Literacy Builders

For the Love of Learning

Education

New Beginnings

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Leap and the net will appear.

For the past twenty years, I have been working closely alongside teachers in their classrooms, helping them to think about and refine their approaches to teaching reading and writing. I have been reading research, co-authoring books about teaching reading, and leading literacy trainings. My professional life has been rich and rewarding; however, over time, I have had a growing nudge that it’s been missing something and this fall, I will finally be able to fill the void I’ve felt. I am returning to the classroom.

Prior to beginning my career as a consultant, I taught third, fourth, and fifth grade–a solid entrenchment in upper elementary teaching and learning. Now, I will be rounding out that experience as a sixth and eighth grade ELA teacher. When I think about being with kids all day, every day, my heart grows tenfold. Add to that the thought of teaching nothing but reading and writing and I am positively giddy. Part of me simply cannot wait for the first day of school.

But…

Another part of me is thinking about how I’m going to organize the desks in my classroom, especially now that students need to maintain a distance of six feet between them. I’m thinking about books and trying to figure out how to make sure that I’ve got a well-stocked classroom library. I’m thinking about curriculum and wondering whether it’s better to start the year exploring a theme like “Identity” or if it makes more sense to start with a big idea like “Vision.” My mental checklist of things to think about feels endless and I begin to wonder if I’m up to the task.

Things to Think About - New Beginnings

Suffice it to say, this is the part of me that is thinking I’m never going to be ready for the first day of school.

Yet, it will come. And when it does, I will leap and trust that the net will appear.
(I’m kind of hoping that the net might come in the form of really great advice from anybody who has really great advice to share!)

*If you’re interested in having me consult at your school, I have a few days still available for the 2020-2021 school year. Also, I’m starting to book for Summer 2021. Early birds get the best choices!

The Times They Are A-Changin’

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Over the course of the last week, I began to notice the days have been getting shorter.  The mornings are cooler.  And the shelves of Target are stocked with boxes of Crayola crayons on sale for forty cents.  I don’t know when all of this happened but I realized with summer fading into the horizon, I better get out there and enjoy its final days before it completely disappears.  So, yesterday, I rallied my family, packed towels and sunscreen into an oversized beach bag, and headed to a local water park.
During the thirty minute car ride to the park, I unconsciously placed my hand on my stomach and began to rub.  I had this feeling…not like I was sick…no, nothing like that, this feeling was…that uncomfortable feeling that you get when something doesn’t seem quite right…this was…anxiety.  A bright, sunny, summer day, my boys in the back seat, my husband at the helm of the car, the promise of a day of fun in the sun—why should I be nervous?
As I gazed out the window, my mind wandered to the day before as I sat around a table catching up with my study group colleagues.  People shared stories of weddings and new homes and babies.  The conversation then turned to new principals, new technology, and the new standards in education.  We pondered and postulated what this year would bring with the Common Core and APPR and then we spoke but one word:
Daunting.
It was overwhelming to consider all of these possibilities and all of these unknowns.  There was speculation and worry…and some optimistic, eager anticipation. And then it occurred to me.  That was exactly what I was feeling at that very moment. The root of this feeling in the pit of my stomach was change.  Taking a day off from work in the middle of the week is not something I do often.  I had phone calls to make and email to respond to and I still hadn’t written this week’s blog post.  But I thought: eager anticipation.  Carpe diem.  Enjoy the day with your family.
And so I did.  I splashed down things called the Dragon Den and Mammoth Mountain.  I shivered in line and cheered as my husband dropped eight stories in three seconds down something called Cliff Diver and at the end of the day, I felt happy.  My agitation was long gone and my phone calls and email had waited for me.  I returned to my desk this morning to write my blog and what wouldn’t flow in the brief thirty minutes I had yesterday before we loaded into the car, just poured out onto the page today.  In spite of all of my gut wrenching and worry, it all turned out okay.  As it always does. 
Deb Hannaberry, a new study group colleague said, “Change isn’t bad. Change is just change and we need to embrace it.” As we begin this school year, I pass this wisdom along to you and ask, what’s giving you that anxious feeling in the pit of your stomach?  And what will you do to embrace it?

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?  

What’s Worth Fighting For?

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This past Saturday, Linda Darling-Hammond, educator-extraordinnaire, stood before an audience of approximately 3000 people in Riverside Church in New York City and told a story of some doctors who had gathered at a conference in her home state of California to discuss the issue of inmates who had been sentenced to death row.  The question that sat before this group of anesthesiologists was this: What is the best way to end a human life?
The doctors talked and wrestled a little with the question but it didn’t take them long to realize that they while they could answer this question and offer the state of California more humane options for death row candidates, they would not.  They decided that they were not in the business of killing people and so decided to stand together as professionals and say, “This is something we will not do.”
This-is-something-we-will-not-do.
Dr. Darling-Hammond then asked the large crowd assembled before her, “What is it as educators that we should stand up for?  What is it that we should be refusing to do?”  With the exception of the occasional voice speaking up to say, “standardized test,” she rendered the crowd speechless.  We were all lost in our own sea of thoughts thinking hard about what it is that we do as educators that deserves that kind of unanimity?
Since Saturday I have found myself thinking often about this question and I find myself thinking a lot about instructional decision making and educational programming.  So much of what we do depends on conflicting directives.  Decisions are made on the basis of anything from funding to staffing to research to the whim of a single individual. Directives are given and in spite of whether or not the directive is in the best interest of the students we teach, we comply.  When I think about this and I think about the question that Dr. Darling-Hammond posed, I answer her question like this: I will not do anything that is not in the best interest of a child. 
Instructional programming and decision making can’t be about politics and whim.  They need to be about children and their best interests.  That’s what I’m willing to stand up for.  And you?    

