Literacy Builders

For the Love of Learning

Kim Yaris

Loving What Books Do For You

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Ahhhh summer.  I have been immersed in all those things that patiently wait for the freedom of time and good weather—walks on the beach, water parks, reading in the hammock.  I love this time of year because slowing down gives me time to look back and reflect.  One of the things I did recently was reread some old notebooks where I had taken notes at conferences and I came upon a gem that I wrote down two years ago as I listened to Peter Johnston, author of one of my favorite professional books, Choice Words.  He said, “I don’t want children to love books.  I want children to love what books can do for them.”
As I thought about Peter’s statement, I realized how the simple juxtaposition of words makes a huge difference in meaning.  Reading is about ideas.  While we may love the feel and smell of books, the book alone is not why we read.  We read for the inspiration and thinking that happens as a result of cracking the spine and letting the words wash over us. 
As I mulled that idea over, days passed and another idea from one of my notebooks resurfaced.  This past spring, I listened as Kelly Gallagher spoke about the importance of interpretation.  He shared how he gives his ninth graders a short passage or sentence and asks them to think about what it means.  The example he shared with us was this: Three out of four people released from jail return within three years. 
I was eager to try this idea out and shared it with my fifth grade son.  When I asked him what it meant, he paraphrased and said, “It means that people get out of jail and then go back to jail.” I pushed him further.  “Yes, but what does it mean?”  He thought about it and said, “I guess it’s saying that jail isn’t really doing a good job.  It’s kind of like Bellatrix LaStrange in Harry Potter. She was bad before they sent her to Azkaban.  But when she got out…she was wicked!”
In this exchange, Matthew began to interpret the text laid out before him and I think Kelly Gallagher would be proud. However, what I didn’t know is that Peter Johnston’s idea was at work as well. 
Yesterday, my younger son was having a momentary lapse of behavior that landed him a cool off stint in his bedroom.  Truth be told, he’s had a few of these lapses lately and is becoming more and more familiar with the four walls of his room. Disturbed by the familial disruption, my older son came to me and said, “Do you remember that thing you told me about jail and going back? Do you think that maybe sending Nay to his room is kind of like that?  It doesn’t really seem to be working.”

I looked at him and was awed both by his sensitivity and keen observation.  As I digested this comment, I realized that books and reading have become Matthew’s dress rehearsal for life and because he reads, he understands his own life better.  As a reading teacher mom, I love that this has happened, but what’s more, Matthew loves it and I think that’s what Peter Johnston was getting at.  Matthew sees value in reading and THAT will keep him coming back to books for his entire life.   

Losing the Stanley Cup: A Lesson for Teachers

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Last night, the Vancouver Canucks lost the last game of the Stanley Cup finals to the Boston Bruins.  Following this devastating 4-0 loss, disappointed fans took to the streets of Vancouver and began rioting.  Usually I am not too excited by hockey or sports in general, but images of angry, drunken Canadians behaving badly were all over the news this morning, so I couldn’t help but notice.  In a casual conversation with my husband, I mentioned, “Boy, Vancouver took losing the Stanley Cup really hard, huh?”  An avid hockey fan, he told me that Canadians take their hockey very seriously and jokingly added, “There’ll be a public lynching of the coach later this afternoon.” 

