Reading Comprehension Strategies in the MS Classroom

Have you ever had a time when a thought or topic just keeps working in the back of your mind, resurfacing over the course of a few weeks? This has been my life lately. Last post, I wrote about making reading thinking visible through annotations, which got me going on the topic of reading comprehension, and the idea hasn't left me. What keeps swirling around in my head is this: Why did my kids miss so much in their reading? Why didn't they understand the subtleties, make the connections, notice what was missing and not just what was stated? Which leads to this thought: What teaching didn't happen, what learning opportunities were missed, and what can I do about it? 

When Stevi Quate came back to our school to consult with our secondary English teachers the week after I wrote that post, she asked my teaching partner and me what we've been working on in grade 8. I shared our work with annotations and helping kids dig deeper into their reading using text/subtext thinking. And I also shared my continuing questions. She asked us if we were teaching reading comprehension strategies, based on Ellin Keene and Susan Zimmerman's 2007 book Mosaic of Thought: The Power of Comprehension Strategy Instruction (Heinemann): Monitor for Meaning, Use Schema, Infer, Ask Questions, Create Images, Determine Importance, and Synthesize Information. We sort-of do, teaching it indirectly, but we don't label our thinking as we model, nor assess students' metacognitive use of the strategies. Thus followed a discussion about the value of that teaching, especially if it is taught across grades so that students have a consistent vocabulary to talk about their reading strategy use. 

Keene and Zimmerman's comprehension strategies are not new to me. I read their book years ago, and it changed the way I thought about and taught reading in Grade 5. However, I moved away from it in Middle School, where the curriculum focused more on identifying literary devices in order to write essays to show comprehension of texts. The unspoken belief seemed to be that students entered Middle School knowing how to read, and we needed to teach them how to dig out the "good stuff" from more sophisticated texts. We weren't teaching "reading" anymore; we were teaching "literature".  Stevi reminded me that as texts became more complex, reading strategies became more important to understand them. We left that meeting determined to do more modeling and labeling our thinking with strategies.

Keene, Ellin. Talk About Understanding: Rethinking Classroom Talk to Enhance Comprehension. Heinemann, 2012, p. 9.

A week later came Joellen Killion, a consultant who has been working with our school to set up Professional Learning Teams (PLTs) as a model that increases student learning through teacher collaboration. As the PLT facilitator for the MS ELA/SS team, I met with Joellen privately to get some advice. She asked what our team was working on, and I shared that we had examined grades 7 and 8 reading pre-assessments, and wanted to work on helping students deepen their comprehension of texts. She recommended that our PLT start by choosing a couple of reading comprehension strategies to focus on based on the student work we examined, and to build our student and educator goals around those. 

Tomorrow, I will meet with our PLT and we will do the work Joellen suggested. This will launch us into our learning phase of the cycle of inquiry. We'll need to study why reading comprehension strategies work, what each strategy looks like, and how best to teach it. We'll need to identify spots in our curriculum to give the lessons and measure its effectiveness. I know most of us are in a writing unit right now, so finding opportunities to implement the strategies could be challenging. It's a good thing we also teach Social Studies! This could open up more opportunities.

And finally, Ellin Keene is going to be in the region for a conference at the beginning of November, and we will be able to learn from her while she's here. I am excited about the opportunity to meet her, see some model lessons, and get some of my questions answered. 

How do you teach reading comprehension at Middle School? Do you use modeling and metacognition, as suggested by Keene and Zimmerman? Do you balance it with the teaching of "literature"?

Making Reading Thinking Visible Through Annotations

Our first major unit in English Language Arts is short story reading. At this point in the year, I don't know a whole lot about my students as readers. I've gotten some info about books they read (or didn't read) over the summer, and I have standardized test scores from the previous spring. However, knowing how they dive into a text and construct meaning out of it is a complete mystery at this point in the year. I needed some sense of these kids as readers before I forged ahead.

The unit started out with a pre-assessment during which students read a story new to them, annotating in the margins as they read (see my previous post about annotations as assessment), and then answered summary, theme, and literary argument questions. As I was surveying these assessments, I noticed a few things about the annotations:

1. Although annotating texts has been taught in previous years, and I emphasized doing it when I was giving instructions, about half of the students either did no annotations or they did minimal annotations.
2. The annotations that were done were often confirming literal comprehension or asking questions about places where they were confused. 
3. The story we chose, "A Path Through the Cemetery" by Leonard Q. Ross, has a twist at the end that is easy to understand if the reader is paying attention to details and can make inferences. Very few students caught the ending correctly and fully.
4. I got a lot of insight about students as readers from the annotations that I didn't necessarily get from the follow-up questions. I discovered who made inferences as they went along, who connected to other texts or the world, who did word fix-up work, and who was confused throughout (and didn't do anything to fix up their confusion).

