Anecdotal Notes: Still crazy after all these years!

Anecdotal notes-- AAAARGH! You would think that after 30 years of teaching, I would have this beast figured out! I want to capture the important stuff about kids as it happens, but I don't want to spend a lot of time doing it. I also need my system to be organized and easy to use. I want to track data about individuals as well as easily identify small groups with similar needs. Is there one system that can do it all?

I've tried the notebook approach: Each student gets a page in a notebook, and I take notes on that page when I confer or get a new piece of data (like a standardized test score or a reading goal) or have a parent conference. That works pretty well if I'm only going to focus on the individual and his/her progress. It's much harder to see trends across the class or pull together small groups.

I've tried an iPad app called Confer. It seemed like it could hold individual info as well as do the kind of sorting/grouping I was looking for. It also promised a way to match student information with the CCSS standards to track progress and help with standards-based grading. However, the set up took so long, inputting the CCSS and students, and typing on the iPad is so slow for me, that I abandoned that method as well.

For several years I used a card system that was housed in a folder. Each student had a card, but unlike the notebook idea, the cards were taped onto the interior sides of the folder in a tiered manner, so that one overlapped the other, leaving a small portion visible at the bottom. Student names were written on the visible part, and I could use that space to track how often I met with a student. Again, this was good for individual progress, and a better system for making sure I was getting to all students in a timely manner, but still not so good at pulling together groups of common needs. Also, handwriting is slow work!

So this year I am back to technology. Our tech coach suggested using Google Forms as a system. It's not slick and it's not fancy, but so far it's working out. I have a form that lists student names as a "checklist" of answers to "question", a list of my unit names as the checklist answers to my next "question", an open text box to answer the question of Notes, and a final open text box for the question of Items for Next Meeting. As I confer or get data, I select a student name and unit from the checkboxes, quickly type in my conference notes, and capture what next steps will be. This data, along with the date, is gathered in Responses, which can be viewed as a Google spreadsheet.

The advantage of the spreadsheet is in the sorting and filtering it can do that the notebook and flip cards can't. If I want to see all notes on a student, I can sort names alphabetically, and all responses for the student are clustered together.

If I want to see which students need work on their close reading, for example, I can filter out only the Short Story Reading unit, and even find all responses that have the words "close reading" in them. Voila! A small group with similar needs!

So far I don't have many notes on kids because we are just getting started in school. I wonder if the spreadsheet will eventually get messy or bulky and hard to use. I may need to have one for semester 1 and one for semester 2. However, it has fulfilled a lot of needs so far.

Another tech tool suggested by the tech coach was Evernote. I haven't done much exploring with it yet because I'm kind-of into Google Forms right now. So I'm keeping that option in my back pocket as I see how Forms plays out.

What is your anecdotal note systems? Does yours handle multiple classes and large numbers of kids? Can you track individuals as well as filter/sort for small groups?

"Where is there a place for students to choose their genres?"

Last spring, our school hosted literacy consultants Stevi Quate and Matt Glover to work with our staff for the same week. Stevi was focused on secondary literacy (MS/HS) while Matt worked with the elementary teams on their literacy units. Near the end of their week, they sat down with team leaders and the curriculum director to look over reading and writing units from K-12. A colorful matrix was created, color coding the different modes (narrative, informational, argument) and types of products (literary essay, realistic short story, etc.). 

When the dust settled, Stevi turned to me and asked this question of our middle school writing program, "Where is there a place for students to choose their genres?"

I looked her in the eye and answered, "No where." 

It's true, we have controlled every genre in every unit. We also control the type of product within that genre. We allow kids choice of topic within the structured genre and product type, but we don't have an "open" unit.  To make that happen, we would have to drop a unit, and the only one that is moderately "optional" is our poetry unit ("optional" because it doesn't neatly fit into the narrative/ informational/argument CCSS modes). 

I know my team feels strongly that the poetry unit is essential to our middle school writing program. Year after year, we see middle schoolers pouring out their hearts about big important issues in their poetry. Our struggling writers love the loose structure and low volume that poetry offers. Our strong writers embrace obscure references and hidden symbolism. Shy students perform proudly in front of audiences. Drama queens and kings slam their poems with gusto. 

And when we implemented the CCSS and revised our units to meet the standards, poetry worked for many of the language standards, especially those that addressed connotations and denotations of words, the power of strong verbs and nouns, and understanding and use of figurative language. So we felt good about keeping poetry in our year-long plan. 

But here's the thing: I still have Stevi's question in my head. If we want our kids to be motivated and self-directed writers, they should be able to choose a writing project at some point. 