At first, I wanted to respond to this statement with a flip, “Why? The coach didn’t lose the game.  The players did.”  But before I spoke these words out loud, I found myself thinking about the coach’s role and his responsibility to his team. In any type of sports match, players act and react to the heat of the moment.  Their decisions and moves reflect an immediate interpretation of the game.  A coach, watching from the sidelines, sees the game from a completely different perspective.  It is his responsibility to read and interpret what’s going on all over the field, or in this case, the ice. That information, coupled with the sum total of mental data he has collected about his team through countless practices and games throughout the season, saddles him with the responsibility of calling the shots. It’s up to him to think about what he knows about these players—their strengths and weaknesses and make the decisions that will affect a more favorable outcome. 
As I thought about the coach’s responsibility to his team, I found myself thinking about teachers in the classroom.  So often we want to blame students for their failings: they don’t pay attention, they don’t do their homework, they’re not trying hard enough, they misbehave. But as teachers, we have to look at our students as if they were these hockey players.  Vancouver has never won a Stanley Cup and to be that close to the top prize in hockey, you know they WANTED to win.  They WANTED to be successful. Perhaps they played badly, but they didn’t lose because they are bad players.
I suspect that Alain Vigneault, head coach of the Vancouver Canucks will spend his summer watching video replays of last night’s game over and over.  He is going to want to know what went wrong.  Why did his team fail?  What could he have done differently to help them capture the coveted prize? As a coach, he basks in the glory of winning but he also shares the pain of defeat. 
And as educators, so too, must we.
Our classrooms are spotted with students who are struggling but we need to remember that they are not failing because they are bad kids.  They WANT to be successful.  As teachers, it is up to us to assess and reassess the big picture and call the shots that lead to more favorable outcomes.   When students fail, we must share the pain of defeat and closely examine its cause. And when they succeed, we can bask in the intoxicating glory of success because after all, when it comes to learning, teachers and students are in the game together.

A Smoothie at the Zoo

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In Steven Johnson’s book Where Good Ideas Come From The Natural History of Innovation, (Amazon affiliate link) he tells the story of a nineteenth century French obstetrician, Stephane Tarnier, who noticed a chicken incubator on a visit to the Paris Zoo.  As he watched the chickens toddle around in the warmth of the device, he thought about the number of babies he delivered that had died.  Those babies had been born too soon and as he watched, he wondered if an incubator was the answer to this problem.  With the help of the local zookeeper, Tarnier set to work creating the first incubator for babies and as a result of this collaborative mindstorm, Tarnier succeeded at cutting the infant mortality rate at his hospital in half.  Incubators revolutionized maternity wards and are so successful at nurturing the life of premature babies that they are used to this day in hospital NICUs the world over.
Why am I telling you this story?  Well, this morning I happened upon a blog by Dr. Todd Kashdan at Psychology Today titled “Ways to Be Insanely Creative Dissecting the Worlds’ Greatest Maverick Scientist.”  With a title like that, who could resist? I was fascinated to learn about John Lilly but what really stuck with me was Kashdan’s commentary about what we can learn from Lilly’s life.   He wrote, “The quickest route to creativity is the blending of ideas from multiple topics and disciplines,” and it dawned on me: that’s exactly what happened when Dr. Tarnier went to the zoo. And it’s exactly what happened when Donald Graves started to think about how we teach children to become better writers.  Once upon a time, we “assigned” writing. It was a task that was completed in a minimal amount of time and handed in for a grade.  We lamented the poor spelling, lack of grammar, and overall quality of the writing, gave it a C, and handed it back.  Like Tarnier who was at odds with an uncomfortable reality, Graves walked into the proverbial zoo with this problem on his mind.  If kids are to be better writers, he reasoned, we need to look closer at the people who publish books. How do they do it? How can our classrooms mimic the process that authors use to produce successful writing? 
Kashdan calls this blending of ideas “intellectual smoothies.” I love smoothies and I can think of no better time for a “smoothie” than the summer.  Education is ripe with paradoxes and problems in need of creative solutions.  My question is this: what will you be mulling over on your trips to the zoo?  

