Kim Yaris

The READING Checklist Manifesto

July 1, 2010 by Kim Yaris

A couple of weeks ago, I shared that I was looking for something non-teachery to jumpstart my summer reading. The book I settled on was The Checklist Manifesto (Amazon Affiliate Link) by Dr. Atul Gawande. The beginning read like some of the action packed scenes I’ve seen on Grey’s Anatomy and ER. I felt queasy after reading about some of the operating room emergencies he described but what I really liked about this book was that in the cracks of what was primarily a book about medicine, was careful reflection that could be applied to all professional disciplines. In the early chapters, Gawande wrote:

“Here, then, is our situation at the start of the twenty-first century: We have accumulated stupendous know-how. We have put it in the hands of some of the most highly-trained, highly skilled, and hardworking people in our society. And with it, they have indeed accomplished extraordinary things. Nonetheless, that know-how is often unmanageable. Avoidable failures are common and persistent, not to mention demoralizing and frustrating, across many fields—from medicine to finance, business to government. And the reason is increasingly evident: the volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our individual ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely, and reliably. Knowledge has both saved us and burdened us.”

“Avoidable failures are common and persistent, not to mention demoralizing and frustrating.”

These words inevitably bring me back to education. I think about reading and the oft talked about failure of schools to effectively bring all students to an acceptable level of reading proficiency. How is it that so much has been researched and written about teaching kids to read, yet, education consistently fails to meet the needs of some students?

In The Checklist Manifesto (Amazon Affiliate Link), Gawande told the story about being part of a multi-nation team sponsored by the World Health Organization to devise a cost-effective way of improving surgical outcomes. After many meetings and much research, they devised a simple, two-minute, nineteen item checklist to be completed during the course of surgery. In their clinical trials, using the checklist caused the rate of major complications following surgery to fall 36% and deaths to decrease 47%. Those are significant results and because of what—a checklist?

This has got me thinking a lot about what we in education can do “to increase our outcomes without necessarily increasing our skill.” If something as simple as a checklist has made such a significant difference in efficiency and effectiveness in something as complicated as an OR, should we be considering it in our classrooms as well?

Gawande and his team took a lot of time to devise and refine the checklist that is now being used in operating rooms across the world, but off the top of my head, some of the things I would be considering for my checklist to improve daily reading instruction would include:

_____ALL students have spent no less than thirty minutes reading independently.
_____ALL students are reading books during independent reading that match their ability level.
_____I have checked in with my neediest, most struggling readers in either a small group or one-on-one conference.
_____I have delivered whole group, small group, and one-on-one instruction.
_____ My whole group, small group, and one-on-one mini lessons were derived from the observed needs of the children in my classroom.
_____I have read aloud to my students today.

This is where I’d start. As I continue to think about developing this list, I’m curious to know what you think. Does anything on my list seem unreasonable? What else should be on this list?

The Summer Writing Project: Blogging

June 22, 2010 by Kim Yaris

The end of the school year is imminent. Just three days and the kids are out for the summer. For about the last month, I have been priming my own children for what they will be doing besides going to the beach, lazing around, and hanging out with their friends:

• Reading for no less than five hours a week
• Practicing math facts
• Learning how to type

Over the years, this has been standard practice so Matthew and Nathan seem okay with this plan. But in the back of my mind, I had been toying with yet one more thought for Matthew. Last week he came home with this great little piece that he told me he jotted off the top of his head one afternoon in school. He called it, “My Little Instructions on Life.” On this list of twenty ideas, he included things like:

• Do not kiss your puppy if he does not have a flea collar.
• If the worm is eating the bird, run away.
• If you see an eyeball in your soup, do not eat it.
• Do not name a cat Dog, Monkey, Shark, or Charles.
• Thomas Jefferson did not write Percy Jackson.
• Do not buy lotto tickets because you have a 1% chance of winning.
• Do not smoke because you can get heart disease if you do!
• You will find your long lost piece of cheese when you least expect it.

When I read it, it felt very blog-like to me. So, as I once again reviewed his summer responsibilities, I surreptitiously plugged the idea of a blog. I didn’t know what to expect. I wasn’t sure if he’d roll his eyes and complain about me giving him one more thing to do or if he’d warm up to the idea.

At first, he had a lot of questions. What was a blog exactly? What would he write about? Who would read it? People could really comment on what he was thinking? Hmmmm….

He thought about it for most of the afternoon and kept coming back with questions and ideas. He’d say things like, “You know what, I could write about how to deal with an overtired little brother.” A little while later he’d come back and say, “I could write about how I’m trying to figure out how to get past this one level on my Lego video game. Maybe people could write back and help me out.”

By the end of the day, he had come up with at least ten things he could write about and said, “Can we start this right now?” followed quickly by, “how often do people blog? Could I write like three times a day?”

The idea of blogging has opened a floodgate of possibilities for Matthew. It’s got him thinking like a writer. He’s considering potential topics and making plans about how and what and when to write.