Teach them Well

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Left to their own devices, my boys, aged 10 and 7, would grunt hello in the morning, leave their pants of the floor for me to pick up, and command me to fix them a snack when they were hungry. I find these behaviors rude and appalling and work very hard to correct these obnoxious habits. When they bark orders, I remind them to say please and thank you. In spite of their angry protests, I make them clean up the bits of construction paper they sprayed all over the floor in the great confetti experiment. They are responsible for putting their clothes in the hamper and their dirty dishes in the sink and as a result, people often tell me how polite and pleasant my boys are. I am always flattered and hear myself saying, “yes, they are such good boys,” as if their affability were innate and had nothing to do with me at all.

I recently visited a first grade classroom and modeled a lesson about how to help children recognize words they don’t know in their reading. Following the lesson, the six year olds in this class grabbed their book baggies, found their cozy spot in the classroom, and read for fifteen minutes. There was a quiet buzz in the classroom as children spoke softly into their whisper phones or shared something too good to be missed with a friend sitting near them. The tenor of this independent reading period was focused and productive. When I complemented the teacher on the efficacy of her reading workshop, she smiled and said, “It’s because I have such a good group this year.”

It surprised me to hear her say this. Implied in her comment was the notion that what I saw might not be possible with a different group of students. In the same way that I attribute my own children’s pleasantries to something they were born with, she saw her success as a workshop teacher as dependent upon her students. I quickly reminded her that while it’s always nice to work with a “good group,” our successes as educators are directly linked to what we know about best practice and the daily decisions we make about how to implement this knowledge. While “a good group” might facilitate implementation, what I saw was directly linked to good teaching.

As educators, we need to think hard about educational responsibility. When things go well, it is not just because our students are “smart” or “working really hard.” It’s because we are doing something right as teachers. In the same sense, when things are not going well, it’s not just because children are “difficult” or “come from poor homes” or “distractible.” It’s because we need to do something different to reach those students. While it is easy, and arguably natural, to attribute both positive and negative learning outcomes to children, there is really but one direction to point the finger for the success and failure of our students: at ourselves. What students learn and how well they learn is dictated by the quality of the person delivering the instruction: children’s educations are our responsibility. The more we know, the better we teach. The better we teach, the better they learn.

Poem for the Beginning of the School Year

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There’s no more avoiding or denying it. It’s back-to-school season. It is my sincere hope that everybody has the most amazing year ever and as you begin, I’d like to share with you a poem that I wrote last year after attending my son’s first grade poetry celebration.

As he plays, I watch.
He writes books with blurbs
And speech bubbles.
He scribbles song lyrics
And journals about his trip to the zoo.
He is a writer.
He asks to go to the library.
He seeks out books on bunnies
And runs to me when he learns
What they eat
And how long they live
And what we need to do to take care of them.
He is a reader.
He holds coins in his hands
And asks, “How much is this?”
And then counts
And adds
And figures it out for himself.
He is a mathematician.
He mixes chocolate
with water
and yogurt
and salt
and sugar
And says,
“I need to watch and see what happens.”
He waits
And observes
And makes notes.
He is a scientist.
He sits at the table and does his homework.
He’s in a hurry.
He wants to be done
But
He stops and asks,
Is this my best work?
He is a student.
He is a writer.
He is a reader.
He is a mathematician.
He is a scientist.
He is a student.
Why?
Because he has a teacher.

I hope you all have a fantastic year molding writers, readers, mathematicians, scientists, students, and most of all LEARNERS!

Rethinking Curriculum Refuse

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I spent some time revisiting some of my old blog posts and came across this one from last August. As I sift through my own files and ready myself for the school year, being reminded that every lesson I teach doesn’t hold equal weight was humbling.

My good friend once said to me that in the life of a teacher, July is like Saturday, a time for relaxing and regrouping; and August is like Sunday, a time to start thinking about and preparing for work.

Well, it’s here. It’s August. While many of us are still enjoying outings to the beach and riding roller coasters with our hands up, in the corner of our minds, we are entertaining thoughts of September. We are thinking about unpacking dust-covered books and decorating bulletin boards and readying our classrooms for the first day of school. In addition, we are organizing our materials, paging through professional resources, and thinking about what we will teach this year.

So many teachers start the school year with good intentions. We vow that children will read independently every day. We promise to make time each day for writing. We will conference and assess and plan meaningful instruction. But then, we have our first faculty meeting and we receive the laundry list of directives for this school year. Then, there’s the pressure of back-to-school night and parent-teacher conferences and report cards. Next, it’s prepping for the ELA, the math assessment, the Terra Nova, and whatever other standardized tests are coming down the line.

There go our good intentions.

Feeling like there is too much on our plates is a common lament. As you start this school year, I urge you to keep your eye on your best intentions. Years ago, I heard Lucy Calkins speak about making time for the teaching you know is important. She said that sometimes, “you have to take carloads of curriculum to the dump.”

As you sift through your thoughts and plans and ideas for this school year, think carefully about what you do. If you’re not sure if a piece of your curriculum is worth keeping, ask yourself this question: How does this benefit my students? If you can’t think of at least three good reasons, take it to the dump.

So, don’t forget to share—what ideas, practices, and lessons will you file in the trash this year?