A High Octane Year

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It’s June and in June, it feels only natural to reflect.  In my travels from school to school, I have participated in many end-of-year conversations. I have laughed about Dylan, who talked incessantly during read aloud and about Gia, who refused to write a word in her notebook until January.  In thinking back, my colleagues and I have celebrated our triumphs and lamented our failings and wondered out loud if students mull the year over in the same way we do.  We quickly dismissed that notion as highly unlikely but after an insightful late afternoon stroll with my ten year old son, I learned that student reflection may well happen more often than we think. 
As Matthew and I walked, he began to talk about his school year.  This is his last year of elementary school and he was feeling nostalgic and sad that this chapter is coming to a close.  As he reminisced, he turned to me and said, “I wish this year had been better.  I was really on the wrong track for awhile.”
I listened intently as he told his version of a tough September, October, and November.  Those months were characterized by a blasé attitude and a commitment to doing the bare minimum.  School was very low on my son’s priority list and by mid-year, the problem had worsened to the point that my husband, my son’s teacher, the school principal, and I decided that it was time to intervene.  We formed a united front and devised a plan dedicated to rekindling Matthew’s  passion for learning. 
We knew that getting Matthew back on track would require regrouping, reorganizing, and something to pique his interest enough to motivate him to crave learning. Our plan was vast and intense–it included a new notebook system, a new reading log, some one-on-one learning time, and an independent study project. At the time, it felt like a leap of faith, but as it turns out, it was exactly what Matthew needed.
On this late afternoon stroll, Matthew thought hard about all that had transpired and revealed this, “You know, mom, I realized this year, I’m kind of like a car.  If you don’t give a car the right fuel, it won’t go.  I think I was getting the wrong fuel at the beginning of the year.  I needed my Lego stop motion project to make me interested in school again.  It helped a lot that my teacher took time to help me get organized on Tuesday mornings.  The second half of the year was way better than the first.”
He took his analogy further and went on to say that he wished that other kids could be “refueled” the same way he was. He thought that one boy in his class needed “technology” fuel and would behave better and do better in school if he had more opportunities to respond via a computer or ipad.  As he chatted, I took intent mental notes of his insights and thought hard about this idea of “learning fuel.” 
As teachers, we don’t get to pick our students.  Some struggle.  Some don’t care.  Some care but feel like their efforts are futile.  Some work hard.  Some work hard…most of the time.  Some do it perfectly.  Some never seem to get it right.  In spite of the “ya never know what you’re gonna get,” nature of our business, as teachers, we can know what we’re going to give: learning fuel.  Some need regular, some need high octane, some need diesel.  Fill the tank right and they’re all gonna go…and some might even sit around in June and say, “Thank you teacher, I had a great year.”

The Secret Society for Selecting Stories

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This week, the “Social Times” segment of the NY Times posed this question to its Facebook fans: “While writing about the First Book Marketplace for fixes, I got to thinking about books that make children fall in love with reading. I just read Roald Dahl’s book The BFG with my son and he was enraptured.  What book did you—or a child you know—fall in love with?” Naturally, I responded because I have such vivid memories of my second grade teacher reading aloud Ramona the Pest by Beverly Cleary and my third grade teacher reading aloud Tales of the Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Blume.  When they read, I hung on to every word.  I begged for more when they closed the books.  And when they finished reading, I went to the library for more books by these authors.  When the Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary phase of my reading life ended and it was left to me to select my own books, I never picked ones that were as good as the ones my teachers read.   I came to believe that choosing great books was the result of belonging to some sort of secret society.  My teachers knew stuff that I didn’t and try as I might, I couldn’t replicate their success so I quit trying.  Eventually I stumbled upon Nancy Drew and that passion lasted for awhile but when fifth grade came around, I embarked on a reading dry spell that sadly lasted well into high school.  I read occasionally, but my reading habit went into a long period of hibernation.
As teachers, we are responsible for the reading growth and development of our students.  If we want our students to achieve increasing levels of proficiency, “long periods of hibernation” are simply unacceptable.  We are charged with the responsibility of cajoling and nudging and doing whatever it takes to ensure that children read.  This can be a particularly challenging charge; however, with reading proficiency so intimately linked to reading volume, it is probably our greatest responsibility as teachers.  But the question is how?  How do we get kids to want to read?
The answer is really not as complex as it seems. When my teachers introduced me to great authors through reading aloud, I was a reader.  When my teachers told me about books that I’d find on the shelves of my school library, I was a reader.  I only stopped when I could no longer find great authors and titles.  I stopped when that information became “secret.” When we ask, “How do we get kids to want to read,” the answer is simple: Invite them into the Secret Society for Selecting Stories by reading aloud and advertising books with the marketing zeal of McDonald’s. Every day pick up no less than five books and tell students something about the title or author or genre or series.  Let them know what’s out there!
The NY Times’ Facebook question yielded 144 responses.  People spoke fondly and  passionately about the books that turned them into readers.  The list was vast and varied and as I read through the titles it occurred to me that this list needed to be made public in a big way.  The more teachers know about books, specifically books that turn kids into readers, the better able we are to inform students.  If you’ve got students who look at reading as drudgery, be sure to check out the titles that people recommended. http://www.facebook.com/#!/permalink.php?story_fbid=184828184899541&id=147881585260868  
But let this be only a beginner list!  Share with us the book that turned you into a reader!  And your children?  And your students? 

