Learning How to Teach Reading From Ellin Keene

The group of 8th graders snuggled together on bean bags and pillows in the reading corner, facing the visitor in the big blue chair. Ellin Keene, author of Mosaic of Thought and Talk About Understanding, held a picture book in her hand. "This looks like a children's book, I know, but I would never suggest elementary students read this. It's a book for older people like you because you are mature enough to handle the content." (Way to hook them in, Ellin!) The book was Rose Blanche by Roberto Innocenti and illustrated by Christopher Gallaz, a story about a German girl in WWII who discovers a concentration camp near her home. Ellin was doing a demo lesson with my class on inferring. 

image from Amazon.com

She introduced the idea of inferring by telling them that it's the thoughts, feelings, beliefs and actions that readers understand which were inspired by the book but are not written in the book. Throughout her reading, she kept coming back to those four ideas: thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and actions. Each time she said those words, she touched her head, her heart, put her fist in her other hand, and swept her hands out as if going into the world. I think she did that 7 times throughout the lesson. Repetition is powerful.

As she read Rose Blanche, she stopped and showed the illustrations. She pointed things out like, "Do you see where she's standing? Look at that facial expression!" And she would prep the kids to pay attention to details in the story with, "Wait until you hear what's next!" or "You are not going to believe this next part!" At one point, she asked everyone to gather close together to look at an especially important illustration. All the kids leaned in, almost piling on top of one another, to see what was on that page. It was magical!

After the read-aloud, she had pairs participate in a written conversation about the inferences they'd made in the book. It was dead silent in the room except for the sound of pencils scratching on paper. 

image from wikipedia.com

She quietly invited one struggling reader to confer with her (in front of 5 watching teachers-- oh the pressure!). He brought his independent reading book with him, Maus I: A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman, a graphic novel about a Holocaust survivor. Ellin asked the boy if he thought he was doing any inferring in his book. He shrugged and said he wasn't sure, he didn't really like to read, but he thought it had "deep meaning" and connected with the book that she had just read. She asked what he meant by "deep meaning", and as he explained, she nodded and paraphrased. At the end, she exclaimed, "Everything you just told me is inferring! In fact, it's the most complex kind of inferring: empathizing with the character. You are feeling right along with the character. Did you know you were the kind of reader who could do such complex reading work?" He shook his head with a shy smile on his face. "Well you are! I am so impressed with you right now!" She ended the conference by challenging him to do more inferring work on his book, and to go back to Rose Blanche to practice some more. "I'm going to gift the class with this book, but I want you to have first crack at it!"

In just 70 minutes, Ellin was able to draw in a brand new group of 8th graders to marvel in a beautiful picture book, engage in high level thinking, articulate their thinking, and have their thinking nudged by peers and/or a teacher. During her conferences, she inspired each student to re-envision himself as a new kind of reader, one who does sophisticated thinking and doesn't just read for plot or because he has to for school. It was inspiring!

Now it's my turn. Tomorrow, my PLT is designing a pre-assessment for inferring and determining importance, and a lesson plan to implement reading strategies. This week I will give the assessment, and do the lesson over several days in the coming weeks. By winter break, I will assess again to see if they are better at these two reading comprehension skills.

I believe this is important work. As texts get more complex in middle and high school, students need to apply reading strategies effectively if they are to understand their deep and subtle meanings. By assuming students know how to do this thinking work, we are holding them back from powerful learning. True, some will eventually figure it out themselves, but doesn't every child deserve to know the "secrets" of reading well?

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?

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?

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.

Using Technology to Grade Book Club Discussions

My school has taken the plunge into standards-based grading. Well, maybe I should say: my school has waded in up to its ankles into standards-based grading. We are grading and reporting on a small, manageable number of "categories" related to standards rather than each individual standard. For English Language Arts, we've chunked the standards into Reading, Writing, and Speaking & Listening (Language standards are incorporated under Reading and Writing). So far this semester I have given 3 Reading summative assessments, 1 Writing summative, and 0 Speaking & Listening assessments. 

Luckily, we are finishing our novel unit this week, which includes their third Book Club discussion. This seems like a perfect opportunity to grade Speaking & Listening standards! But without "fishbowling" six discussions (and taking 2 or 3 class periods to do so), how can I fairly assess each group? Getting around and listening to six discussions for 5-7 minutes each may not catch the normally quiet student who said all their "good stuff" while I was with another group. 

image from commons.wikimedia.com

Technology to the rescue! Students recorded their first two discussions using either QuickTime or Garage Band, and uploaded the audio file into a shared Google folder. Last year we tried using the Photo Booth app on their Macs, but the resulting video file was too large to upload. We discovered that audio files are smaller and easy to upload, and really it's the audio we want anyway. 