So I offered a compromise: an after school creative writing club. Those writers that want a time and space and some feedback on their independent writing projects can join me an hour a week and get words on paper (or screens). Twelve enthusiastic writers signed up, most of whom had projects started or had an idea they've been waiting to write. One has already published her ongoing story on a fan fic site and gotten several hundred readers. All but one are in 6th and 7th graders (hmmm... what's up with the 8th graders?). 

I'm pleased there is interest out there for this open-ended writing club. I wish there were space in the year to extend it to all kids, but I just don't see how that will happen without a massive curriculum review/revision. For now, it's baby steps.

How do you balance the demands of the CCSS writing modes with open-genre writing units?

U.S. Elections Projects: "Fair and Balanced"

As a teacher of U.S. History, I cannot ignore the momentous happening of a Presidential election, even though I am teaching in a Middle Eastern country to international students. Our kids walked into the new school year from summer vacation with their heads filled with news, ads, and dinner table conversations about the candidates. Passions were high, and misinformation rampant. 

My grade 8 colleague and I knew we needed to harness the energy around this topic without letting it devolve into a "my candidate is better than yours" playground fight. We needed to find a project which allowed students to learn about the candidates and issues in an objective manner so that they could make informed choices rather than being swayed by the latest sensational headline or the loudest voice. We needed a way for students to agree or disagree with a position and back up that opinion with factual information, rather than fighting for (or against) a particular candidate. Just like our professional meeting norms, we wanted them to "disagree with ideas, not people" to keep things from getting too personal.

CC image from Wikimedia Commons website

We decided against doing a traditional campaign ad project. First, the vast majority of our students already backed one candidate, which makes those that favor the other major candidate feel outnumbered and isolated-- never a good idea in middle school. Secondly, if we "assigned" a candidate to students as a way to get a more balanced view, those students who had very strong feelings against that candidate would instantly shut down-- again, never a good idea to lose motivation with middle schoolers.

By G. Skidmore on Wikipedia

Therefore, we decided to make our project revolve around issues, and to include the top four candidates instead of only the top two: Jill Stein (Green Party), Gary Johnson (Libertarian Party), Donald Trump (Republican Party), and Hillary Clinton (Democratic Party). We formed groups of 4, and students split the candidates between themselves. We then randomly assigned the groups one issue each: Immigration, Economy, Terrorism, Civil Rights, Environment, and Gun Control. 

Image from Wikipedia website

Students researched "their" candidate's position on how to solve the focal issue. They used ProCon.org (they have a very easy-to-use 2016 Presidential Elections page that features all four candidates), the candidates' own websites, and reputable news organizations to find their information. Students did not have to agree with the candidates' positions; they merely had to find out what that position was so that they could teach their group members about it. This alleviated a lot of push-back when students had to research a candidate who was not their initial choice. They could see the logic of understanding other candidates' views in order to argue intelligently against them.

Once the research was finished, students shared out how each of the four candidates would solve that particular issue. Next, they had to come to an agreement about which position their group would support, answering this question: Which solution is best for America? This led to some very lively discussions, with lots of critical thinking around the pros and cons of each, and students defending their opinions with researched information. Some groups also learned the art of compromise when they could not agree on a single position.

By focusing the discussion on the candidates' positions on a particular issue, it kept candidates' personalities out of it (the source of much of the sensationalist news headlines). Additionally, the focus was so narrow that it avoided the question of who is the best candidate overall. It also allowed those few students who backed the less popular candidate a safe way to advocate for their candidate without getting shouted down. 

The final step was to present their findings in a multimedia project ("live" slideshow, screen-cast recording, or movie) during which the group's choice for best solution was highlighted and contrasted with the other solutions. All students were involved in creating the production, since each group member was an "expert" on one position. Interestingly, when all the presentations were finished, each class featured three different candidates as having a "best" position, and across all classes, all four candidates were represented at least once. 

When I asked students what they had learned from this project, many students wrote that they didn't know there were other parties besides the Democratic and Republican parties. They had never heard of Gary Johnson, Jill Stein, or their parties. They learned that their preferred candidate may not have had the best solution to their focal issue, and that other candidates had some good points. They learned that some candidates agreed with others on issues-- even Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton had points of agreement! They learned about the particulars involved in their focal issue, and some of the terms that were being thrown around related to them: TPP, fracking, immigrants vs. refugees, Dreamers, Obamacare, Religious Restoration Act, EPA, etc. They also learned that there are places to find accurate information, and to not always believe what a candidate or headline says is true.

We still have a couple months before the elections. Although our project is over, our discussions aren't. We will jump into early US history next week, but as the Presidential debates and other major milestones happen, we will keep track of current events. My hope is that, as the months pass, my students will listen and read with a more critical and informed perspective than they had when the year began. They will be active citizens.

