There are a few sub-questions here: 

• Is it fair to "double dip" (in other words, can one assessment be counted twice)?
• How specific should we be about dividing up the assessment into "strands"? Could we just use one holistic score and put it in two strands? Or do we have to identify which section goes into which strand and keep track of it that way?
• Do we even know which specific standards are being assessed on the assessment? If we were called on by a parent or administrator, could we justify the grade based on the standards assessed?
• Does going to standards-based grading and reporting mean that we have to create more assessments, such as "artificial" tests and quizzes that get us away from our authentic assessments, so that we have enough evidence for the grade in a particular strand?

My inclination is to go for specifics, analyzing the assessment to identify where each standard is assessed and then tracking those parts for depth of student learning. This would be possible with a fairly simple template, though it would take more time before and after the assessment. Doing this kind of analysis would ensure that all the standards got assessed (and yes, we may need some more assessments, or expand the ones we have, to include all standards) and that the grade reported is actually reflective of achievement on the standards.

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As our PLT moves through our cycle of continuous learning, we will be wrestling with these questions and others that come up. I hope we will be able to look at some models from other schools and settle on a system that makes sense for our school. 

We would love to hear feedback about what has worked in other schools. If you have a suggestion, please leave a comment!

Questioning the Labels for the Units of Study in Argument, Information, and Narrative Writing

Last week we had a professional development day that was dedicated to writing curriculum. This was a much needed pause from the day-to-day hustle of the classroom, especially as we are trying to understand and implement the CCSS and the new Units of Study in Argument, Information, and Narrative Writing (Heinemann, 2014). As a department, we agreed to tackle our final writing unit of the year. At the 8th grade level, this was the Position Paper unit, which the TCRWP authors labeled as our "Informational" writing unit.

Since we use the Understanding by Design (UbD) unit planning process (Wiggins & McTighe), we started by unpacking the CCSS informational writing standard, examining what it looked like for the years before and after us as well as what is new and unique to our grade. As is the case with Narrative and Argument writing, there are only a few new things in 8th grade compared to 7th, usually bumping up the level of abstraction or depth of support. The implication, though, is that the grades before us must do their job in order for students to be ready to add the new piece at our grade. This is the only way the spiral will work.

We then went to our Rubicon Atlas mapping site to continue our UbD work: identifying enduring understandings and essential questions, including knowledge and skill objectives based on the demands of the standards, revising assessments and rubrics. All this was done fairly quickly, as the unit focus wasn't changing much from what we'd taught before.

Finally, we were ready to tackle the Learning Activities. We opened the "Informational" unit, Position Papers, and double-checked our list of standards against the list provided in the back of the book. Wait, what? The only genre-specific standards listed in the book were argument standards. I thought this was our "Informational" unit, so where were the informational standards?

Next we started digging into the lessons. Indeed, the focus of this whole unit was arguing one side of an issue and backing it up with evidence and explanation. It is a great unit, full of focused strategies and engaging topics, but it sits firmly in the argument arena, not informational. Yes, there is a component of research to find evidence to back up your side of the argument, and to find counterarguments, and yes, that research would have to be explained  in an informational way to readers who may not have the same background knowledge. But the thrust is still to argue one side. How am I supposed to assess the informational standards?

This is not the first time I have questioned the labeling of the TCRWP units. The 8th grade "Narrative" unit is Investigative Journalism. As I taught that unit earlier in the year, the teaching points were mostly about getting your information across in an interesting way-- AKA Informational writing. We taught fantasy short story writing as our Narrative writing in English Language Arts, so I felt solid about meeting those standards through that unit.

My 7th grade colleagues also ran into a labeling question. The 7th grade Literary Essay unit is considered their Informational unit; they also have Realistic Fiction for Narrative, and The Art of Argument for Argument units. Our Literary Essay unit is labeled as our Argument unit. What makes a Literary Essay more informational vs. more argumentative?

Perhaps we should rearrange the labels of the 8th grade English Language Arts writing units this way:

• Literary Essay: Informational (work with 7th grade to see how they did it as an informational piece and add our 8th grade bits onto it)
• Fantasy Short Story: Narrative
• Position Paper: Argument

I suppose we could leave the Literary Essay unit as an argument unit, knowing we are covering informational writing in our Week Without Walls Investigative Journalism unit in Social Studies. As long as the students receive the teaching, it is not so important that it happens during ELA. Besides the Week Without Walls project is outside the Social Studies curriculum, so it's already in a gray area.

I respect the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project staff and the work they do with curriculum. The units are demanding and full and vertically articulated. My colleague thinks the middle school units were thrown together hastily to get something out on the coat tail of the elementary units of study. I don't see that within the content of the units themselves, but perhaps she's right when it came to labeling the units to meet the CCSS modes of writing.

At the end of the day, as long as the students are being taught how to write in those various modes of writing, does it really matter how the units are labeled? Now I've got to go back into my Atlas Rubicon unit plans and adjust the standards. I don't think Jay McTighe would approve.

