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?

C3's Informed Action: Making It Relevant

Teaching early U.S. History during a presidential election year makes for endless past-present connections... IF one is looking for them. The middle school brain has an uncanny ability to segment information into discreet categories, never the twain shall meet! So teachers need to provide students with the catalyst to open the doors of those categorized boxes and let things mingle. 

We recently finished our long journey down the Road to Revolution, past the Declaration of Independence, and arrived at our destination: The Treaty of Paris. We have less than three weeks until Spring Break, and a classroom full of tired kids. It doesn't seem like the time to jump into the Articles of Confederation, Shay's Rebellion, or the Making of the Constitution. Fortunately, we live in interesting times, and the C3 Framework gives us the structure to take advantage of it.

The C3 Framework includes a fourth dimension: Communicating Conclusions & Taking Informed Action as a way to communicate inquiry findings and connect to relevant democratic activities. Making a connection between the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the presidential election campaigns seemed very timely. The students are hearing a lot about the candidates on the news and social media. They are beginning to form opinions about candidates of their choice (or their parents' choice, since they are easily influenced at this age). We decided to grab hold of that current event interest and end the unit with an Informed Action project.

Super Tuesday: We started our Informed Action with a casual, motivational investigation on Super Tuesday. We threw out this question: Should presidential candidates tell the truth while they are campaigning? Students generally agreed that they should, but they already knew that candidates didn't always stick to it. I directed them to look at two websites: PolitiFact and FactCheck.org. These two sites check the accuracy of statements made by candidates and others related to them (e.g., Super PACs). The students were very engaged, looking up candidates they supported, those they didn't support, learning about those who they didn't know much about, and noticing differences between them. They especially enjoyed finding out which statements rated as "Pants on Fire" (complete untruth) via PolitiFact. After about 20 minutes, I brought the discussion back to the group. I asked them what they had found out, and several students shared discoveries. I asked them the inquiry question again, and got pretty much the same answer as the beginning of the class, so I flipped it around a bit: Which candidate is the most truthful? (as of that day, it was John Kasich with Bernie Sanders a close second). Which candidate is the least truthful? (as of that day, it was Donald Trump by a long shot). Students also brought up questions about why the websites would fact check some statements and not others, whether we could trust these sites, and who was finding out about this information. Great critical citizenship! 

Campaign Propaganda: Now that students had some sense of who the candidates were, we are turning our attention to campaign advertisements. The overarching inquiry question that connects back to past learning is What does "consent of the governed" and "alter and abolish government" look like? To start our inquiry, I showed a quick series of campaign ads from the previous week (found on P2016) and asked students to think about how they connected to the two ideals from the Declaration of Independence. They jotted ideas and questions on small slips of paper. We discussed afterward how the campaign ads were trying to persuade voters to give the candidates their "consent" to "alter" the government. The idea of "persuasion" led into the Mini-Q: Campaign Propaganda: Which Strategies Would You Use? Students investigate past presidential campaign ads to identify six propaganda strategies and evaluate them on how informative, effective, and ethical they are. Then they decide which three they would use to make a campaign ad. This builds student knowledge before we get into the project.

Public Service Announcement: It would make sense to have students make a campaign ad for the candidate of their choice at this point. However, we are holding off for now for two reasons: 1) We don't have enough time before spring break for the amount of research and production time they would need, and 2) Students don't have enough information about the electoral process yet to see how their candidate and their issues fit into the big picture. Instead, we are having our students make a Public Service Announcement (PSA) alerting citizens of propaganda techniques used in campaign ads. They will make a short movie/slidecast showing three campaign ads, identifying the propaganda technique the candidate used in each, and explaining how it is informative, effective, and ethical (or rather, how it is not those things). This fits into the role of informed citizenship, taking action for the greater good. 

In the spring, after we teach the Constitution and the electoral college, we will have another presidential project, probably making an advertisement. By that time, students will have time to dig into issues, see where candidates stand on them, and consider which issues are most important to address in order to get the most electoral college votes. The number of candidates will have whittled down a bit as well.

In past years, we connected The Road to Revolution to The Arab Spring through the question: When is it necessary for citizens to rebel against their government? We did interesting projects with this as well. However, rolling with the times and student interest can make for a much more relevant investigation. It will not be too many more years before these 8th graders will be eligible to vote, and perhaps they will think back on their inquiry this year as they do, and wonder, "What should I know about this candidate before I vote for him/her?" This is informed action in the real world!

Working with content knowledge during inquiry

There are many aspects of the C3 Framework for Social Studies that I am still trying to wrap my head around as I simultaneously revise and implement inquiry-based units. The biggest one remains: What is the role of content teaching in the inquiry arc, and how much should students "discover" the content vs. content being "fed" via teacher-led lessons?

As I've been wrestling with this question, I have been trying out some new resources that are more inquiry-based. Some have been moderately successful, while others really hit the nail on the head. An example of the latter was a "Mini-Q" based on this question: The Ideals of the Declaration: Which is most important? (DBQ Project, 2012).

Students had already read the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence and we unpacked the four principles of government together. Last year, I just went on to the Revolutionary War from there. But this year, I wanted to linger on the Declaration a bit longer because it forms the foundation of the US government, and if students really understand those principles, then the next units on the Constitution and Bill of Rights make a whole lot more sense. 

This Mini-Q presented a range of primary source documents, from a Declaration from the Women's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls in 1848 (Equality), to a segment from NPR's "This I Believe" in 2005 (Unalienable Rights), to a photo of demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 2009 (Consent of the Governed), to a statement by the Tea Party from 2010 (Alter or Abolish Government). By examining more modern examples of the ideals, students were forced to shift their thinking out of the 18th century Patriots vs. Loyalists debate and apply them to issues in the 21st century. 

The best part, though, were the discussions around the follow-up questions at each table group. Here are some of the questions presented in the Mini-Q:

• Is it possible to achieve equality without liberty? Liberty without equality?
• Can you achieve happiness without the consent of the governed?
• Which is more important: equality or the right to alter and abolish the government?

Students had to really think about what liberty actually entails, whether citizens can have any rights without the guarantee that they can change the government if it's not meeting their rights, and how some of the ideals are embedded in other ideals. (My favorite conclusion was that yes, you can achieve happiness without the consent of the governed, IF the government has citizens' happiness as a priority. Sometimes it happens, but not often.) By working with the four ideals in this way, students examined each one carefully, defended their opinions to others at their tables, thought of examples to illustrate their thinking, and tried to understand other viewpoints. 

image from wikipedia.org

And when asked to answer the main question: Which ideal is most important?, they almost unanimously agreed to this answer: It's not fair! They're all important!, which is sort-of the point of this exercise. Ultimately, they were able to pick one and defend it as most important, thus demonstrating that they understood the subtleties of each ideal. I deem this a highly-successful learning activity!

Back to my original question about content in the inquiry arc. During this Mini-Q, students worked with content, but did not learn new content. They needed to come into the activity already knowing something about the Declaration of Independence and the principles of government embedded in the preamble. Doing the Mini-Q without that content knowledge would have been confusing and students would have done surface-level thinking. Therefore, I wonder still about the value of "knowledge discovery" in inquiry-based units. 

This week we are hosting a consultant who will be addressing that questions with secondary Social Studies teachers. I am excited to hear what she has to say about this. More next week, I'm sure!