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"?

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!

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.

Thoughts About Mentoring a Student Teacher

I hosted a grad student in my class last week. She is a second-career education student who is finishing her last course before her student teaching experience. She visited my class because she needed 10 hours of Observation and Participation. In her 10 hours with me, she observed four hours of my teaching and she taught two 55-minute lessons. The other four hours consisted of break, lunch, planning time and study hall. She was required to plan the lesson she taught (twice) and write a journal reflection on the 10-hour experience. I was required to sign off on the hours.

There were some outcomes from this experience that surprised me. First, she had never heard of the workshop approach to teaching literacy. Her undergrad major was English Literature and Composition, and she is majoring in secondary education, so I assumed she had taken a literacy education course along the way. I know there are many many ways to teach literacy, and workshop is not the usual method in secondary schools, but I would have thought she had at least heard about it. I gave her an everything-you-need-to-know-about-workshop-in-1-minute-or-less lesson so she could understand what she was observing.

Next, she didn't take notes during, or have any questions after, the observation. I wondered what she had gotten out of the lesson. Through our follow-up discussion, she seemed to be impressed with how well the students behaved and how nice the room was and how each student had their own computer to use. These were not the observations of someone about to take over a classroom, clued into the subtleties of classroom management, instructional technique, and creating classroom climate. Rather, they seemed to be those of someone in culture shock.

On the day that she taught, using my lesson objectives and a modified workshop structure, her passion for teaching came through. Like any substitute teacher, she was faced with a room full of students who's names she didn't know, who's personalities and learning levels she didn't know, and plopped into the middle of a unit she didn't know. However, I suggested the kids make simple name cards when they came in, and she used their names during the lesson to connect with the students. She was personable, and seemed to enjoy the content and the students.

We had a debrief between the first and the second lesson. We talked through what went well and where the rough spots were. I helped her consider things such as how to get students' attention back after releasing them to an activity, prioritizing lesson parts when things are dragging on too long, questioning techniques when kids are reluctant to share, and immediate application of learning. The second lesson went better.

When we debriefed the second lesson, she was amazed at how something as simple as an attention cue can make transitions go quickly and smoothly. She said that she was in her last week of her behavior management class, and never had they talked about cues. They talked about making rules and consequences. I shared with her other things I do that contribute to classroom management: seating choices, lesson variety with active engagement, walking around while kids are working and holding kids accountable.

This young woman is eager to get into the classroom and make a difference in children's lives. It was refreshing to see that passion. Sometimes I forget that I was the same way starting out. I was just as nervous and just as ill-prepared to step into a room full of kids. I wonder if teacher prep courses could up their game, however. The accountability piece for this particular Observation and Participation requirement seemed really weak. I've read articles advocating for a medical-student-like preparation course for teachers: classwork followed by internship followed by residency followed by full certification. It is the on-the-ground experience while being mentored by an expert that creates competent practitioners.

I don't think I want to be her mentor teacher for her student teaching experience next year. Not because I think she is hopeless, but because I already have a lot on my plate. I will recommend her to another teacher who would be willing to take on that responsibility. And I wish her well on her journey into the joys of teaching.

Merging CCSS Social Studies/History Standards with Reciprocal Teaching

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teaching Argument Through Primary Source Evidence

A couple of weeks ago, a literacy consultant, Stevi Quate, came to our school to work with the middle and high school teachers. Our Director of Curriculum and Professional Development invited her, knowing that the English departments at both levels were implementing the CCSS, as had the Math departments, and that Social Studies and Science were soon to follow. Literacy is a big push for all those subjects in the CCSS, and Stevi would be a great jump-start into improving our practice.

Stevi sat down with my co-teacher and me one morning to help us think through improving argument skills in eighth grade Social Studies: Early American History. One of our big units of the year is The Road to Revolution, during which students take on the role of a historical Patriot or Loyalist, and debate, during a series of Town Hall meetings, the issue of rebellion. Over the past few years, the results have been something like this: "Um, so I think we should rebel because, you know, the Stamp Act was really unfair." "Yeah, me too. The Stamp Act and the Quartering Act." (Etc.) Uninspired, mindless repetition of textbook content.