Merging CCSS Social Studies/History Standards with Reciprocal Teaching

In my January post, Using Close Reading of Multiple Sources to Get Away from the "Single Story" of US History, I shared a scaffold I learned from Stevi Quate called Reciprocal Teaching. This scaffold assigns roles to students in groups of four: Summarizer, Clarifier, Questioner, and Predictor, as a way to help everyone in the group unpack complex texts. I used it with a packet of primary source materials about The Great Awakening, and noticed that students were getting a lot more out of the texts than previous classes had. 

Along the way, I added some minilessons aligned to the CCSS Literacy in Social Studies/History standards from the Teacher's College Reading and Writing Project as a way to build students' skills for reading informational texts. I connected those reading skill lessons to the Reciprocal Teaching roles: 

• Clarifier (This role goes first after a chunk of text has been read): READING FOR KEY IDEAS AND DETAILS: Standard 1: Reading Closely and Making Logical Inferences: "Readers know that informational texts are conveying ideas, facts and examples. Our first job, then, is to make sure we read informational texts in a way that we can really “get” the information without veering off into personal connections or response. If we’ve done our job well, we should be able to turn around and teach someone else everything we’ve learned so far. We can do this by reading a short chunk of text, pausing, covering or looking away from the text, and trying to say back everything we’ve learned so far." 
• Questioner (This role goes third): READING TO INTEGRATE KNOWLEDGE AND IDEAS AND THINK ACROSS INFORMATIONAL TEXTS: Standard 8: Evaluate Text Evidence, Weighing the Validity of Author's Claims: "Readers of informational texts consider how well an author has made his/her claim by taking a close look at the evidence used to support it. Readers ask ourselves questions like, 'How valid are the author’s claims? Is there enough evidence? Is the evidence good? Does it fit the claim and seem reasonable? Can I trust the source of the evidence? Has the author laid out the evidence in a logical manner that makes sense?”' 
• Summarizer (This role goes last): READING FOR KEY IDEAS AND DETAILS: Standard 2: Determining Central Ideas or Themes: "Once readers really “get” the information in an informational text, their next job is to try to find the central, or big idea of the text. We do this by asking ourselves, “What is this text starting to be about?” We can think about all the details we’ve read about so far, and put them together to find the central idea. We remember to hold ourselves to what the text actually says and suggests, and not veer off into personal connections and response. This way we stay close to the text."   

These minilessons and the practice students had while using the skills during their roles kept their reading (and behavior) focused on the text in front of them.  Students felt much more comfortable digging through the complexity of 18th century writing than they did before.

Fast forward several weeks. We completed a series of "Town Hall Meetings" in which students took on the role of a Patriot, Loyalist, or Neutralist and debated whether the colonists should rebel against Great Britain (see my previous post "Practicing Argument Strategies During Socratic Smackdown". It was time to dig deeper into the issue and come back to primary source texts.

Using another set of Debating the Documents materials, Loyalists and Patriots (MindSparks, 2006), Reciprocal Roles were revived. I wanted to keep the structure from the last round, and also build more informational reading skills. I kept the Clarifier and Summarizer roles the same; students really needed the Clarifier to help them understand the difficult language of the written texts. Summarizing skills were not where they needed to be yet, so I wanted them to have more practice.

However, I changed the Predictor and Questioner roles. I noticed during the first round that the Predictor was floundering around trying to figure out what to do. When confronted with a visual document, what is there to predict? And although I liked the direction the Questioner was going, it seemed like students were ready to dig a little deeper into the idea of bias. I changed these two roles into new ones:

• Schema Connector (Goes after Clarifier): READING TO INTEGRATE KNOWLEDGE AND IDEAS AND THINK ACROSS TEXTS: Standard 7: Integrate and Evaluate Content in Different Media: "Readers of informational texts are always thinking about how new information connects to information from other sources. We do this by comparing what we already know to new information and asking, “Does this fit with what I know? If so, does it add something new or change it slightly? If not, should I change what I thought I knew to this new information? If so, why?”  
• Bias Detector (Goes after Schema Connector): READING FOR CRAFT AND STRUCTURE: Standard 4: Reading to Interpret the Language Used in the Text: "Readers know that even the most factual informational text is written by a person that has a personal perspective. Readers can determine the author’s point of  view and consider how that point of shapes the meaning of the text. We do this analysis by looking back on the language choices in the text. Ask yourself, 'How does the choice of words, the tone of the language, reveal the author’s point of view on the topic?' 'How does the visual style (angle, light, composition, etc.) reveal the author's point of view on the topic?'”  

Here is the new card that students used while discussing the Loyalists and Patriots packet:

These roles worked out well with the second packet. They seemed to fit the information a bit better, and helped students to understand not just what the text was saying, but to think through other important elements such as bias and validity. I liked bringing in the CCSS Social Studies/History standards and finding a way for students to practice the reading skills in a meaningful way. 