Holding kids accountable to home reading: Reading logs?

To use reading logs or not to use reading logs? That is the question! 

Our middle school English Language Arts program has a commitment to lifelong reading habits, which means that we expect students to have a book going at home at all times throughout the year. We are also committed to holding kids accountable for that reading, because we know that our reluctant readers need some kind of accountability system to keep them going. What that accountability system looks like varies from grade to grade, and even from classroom to classroom. 

Over the years, we 8th grade teachers have tried many things, but we've always started the year with paper reading logs that track daily reading statistics, and a weekly reading response. Based on the Teacher's College Reading and Writing Project's (TCRWP) recommendation, reading logs that track title, author, time of day, number of minutes, and number of pages read each day can become a data source for students to reflect on themselves as readers. Am I only reading at night and falling asleep with my book? Is that the best time to do active reading? Do I read in 5 or 10 minute bursts, when I'm in the car or waiting for the bus? Do I wait until the weekend and read for long stretches of time but don't read during the school week? Am I reading at a good pace, or am I slow (is my book too hard?) or fast (is my book too easy?)? How do I want to improve as a reader?

We only ask for the daily log to be completed for a limited time-- usually during the first couple months of school. During those first months, students do some analysis to look at their reading habits and evaluate how well they are meeting their goals. Later, we back off and ask students to track number of minutes and number of pages read each week, which they report along with their weekly reading response.

Here's the thing: Kids HATE reading logs! The good readers hate them because they just want to immerse themselves in their reading and not bother with tracking their minutes and pages. The struggling readers hate them because it's tedious and it shows that they aren't actually doing the reading they are supposed to. Mostly, it just seems like busywork without purpose. 

This led my colleague and me to really re-think reading logs this year. Something needed to change. Either we make the value of reading logs clearer to students (as TCRWP explains, just like athletes keep stats to find what's working and what needs improvement, so can readers use these stats to become better readers), or we find another way to hold students accountable for their reading. 

That thinking led us to this question: What do adult readers do when they want to have an active reading life? As active adult readers, here is what we do:

• We keep track of the books we read on a social media site (I use Goodreads). I post up a book when I start it, and then review it when I finish it.
  
• We talk about the books we read with others. I have been a member of an adult book club for almost 20 years. Knowing that I have to discuss a particular book on a particular day (and have something to say about it) holds me accountable to reading and thinking about that book.
• We get suggestions for our next reads from friends, through social media (like Goodreads) or from Amazon.com ("Customers who bought this item also bought..."), or by exploring more books by the same author.

Here is what we don't do: Keep a daily reading log, even a weekly reading log, of minutes and pages. We log the books we are reading as we change books. We are held accountable because we have people in our lives that follow our reading and talk to us about our books.

Yes, but... middle school students do need a little more accountability structure than I do as an adult reader with well established lifelong reading habits. Our compromise:

1. Students need to read at least 100 minutes (about 100 pages) each week. They will need to track this somehow on their own. They can decide when those minutes happen, although I will recommend that it's not all one chunk of reading on the weekend (there is value to smaller but more frequent practice).
2. They need to think about their reading, and show that thinking in a weekly reading response. I am afraid that waiting until the book is finished will result in very little writing about reading for reluctant readers. Writing weekly will keep them accountable for reporting their reading minutes/pages, and having to say something about what they read means they have to have read something. I will give them in-class time to complete this for the first month.
3. Writing about reading is a pointless task unless you use it as a way to communicate your thinking to others. We are going to have kids get into small Reading Clubs (3-4 students) who will hold short book discussions on Thursdays. We'll ask them to write their response first, and then discuss their books with others. 
   
4. Their written responses will be on Google docs, which they will share with members of their group (and me), so they can go back and see what they each read if they need a next book suggestion. We used to use Shelfari, which was a super easy and attractive platform, but they have merged with Goodreads and are not in use anymore. Goodreads is not very student friendly, and Google docs is familiar and easy for the kids because we use it all the time.

We are launching this next week. I hope the social aspect of Reading Clubs makes their home reading feel more fun and purposeful (and hold them accountable for doing their reading). I was reluctant to give up class time at first (so much to do! so little time!), but if I value the home reading program (which I do), then I should devote class time to it. We can ease off of weekly Reading Club time, and turn it into monthly Reading Club as habits get established. 

What do you do to hold kids accountable for reading at home? How do you track what and how much kids are reading? Do you use reading logs?