Stevi introduced us to the work of George Hillocks, Jr., and his text Teaching Argument Writing, Grades 6-12 (Heinemann, 2011). In the sample first chapter, Hillocks demonstrates his methodology for teaching students how to notice evidence, explain the "rule" (he also calls it "warrant"), and draw conclusions. He uses crime mysteries-- narrative plus illustration-- as his hook to teach the skills. He asks the question: "Is Queenie (the victim's wife) telling the truth?" Then he walks students through the deductive reasoning process.

Chart adapted from Hillocks, 2011.

We just finished two big writing units: Literary Essay (use evidence to support an idea) and Investigative Journalism (find out evidence to help you explain an idea). We also did some work with "The Historian's Process": using primary and secondary sources to draw conclusions about historical events. This Hillocks method seemed like a very natural next step to develop arguments and do even better work with primary source documents. As you know, I am a great believer in adopting/adapting good ideas.

My co-teacher and I decided that the crime mystery in Hillocks' chapter would not be a good fit for our community. Besides, I like practicing skills on things that are actually part of the curriculum; it's a two-for-one kind of a thing. So we decided to use the primary and secondary source materials from our next Social Studies chapter, Life in the Colonies (US Through Industrialism, TCI, 2011) as the texts to use for learning deductive reasoning skills.

The textbook activity directions say: "Acting as investigative journalists, you and your partner will investigate life in the American colonies. You will travel to eight places to examine primary and secondary sources and uncover the truth about what life was really like in the colonies." Each "place" has a visual and a written document, and a "headline" (fictionally) published in the English press about what life was like in the colonies.

To introduce the students to Hillocks' method, I will show them a 3-minute clip from the BBC show Sherlock, in which Sherlock Holmes, "consulting detective", explains to his new room mate, Dr. John Watson, how he knew so much about him when they first met. In his explanation, Sherlock names the detail he noticed (for example, Watson's haircut and stance), explains why it is important (suggests time in the military), and draws a conclusion (combined with his tan line, it could only mean he was serving overseas: in Afghanistan or Iraq). This engaging clip, combined with their recent work as "investigative journalists" and "historians", will lead us into the day's work.

Using the Gradual Release of Responsibility method (basically, workshop minilessons), I constructed a slideshow so that I could model the technique, have students try it out with my guidance, and eventually release them to do the work on their own. With each source and using the form above, students have to find evidence, the rule (why the evidence is important), and draw a conclusion about how accurate the (fake) English headline is. Students will need 3-5 pieces of evidence before they can confidently "prove" that the headline is either true or false. I will go through at least one visual and one written source to model/practice. Here is a sample visual slide:

Image by Janet Pohl adapted from TCI, 2011 and G. Hillocks, Jr.

The important part of this process, and what has been missing from my previous instruction, is the "rule" (or "warrant"). Students were giving evidence without explaining why it was important or how it proved anything. In their literary essays, we did some work on this using sentence starters like "This illustrates...", "This shows...", "This is important because...", "This connects to .... because...", and "Consequently...". If students can transfer some of that language and thinking into their Social Studies debate skills, their debates will be much better. So will their constructed answers on tests, and on future essays.

The next part of this process will be to teach them how to prove their point with logic, and, even more difficult, how to pick apart someone else's argument. But that's for another blog.

Dreaming of Demons: Using the Rule of Three to Modify Teaching Texts

Last spring, I was reading the news and stumbled across this article, "Strange Sleep Disorder Makes People See 'Demons'". Hmm, I thought to myself, this could make an interesting fantasy story. I saved the article to my computer for some future date. This summer, when I had some time, I wrote the story that had percolated for a couple of months, and called it "Demon Dreams".

