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"?

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.

Disciplinary Literacy in History: Thinking Like a Historian

There has been a lot of buzz in the education community over the past year or two about "disciplinary literacy" as distinct from "content literacy". In a nutshell, disciplinary literacy is doing the work of the discipline, and teaching students explicitly how to do that work. By contrast, content literacy is learning how to read and write in the content areas-- a valuable skill, but not the whole package.

I am an English Language Arts teacher by passion and training, and a Social Studies teacher by default. I understand teaching reading and writing. I understand how to teach reading and writing in Social Studies. What I haven't understood is what historians actually do when they read and write (beyond what I was already teaching). I decided I needed to find out.

CC0 by shotput on pixabay

Just as I was starting to poke around last spring for a workshop to take over the summer that focused on disciplinary literacy, I saw an announcement by NCSS for a MOOC they sponsored called "Improving Historical Reading and Writing." Ta da! Just the ticket (and it was FREE!). This 15-module course opened up the world of historical thinking to me. Here are some big "ah ha's":

Historians gather multiple pieces of evidence about a historical question they have. If they don't know anything about the historical question, they start with a general secondary source to get a sense of the event. Next, they try to find several primary sources (journal entries, newspaper accounts, photographs or paintings, maps, inventories, etc.) that can dig down into the details from people who were there at the time. Historians want to piece together the puzzle and find their own interpretation of what happened in the past.

• Historians do a lot of work before they even start reading-- a lot more work than ELA readers do. Historians consider the source: they search out the author, publisher, and date of the document first and consider questions of reliability: Who wrote it? Who published it? When and where was it published? Are these people biased or coming from a particular perspective? Can I trust this to be a reliable source? If not, can I use this source to gain an understanding of one particular point of view?
• Historians also access all the background knowledge they have about the context in which the document was published before they start reading. What was going on during that time? What background knowledge do I already have about this event or person that will help me understand the information? Adding this layer of thinking about contextualization also helps readers think about reliability, bias, and perspective.
• Historians do a lot of work while they read-- this is most like the work that ELA readers do. These days we call it "close reading." Historians are reading for the main idea and supporting details, but they are also watching the use of language to clue them into bias and perspective. They try to put themselves into the author's shoes to really dig into the human reality behind the writing.
• Historians do a lot of work after they read, comparing and contrasting the information they just encountered with what they already know. Is the author adding to or confirming what I already know? Is this information different than what I already know? If so, how does it differ, and why would it differ? Can I find any other sources of evidence that can help confirm or deny this information? This act of corroboration ensures historians are looking at the full story, not just the single story which can be distorted by time, selective reporting, or bias. 
• Historians tell other people what they found out so that their voice can add to the collective understanding of history. There are many ways to do this; book publishing is just one way. For students, this can mean debating issues, writing editorials, making public service announcements, starting or contributing to a social justice campaign, blogging, etc. 

image found on Wikipedia website

The Stanford History Education Group website has a lot of great resources aligned to this thinking process. I used their 5-lesson Introduction to History series last week, and my 8th graders loved it! Keeping my historical thinking hat on while I teach Social Studies this year will ensure that I am not relying on the textbook as my sole resource, and it will (hopefully) develop the critical thinking stance that students should take when encountering any source of information-- from the internet, the newspaper, advertisements, or even their friends. That is a valuable life skill!

Moving into Standards-based Grading and Reporting

Our school took the plunge into standards-based grading and reporting this year. Oh, we've had standards for years, and our UbD unit planning has ensured that we at least knew which standards connected to the unit. But until the grade book and report card demanded that we specifically connect a grade to a standard, we continued on our merry way hoping our assessments captured at least some of the standards, much like flinging a handful of pebbles at a target, hoping some will hit.

We took a middle road, though: we don't have to report on every standard, just on "strands". For English Language Arts, we settled on Reading, Writing, and Listening & Speaking. They make sense to us and how our standards are organized... until we get to those units where we are using our reading to inform our writing content (e.g., literary essay and research reports), or have cross-disciplinary projects (e.g., investigative journalism about environmental issues).

cc 2.0 by Colin_K on Flickr

So this is our first Professional Learning Team (PLT) investigation: How can you use one assessment to grade and report on more than one standard strand?

