Literacy Builders

For the Love of Learning

Reading

Rome wasn’t built in a day…

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The Literacy Builders community has been thinking a lot about classroom environment and its impact and effect on teaching and learning.  At the beginning of the school year, we heard from Kathy Merlino, a second grade teacher from Islip, New York about her travails and triumphs with going deskless.  This week, Cara Newman, a fourth grade teacher from Plainedge, New York, shares her “hybrid” approach to the “deskless” classroom. 

I’ve been a teacher for 8 years now and one aspect of teaching that I have always struggled with is classroom setup. Every year I enter my classroom over the summer, set the desks up in tables of 4-8 desks, put the teacher desk off to the corner somewhere and then wait for the students to come in, in order to see if the classroom set up works.  It wouldn’t be long until I stayed after school and re-arranged the classroom again, this time hoping it would work. Through all of this re-arranging I wanted to achieve a “homier” feeling but that wasn’t going to work with a minimum of 22 desks taking up the classroom space and current fire codes.

At the end of last year I asked my principal if I could get rid of all desks and set up my classroom with just tables. I had a dream classroom in my mind and I couldn’t wait to set it up. Unfortunately, the answer was “no”. My husband and I then went into my classroom at the end of the summer to set up and while moving each desk into tables I was so upset that once again my classroom would be mediocre and not have the “homey” feeling I was craving. I left knowing this set up wouldn’t last all year but didn’t know how I could fix it with the desks in the way. The classrooms that I read about over the summer, in books such as Classroom Management In Photographs (Amazon Affiliate Link) by Maria L. Chang and Spaces & Places: Designing Classrooms for Literacy (Amazon Affiliate Link) by Debbie Diller seemed so unachievable.

As the school year began I launched Daily Five, Math Workshop, Science and Enrichment. My kids are allowed to move anywhere in the classroom when they are working and very often the desks would be empty. Something had to be changed! The desks couldn’t take up the prime real estate in the classroom when they weren’t being used 75% of the time. Keeping my principals “no” in my head I had to think of a creative way where each kid would still have their own desk, although may not be where they sit all the time.

With the help of the math teacher, who was also looking for a more manageable way to do Math Workshop, we sat down and drew out a floor plan. Together after school we moved the furniture in the classroom and came up with a plan that I think may work. Half of the desks in the classroom were moved to the outside parameters and now half of the children are sitting at tables while the other half is still at desks. I have 11 desks, 1 hexagon table of 6, and two circle tables of 4. The children sitting at the tables have two places where they can put their materials. Since their desks are arranged on the outside of the classroom flat against the wall, open side facing out, they are still available for storage. Also, each table has a crate for materials. We use a “tool book” basically a big binder with everything in it and this is the only item they need for the day. The children at the tables have also taken it upon themselves to put pencils in a common supply box, along with stacking their independent reading books in various areas. I love how every time I look at the tables the kids have come up with a new idea.

In order to avoid parent or student complaints we talked a lot about “good fit” spots and how they can try both the tables and desks to see what they like better. We spoke about how trying different things is good and sometimes change is for the better. No child has to sit at either a desk or table. I am glad I didn’t get rid of the desks because now the option is still there for the children who want them. Some kids came in the first day very upset when they saw the new arrangement and were like “I don’t want to sit at table!” I made sure they knew they didn’t have to. I also had a child who was agonizing over the decision of whether or not he wanted to sit at a table. I told him not to worry about it and try the table for a day. He said he would next week. At the end of the day I looked at his desk and found a post it with a note on it that he wrote to himself, “Next week I will try a table”. When I questioned him about the note he said he didn’t want to forget that he wanted to try the table when he walked into school on Tuesday. A lot of Daily Five is about student choice and I think because they are being given the choice and opportunity to be a part of the classroom set up, they are more opt to respect their area, the classroom, materials, and the new arrangement.

Some of the positive aspects of this change are: the classroom is bigger, there is more room for everyone to move around, children’s seats are no longer bumping into each other, children have personal space, kids sitting at the tables are not worrying about the next step (taking out a book before I say so), I’ve taught more lessons where kids are on the carpet, I have a common area for group work and we now have only one meeting area instead of two. I’ve also found the classroom to quieter. This is all in only one week.

Things I need to still work on… some of the children at desks can not see the Smartboard from their seat, if more kids want to sit at the table and/or desks there is not enough room, switches need to be made but that may not be an option, and I need to get use to all of the movement with kids getting up to get materials (I am thinking about putting tennis balls on the legs of the chairs). We also need to work on our transitions.

It has been an interesting week one and I look forward to improving the classroom set up as we move forward. As my dad once reminded me when I moved into my college dorm and wanted everything to be set up at once, “Rome was not built in a day” and neither are our classrooms.