I know that one of the things I need to do more of as an educator is consider how to harness the potential of digital media. For me, Matthew’s blog feels like a big experiment. The first note I have made is that it generates a lot of enthusiasm. Matthew loves the idea of having a place to put his ideas and the potential of a real audience. But I find myself wondering, will this be the sort of project that will start out with a lot of energy and lose steam? Or, will it be the springboard to great thinking, an online writer’s notebook of sorts? I guess only time will tell. As the summer wears on, I promise to keep you posted.

What You Know Without Being Told

June 7, 2010 by Kim Yaris

Look at this picture.

What can you guess about the character that it belongs to?

This is exactly the question I asked a group of second graders and when I did, they astutely called upon their background knowledge to tell me some very smart things. The character is a boy because girls don’t wear swim trunks. The character is not a grown-up because the trunks are not big enough to fit someone older than seven or eight. The notebook is small and portable (they really used that word) so the character carries it with him. The character must be at the beach because you use a bucket and shovel to dig in the sand.

So, do you know who this stuff belongs to? What boy character in the neighborhood of age eight carries around a notebook? Being able to answer that question requires having some background knowledge about children’s literature which given that this character comes from what is popular with the second grade set, they saw that there were only two choices: Jack from Magic Tree House or Nate from Nate the Great. When I added a bottle of maple syrup to the mix, they knew right away. These items belonged to Nate and Nate was going to the beach to do some detective work.

In order to draw this conclusion, these second graders had to infer. Most teachers recognize inferring as an important, higher level comprehension skill but feel stuck when it comes to knowing how to teach it. When we started here and pointed out that inferring is when you take information and put it together with what you know from your prior experiences and draw a conclusion, somehow, it seemed so much easier than it had in the past. As we began to read the Nate the Great and the Boring Beach Bag together, we stopped every so often to talk and think about what we knew without being told and it was amazing how the students could “see between the lines.”

What do you do to help teach your students how to infer? Join our discussion or leave us a message here. We’ve also been doing some work with visualizing to help kids arrive at inferential thinking. If you’re interested in seeing how we did that, click here.

To Assign or Not to Assign? That is the Question

June 1, 2010 by Kim Yaris

It seems that no matter where I go, I enter into the debate about “assigned reading.” In elementary school, it goes by another namesake, “the whole class novel.” Either way, handing out class sets of teacher selected books, assigning chunks of texts to read, and answering questions about the text is fiercely defended by its proponents as a constructive and effective means for teaching children how to become better readers. For those who believe in teaching this way, I always ask one simple question: How much do your students read?

When I talk to teachers about the amount of time that they spend with a whole class novel, most of them tell me that a book generally takes a month or better to complete, depending on how many chapters are in it. At that rate, students finish somewhere around eight to ten books a year. That falls significantly short of the twenty-five book a year standard required by New York State, not to mention my own personal standard of making sure kids finish at least three books a month. When I mention this, I often hear the voice of exasperation, “You think my students should be reading more? I can barely get them to read that much.”

Though it doesn’t sound highly scientific, reading a lot is one of the tenets proven by research to help children become more proficient readers. If kids aren’t reading a lot, we need to question the validity of our teaching practices and wonder out loud and talk to EVERYBODY about what we can do to change this.

Does getting kids to read five to eight hundred pages a week seem like an unattainable dream? If you think yes, I urge you to gather some colleagues together to watch this video. When it’s over, think hard about next year. What can you do differently to rekindle the passion for reading and help your students read more pages, more often?

The More We Know

May 25, 2010 by Kim Yaris

Last night, I laid alongside my first grade son Nathan as he read a book aloud to me. As he read, I found myself listening intently. On the heels of finishing Preventing Misguided Reading, I wanted to understand his reading process better. The authors of this book, Jan Miller Burkins and Melody M. Croft, emphasized time and again the importance of helping children develop “smoothly operating systems” for reading and understanding text. As I listened to Nathan, I thought a lot about his mistakes. What were they telling me about what he knows about text? How did he solve problems that caused him difficulty? Was his system smooth and efficient?

To most people, Nathan is an exceptional first grade reader. However, as I listened to him, I realized that though skilled, he tends to over-rely on guessing words he doesn’t know. Rather than attending to what he knows about letters and sounds, he looks at the first letter and approximates what should go there. Up until now, this has worked well for him. But as I listened, I realized that as the texts he reads grow increasingly more difficult and are supported with fewer picture cues, this won’t be efficient. He is going to need to integrate other strategies into his repertoire to support him as he moves forward.

As I sat analyzing Nathan’s reading behavior, it occurred to me how the work of the reader in a guided reading group is similar to the work of a teacher of guided reading. When children gather to read a book that has been carefully selected by the teacher to present a reasonable challenge, children call upon all of the skills and strategies they know to be able to read that text. With the support of the teacher, children put all of their information together in an effort to nudge forward, to gain greater proficiencies in reading. All the while, the teacher is doing the same thing—calling upon everything she knows about how children learn to read to assess and understand the readers who sit before her. Whose system is efficient? Who is having decoding issues? What, specifically, characterizes those decoding issues? Who is understanding? Who is going deep? Who is fluent? Who understands character? Who understands theme? For whom is this book too easy? Who is ready to move groups?