There are a few sub-questions here: 

• Is it fair to "double dip" (in other words, can one assessment be counted twice)?
• How specific should we be about dividing up the assessment into "strands"? Could we just use one holistic score and put it in two strands? Or do we have to identify which section goes into which strand and keep track of it that way?
• Do we even know which specific standards are being assessed on the assessment? If we were called on by a parent or administrator, could we justify the grade based on the standards assessed?
• Does going to standards-based grading and reporting mean that we have to create more assessments, such as "artificial" tests and quizzes that get us away from our authentic assessments, so that we have enough evidence for the grade in a particular strand?

My inclination is to go for specifics, analyzing the assessment to identify where each standard is assessed and then tracking those parts for depth of student learning. This would be possible with a fairly simple template, though it would take more time before and after the assessment. Doing this kind of analysis would ensure that all the standards got assessed (and yes, we may need some more assessments, or expand the ones we have, to include all standards) and that the grade reported is actually reflective of achievement on the standards.

cc by ePublicist on Flickr

As our PLT moves through our cycle of continuous learning, we will be wrestling with these questions and others that come up. I hope we will be able to look at some models from other schools and settle on a system that makes sense for our school. 

We would love to hear feedback about what has worked in other schools. If you have a suggestion, please leave a comment!

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.

Questioning the Labels for the Units of Study in Argument, Information, and Narrative Writing

Last week we had a professional development day that was dedicated to writing curriculum. This was a much needed pause from the day-to-day hustle of the classroom, especially as we are trying to understand and implement the CCSS and the new Units of Study in Argument, Information, and Narrative Writing (Heinemann, 2014). As a department, we agreed to tackle our final writing unit of the year. At the 8th grade level, this was the Position Paper unit, which the TCRWP authors labeled as our "Informational" writing unit.

Since we use the Understanding by Design (UbD) unit planning process (Wiggins & McTighe), we started by unpacking the CCSS informational writing standard, examining what it looked like for the years before and after us as well as what is new and unique to our grade. As is the case with Narrative and Argument writing, there are only a few new things in 8th grade compared to 7th, usually bumping up the level of abstraction or depth of support. The implication, though, is that the grades before us must do their job in order for students to be ready to add the new piece at our grade. This is the only way the spiral will work.

We then went to our Rubicon Atlas mapping site to continue our UbD work: identifying enduring understandings and essential questions, including knowledge and skill objectives based on the demands of the standards, revising assessments and rubrics. All this was done fairly quickly, as the unit focus wasn't changing much from what we'd taught before.

Finally, we were ready to tackle the Learning Activities. We opened the "Informational" unit, Position Papers, and double-checked our list of standards against the list provided in the back of the book. Wait, what? The only genre-specific standards listed in the book were argument standards. I thought this was our "Informational" unit, so where were the informational standards?

Next we started digging into the lessons. Indeed, the focus of this whole unit was arguing one side of an issue and backing it up with evidence and explanation. It is a great unit, full of focused strategies and engaging topics, but it sits firmly in the argument arena, not informational. Yes, there is a component of research to find evidence to back up your side of the argument, and to find counterarguments, and yes, that research would have to be explained  in an informational way to readers who may not have the same background knowledge. But the thrust is still to argue one side. How am I supposed to assess the informational standards?

This is not the first time I have questioned the labeling of the TCRWP units. The 8th grade "Narrative" unit is Investigative Journalism. As I taught that unit earlier in the year, the teaching points were mostly about getting your information across in an interesting way-- AKA Informational writing. We taught fantasy short story writing as our Narrative writing in English Language Arts, so I felt solid about meeting those standards through that unit.

My 7th grade colleagues also ran into a labeling question. The 7th grade Literary Essay unit is considered their Informational unit; they also have Realistic Fiction for Narrative, and The Art of Argument for Argument units. Our Literary Essay unit is labeled as our Argument unit. What makes a Literary Essay more informational vs. more argumentative?

Perhaps we should rearrange the labels of the 8th grade English Language Arts writing units this way:

• Literary Essay: Informational (work with 7th grade to see how they did it as an informational piece and add our 8th grade bits onto it)
• Fantasy Short Story: Narrative
• Position Paper: Argument

I suppose we could leave the Literary Essay unit as an argument unit, knowing we are covering informational writing in our Week Without Walls Investigative Journalism unit in Social Studies. As long as the students receive the teaching, it is not so important that it happens during ELA. Besides the Week Without Walls project is outside the Social Studies curriculum, so it's already in a gray area.

I respect the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project staff and the work they do with curriculum. The units are demanding and full and vertically articulated. My colleague thinks the middle school units were thrown together hastily to get something out on the coat tail of the elementary units of study. I don't see that within the content of the units themselves, but perhaps she's right when it came to labeling the units to meet the CCSS modes of writing.

