Reading Critically in Social Studies

Starting the year in Grade 8 Social Studies: Early American History means setting up ways of thinking and doing while tackling content at the same time. Two basic skills in particular are used continually throughout the year: reading primary source documents and thinking critically about perspective and bias within sources. Therefore early in the year it's important to establish strategies for reading informational texts and to consider context while reading.

Our first unit is Residents and Invaders (AKA Native Americans and Explorers). The first textbook chapter focuses in on Native Americans before Europeans arrived. It discusses how they arrived in the Americas and how different regional groups adapted to their environment. As with all textbooks, the information is general and limited, but gives students a basic understanding. It also does very little to address primary sources and bias. 

Therefore, I open the unit with a slideshow that addresses the idea that there is a lot of bias and stereotyping of American Indians in society today. I list the many different terms used, including Indian, American Indian, Native Americans, and First Americans and ask students to consider which term seems to fit the best, and which one the worst. I show images of sports mascots and children's coloring book images that negatively stereotype them, and ask them to discuss what these images are actually showing. This opens them to the idea of considering popular terms and media images with an eye to bias and racism. Then I throw out the question, "If I wanted to know what name to call them or what they think of these images, how could I do that best?" Of course, at least one of my brilliant students comes up with, "You could ask them!" (also "You could Google it!"). 

As I was transitioning through Dulles Airport a couple years ago, I wandered through the Smithsonian Museum gift shop (so cool!). They had a display from the National Museum of the American Indian, and I bought a book called Do All Indians Live in Tipis? (2007). This question and answer book addresses the most commonly asked questions the museum guides hear, and all the answers are written by American Indians. Here was a way we could "ask them!" I knew immediately that this could be my resource for opening the door to primary source documents, and also reading informational texts because the articles are short and at approximately a sixth grade reading level (easy enough for almost all of my students to read independently with good comprehension). I chose four articles to read over the next couple of weeks: "What is the Correct Terminology: American Indian, Indian, Native American, or Native?", "What's Wrong with Naming Sports Teams Indians, Braves, etc.?", "Where did Indians Come From? How Did They Get to the Americas?", and "What is the Relationship of Native Americans to the Environment?".

I taught students how to annotate informational texts using the gradual release of responsibility model (I do it, we do it together, you do it). I started by reviewing the seven major reading comprehension strategies, as outlined by Harvey Daniels and Nancy Steineke in Texts and Lessons for Teaching Literature (Heinemann, 2013):

THINGS TO THINK ABOUT WHILE READING:
·            What I understand right now (short 1-sentence summary)
·            Personal connections that I am reminded of
·            Visual or sensory images I am experiencing as I read
·            Questions I have (including new words)
·            Answers to my questions (including predicting word meanings)
·            Parts that seem especially important or interesting
·            The main idea or message of the whole text

I modeled how to make "margin notes" to capture thinking about the reading while I read, including noticing new vocabulary words and guessing meaning before continuing. Students were good at underlining and highlighting parts that stood out for them; they were less skilled at noting why they marked those particular passages. I gave them a "notes goal" for each passage (usually 3-5 depending on the length of the piece), and asked them to write a main idea summary at the end. I collected the articles with their annotations, and gave them feedback to help them progress. 

One common error that I continually wrote feedback, and taught follow-up lessons, about was the main idea summary. Students often wrote what the article was "about", for example: "This article was about how Native Americans came to the Americas and settled there". True, that is what the article was about, but there is no actual information embedded within that summary. Did they even read it beyond the title? I was looking for the three scientific theories and the Native American's perspective captured within the summary statement. If students followed the "about" statement with main idea details, that would have been fine; however, they rarely did. Nancy Boyles, in this article from Educational Leadership says this about close reading of texts, 

"Paraphrasing is pretty low on Bloom's continuum of lower- to higher-order thinking, yet many students stumble even here. This is the first stop along the journey to close reading. If students can't paraphrase the basic content of a passage, how can they dig for its deeper meaning?"

Students made progress, but there is more work to be done here. We are about to do a short text set unit that will investigate whether Christopher Columbus was a hero or a villain. Within this mini-unit, we will continue our work with text annotations and main idea summaries, as well as noticing how authors include bias in their texts. The foundations laid this first quarter will set us up as we read primary documents from the colonial America era as well as current event articles and research. Each successive reading experience gives me the opportunity to review past skills and add on an additional layer. Hopefully by the end of the year, they will be skilled readers of primary documents and critical thinkers about sources and bias.

I

Using Booksource's Classroom Organizer with My Classroom Library

Today I want to put a plug in for a great new tool I've started using with my classroom library: Booksource's Classroom Organizer. This is a free book check-out system that also generates handy teacher reports.

All set up and reports can be managed via the teacher page:

The first thing to do to get things set up is to import your classroom inventory using an Excel spreadsheet. You can choose which categories to include for the books. It's easy to add additional titles individually once the big bulk of the inventory is imported.