Deconstructing one CCSS Reading Information standard

My teaching partner and I are happily chugging our way through the social justice informational reading unit, spending quite a lot of energy on teaching summarizing in a way that "Determine(s) a central idea of a text" (RI 8.2) and "Cite(s) the textual evidence that most strongly supports an analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text." (RI 8.1). It surprises me how difficult it is for students to boil down details into a main idea, and then figure out which details to include in their summary paragraph. Then again, I have been practicing this for a lot of years, and this is our first year implementing the CCSS reading standards with students. I hope to see summarizing skills spiral up in the coming years. (see this blog post about breaking down summarizing skills)

Anyway, although we have our work cut out for us with summaries, we know how to tackle it. However, this new CCSS reading standard had us a little stumped: "Analyze how a text makes connections among and distinctions between individuals, ideas, or events (e.g., through comparisons, analogies, or categories)." (RI 8.3) At first glance, it seems fairly straightforward: students would find who is connected to whom, what events they participated in, what social justice ideas they were fighting for. A mind map, web, or graphic organizer could help students show those connections.

But then we went back to "Analyze how a text..." Here the standard seems to be looking at author's craft rather than finding the connections. And then there's "...(e.g., through comparisons, analogies, or categories)" which seems to direct the reader to look for those particular author's craft moves. This could be a little trickier. First, what's the difference between "comparisons", "analogies", and "categories"? We'd need to teach that. Then, finding points in their texts where the author "make(s) connections among and distinctions between" so students can analyze how the author is doing that.

image from books-a-million website

What does this look like in practice? Time to turn to models and examples for help. I returned to the Grade 8 EngageNY units to see how they address this standard. In module 3B, The Civil Rights Movement and The Little Rock Nine, students read two texts: A Mighty Long Way by Carlotta Walls LaNier and Little Rock Girl 1957 by Shelley Tougas. Students have this learning target: "I can use items about the civil rights era to build background knowledge about A Mighty Long Way." This seems to be directly related to the schema research students did before they got their books. Check!

Next: "I can explain how the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court case connects to the Jim Crow laws." and "I can use evidence from Brown v. Board of Education to support my understanding of the text and the desegregation of schools in the South." OK, easy enough to ask students to find places in the book where they can connect what they learned from their social justice issue schema research to events in their book. So far so good!

image from Smithsonian APA website

At this point, students are just finding connections, but haven't yet done any author's craft work. Later in the unit, there is this learning target: "I can analyze the connection between Brown v. Board of Education and Carlotta’s experiences." At least this has the word "analyze" in it, but I still don't see where students are looking at how the author is making connections and distinctions via "comparisons, analogies, and categories".

Our Curriculum Coordinator gave each of us a "flip book" for the CCSS that breaks the standards down into learning targets (very handy! Unfortunately, I don't have it in front of me to cite right now, but will add it later). Here is what the flip book had for RI 8.3:

• I can explain how the individuals, events, and/or ideas in a text affect one another. 
• I can analyze connections and distinctions between individuals, events, and/or ideas in a text.
• I can analyze how an author makes connections and distinctions between individuals, ideas, or events through comparison (e.g., The Underground Railroad and the Jewish Resistance Movement), analogies (e.g., One-part-per-billion is equal to one sheet in a roll of toilet paper stretching from New York to London), or categories (e.g., Leaders of Change-- Rosa Parks, Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Henry Ford).

Once again, the first two bullets are easy enough to manage, especially with some kind of graphic organizer. I also like how there is an easy-to-hard progression with these bullets. The third one is helpful in the way it gave examples for what each of those craft moves could look like.

image from bibliolinks.com

I think what I will need to do in order to fully meet the standard is to teach the vocabulary (compare, analogy, and category), and then model, model, model. 

Our model text is We've Got a Job by Cynthia Levinson. I have been modeling summarizing and connecting to schema. Now I need to start modeling "connections and distinctions between individuals, ideas, or events" with some kind of graphic organizer. And finally, I need to go back into the text and look for places where the author compared, categorized, or used analogies in order to make those links.

I will ask students to do the same with their books. Perhaps the best place for them to work through this is during a book club discussion, so that they can get support from each other and build those ideas together. Periodic exit tickets to check their understanding, and perhaps an item on a summative assessment would show me how well students met the standard by the end of the unit. 

As I looked back at the CCSS document to write this blog post, I noticed that the grade 6 and 7 standards have students learning how to make connections within informational texts. I am pretty sure my grade 8 students will not have trouble with the first two bullet points from the flip book. 

But to lift their level of analysis to the grade 8 standard will take careful planning, modeling, and practice. It's easy enough to just do the parts of the CCSS that are familiar and comprehensible, but to really address the standards so that students reach the level of rigor intended, we teachers need to push ourselves out of our comfort zones. By deconstructing each standard, we can identify what the new learning is for our students and make sure we teach it in a way that makes sense to kids.