At the end of the day, as long as the students are being taught how to write in those various modes of writing, does it really matter how the units are labeled? Now I've got to go back into my Atlas Rubicon unit plans and adjust the standards. I don't think Jay McTighe would approve.

"Is this graded?"

After three heavy weekends of grading and reporting, I can finally come up for air. Oh yeah, of course I still have some work to do-- it's never ending-- but this weekend it's about feedback and not about grading, and it's only about 3 hours' worth instead of 10 hours' worth.

Our middle school faculty is doing a book study of Thomas Guskey's Answers to Essential Questions about Standards, Assessments, Grading, and Reporting (Corwin, 2012). We have been having a lot of discussion about formative assessment: what it is, what it looks like, what to do with it once we have it. We are not new to the concepts of formative and summative assessments. We did a lot of work around those ideas about 5 years ago and have been working with it since. It's pretty surprising, then, how much variety we have as a faculty in our understanding and use of formative assessments.

Five years ago, our middle school made a decision to make our grade books consistent by having two categories of grades: formative (weighted as 15% of the whole grade) and summative (weighted at 85%). This change definitely made a big difference in helping our students and parents understand how grades were being calculated. Before this change, some teachers were counting homework as 85% and tests as 15%, others had standards-based categories (for example, world language teachers had categories for Speaking, Listening, Reading, and Writing-- each weighted as 25% of the total grade), and others had categories that included participation and collaboration. The 85%/15% weighting keeps us teachers focused on using grades to show achievement of standards, rather than behaviors (like participation), and keeps the grade reflective of how well the student can achieve on his/her own (summative assessments like tests and performance tasks and in-class projects) rather than practice opportunities (like homework).

This system has been good for teachers and parents, but we are starting to question the value for students. Students have become "trained" to ask, "Is it formative or summative?" when an assignment is given. Teachers infer that students use the answer to gauge how much effort they should put into completing the assignment: not much if it's formative, quite a bit if it's summative. It makes sense, considering the weighting categories, and our students are not fools. They do what they need to do when playing the game of school. (You can tell I am in the midst of a poetry unit! I may be a poet and not even know it!)

According to Guskey, formative assessments are supposed to give feedback to students about how well they are meeting the standard (and hopefully some information about how to get closer) as well as giving feedback to teachers about how to adjust instruction based on where students are in their learning. Bottom line, formatives shouldn't be graded because their purpose is practice and feedback. 

So our conversations about formative assessments have two sides to them: we understand and agree to the concept that they shouldn't be graded, yet we wonder if students will take them seriously if we don't slap a grade on them (even a small one like 15%). 

I think we can get away from grading formative assessments if we do more work re-training our students to view them as learning opportunities in which they get to practice a skill or strategy and get feedback about how well they are doing before the summative assessment. To that end, I have been watching my language when I make assignments and get the inevitable question, "Is this graded?" I am using the phrases "learning opportunity" and "get feedback" more and more often. 

It's been interesting to see how this response affects students. The students who "get it" really do use the feedback to improve their work. I saw this very clearly when I was grading fantasy stories last weekend (one of the 10-hour work weekends I've been having): students who used the rubric to self-assess and make goals asked for help from peers and me when they got into trouble spots, and made improvements based on that feedback. Their summative assessment results placed them squarely in the A-B range. Those students who went off on their own and disregarded my feedback, did not get help from peers, and didn't see the rubric as a tool to improve their writing, sat squarely in the C-D range. 

I have a selfish interest in the "no grades for formative" debates too-- less grading for me to do! I still need to hold students accountable for doing the practice pieces (homework, in-class activities), but a complete/incomplete designation in the grade book can take care of that. As for "formative feedback", that is work I am glad to take on as long as students use it to make improvements before their summative. 

Now I have to get back to giving feedback on poetry analysis annotations. They will want to use it when they write it up for their summative poetry anthology project.

Jumping into Scoring On-Demand Assessments

I am about to jump with both feet into the hard work of analyzing student work to make my teaching better. This work is made harder because I am using a new tool, the rubrics in the Units of Study in Argument, Information, and Narrative Writing (UoSW) for grade 8 (Heinemann, 2014). These rubrics are written as a continuum of skills along categories that match the CCSS writing standards' performance indicators. There are categories for leads, endings, transition words, organization, elaboration, craft, mechanics, and an overall category. Although these are things I evaluated using our modified Six Traits rubric for the past four years, the wording is different and open to interpretation in places. 