Then you need to add students to your list so they have permission to check out (and check in) books electronically. They can do this from the student page:

Admittedly, the graphic is a bit elementary for eighth grade, but the tool is worth it. So far, students have been very responsible about using the system independently (once I posted all the login information in two or three places around the room). One super nice feature is that students will get an email every three weeks reminding them that they have a particular book checked out. This frees me up from looking at the hand-scrawled sign-out paper and trying to monitor that myself. Often just this little reminder is enough to get them to return the book to the library.

I haven't used the teacher reports much yet, since we've only been in school a month. Here are the options









This is my favorite report, Current Books Checked Out. This also gets sent to me automatically via email every three weeks so I can keep track.











This is what the Student Checkout Detail looks like for one prolific reader. I can see he is a dystopian reader mostly, but graphic novels also catch his attention.

I've been very pleased with the hand-off nature of the Classroom Organizer system. There is still an honor system in place for kids to actually do the check-in/check-out process instead of just walking out with a book. But it's no worse that it was before. The Classroom Org. system takes a little time to get set up, but their tech support people were super helpful when I ran into a glitch. For teachers who are trying to track students' reading lives, levels of text complexity, variety of genres, or volume, I highly recommend this system.

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! 

Building Classroom Community

The first week of school is over. This past week has been filled with community-building activities, communicating rules and procedures, and establishing routines. I'm itching to get started with curriculum, but I know that these past four days are vital preparation for a smooth year ahead. Here are some of the things I did last week for Get-to-know-you/ Community-building games: 

• Seating Challenges: Middle school students tend to stick to the people they know, especially early in the year. If allowed to choose seats on the first day, they would sit next to their friends, leaving the new kids and those who may not have any friends in the class to fend for themselves and feel left out. Not good! The series of seating challenges in this article makes sure that every day for the first 5 days of school, seating is mixed up and students work with different seat mates. It takes about 10 minutes of class time, but by the end of the 5 days, students are better able to work as a group, I have a good sense of leaders and followers, and the set-in-stone seating friendship spots are never allowed to start. It also gets students in the habit of looking at the front of the room for any instructions they need to do right away.
• Gorilla-Man-Net: This is also known as Gorilla-Man-Gun but I am trying to reduce violence in the world so we use nets instead of guns. Basically, this is a variation on
  
  rock-paper-scissors. Students stand back to back, say, "Gorilla, Man, Net, Go!" and on "Go", they spin around, assuming one of the positions-- monkey arms for the Gorilla, fashion-model pose for (hu)Man, or swing an invisible net for Net. Gorilla beats man, man beats net, and net beats gorilla. As students are preparing to play, I shout out a category, for example "food", and the winner has to tell their favorite/best, and the loser has to tell their worst. Students find new partners while music plays, and then go again with another category (movies, books, bands, vacation spot, sport, color, etc.). It's fun to end up with a whole group share, "What did you learn about someone that you didn't know before?"
• Alliteration Name Game: Although this is an old and familiar game, it quickly teaches everyone's name to everyone in the room--including me. Students think of one thing they like that starts with the same sound as their first name, for example, "Ms. Pohl likes playing piano." Students sit in a circle. One person starts, then the next person has to say the first person's name and likes before saying his/her own name and likes. This continues around the circle until the last person has to say all the students' names and likes before his/her own.
• Six-Word Memoir: The idea of telling one's story in only six words appealed to me as a quick way to learn something meaningful about each other. We studied a selection of six-word memoirs and analyzed the kinds of stories they told: passions, recent activities, life philosophies, past lives (memoirs), feelings. I shared a few of my own: "So many books, so little time." (passion), "Changing 'should' to 'am' is hard." (working on some life goals this year), "Setting up house for college boys." (the story of my summer). I had students work with partners to write one or two six-word memoirs about the first day of school as a way to practice the genre without any personal risk. I read a few aloud (anonymously). Finally, we watched Gigi McAllister's class video sharing their fourth grade end-of-year six-word memoirs to look at more examples. Students were then let loose to draft several that captured a passion, a life philosophy, or a memoir. I asked them to choose their favorite to write on a brightly colored sentence strip, which they read out to the class before sticking to the wall around the room.
• Where in the World? As international people, one of the hardest questions we get asked is,

  