If anyone has any other creative ways to teach informational reading and/or strategies for tackling complex texts like primary source documents, I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Using Checklists for Self-Reflection, Goal-Setting, and Formative Feedback

We are in the final week of our first CCSS-aligned writing unit: Literary Essays. Throughout the unit, I have been using the student checklists provided by the Units of Study in Argument, Information, and Narrative Writing (Heinemann, 2014). The only modification I made was that I took off the grade level indicator from the top of the checklist. Since we are in the first year of implementation, I did not want students to feel stupid because they were not yet working up to the Grade 7 CCSS expectations at the beginning of eighth grade. Instead of the grade level indicators, I labeled them Semester 1 (Grade 7) and Semester 2 (Grade 8). We will use these checklists again at the end of the year with our Position Papers unit.

CC image from pixabay

I first had students assess their on-demand argument writing piece using the Grade 7 Argument Writing Checklist. They rated themselves as "Not Yet", "Starting To", or "Yes!" for each descriptor under the categories of Overall, Lead, Transitions, Endings, Organization, Elaboration, Craft, and Mechanics. I had also rated their on-demands using the checklist, but I did not share my scoring with them-- I wanted them to think honestly about what they saw they were capable of achieving and where they saw their writing had gaps. I noticed that the students were fairly accurate in their ratings, although they tended to rate themselves higher on some of the more complex areas than I did. I think this is probably because they didn't have a good sense of what the target was yet.

Once that was done, I asked them to choose 2-3 of their "Starting To" areas, and write goals for the upcoming unit. I asked them to target the "Starting To" areas because those were skills they felt they had some competence with, and those were areas that they could see immediate progress and success. Goals that are baby steps-- that lift the level of current writing-- are more motivating than trying to take a giant leap into the unknown and hoping you get there, uncertain where to even start. 

The first bend in the Literary Essay unit focused on writing a Theme Essay. Over the course of seven lessons, students analyzed short stories for theme, wrote their thinking in their reading notebooks, made a plan for the lit essay, drafted the essay, and revised for strong topic sentences, making evidence logical, adding counterclaims, and learning more about internal punctuation. During the course of the daily lessons, I conferred with students, and often used their goals as a starting point for the conference: So, how's your goal going? Can you show me the work you've been doing to improve ___? This helped the students to keep focused on the goal and to keep ownership in the learning process.

On the day the Theme Essay draft was due, students received a new checklist: the Grade 7 and 8 Argument Writing Checklist (the two checklists are side by side, so students can see where they need to go next-- like a continuum). Again, they scored their Theme Essay draft using the checklist, and used it to write some goals to carry them forward to the next half of the unit. I also asked them to do some reflection on their first set of goals by completing this sentence: I used to _____, but then I learned how to ____ by _____. Interestingly, most students chose something that was brand-new to them (e.g., adding a counterclaim, or using logic in their body paragraphs) rather than reflecting on the success of their goals. I guess these were their big new "aha!" skills.

Bend II: The Author's Craft Essay. Last week, students collected author's craft analysis entries in their reading notebooks, and created a plan for their next lit essay draft. They will write with flying fingers on Sunday, using all they learned from the theme essay section in their next draft. They will work to lift the level of this draft by keeping their goals in mind.

But now it's my turn to work with the checklist. I believe that timely, specific feedback does big work in moving students forward. I don't want to wait until their final draft and the summative rubric to give them feedback about what they are doing well and what they need to improve on. I also don't want to tell them "what to fix" in their Theme Essay. As Lucy Calkins reminds me, "Teach the writer, not the writing." My feedback needs to be useful to them as they move into the next essay (and all the rest across this year in all subjects, and beyond) rather than dwelling on the last essay. 

So this weekend I am reading Theme Essay drafts with the self-assessed Grade 7 and 8 Argument Writing Checklist in hand. I am marking with green highlighter what I see they are doing, and where I see they fall in the "Starting To", and "Yes!" ranking, for each descriptor. I am marking 3-4 descriptors as "Not Yet" or "Starting To" with pink highlighter where I think they need to do some work to lift the level to where it should be. Then I am writing next to that descriptor how to do it (if they already knew how to do it, they would have done it already!). I tried to pick descriptors that I knew I'd already taught into, so that I could send them to a chart or model as a scaffold for using the strategy. For example, if I highlighted Transitions, I would write "Use the Thinking Prompts sentence starters as transitions to link your reason, your evidence and your analysis." My feedback on the checklist will also be the starting point for conferences and small group work over the course of Bend II.

The Literary Essay unit ends in five more lessons. By the time they turn in their finalized, self-assessed (yes, once again) essay, they will have used the checklist at least three times: before the unit to set goals, mid-unit to reflect and set new goals, and at the end to reflect on their growth as writers over the course of the past four weeks. I will have given each student two pieces of written feedback (I also wrote comments on each early draft regarding their thesis and topic sentences) and several verbal conferences. Between the descriptors on the checklists and the model texts, students have had a clear target to shoot for, and feedback to guide them along the way. I am fully expecting to see significant growth in their essay writing skills in their final essay.