Rubric excerpt from Units of Study in Argument, Information, and Narrative Writing (Heinemann, 2014)

I now have 43 on-demand pieces of argument writing to analyze before we jump into our literary essay unit in a couple of weeks. Because the rubric is so unfamiliar, however, I am looking at this stack with trepidation. I feel unready to tackle this task without a better understanding of what I'm supposed to look for. I need a plan.

I already tried out the rubric once with my department team members, as we collaboratively scored a seventh grade student sample. It didn't go well. We had so many questions like, "How is 'clearly articulated' different from 'logical' evidence?" "The rubric jumps from one thing to another. Is it supposed to be a progression?" We were definitely not comfortable with the tool, nor did we come to any clear understanding of how to use it with any grading consistency. 

I think I need do one more "training" exercise before I try to score my own students' writing. The UoSW provides annotated teacher-written exemplars that meet the grade level standards. I think I need to sit down with the grade 6, grade 7, and grade 8 exemplars as well as the rubrics, and try to match them up. Where the annotation says this is the "clearly articulated" evidence, what does that look like? How can I see it in my students' writing as well? I want to have all three levels in front of me because I know my students will be all over the place depending on their past experiences and their developmental levels. Even my better writers may be at a sixth grade level in some areas, and my struggling writers may reach the eighth grade level in others. In general, though, I expect I will see mostly seventh grade writing, which makes sense because we are just starting eighth grade!

By getting a clearer image of what the rubric descriptors look like in a writing sample, I hope to do a better, more consistent job scoring my students' writing. I also hope that once I get on a roll, I will start being more efficient with my time. I expect the first few (5? 10? 20?) will take about 20 minutes each as I work through the descriptors and make judgments about what I'm seeing in front of me. Getting that down to 10 minutes each would be much more comfortable.

In the end, I will have a bank of data that can lead me into making better teaching decisions during the literary essay writing unit itself. I can plan whole class mini-lessons to target general needs. I can plan small group work where I see clusters of need. I can confer with individuals to move them from where they are to where they need to go. I don't need to guess or wait until mid-unit when I look over drafts. 

I can also ask students to use this writing sample as a way to set some goals to work on during the unit, identifying a few areas to really pay attention to and work to improve. The process of reflecting on oneself as a writer, identifying needs and goals, and working to improve is an act of self-actuality. It puts the responsibility to learn and grow as a writer actively on the students' shoulders, instead of passively waiting for the teacher to tell them what to do. Isn't this the goal of becoming a lifelong learner?

So. Big work ahead, but good work. Important work. Work that will strengthen my teaching and strengthen student learning. Deep breath! 

Planning for the Hard Work of Implementation

Here we are at the end of May, the end of another school year. It's a good time to look back and reflect on successes and challenges during the year, as well as look ahead to the work that needs to be done next year. At our May department meeting, the middle school English Language Arts and Social Studies teachers did just that, especially thinking ahead to next year and implementing the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).

Over the past four months, we participated in a book study of Pathways to the Common Core (Calkins, Ehrenworth, & Lehmann. Heinemann, 2012). We read the overview chapters, laying them alongside the middle school standards, to get a sense of what the CCSS was asking learners to do in reading, writing, listening, and speaking. We congratulated ourselves on already having a solid program in place, with many of the expectations already embedded in our units. We deemed the changes do-able and not intimidating or frightening. The discussion turned to the practical: How do we do this? When will we have time?

The last chapter of Pathways focused on strategies for implementing the CCSS in a way that fueled "whole school reform". The authors listed three targeted suggestions which we took to heart. First, don't try to add the CCSS onto an already full curriculum. We acknowledged that we will need to closely examine our units in a vertical way, noticing areas that we can release because another grade level is accountable for them or because they just don't fit the new standards. Only by creating space in our units will we be able to add the new pieces from the CCSS.

Second, look at your current program and decide where your strengths lie. This is the best place to start making modifications. We recognized that we will not be able to implement all areas of the English standards at once, and after a very quick discussion, turned our attention to our writing program, our area of strength. We decided that we will read the corresponding Pathways chapter and examine the standards about the upcoming mode before we start a unit of writing. We will work as a team to look at what we have that can continue as is, and identify places needing adjustments. Doing this work on an already strong program will teach us how to do it and get us ready for the next year's work: reading.