An Evolution of Change in our Reading Diet

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One night last week, my second grade son Nathan stayed up late reading Mary Pope Osborne’s Dragon of the Red Dawn from the Merlin Mission installments of The Magic Tree House series.  I was very pleased to see this because Nathan has always been my eager reader but second grade brought about a bit of a change.  He became a “take it or leave it” reader—devouring books that captured his fancy and being perfunctory at all other times.  It was good to see him feeling hungry for his old friends Jack and Annie.
The next morning, he came into my room with the book in hand and said, “Mom, mom, you’ve got to hear this!” The passage he read aloud went like this:
Below the tree house was a beautiful garden filled with cherry trees and long-leafed willows.  A waterfall tumbled into a sparkling green pool.
He went on to say, “Can’t you picture that mom?  Isn’t that beautiful?  You know, I like the Merlin Missions so much better than the “original” Magic Tree House.  I have to read these books slower and I like them so much better because they don’t take me just a day to finish like the other ones.”
Really?
When I talk to teachers about book choice, I often encourage them to allow children to choose “easy” reads.  I implore teachers to bless magazines and picture books and comics as valid reading but teachers are skeptical.  I am often questioned about this idea of “challenging” young readers.  If students are capable of reading a chapter book, why shouldn’t they? If they are always reading things that are too easy, how will they grow as readers? 
I think these concerns have real merit, but my response always begins like this: If our students do not embrace reading, hard or easy, it won’t matter because they won’t be doing much of either.  And the second thing I always say is that nobody stays in the same place as a reader forever.  Nathan is living proof.  Once upon a time, Dinosaurs Before Dark and Afternoon on the Amazon satisfied him as a reader.  Now, he craves longer books.  He craves books with richer description and that is why the Merlin Missions, with their familiar characters, but slightly more complex language, have rekindled a fire. 
When I was in high school, I loved VC Andrews and Danielle Steel.  Once I got married and settled into my grown up life, romance novels no longer had the appeal they once did.  I moved on to Belva Plain and then read everything by Jodi Piccoult.  I eventually tired of them and began a steady and exclusive diet of non-fiction.  Now I love Malcom Gladwell and Chip and Dan Heath, and of course, all books about literacy and learning.  If anybody would have told me that VC Andrews was not challenging enough and suggested that I try out something more my “speed,” I wouldn’t have.  I wanted to read what I wanted to read.  And when I was done, I moved on to the next thing that I wanted to read.  Like I said before, nobody stays in the same place as a reader forever.  If you doubt me, think about your own reading life.  Do you read the same stuff you read in high school?

Literacy Gospel Unhinged

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As a literacy coach, I travel from school to school. I don’t have a home base and therefore, often work in classrooms that don’t look even a smidge like what my own classroom used to look like. Sometimes desks are organized in rows and it’s difficult to move about the room. Sometimes there’s no meeting area. Sometimes there’s no easel or markers or paper. Sometimes the classroom library is nothing more than books crammed onto a shelf in the back corner of the room. I work within the parameters I am given and have to think on my feet about how to adjust to mediate my vision for good literacy instruction.

One day, while visiting a second grade classroom, I gathered the students on the carpet and taught a mini lesson. At the end of the lesson, I released the students to read independently. Generally speaking, it is my practice to invite children to find their comfy nook around the room and cozy up with their book, but in this classroom, the desks were butted up against one another in three long rows. It wasn’t clear to me where the students would comfortably and safely go, so on this day, I simply instructed the students to return to their seats and do their independent reading there. It all seemed relatively straightforward until a couple of weeks later when I was having a casual conversation with one of the teachers who observed this lesson. She and I rapped about some of the things she was doing differently and she shared that she had stopped having her students read around the room and had them now reading at their desks. I was surprised when she told me this so I asked her why. “Well, Kim, when I watched you, that’s what you did.”