The first two discussions were formative. Students received the Book Club Discussion rubric before they began so they were aware of what would be assessed. As students discussed (and recorded), I walked around and spent a few minutes with about 4 groups. I coded the discussion so I could have a sense of how it was going: NT- New Topic, Add- Added to previous comment, TE- used Text Evidence, I- interruption, etc. 

If things seemed dire, I would interrupt and prompt the group; for example, "I've been sitting here for a few minutes, and I've already heard three new topics. See if you can stick with one discussion thread for longer so you can really dig deep into your ideas." Then I would listen for a few more minutes and see if they could make the correction. In all cases, before I left I would interrupt the discussion and give feedback to the group: "So here is what I heard while I was sitting here: 'A' started a new topic about ___, and then 'B' added on with some interpretation, and then 'C' brought in text evidence. This was a great way to keep the discussion going. I also noticed 'C' kept talking and never let 'D' have a chance. Make sure you are giving everyone equal air time. That's everyone's job to monitor. If you notice someone hasn't talked, be sure to invite them in. If you know you've already said a lot, hold your thought until others have a chance to speak. If you know you haven't said much, make sure your voice is heard-- you have important things to contribute!" When the discussion time was finished, the group rated themselves and others for the four categories of Prepared, Quality of Speaking, Quality of Listening, and Behavior. They then made a group goal for the next discussion. 

During the second discussion, they reviewed their goal, and repeated the process. I made sure I sat with the groups I hadn't seen the first round, and went back to those that had the most trouble previously. Again, groups recorded their discussion, rated themselves and others, and made a goal for their final one.

Now that students have had practice in recording (we had some tech issues to resolve the first time around), are familiar with the rubric because they used it for reflection and goal setting, and have gotten teacher and peer feedback, they should be ready for the final summative discussion. On Monday they will repeat the process just like they did the first two times. I will walk around, but I will not interrupt or give feedback this time. I want this to be independent, but I can also get info about body language, preparation (do they have their books and notebooks with them?), and behavior which the audio recordings may not pick up.  

Then I can sit down with their self-rated rubrics and listen to full discussions from the audio files. I will be able to catch the quiet kid who is reluctant to talk when I am sitting with the group. I can hear the "good stuff" come up and not just judge the bits and pieces I overhear for a few minutes. Technology allows me to be everywhere at once, which means I can grade each student fairly.

How do you grade Book Club discussions?

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!

How can I help at home? Parental Support Suggestions

I just finished meeting with 44 out of my 46 families during the two-day parent-student-teacher conferences last week. It was a marathon! Twenty-seven 15-minute conferences on one day, and 17 the next. Whew! Although exhausting, I was continuously impressed with the commitment shown by the parents to be involved in their child's education. 

image from room206lce.wikispaces.com website

One question kept coming up: How can I help at home? It's a tricky question for eighth graders. Most 13-year-olds do not want their parent hovering over their shoulder, "helping" them with homework. They know they can do it on their own, although some do need help with organization and time management. For those kids, we had a good chat together about structuring time, using organizational tools, and balancing homework and down time. Parents came away with some strategies to help their children with those needs.

What about the rest? And what about academics? Here are a few things I suggested:

• Help your child read by keeping books in his/her hands. This could mean giving time to get to the library, buying books at the bookstore or for e-readers, or suggesting books off of the family bookshelves.  
• Talk about what they are reading, not just summary, but questions about characters, author's craft, or theme. Compare this book to others: Do any of the characters remind you of any other characters in other books? If this is a book by an author you've read before, do you see a pattern emerging (is it formulaic)?
• Discuss the social studies content your child is learning. By "teaching" family members, students process and remember information longer. Asking clarifying questions, watching videos connected to the content, and looking at maps or other resources together enriches and deepens the information.
• Encourage authentic writing at home. I found this great chart that places best practices for teaching writing along side suggestions for teen writers (from Fleischer, Cathy and Kimberly Coupe Pavlock. 2012. "Inviting Parents In: Expanding Our Community Base to Support Writing." English Journal 101 (4): 29-36.). Here's an excerpt:

 

Parents want what is best for their kids, and they want to do what they can to help. Giving them tools that show them appropriate and authentic ways to support their children is a win-win situation. What other suggestions do you give to parents?

Scaffolding too much?