Finally, work fully and deeply to make lasting, significant changes. In order to reap the benefits of these challenging standards, a band-aid approach won't work. It will take planning, purposeful implementation, and reflection. We will need to look cross-curricularly to ensure we are finding time to teaching writing in all three modes and identify resources to use. We will need to focus on our formative and summative assessments to reflect on areas of strength and areas of needs. We will need to revise our rubrics and gather anchor papers. We will need to observe each other while teaching to lift the level of our practice. This is the hard work of implementation.

Fortunately, I have a team that knows how to roll up their sleeves and get down to work (after an initial bit of whining). We have supportive administrators. We have the new middle school Units of Study in Writing (Heinemann, 2014) coming during the summer and a consultant lined up to work with us next year. Some choices will be hard to make, especially releasing those lessons that feel so comfortable and taking on lessons that are totally new to us. I know that in the end, our students will be more challenged and our teaching stronger. We just need the courage to go for it!

Checking In On My Classroom Library Goal

I read 54 young adult books this school year (so far-- still 5 school weeks to go!), almost all of them from my classroom library. I expanded my classroom library by about 120 books this year, and made a professional goal to do a better job using the library as a teaching tool to encourage independent home reading. Reading is my passion, and I enjoyed reading almost all of the YA books, so I certainly don't view the task as a chore. Sometimes I read so fast, or the plot is so ordinary, that I forget I've read it. That's why I keep track on my Shelfari shelf. That's also how I know I've read 54 books this school year (so far). 

I like making my reading life visible to the kids. Some kids regularly look at my Shelfari and get suggestions from it. I also periodically put up a bulletin board called "Ms. Pohl's 5-Star Favorites" with book covers of those books, and then I display those same books on the tops of the bookshelves. I prop the books I recently read on a shelf by my desk before I re-shelve them. 

But the best part of this project is when I see a student browsing the shelf, and I ask, "Do you need a suggestion?" When the answer is yes, I love to ask, "What kind of book do you like?" or "What did you read recently that you really liked?" so that I can follow up with "Then you might like this one [as I pluck the book off the shelf] or this one [pluck]. I liked this one because..." And when I'm really on my game, I might say, "I thought of you when I was reading this because I know you enjoyed reading..." 

I'm getting better at the "If you liked this one, you might like that one" game. What I still need to work on is the "If you felt comfortable reading this one, you should try that one because it's slightly more challenging". This is more difficult, the push into greater text complexity. I am still reading the YA books with the lenses of 1) Is this a good story? and 2) Who would like this? I need to add a third lens: What is the work that kids would need to do in this book? What makes this book easy or complex?

If I have some lead time, I can come back with a suggestion that includes increasing text complexity. That's why I like having kids use Shelfari as their reading log. I can look at their shelf, consult the complexity guides (either Scholastic Book Wizard or the Lexile site), return to my inventory, and suggest a book that is similar to what they are reading AND is somewhat more complex. When it's on the fly, I'm less confident I will pick a book that will be at the appropriate level.

My goal of building book ladders and using the library as a teaching tool has made progress. I'm happy about getting familiar with the books in the library and having some tools set up to help me make better suggestions. With practice, I will be able to nudge more kids into harder books. For now, though, I'm ready to pick up #55!

p.s. I also read 18 adult books this year. Not too shabby!

Some Take-Aways from Amanda Hartman's Workshop on Writing Continuua

Last weekend I traveled to Muscat, Oman with my 7th grade colleague to attend a weekend workshop led by Amanda Hartman of Columbia University's Teacher's College Reading and Writing Project (TCRWP). This workshop focused on using the new CCSS-aligned continua for writing as a tool to study student work. Since Amanda is a primary level expert, most of her examples were from the early elementary grades, although she did bring in a few upper elementary examples, and she tried to address some middle school concerns for those of us in the audience.

By the end of the weekend, I had a few take-aways:

1. The collaborative work we have done over the past four years in middle school around reading and writing workshop has paid off in a cohesive, vertical spiral. This take-away is a result of the many conversations I had with my 7th grade colleague around the student work samples we each brought, the thinking we shared around what we do with students, and how much we trusted each other to voice concerns or issues in our classes. Although I am less confident with the sixth grade program because those teachers are newer, I know that the flow from 7th to 8th is a smooth progression. 
2. Having tools aligned to both the CCSS standards and TCRWP units of study can save us a lot of time and energy. The assessment rubrics we use now were developed collaboratively within our department. There was value in that, especially through the discussions we had around what we were looking for in writing at each grade level, and how to write a good rubric. As we shift to the CCSS next year, though, it will be nice to have the rubrics, checklists, continuua, and exemplars already made for us. Of course we will gather our own exemplars as well, but having some on hand as we jump into our revised units is great.
3. Breaking out some of the discrete skills from the continuum and turning it into a "mini-rubric" can make those skills more visible. For example, one of the more important skills on the writing rubric is the ability to elaborate. Last month, I gathered a Social Studies essay from my students that showed very little elaboration (or, according to the instructions, "explaining"). I decided I would break down what "explaining" was at 4 levels of complexity, including an example for each. When I returned the essays, I asked the students to compare their level of explanation to the rubric and evaluate where their essay fell. Most could see they were at the 1 or 2 level. I then asked them to pick one thing they would do differently next time they needed to explain something, and write that goal at the bottom of their rubric. Throughout this next unit, they have been practicing explaining ideas to their partner, using the Explaining rubric as a reminder of what is expected. My hope is that there will be a jump in their elaboration on the next essay.
   
4. 4. Amanda's recommendation of doing on-demand writing as a pre- and post-assessment for all three genres makes my head explode. My grading load is at a level now that I can barely keep up with it. One writing piece takes me at least 5 minutes to read, and then at least another 5 minutes to evaluate. Add in comments or noticings of student strengths and weaknesses, and there goes another 5 minutes. Multiply those 15 minutes by 45 student samples, and multiply those 11 hours by 6 on-demands plus 4 writing projects for grading, and there would be nothing left of my life except assessing writing. I understand the value: I can see what students can do on their own without any support or assistance. But to be realistic, there's got to be another way.

It's good to break away from the routine of teaching to examine our practices and challenge our thinking. I think the work of using the CCSS/TCRWP continuua to assess student work is not something we are ready for yet. However, as we launch into our revised units next year, they will be wonderful tools to have on hand, as well as a focus for more collaborative conversations.

Book Ladders Part III

Here it is, December already. Nearly half the school year has passed. In that time, we have made some progress with our classroom library/book ladder/text complexity project. Here's an update:

• Only 3 of the 6 of us chose this work as our professional goal this year. Two others wanted to dig into our new school-wide communication and grading system, Veracross. One other wanted to start a blog after going to a tech conference. I have to admit that I am disappointed. Without a departmental goal that all can work with, we have lost a lot of cohesion. 
• The grades 7 and 8 classroom libraries have been inventoried and leveled. Except for my own inventory, which I did myself, our Teaching Assistant tackled that job. There are holes and errors, which teachers are just now discovering, but it definitely saved hours of their time to have her do it.
• We downloaded the book lists from the Teacher's College Reading and Writing Project site. Each genre or thematic list is arranged with titles from most simple to most complex within a leveling system, first the guided reading A-Z system, and then the Lexile system. 
• We highlighted the books we already have on that list (well, our TA did that part too, again with some holes and errors but still worth it).
• Since it is ordering time, we ordered books that fell between our current books on the list to fill out book ladders for next year.
• From the current and order list, we created a couple of book ladders that reflect the books in our classroom libraries.

I want to talk about that process a little bit. The TCRWP Fantasy book list is a long one that jumbles all kinds of fantasy together, from classic fantasy books like Eregon, to paranormal fantasy like City of Bones, to science fiction like Divergent. This made putting a book ladder together using just the TC list difficult and confusing, especially since kids tend to stick to one sub-genre for a while.

So on our Professional Development Day last week, the three of us sat down in my classroom to make a dystopian novel book ladder. This is a genre that many of our kids are reading right now, and we share a lot of the same titles on our shelves. It seemed a logical place to start.

Image found on olx.in website

With the classroom library inventory opened on our computers, we pulled as many science fiction dystopian books that we knew off the shelf and piled them on a table (there are probably more, but I haven't read all the books on my shelf yet!). Then we got sticky notes and we labeled the books based on our inventory's leveling information. Sometimes that level was a guided reading letter (T-Z), sometimes it was a Lexile score (usually between 650-850), and sometimes both.

Because we are hands-on, visual people, we lined up the books that had letter levels first, from easiest to hardest. Next, we slipped the Lexiled books into the line where they seemed to fit. Then we took a step back and frowned. Should the Shadow Children series (level Z) (e.g., Among the Hidden) be higher than Insurgent (Lexile 710) just because it has a dystopian theme? Considering length alone, the Divergent series seemed more challenging, as well as having a more complex plot and more complex characters. And what about Gone (Lexile 620)? It's a massively thick book, but not a complex storyline. Is there more to think about, infer, and discuss in Among the Hidden than Gone? We thought so, and put it behind the Shadow Children books.