I read Preventing Misguided Reading because I have so many questions about how to make small group instruction more effective. As I sit here reflecting on what I read and what I learned, I think that it comes down to this: Good guided reading instruction relies on what we know about HOW children develop “smoothly operating systems.” It’s not the materials and it’s not the methodology. Very simply, the more we know and understand about the complex process of learning to read, the more effective our guided reading instruction will become.

Something New Every Day

May 18, 2010 by Kim Yaris

Every time I receive an email from one of the administrators I work with, I smile each time I see her signature. She has cleverly placed these words in bright blue letters to remind educators each and every day of this important message:

“Learning from a teacher who has stopped learning is like drinking from a stagnant pond.”

Indonesian Proverb

At the moment, I am in the process of defining one hundred terms related to literacy. Until I began this venture, I felt confident about my understanding of teaching reading and writing. I am finding that each time I sit down at my computer to write, I toil with the subtleties of language and question what I know. Each definition becomes a quest to confirm my understanding and as I read for validation, I find I don’t know some things as well as I thought.

Two of the terms that I recently set out to define were “mentor text” and “touchstone text.” My first thought was, “Easy! We use these terms interchangeably so whatever I write for one I can cut and paste for the other.” Oh, how I wish it were so simple.

As I sat thinking about these two terms and synthesizing the information in my head, it occurred to me: These terms do not mean exactly the same thing. A touchstone text is a book or piece of writing that a teacher uses as her “go-to” text for classroom discussion and demonstration. A mentor text is the book that a writer lays alongside her when she writes to guide her decisions about writing. The difference is subtle but significant.

My understanding of these terms will impact how I teach students and teachers about the role of mentor texts and touchstone texts in the writing workshop classroom. It reminds me that in my recent teaching, I have forgotten to encourage children to find and use mentors to guide them as they write.

Some days I am absolutely overwhelmed by what I am learning. Other days, I am awed and inspired. But I can safely say that there is not a day that I do not learn something new that humbles me and reminds me of how much there is to learn about being a good educator. A recent IRA publication by authors Jan Miller Burkins and Melody M. Croft called Misguided Reading came in the mail yesterday. I am devouring its short 130 pages because I need to know and understand Guided Reading better. I suspect I’ll have some new learning to share with you next week but in the meantime I ask you this: What are you learning?

Involve Me, I Understand

May 11, 2010 by Kim Yaris

When it comes to planning reading and writing instruction, there is an old Chinese proverb that I live by:

Tell me, I forget.

Show me, I remember.

Involve me, I understand.

I recently taught a group of first graders how to place line breaks in their poetry to help them achieve the sound they desired. If you’ve ever taught this to first graders, you know this is not an easy concept for six and seven year olds. So I started by modeling. I wrote one of the poems written by a child in the class on a large piece of chart paper. The student read how he wanted the poem to sound and as he read it, I marked the pauses with an orange line. Afterward, I showed them how line breaks change the look of the poem.

At one point in my teaching career, this would have been the time when I would have sent my students back to their seats and said, “Now I want you to try this with your own poems.”

And I know what would have happened. I would have been bouncing from frustrated student to frustrated student re-explaining line breaks and what I wanted them to do. While they would have remembered what I wanted them to do, they would not have understood the task.

This is why I don’t stop at modeling when I am introducing new concepts. The Chinese proverb says: “Involve me.” Guided practice is my answer to “involve me.” At this point in my poetry lesson, I asked students to pair off and look at the first part of a poem written by Christiana, another student in the class. We listened to how Christiana wanted the poem to sound and as she read, we used red pens and drew line breaks. Afterward, we practiced rewriting the poem so that it looked the way Christiana intended it to sound.

While students practiced in pairs, I easily visited the eleven groups huddled around the classroom. I knew right away that Mark and Tatiana were having trouble. I knew Dylan and Skylar were struggling too. So I pulled them all together and we worked out the kinks as a small group.

Then, I knew they were ready to try it on their own.

When they went off to write, it was calm and peaceful in the classroom. The poems written by these first graders were inspired and beautiful. And most importantly, they appeared on the page the way these writers wanted them to sound.

As a student teacher nineteen years ago, I had an outstanding mentor who reminded me daily of the importance of modeling. For years, as I sat down to plan, I’d hear Patti Reagan’s voice saying, “Model, model, model.” Today, these words still echo in my planning brain but I’ve modified the mantra just a little bit. Because I am so committed to helping children understand, I chant:“Model, model, model. Involve, involve, involve.”

The READING Checklist Manifesto

The Summer Writing Project: Blogging

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