There seems to be a logical cause-effect relationship in the above noticings: Without annotations, students didn't read closely enough nor pause in their thinking enough to understand deeper meaning. However, I still wasn't sure whether the problem was that students didn't see the point of annotating, and therefore, didn't stop to do it even though they were constructing meaning all along, or that they weren't digging deeply enough in their reading to construct meaning. Without annotations, I couldn't decipher the problem. 

image from Amazon.com

So I tackled both at once, and taught them a strategy I found in Dorothy Barnhouse and Vicki Vinton's What Readers Really Do: Teaching the Process of Meaning Making (Heinemann, 2012). They suggested a two-column note-taking chart that tracked what was said in the text, and what that text meant, or "subtext". The idea is that readers pay attention to not just the literal meaning in the text, but that readers also track the implications: character motivations; what the author is showing about mood, traits, relationships; tone; connections between events and characters, etc. Doing this work gets readers to the deeper levels of inferring and synthesizing that are necessary for more complex texts like those encountered in 8th grade and beyond. Here is an excerpted example from my Reading Notebook which I used as a model for the students:

Throughout the unit, I saw students doing more and more text/subtext work in their notebooks. Some were still using it as a way to restate the literal meaning, but more and more were making inferences from the details they captured. It became a great launching point for conferences because their reading thinking was visible to me.

By the post assessment, a repeat of the pre-assessment but with a new story, their annotations were much more complete and deeper, showing the subtext and not just restating what was already there. Many more students annotated than the first time as well. This allowed them to really dig into the inferred meaning, and their follow-up answers were much richer because of it.

My next step is to have them reflect on how doing annotations helped them understand stories better. I hope that will also bring home the purpose for stopping and jotting, so that they will continue to use it as we tackle more complex texts in English Language Arts, and also in Social Studies.

What strategies do you use to get kids to dig deeper into their reading comprehension? How do you make that thinking visible?

Anecdotal Notes: Still crazy after all these years!

Anecdotal notes-- AAAARGH! You would think that after 30 years of teaching, I would have this beast figured out! I want to capture the important stuff about kids as it happens, but I don't want to spend a lot of time doing it. I also need my system to be organized and easy to use. I want to track data about individuals as well as easily identify small groups with similar needs. Is there one system that can do it all?

I've tried the notebook approach: Each student gets a page in a notebook, and I take notes on that page when I confer or get a new piece of data (like a standardized test score or a reading goal) or have a parent conference. That works pretty well if I'm only going to focus on the individual and his/her progress. It's much harder to see trends across the class or pull together small groups.

I've tried an iPad app called Confer. It seemed like it could hold individual info as well as do the kind of sorting/grouping I was looking for. It also promised a way to match student information with the CCSS standards to track progress and help with standards-based grading. However, the set up took so long, inputting the CCSS and students, and typing on the iPad is so slow for me, that I abandoned that method as well.

For several years I used a card system that was housed in a folder. Each student had a card, but unlike the notebook idea, the cards were taped onto the interior sides of the folder in a tiered manner, so that one overlapped the other, leaving a small portion visible at the bottom. Student names were written on the visible part, and I could use that space to track how often I met with a student. Again, this was good for individual progress, and a better system for making sure I was getting to all students in a timely manner, but still not so good at pulling together groups of common needs. Also, handwriting is slow work!

So this year I am back to technology. Our tech coach suggested using Google Forms as a system. It's not slick and it's not fancy, but so far it's working out. I have a form that lists student names as a "checklist" of answers to "question", a list of my unit names as the checklist answers to my next "question", an open text box to answer the question of Notes, and a final open text box for the question of Items for Next Meeting. As I confer or get data, I select a student name and unit from the checkboxes, quickly type in my conference notes, and capture what next steps will be. This data, along with the date, is gathered in Responses, which can be viewed as a Google spreadsheet.

The advantage of the spreadsheet is in the sorting and filtering it can do that the notebook and flip cards can't. If I want to see all notes on a student, I can sort names alphabetically, and all responses for the student are clustered together.

If I want to see which students need work on their close reading, for example, I can filter out only the Short Story Reading unit, and even find all responses that have the words "close reading" in them. Voila! A small group with similar needs!