  Image from 4shared.com

  "Where are you from?" On the surface, it seems easy enough, but to those of us who are expatriates, there are lots of different angles to it: Where were you born? What passport do you hold? Where do you live now? What's your "home" country? Each question could be a different answer. For those students who have mixed-culture families, it becomes even more complex. For this activity, I have students answer each of those questions above on an index card. I post continent signs around the room (excluding Antarctica). Then I call out one of the questions, asking students to go to the continents where the country of their answer resides. Once in those groups, they share where they lived, learning something new about each other. I finish with the whole group, asking, "What did you learn about someone that you didn't know before?"
• Workshop Agreements: This came on day 3 after students had done other community-building games both in my class and in other classes. We are starting the year launching Writer's Workshop, so I asked the students to think of a time when writing was going well for them, when they were immersed in their writing, ideas were flowing, it was all good. What were the conditions that allowed that writing to happen? Think of environmental conditions, mental conditions, etc. They brainstormed a list in their writer's notebooks for about 5 minutes. Then I turned it around and asked them to think of a time when writing was bad for them, stuck for ideas, unable to focus, not productive at all. What were those conditions? They wrote for another 5 minutes. Students shared out while I made one list of conditions for good and conditions for bad. I reminded them that we were a community of learners, and we needed to make some agreements for how our class would be run so that everyone was able to do their best work, which meant doing those things on the "good" side and trying to avoid those things on the "bad" side. I asked them to notice that not everything on the "good" side was something we as a class, or I as a teacher, could control, such as having a plan before writing or having too many thoughts to settle on one. But there were several things on there that we could control, so we highlighted those: quiet to work, time to get help from partners (talk time), comfortable seating/ temperature/ lighting, organized materials, good seating choice, focused and on-task behavior to meet deadlines, participation in conversations. The next day I wrote them up as agreements and went over the list, giving them an opportunity to ask clarifying questions or to object to any of the items. Finally, I asked them to give a thumbs up if they could live with those agreements. These agreements will form the foundation of my classroom management for the rest of the year.
• Reader-Writer Poster: One of my main objectives as an English Language Arts teacher is to promote lifelong habits of reading and writing. The Reader-Writer Poster is a project to
  
  showcase who students are as literate people (and as a message: Everyone in this room likes to read and write! You are a member of the literacy club!). The components of the poster are: a photo of yourself, an "about the author" blurb, a self-written one-sentence philosophy statement about reading and another one of writing, a quote from someone famous that you like, a piece of writing from the past 5 years (or excerpt), and 3-5 favorite books, each one with a short summary and a quote (and a book jacket picture if possible). One of the books is marked "favorite", and that blurb needs to explain why it's your favorite. Any program can be used to make it (a technology diagnostic assessment!), or it can be done by hand (also a piece of technology diagnostic information). Students lay them out on top of their table, and then go around the room for a gallery walk looking at others' posters. They complete a graphic organizer finding connections to other people in the room who have similar taste in books or life experiences, etc. I like finishing the class with a whole group share: "Who did you find a connection with? What was that connection?"

I had a lot of fun last week playing the games, learning bits and pieces about the kids, and watching their personalities. I will continue to learn more about them academically over the next couple of weeks as we do beginning-of-year assessments. I feel good, though, about getting the year started on a positive and fun note. We have plenty of time for seriousness!

Setting Up For a Year of Learning

Here we are again, poised to open our doors to a new batch of learners on Monday. This year, the batch of learners needs to include the middle school English Language Arts teachers as well, while we launch the implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) writing standards. Over the past month, I immersed myself in leadership training, learning techniques and thinking through how to help the department in this journey.

In true Understanding by Design fashion, I identified our goals:

1. Become familiar with the CCSS writing standards and related language standards, including noticing what was similar and different with our last set of standards as well as noticing what elements built up from year to year within the CCSS strands (unpacking the standards).
2. Identify and understand how to use the new Units of Study in Writing (Heinemann, 2014) on-demand performance assessments and learning progressions as tools to identify student strengths and needs (prepare for student data analysis). 
   
3. Become familiar with the new Units of Study in Writing (UoSW), including mapping out the sequence of units across the year and across curricular areas, noticing similarities and differences with our last set of units, and tips to lift the level of our teaching in those units (prepare for new teaching).
4. Make a departmental goal that guides our learning together and supports our efforts of professional growth as well as impacts student learning (goal setting).
5. Gather student data and analyze it so that it informs our teaching in ways that improve student learning (student data analysis).
6. Teach the new units, reflect and get feedback on our practice, and look for improvement in student learning (implementation of curriculum).

Our teacher inservice week focused on setting up Professional Learning Teams across all school divisions, during which we learned a cycle of continuous improvement as a way to work in our PLTs:

1. Analyze student data for areas of strength and areas of need
2. Identify a curriculum standard related to the area of need and unpack it
3. Identify a student and teacher goal to address the area of need
4. Professional learning to address the area of need
5. Implement new learning and gather assessment data
6. Analyze student data to see if student need improved

This continuous improvement cycle fits well with my goals for the department. Once we've decided the year-long calendar, we can gather student data through on-demand assessments before the unit starts, unpack the related genre-based writing standard for the unit we're about to launch, and make our student and teacher goal. We can spend our professional learning step digging into the unit itself as well as other resources such as Pathways to the Common Core and TCRWP videos. We can implement the unit in the classroom, get feedback from peer observation, and bring student data back to the team for further analysis and reflection.

I am excited by this school-wide initiative, and how it supports the work we teachers need to do this year. We have always been a strong team, and this protocol will help us become even better.