This particular teacher had nurtured her classroom environment all year and had made sweeping changes. She had a well-stocked, well-organized classroom library and her students had book baggies that they were reading from religiously every day. It surprised me that she did not question me before shifting to a practice that seemed so counterintuitive to the work she had been doing. But I was her expert. She saw me do something and therefore, it was so.

At first, this shocked me but as I thought about it, it occurred to me that I do the same thing. I once heard Dick Allington discuss the “five pillars” of reading instruction: phonics, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. When he said this, I took frantic, thorough, copious notes. I memorized them so that I could recite them backwards and forward. And I have repeated his words on countless occasions—in spite of the fact that I had the hardest time explaining the difference between phonics and phonemic awareness instruction in the classroom. Aren’t they kind of one in the same when you’re teaching? I wondered. Dick Allington is one of my experts. He said it, therefore, it was so. I didn’t trust that I would be worthy of questioning the gospel spoken by one held in such high esteem.

When it comes to great literacy instruction, it isn’t enough that Lucy or Dick or Irene said it. Inquiry and reflection help us hone our skill and practice as educators. If we are going to make lasting changes, we cannot heed everything we read and see and hear as the literacy gospel. Change is rooted in understanding and the path to understanding is paved with questions. When you’re confused or uncertain, stop at nothing to find answers to the things that do not make sense.

Boy Friendly Classrooms

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My family and I recently returned from a memory-filled vacation at Disney. While there, my fifth grade son Matthew had the foresight to think about how he would preserve these memories and asked if I would purchase a photo album so that he could make a scrapbook commemorating the highlights of our trip. Both touched and thrilled at this suggestion, I overpaid for a Mickey themed album, brought it home, developed our photos, and Matthew went to work. I sat beside him as he busied himself with sliding the pictures into the plastic sleeves and wrote catchy captions to describe the events of our vacation. I watched intently as he worked. He misspelled words and scribbled them out and rewrote them. His handwriting was messy. There was none of the meticulousness that I remembered applying to similar projects in my childhood.

As he worked, I thought a lot about what I had read that morning. In Pam Allyn’s Best Books for Boys: How to Engage Boys in Reading in Ways That Will Change Their Lives (amazon affiliate link), she quoted Harvard psychologist William Pollack who says, “More boys than girls are in special education classes. More boys than girls are prescribed mood-managing drugs. This suggests that today’s schools are built for girls, and boys are becoming misfits.” And it was these words that forced me to muster every ounce of self control in me and refrain from chastising his work. I wanted to say, “Can’t you do that a little neater? Don’t you think it would be better if you were more thoughtful?” But I didn’t because I realized that what I wanted was to cloud his vision with what I perceived to be a more correct vision. I wanted him to do it my way. My female way.

This got me thinking about how often we do this in schools. Are children, particularly boys, doing things “wrong” as often as we think they are? When they write, is it really not that good or is it that it doesn’t match a preconceived notion of what they should have written? Are they really misbehaving or is it that they are not behaving in the way that we would have? Is their artwork messy because they didn’t color in the lines or is it that they intended to add action in ways that we could not conceive of?

Most school faculties are comprised of a female majority. School activities and classroom management and expectations of how children comply are driven by the female psyche. Could it really be that the female way of thinking is different enough from males that we create environments that alienate half of the learning population? On this one occasion I stopped short of committing the crime of imposing hearts and borders on my son’s scrapbook but I have to wonder, how many times did I not? I am willing to stand among the convicted when it comes to admitting guilt of making boys feel like misfits. But I am repenting. I am thinking hard about what I will do differently to embrace gender differences and create learning environments that cater to the unique needs of boy learners.

To start, I will no longer insist that children write or read sitting down. If they need to stand and shift from side to side, so be it. I will no longer insist that reading time be uninterrupted by bathroom breaks or short periods of gazing out the window. If they need to let their minds wander or to think more about what they are reading, so be it. But past this, I’m not sure what else I should change and that is why I am appealing to you, my readership, to share your suggestions for modifying common practices to make boys feel more at home in the classroom. What else can we do in schools to close the gender gap?