Tackling the beast: Examining text complexity through the departmental PLC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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