Last spring, literacy consultant Stevi Quate came to our school to work with our secondary English Language Arts teachers. While here, she did a couple of demo lessons in middle school classrooms, and then we MS teachers gathered to debrief with her. At one point in the conversation, she said something like, "I scaffolded too much." I thought that was a curious thing to say, because I certainly didn't think she supported the kids too much, and in fact, I thought she supported them less than I would have. But our time was short and I didn't have time to explore this idea with her.

image from Steve Wheeler on flickr

Since then, I have run across this question of "too much support" again. This article by Terry Thompson of Choice Literacy, "Are You Scaffolding or Rescuing?", got me thinking about the difference between planned scaffolds based on identified student need vs. "an overall pattern of teaching that included an impulsive need to sweep in and help at the slightest moment of difficulty". Thomson argues that rescuing takes away a student's agency as a learner and encourages the pattern of learned helplessness. On the other hand, scaffolding provides only enough support so that the learner can get to the answer themselves. A key question becomes: Who is doing the most work? If it's the teacher, most likely s/he's in a rescue situation. If there is an equal work load, or more on the student, then it is more likely it's a scaffolding situation. This article has really kept me on my toes as I conference with students, and made me watch my modeling, questioning, and level of "work" so I don't cross the line into rescuing.

"Too much support" also came up in Dorothy Barnhouse and Vicki Vinton's book, What Readers Really Do: Teaching the Process of Meaning Making (Heinemann, 2012), which I read recently. They advocate for a constructivist approach to learning, pushing the "Who is doing the work?" idea even further than Thompson. They suggest that teachers ask students to try something, notice and name what they are doing using immediate student work as models, and construct the teaching point from the student's work. Although both are former Teacher's College Reading and Writing Project Staff, they are turning the workshop model on its head. They contend that when the teacher does all the modeling first, students are passively learning the strategies instead of constructing the strategies based on their own application, trial and error, and/or struggle. Suddenly, teacher modeling during the minilesson has become "too much support." 

Barnhouse and Vinton also warn against pushing our own ideas onto kids' reading interpretation. They have noticed many teachers (I am guilty of this too) who hear students veering off in a different direction in their reading comprehension than the teacher's understanding, or ignoring "vital" pieces of text that "should" be attended to, and those teachers jump in, asking a million leading questions so that the students "get back on track"--in other words, the students are led to the teacher's interpretation. The authors suggest that this teaches students that reading has one right answer, and the teacher holds the key. If they know the teacher will lead them to it, why should they do any interpretation work themselves? They can just wait it out, until the teacher rescues them. Instead, Barnhouse and Vinton recommend going with the students' interpretation, scaffolding only enough to ensure they can support that interpretation with textual evidence and inferred thinking, and if they can't, then scaffolding their work to revise their interpretation to something that can be supported. They call this the difference between scaffolding and prompting. Prompting is a series of questions that lead students to the teacher's understanding of the text, whereas scaffolding leads students to notice and name strategies, and use those strategies to deepen their own understanding of the text.

With all this scaffolding vs. rescuing vs. prompting swirling around in my head, Stevi Quate returned to our school last week. Since she is the one who got me going on this line of inquiry in the first place, I asked her to help me understand its implications for my teaching. She did this through a focused observation of my (last period of the day on the last day of the week!) lesson. She transcribed my minilesson, and then interviewed the kids about what I do as a teacher that supports them as a learner. She shared that with me later and we talked about it. Here are some take-aways from that conversation:

• I still have questions about this idea of how much support is the right amount. Stevi even threw in the idea that kids need an appropriate amount of struggle-- another angle that bears investigation.
• Some concepts really don't need scaffolding, or maybe just a touch. In my minilesson, I threw in a quick strategy and had students practice it for a minute because I knew from their notebooks that they were ready (and very close). When I told them the strategy, their faces said, "Yeah, of course", and when they turned and talked, they could apply it easily. Without the quick minilesson, however, they wouldn't have done it. I didn't need to model it, or say my thinking aloud as I did the work, or even write the strategy on the anchor chart because it was so easily within their grasp.
• Some concepts are so new that without the scaffolding and modeling and thinking aloud, students would flail around in a confused manner. Perhaps some would get there eventually, but who has time for that? In my minilesson, I knew my second strategy would be one of those more complex and new strategies, so I took more time with it. I walked them through my process, I modeled, I included active engagement, I got some formative feedback. 
• The feedback from the kids is that almost all of them feel like the models and examples and conferences and charts are very helpful to lifting their level. They feel supported and comfortable in the work they are doing when trying new things in their reading and writing. Except for the one student who really wants more direction (rescuing? prompting? specific directions like, "Put two pieces of evidence in each 5-sentence paragraph"?), the overwhelming majority think the level of support is good.

Over the course of the semester, I am going to watch my "prompting" so that I don't lead my readers to my own interpretations. I am going to watch who is doing the work in my conferences, and back off if it seems like I am doing most of it. I am going to read up on the idea of struggle as a necessary learning force (but when is there too much struggle? Can't it go the other way?). The bottom line is for all students to grow and learn, and it's my job to help them do that.