In the end, we had a line-up we could live with. Next, we put together book labels for the backs of the books. These said: "If you liked this book, try (the next book in the series, or the next one up the ladder). If this book was not right for you, try (the next one down the ladder or one that is similar in level)." We felt this could give students more self-sufficiency as well as "save face" if they were reading low on the ladder.

Although we had a 3-hour chunk of time to work on this, we only got the one dystopian book ladder done. However, I think we needed to figure out what we were doing and how we would do it before we could get started. Now that we have done the one, we can go on and do others. I think I'll do the Social Justice book lists next, since we just finished that theme in our novel book club unit. Exciting!

How Curriculum Implementation is Like Ziplining

Forgive my absence last week. I was one of 12 adults who took 87 eighth graders to Chiang Mai, Thailand for Week Without Walls. It was quite the busy week: Thai cooking class, elephant conservation center, chatting with Buddhist monks, ziplining through the rainforest, a service project to paint a local kindergarten, a hike up to a rural Karen hill tribe village, sleeping in a dorm with girls who are afraid of bugs, a service project to plant vegetables for the village school lunches, and bamboo rafting down the river. Exhausting, yes, but also a great learning experience for everyone.

One element that I especially love about experiential learning opportunities is putting myself and the students in situations that push us out of our comfort zone. For the students, this uncomfortable feeling came at different points. For some, it was staying in a very basic dorm with thin foam mattresses on the floor instead of a 5-star hotel. For some, it was hiking on muddy trails up and down hills for three hours instead of driving or walking along flat sidewalks. For some, it was rolling paint on a wall, possibly the first time they ever participated in a DIY project. For me (and several others), it was conquering our fear of heights on the zipline.

As I've gotten older, my fear of heights has gotten worse. Last year, I didn't go on the zipline at all. That course had 27 ziplines with 5 vertical rappels/ abseils (I'm not sure which term to use). As the guide was describing the route, my face got whiter and whiter, my heart beat faster and faster, and I just couldn't start. This year, we went to a new place. This course had 26 stations which included 18 ziplines and 8 other ropes course challenges scattered throughout. I figured the variety of activities would give me a break from my terror. Besides, my chaperone group of eight girls needed me, especially the one who was as scared as I was. We made an agreement that we would try the first few together, knowing we could bail within the first six stations.

And so I started and it was scary and I clung to the rope that attached me to the line, eyes straight ahead, never looking down. As I passed the third one and then the fifth one, the zipline became easier and easier. I risked a glance at the forest floor 50 meters below me. I released a hand and made a silly face for the photographer. By the 26th station, I still wasn't comfortable, but the thrill was more pleasurable than terrifying.

Now that I am sitting in my living room looking back, I realize that the zipline lesson works for most risk-taking opportunities. I think back to four years ago when our middle school launched the workshop approach in English Language Arts. Many teachers were very uncomfortable with the model, especially the amount of unstructured independent time involved and the intense conferring element. However, we broke it down into smaller areas to tackle. Just like my agreement with the other scared girl in my group, we agreed to give it a try, focusing on the next tree ahead instead of the 26 stations ahead. With workshop, our department started with minilessons, a structure we could understand how to modify. As that became more comfortable, we began trying a few more things: meeting with each student individually at least twice per three week unit, developing small groups based on MAP data, observing each other to build our repertoire of management strategies and routines, matching books with students to increase their reading volume. And here we are four years later, with smooth workshops up and running. As you can see in my picture, I am still gripping that rope with one hand, just like many of us are still clinging to some structures that we just can't release yet. But we'll get there with practice, one zipline challenge at a time.

Can we do the same with the Common Core?

A Glimpse into the NCSS's C3 Framework

I read the October issue of The National Council of the Social Studies' newsletter, The Social Studies Professional this morning. Pages 7 and 8 give an overview of the new College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies Standards (which is available as a free download here). According to the overview, the major guiding principles are:

• Social studies prepares the nation's young people for college, careers, and civic life.
• Inquiry is at the heart of social studies.
• Social studies involves interdisciplinary applications and welcomes integration of the arts and humanities.
• Social studies is composed of deep and enduring understandings, concepts, and skills from the disciplines. Social studies emphasizes skills and practices as preparation for democratic decision-making.
• Social studies education should have direct and explicit connections to the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies.