So far I don't have many notes on kids because we are just getting started in school. I wonder if the spreadsheet will eventually get messy or bulky and hard to use. I may need to have one for semester 1 and one for semester 2. However, it has fulfilled a lot of needs so far.

Another tech tool suggested by the tech coach was Evernote. I haven't done much exploring with it yet because I'm kind-of into Google Forms right now. So I'm keeping that option in my back pocket as I see how Forms plays out.

What is your anecdotal note systems? Does yours handle multiple classes and large numbers of kids? Can you track individuals as well as filter/sort for small groups?

"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?

Holding kids accountable to home reading: Reading logs?

To use reading logs or not to use reading logs? That is the question! 

Our middle school English Language Arts program has a commitment to lifelong reading habits, which means that we expect students to have a book going at home at all times throughout the year. We are also committed to holding kids accountable for that reading, because we know that our reluctant readers need some kind of accountability system to keep them going. What that accountability system looks like varies from grade to grade, and even from classroom to classroom. 

Over the years, we 8th grade teachers have tried many things, but we've always started the year with paper reading logs that track daily reading statistics, and a weekly reading response. Based on the Teacher's College Reading and Writing Project's (TCRWP) recommendation, reading logs that track title, author, time of day, number of minutes, and number of pages read each day can become a data source for students to reflect on themselves as readers. Am I only reading at night and falling asleep with my book? Is that the best time to do active reading? Do I read in 5 or 10 minute bursts, when I'm in the car or waiting for the bus? Do I wait until the weekend and read for long stretches of time but don't read during the school week? Am I reading at a good pace, or am I slow (is my book too hard?) or fast (is my book too easy?)? How do I want to improve as a reader?

We only ask for the daily log to be completed for a limited time-- usually during the first couple months of school. During those first months, students do some analysis to look at their reading habits and evaluate how well they are meeting their goals. Later, we back off and ask students to track number of minutes and number of pages read each week, which they report along with their weekly reading response.

Here's the thing: Kids HATE reading logs! The good readers hate them because they just want to immerse themselves in their reading and not bother with tracking their minutes and pages. The struggling readers hate them because it's tedious and it shows that they aren't actually doing the reading they are supposed to. Mostly, it just seems like busywork without purpose. 

This led my colleague and me to really re-think reading logs this year. Something needed to change. Either we make the value of reading logs clearer to students (as TCRWP explains, just like athletes keep stats to find what's working and what needs improvement, so can readers use these stats to become better readers), or we find another way to hold students accountable for their reading. 

That thinking led us to this question: What do adult readers do when they want to have an active reading life? As active adult readers, here is what we do:

• We keep track of the books we read on a social media site (I use Goodreads). I post up a book when I start it, and then review it when I finish it.
  
• We talk about the books we read with others. I have been a member of an adult book club for almost 20 years. Knowing that I have to discuss a particular book on a particular day (and have something to say about it) holds me accountable to reading and thinking about that book.
• We get suggestions for our next reads from friends, through social media (like Goodreads) or from Amazon.com ("Customers who bought this item also bought..."), or by exploring more books by the same author.

Here is what we don't do: Keep a daily reading log, even a weekly reading log, of minutes and pages. We log the books we are reading as we change books. We are held accountable because we have people in our lives that follow our reading and talk to us about our books.

Yes, but... middle school students do need a little more accountability structure than I do as an adult reader with well established lifelong reading habits. Our compromise:

1. Students need to read at least 100 minutes (about 100 pages) each week. They will need to track this somehow on their own. They can decide when those minutes happen, although I will recommend that it's not all one chunk of reading on the weekend (there is value to smaller but more frequent practice).
2. They need to think about their reading, and show that thinking in a weekly reading response. I am afraid that waiting until the book is finished will result in very little writing about reading for reluctant readers. Writing weekly will keep them accountable for reporting their reading minutes/pages, and having to say something about what they read means they have to have read something. I will give them in-class time to complete this for the first month.
3. Writing about reading is a pointless task unless you use it as a way to communicate your thinking to others. We are going to have kids get into small Reading Clubs (3-4 students) who will hold short book discussions on Thursdays. We'll ask them to write their response first, and then discuss their books with others. 
   
4. Their written responses will be on Google docs, which they will share with members of their group (and me), so they can go back and see what they each read if they need a next book suggestion. We used to use Shelfari, which was a super easy and attractive platform, but they have merged with Goodreads and are not in use anymore. Goodreads is not very student friendly, and Google docs is familiar and easy for the kids because we use it all the time.