Here I am in December, and we are in the first weeks of our new fantasy writing unit. As with all fiction writing units, the first lessons were focused on gathering ideas using a variety of strategies. I decided to throw in the strategy of "Use ideas from the world around you" as one place to launch into story ideas, and shared the sleep disorders article with my classes. There was quite a buzz that day with "What ifs" flying around the room. I shared with them my quick story blurb based on this article:

image from wikipedia

What if there was a girl who was obsessed with the Mortal Instruments series (City of Bones series by Clarissa Clare), and really wanted to become a Shadow Hunter. She reads this article and decides to create demons from her dreams, and then fight them. It takes her several tries, but then she succeeds. Now, I haven't decided yet how I want it to end. There are several possibilities: she could kill the demon and win, the demon could kill her, or maybe there's something else, which I will keep thinking about.

By the end of the gathering week, students had settled on a blurb that they could commit to, and wrote it in a way that they would remember the idea when they returned from their 3-week winter holiday.

As I was looking ahead to the drafting lessons, I returned to my finished "Demon Dreams" short story to modify sections that we could work with. According to Mary Ehrenworth at the TCRWP Writing Institute, mini-lesson model texts should be based on "The Rule of Three": One place where the teacher shows the students how to use the strategy, one place where the teacher and students can work together with the strategy, and one place where students can work by themselves with the strategy.

I will start with this first drafting mini-lesson (all teaching points from Calkins, Lucy. "Realistic Fiction/Social Action Fiction" in A Curricular Plan for the Writing Workshop--Grade 7, 2011-12. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2011): 

“Writers often think of a story as having three parts—one part where we meet the characters and find out about the setting as well as hints of the problem, one part where the critical problem is faced and choices are made, and one part that shows change and/or resolution. Writers don’t necessarily start drafting with part one, though—we often begin by drafting the second part, to make sure we use our energy on the most critical moment of action, decision, and conflict. Then we’ll write what comes before and what happens after.” 

When I teach this lesson, I'll share a timeline of the blurb to model the decision-making part of what to draft first. When I returned to my finished story, I found the part that focused on her attempts to create and successfully creating the demon, and I copied it onto a new document, called "Draft 1". I'll share this at the beginning of the next class.

The next lesson teaches story leads in order to help the writer get from the beginning to the middle:

“Writers try different leads for our stories. We start in different places, we write three versions of the same scene, we try different voices (first and third), or we start in various settings, to surprise ourselves as writers. Then we show our partner some of our leads and get feedback from a partner writer.”

In my finished draft, I had already written a long lead-in to the middle; it needed a sentence or two to help it make sense: "Liz read through the past couple of days of her dream journal before she went to sleep, focused on making the demon come closer." Next come some dream journal entries that talk about her attempts and the dream in which she succeeds in conjuring the demon. During the lesson, after I read Draft 1, I'll return to that new sentence and teach around what needs to come into the lead: Introduce the character: Liz takes fencing lessons, is a huge fan of the Mortal Instruments series; issue: looking for happiness by becoming a Shadow Hunter; problem: demons are evil and dangerous and Liz is just a girl; context: establish the night paralysis idea and why Liz is keeping a dream journal. We will brainstorm a list of ways to begin stories, such as dialogue, action, flashback, explanation. Then we'll look at my story. I drafted some leads ahead of time, and will share two, ask for help with a third, and have them work independently for a fourth (#2 is the lead I want to use eventually, and I'll choose one other to model how authors think of several leads before settling on one):

1.     Liz had always wanted to be a Shadow Hunter. Ever since she read City of Bones, her dream was to fight demons and live in the supernatural world with vampires, wizards, and werewolves. When she read an article that explained how some people saw demons when they experienced sleep paralysis, she had an idea. (explanatory)