The C3 Framework is organized along four "dimensions":

1. Dimension 1: Developing Questions and Planning Inquiries
2. Dimension 2: Applying Disciplinary Tools and Concepts
3. Dimension 3: Evaluating Sources and Using Evidence
4. Dimension 4: Communicating Conclusions and Taking Informed Action

As I read over these guiding principles and the C3 Framework Organization, I felt comfortable with all but one bullet point: "Inquiry is at the heart of social studies." I can visualize lessons that prepare students to have a broad understanding to lead them into their future. I can visualize lessons that integrate the arts and humanities. I can visualize unit plans that lay out enduring understandings, concepts and skills. And I can visualize how reading and writing in the content areas support the CCSS.

What is hard for me to visualize is how to make inquiry the "heart" of social studies. As a teacher of early US history to international eighth graders living in a Middle Eastern country, I wonder how student questions can drive the instruction, as the Framework suggests. The students have so little background knowledge, they wouldn't know what to ask that would lead them into a deep inquiry. I always have an essential question that drives our unit, but that is not inquiry since the question came from me.

And once the students have a question to go with, then what? Does each unit turn into a research project? That sounds dull. In my class, the most exciting and engaging activities have been the role play activities that lead to debating issues leading up to the American Revolution and the development of the Constitution. Students also enjoy watching historical documentaries that bring the people and events of the time to life. The visual, kinesthetic, and oral involvement make concepts stick.

I am not rejecting the idea of inquiry as the "heart" of social studies. I think it's an interesting idea. I am just wondering:

• What does it look like?
• How would I organize it and support it?
• How would I assess it?

The C3 Framework is new, and like the Common Core, there will most likely be lots of resources coming out to support its implementation. I will be on the lookout for the inquiry pieces. Meanwhile, I will see how I can do the other parts just a little bit better.

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.

Annotations as Assessment

It is very refreshing to read a professional book about teaching reading through the workshop approach at the secondary level. Cris Tovani, in So What Do They Really Know? Assessment That Informs Teaching and Learning (Stenhouse, 2011), describes her practice with high school students, and most examples are from ninth graders. Her students are diverse, some reading as much as six years below grade level and some several years above, and they are from varied cultural backgrounds. She teaches in the block schedule, with 100-minute classes. She has five sections with twenty to thirty students in each class. Knowing that Tovani is a full-time teacher with a normal teaching load adds weight to her information. I appreciate it when she says things like, "I probably should do it this way, but I don't have time, so I do it that way instead, and I still get the data I need." Instead of advice from researchers or literacy coaches or professors or full-time think-tankers, this is advice from the trenches. That adds credibility to her words of wisdom.

One suggestion Tovani makes is to use text annotations as assessment data. This is the second thing I've read in as many days about the value of annotating texts for both the student and the teacher. The other was from Smokey Daniels and Nancy Steineke's Texts and Lessons for Teaching Literature with 65 Fresh Mentor Texts (Heinemann, 2013). These authors insist that annotation is critical for showing thinking while reading. Daniels and Steineke provide a lesson specifically for teaching annotation, while Tovani provides examples of her own model and student samples to show the kinds of information a teacher can glean from annotated texts. Both books are very clear about how to teach annotation and what can be expected from students.

I know my high school expects students to annotate texts extensively from the tenth grade onward. However, in my eighth grade class, I have students use sticky notes or their Reading Notebook for responses instead of writing directly on or near the text. This has been somewhat successful, but only for students who are already comfortable responding with stickies. Most of my students avoid jotting notes while they read because they say it slows them down too much and they lose the flow of the story when they stop so often. I have accepted that as long as they stop periodically to respond in their Reading Notebook in a longer entry. Maybe I need to re-think this.

I was impressed with how easily Tovani was able to pull information from the annotations about where students struggled, where they got stuck, where they lost comprehension which then affected the rest of the piece, and where students were spot-on in their thinking. I got the impression that Tovani knew her students as readers much better than I know mine, despite my ernest attempts at reading conferences and comprehension spot-checks. I also marvelled at how quickly she could pull out these little gems from a few quickly jotted notes, and then spot a trend or gap or next step to address in the next lesson.

I think I will expect more annotations this year, probably still on sticky notes because students don't buy their texts. I will gather them more frequently, instead of only mid-way and unit end. I know I will need practice to see where students are successful and where they need support. All this will take time, but I think having visual evidence of their thinking will help students see their growth as thinkers, help me to give just-in-time instruction during conferences, and help parents to understand the kind of reading work we are doing in class. That's a lot of bang for one small change.