We are launching this next week. I hope the social aspect of Reading Clubs makes their home reading feel more fun and purposeful (and hold them accountable for doing their reading). I was reluctant to give up class time at first (so much to do! so little time!), but if I value the home reading program (which I do), then I should devote class time to it. We can ease off of weekly Reading Club time, and turn it into monthly Reading Club as habits get established. 

What do you do to hold kids accountable for reading at home? How do you track what and how much kids are reading? Do you use reading logs?

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?

In the Technology Groove with Google

I am totally in the technology groove these days. I love it when technology tools exactly fit the learning need, and especially when one tool just keeps on giving. This has been my experience lately with Google Classroom, Google Documents, and Lucidcharts.

I'm loving Google Classroom. I set up an assignment, I attach documents, and I give each student a copy of the Google doc to use which is already named and put into a folder for the student and me. No longer are Google docs "lost" because they didn't get placed into a folder. No longer do I get shared on 23 "Untitled Documents" or "Fantasy Story" documents without knowing who it belongs to. No longer do I send out a group email with attachments. Everything is organized and right at everyone's fingertips.

Google Docs is my best friend when it comes to formative feedback. For some reason, giving feedback to 46 documents feels much easier than facing a towering stack of 46 paper notebooks. Maybe it's the sheer weight, or the challenge of bad handwriting, or the difficulty of transporting all those bulky notebooks home that make them feel so intimidating. Maybe it's knowing that I have to take the notebooks away from the students to grade them (not quickly), which means they can't use them in the meantime, that feels bad. Google Docs fixes all those problems. I can dip in and out of the documents several times over the course of the unit, looking at draft work, making suggestions, staying on top of who is completing things on time and who is not, lifting everyone's level without taking their tool away from them to do it. 

image from commons.wikimedia.com

My new friend is Lucidcharts. I first asked students to use them in the fantasy reading unit as a way to track ideas across a longer text: character development, character interactions, setting and plot events, how elements interact. I had some kids who took off with this, adding shapes, color and keys to make everything connect:

When we moved from fantasy reading to fantasy writing, and we got to the planning stage, I casually suggested, "You know, a Lucidchart could be a good tool for this work. Or you can use paper, or make a timeline in your notebook document. But whatever way you do it, please make sure you get it into your notebook so I can see it and give you feedback." Many kids loved the Lucidchart idea and eagerly jumped in and even figured out on their own how to embed the chart into the notebook instead of adding a link. Here's one that sort-of blew me away:

I have to give credit here to our fantastic tech integrator who regularly checks in with us and asks, "So what are you guys working on? Are you interested in adding a little tech to that? Here, let me show you this tool..." All of these ideas came from her. I am not a huge techie, but I can learn new tricks from time to time, and with the sophistication that our students bring to these tools, it is becoming easier and easier to bring technology into my lessons.

What technology tools do you use that keep on giving?

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!

Ancient Civilizations of the Americas: a Historical Inquiry Project

A couple of weeks ago, I shared my learning about the shifts needed for disciplinary literacy vs. content literacy in Social Studies. Since I am a firm believer in adapt and adopt, I decided to use the historian's process in our first content unit on Native Americans. I had found a lot of great (free!) units on the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) website during the Improving Historical Reading and Writing MOOC this summer, so I turned to the experts to see what was available and how they organize an inquiry-based "Document-Based Question" (DBQ-- I see I am talking in alphabet soup today).

Most of the SHEG DBQ units focused on the interaction between Native American groups and European invaders. Although this is important historically, I wanted to start earlier, and study the ancient civilizations of the Americas as they were before European contact. I did some searching and found a "Mini-Q" (shorter DBQ) unit on the Maya from The DBQ Project: "The Maya: What Was Their Most Remarkable Achievement?" The Maya were one of the six civilizations I wanted students to study (the others are Inca, Aztec, and groups from the Mississippian, Eastern Woodlands, and Southwest cultural regions), and this Mini-Q was set up in the inquiry-based structure I was after. I decided to use the Maya unit as my teacher model, and write my own Mini-Qs for the other civilizations. 

However, "Most Remarkable Achievement" wasn't where I wanted to focus. I wanted students to study the groups as legitimate ancient civilizations, as established and successful as Mesopotamia, ancient China, or Greece, validating their contribution to world history. Instead of achievements, I chose this question as our Mini-Q focus: Which elements were most essential for the ______ (ancient civ.) to thrive?