2.     Liz could barely control her glee as she stepped back into the Sleep Center waiting room, photocopied instructions in hand. “I got it! Let’s go!” Robin smiled warily as she stood up from the orange plastic seat. As they walked to the bus stop, Liz launched into her plan, explaining step by step how she was going to “create a demon” through her dreams and then fight it like the Shadow Hunters in her favorite book, City of Bones. Robin walked quietly beside her. Liz finally wound down as they arrived at the bus shelter. (action- beginning chronologically)

3.     Liz lay in bed, twitching in her sleep. Her eyes rolled behind their lids, and her hands clenched. Short, sharp cries escaped from her pursed lips. She was having a nightmare, exactly as she’d planned for the past two weeks. (action- middle, and will flash back to beginning)

4.     The demon stood before her, scaly and menacing. Liz faced it with her fencing sword, feet planted, ready to fight. This is the moment she’d been waiting for. (action- end, and will flashback to beginning)

We've talked a lot about mood in stories this year, with a focus on how setting details and word choice create that mood. This is a sophisticated writing technique that eighth grade writers can handle, and fantasy stories are ripe for adding setting and mood details. Here is the mini-lesson teaching point:

“As we draft our first scene, writers work on creating a setting that is a psychological state as well as a physical one. We create a mood by something as simple as the weather, and by small details that make a place seem happy or oppressive. We also look to each of our scenes with this lens, elaborating our settings so they create a certain atmosphere that shifts throughout the story.” 

I went back to my Draft 1 and looked for a scene that included a lot of mood details. I found the scene where Liz finally meets the demon in her dream. I had written it like this:

Liz walked through a forest of red trees. It was drizzling and misty, making everything damp. Drops fell off the red leaves like blood. There was no sound. She could feel the demon presence getting stronger as she walked forward, like a throbbing in her core. Part of her consciousness told her to run away as fast as possible. She kept walking, intent on meeting the demon at last.

 Lots of great sensory detail, ominous mood, just what I was looking for. However, there is nothing for students to do with it since it's already done. I needed to cut it back to the bare bones:

She walked through a forest. She could feel the demon presence getting stronger as she walked forward. Part of her consciousness told her to run away as fast as possible. She kept walking, intent on meeting the demon at last.

In my modelling, I can explain how I want this mood to be scary and ominous, and then I can add one or two details about the forest. The class can help me add another setting detail, and finally they can come up with a third.

When we get through drafting, we also need to take a close look at sentences. We did some work with simple, complex, and compound sentences, and sentence fragments during the fiction reading unit, and now it was time to apply those sentence skills. I will use this mini-lesson teaching point:

“We can also take a fresh look at our sentences, with the lens of short and long sentences, and when to use each. A series of short sentences often create a sense of tension, which is released with a longer, serial sentence."

There is certainly an action scene at the end that could use re-writing. Here is what I have in Draft 1:

“Come on!” Liz shouted. “I’m not scared of you!” The demon ran to her in two bounds, but Liz was ready. Her sword slashed through the air, landing on its shoulder and cutting deep. It let out a howl, strangely high pitched, and lunged at her. Its teeth snapped closed as she dodged and ducked. It reared up on its hindquarters, raking the air with its claws.

It is easy to model the first revision: "The demon ran to her in two bounds. Liz was ready." The next sentence also lends itself to being broken up into short, choppy sentences. The tricky part is that "longer, serial sentence" that releases the tension. Where should it come? This is a great discussion point where we can try out different versions of the same scene, looking at the work that punctuation can do for a scene's pace and excitement, and reinforcing the idea that exploring options leads to much stronger writing at the end (I still have students who turn in first draft work, or work that has been only cursorily spell-checked).

In true Understanding by Design style, I started with the end in mind (my finished story), and worked backward to design lessons that will guide students through the writing process step by step. I used Mary Ehrenworth's "Rule of Three" to re-write my model texts so that my lessons used the gradual release model: I do it, we do it together, you do it. I have more work to do, especially around editing, which still befuddles too many students. But I have enjoyed re-thinking my own writing process, the decisions I made while writing, and seeing how my students can make my story even better.

To read my full story (without any student help), click on this link.