I divided the class into six groups of 3-4 students each: Inca, Aztec, Cherokee (Mississippian), Iroquois (Eastern Woodland), Pueblo (Southwest), and Huron (also Eastern Woodland, but important to distinguish from Iroquois for future history lessons). Each group got a packet set up in the same inquiry-based Mini-Q structure, but with information and artifacts related to their ancient civilization:

1. Cover: Question, Graphic Organizer naming 8 elements of civilization (Government & Law, Religion, Writing & Numbers, Trade & Economy, Architecture & Engineering, Art, Technology & Inventions, and Human-Environment Interaction), a quick overview, and a list of the 4 documents they will be studying.
2. Hook Exercise: What does it mean to thrive? Students were given a series of familiar scenarios which they rated from 1 (not at all thriving) to 5 (extremely thriving). They then picked one scenario and justified their reasoning for why it showed the most thriving. This exercise helped students distinguish between "surviving" and "thriving" so that their investigation would stay focused on those factors.
3. Background essay: Students had little to no background knowledge about their civilization, so before going any further, they had a short essay to read highlighting distinguishing characteristics. The essay also included a map to locate them in the Americas, and a photo showing one of the characteristics. Students answered some basic comprehension questions that held them accountable for the information.
4. Understanding the Question and "Pre-Bucketing": Students identified terms in the question that needed definition, and then re-wrote the question in their own words. This helped them process what the question was asking, giving them a better focus as they moved into the documents. Next, based on the list of documents and the information in the background essay, students predicted which three of the elements of civilization would emerge as most essential to thriving. This prediction gave them a "clothesline" to "hang" their new learning on, either confirming or re-adjusting their initial thinking.
5. The 4 documents: Each document included the name of the document (usually an artifact), a picture of the artifact, and a short write-up about the artifact and/or information related to it. Students went through the historical thinking process for each one: Check the source for reliability, access background knowledge related to the document, do close reading that names details (What do I see?) and considers their meaning (What does it mean?) and implications (Why does it matter?), and corroborate between documents (including the background essay). I then asked them to connect the document to two elements of civilization (I gave them the elements to look at-- it's early in the year, and there's a lot of new thinking happening on this page). 
6. Bucketing and Thesis: Once all four primary source documents had been analyzed, students made their final decision independently. They chose 3 elements most essential to thrive, and named the documents that provided evidence to support their decision. They then turned that into a "boxes and bullets" outline: the thesis is written in the box as the answer to the question, and the bullets are the elements with evidence (their reasons). I asked them to do this part independently because everything else had been done in a group, with a lot of support and scaffolding for struggling students. I wanted to see what they chose based on what they got out of working with the documents, not what their group members (especially the more vocal ones) thought.
7. Decision-making matrix: Group members shared their boxes and bullets, and then as a group
   rated the 8 elements of civilization for how influential they were for helping the ancient civ. to thrive. Members had to justify their thinking using evidence from the documents. This was a very high-level discussion, with students arguing their point, negotiating ratings, and compromising based on the strength of the evidence. By the end, they picked the three that the group ranked the highest, and justified them with evidence from the documents.
   
8. Reporting out: The group next made an 8-slide slideshow to report out their findings. Each student was responsible to explain one of the elements or the summarizing conclusion (groups of 4 = one "meaty" informational slide each), and one "thin" slide: The Question, the answer (thesis), bibliography of images, and group members. I did a mini-lesson with The Worst Slideshow in the World, to highlight tips for making good slides. Since students would be presenting the information orally, they did not need to put a lot of information on the slides themselves. The assessment rubric included multimedia, informational, mechanics, and oral presentation criteria. As students presented their slideshows, the audience took notes and asked questions at the end.
9. Synthesis question: When all student groups finished presenting, I asked them to answer the Mini-Q question as a generality based on their notes. I wanted to see if they could identify one- to three elements that repeated across several civilizations, and if they could explain why that element is so important for any civilization to thrive. By moving from specific (their own civilization) to a generality, students show they have built concepts.

I did a variation on this project in previous years. Students had to do their own research on two of the elements, take notes, and then share out to their group before doing the decision-making matrix (jigsaw). Yes, there is value in teaching research skills, and structuring the project with self-directed research did help hone those skills. However, I found that this year students' presentations were much more substantial and informational than in the past, where they were rather hit-or-miss. Having the whole group discussion focused on all four artifacts throughout the project, using the historical thinking and close reading skills during the process, and emphasizing again and again the need to show evidence, all contributed to more knowledgeable explanations. Although the students struggled through the document analysis, needing more modeling and reteaching than I'd anticipated, the struggle was worth it in the critical thinking work I saw happening with each group. I am pleased with the results, and looking forward to our next unit!