Rescuing Picture Books from Extinction

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On October 7th The New York Times ran an article titled Picture Books No Longer Staple for Children. When I saw this article, my eyes bugged out of my head. I had to look twice. Could it be? On the very day that people were banding together to read the Ezra Jack Keats’s classic The Snowy Day (Amazon Affiliate Link) to break the record for the most people reading the same book in a day, was this article to imply that picture books are at risk of becoming an endangered species?

After reading the article, I am disappointed to report that yes, indeed, this was an article reporting sluggish sales of this beloved genre. Good journalists don’t leave out the why and The Times cited some reasons for the decline: “Parents have begun pressing their kindergarteners and first graders to leave behind the picture book and move to more text heavy chapter books….Publishers cite pressures from parents who are mindful of increasingly rigorous standardized testing in schools.”

I nearly cried. Picture books a casualty of our test crazed culture? This is a crime against literacy that can only be exonerated through an unyielding crusade to educate the masses of the formidable value of picture books in children’s reading growth and development.

So, as a self-appointed ambassador in this crusade, I want to share the following anecdote.

When my son entered third grade, he was a proficient, but reluctant, Level M reader. As his mom, I felt it was my duty to “challenge” him. For at-home independent reading, I laid out my collection of Magic Tree House books and said, “Pick one.” Dutifully he did and retired to the den to do his “homework” that required him to read for 20 minutes. I peeked in on him as he read and saw that he had sprawled himself out on the floor. He was rolling around and every five minutes or so, he’d yell, “Am I done yet?” He flipped through the pages and counted the chapters and clearly, he was disengaged.

A few days later, he sauntered into my office while I was busy working. I looked up from my desk to see that he had picked up a book. I watched as he flipped through the pages studying the pictures and then…heaven and bliss, he began to read. When it was time for him to go, he walked out of my office with his nose still in the book…reading.

I couldn’t believe it. Two days before I was engaged in the interminable struggle of forcing reading on my son and now he was reading…voluntarily? What had prompted the change?

The book my son chose to read on this occasion was a Berenstain Bears picture book. He loved the brightly colored illustrations and he loved that he could sit down and finish the book in one sitting. When I offered him my entire collection and informed him that it would be just fine for him to read these books for homework, I had an eager reader.

Some parents would argue that I had done a disservice to my son because he was, well, capable of more than babyish picture book reading. You can imagine their surprise when I tell them that The Berenstain Bear book that my son was reading was a level M, the very same level as those Magic Tree House books I was pushing. And what’s more, my son was experiencing success and joy as a reader. THAT’S what makes children into readers. When kids want to read, they read lots. When they read lots, they get better. Chapter books don’t make them better. Reading makes them better.

This week, my question looms large. What will you do to protect picture books from being a victim of standardized testing? How will you spread the word that picture books are important and valuable in the development of strong, eager, and proficient readers?

What would Harry Potter Do?

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In the opening days of school, my son encountered some trouble on the playground.  He came home visibly upset and his tales pulled at my heartstrings.  What could I do? He was struggling and I wanted to make it all better.  Naturally, marching onto the playground and wagging my finger in front of the noses of those schoolyard bullies wasn’t an option.  I felt stuck.
So I handled it the way I suspect most parents might.  I reviewed the protocol for playground problem solving: ignore it, walk away, tell a grown-up. But that didn’t placate him. That wasn’t what he needed to know.  He wanted to understand why—why do people act this way?
Hmmm.  Good question.  How does one explain what motivates ill-will and mean-spirited, hurtful human behavior?  Why DO people act this way?
As I stuttered and stumbled my way toward an explanation, my son began to mull over his own question.  He said, “You know, Adam is kind of like Voldemort because he’s the leader. He’s really mean and yet the other kids, Zach and Ian follow him and do bad stuff for him.  They’re  kind of like the Death Eaters.”
I couldn’t believe it.  In that moment, Harry Potter’s magic permeated the walls of Hogwarts and took hold in my very own kitchen in Long Island, New York. Through The Sorcerer’s Stone and The Chamber of Secrets and The Prisoner of Azkaban, my son had met and come to know a motley and interesting cast of characters.  Some he admired and others he saw as downright loathsome and wicked. But either way, these people made sense to him. In Harry Potter’s world, evil and ill-will had a place.  We giggled as we imagined the Whomping Willow attacking his tormentors and we wondered what spells Harry Potter might cast to retaliate and fight this brand of school yard evil.
In his book Readicide (Amazon affiliate link), Kelly Gallagher cites Kenneth Burke who postulates that reading is important for children because “it provides them with ‘imaginative rehearsals’ for the real world.”  The world can be big and bad and ugly and good authors know that good stories weave the world’s complexities into their plots and characters. Through reading, children are exposed to many of the complicated issues that they might meet in the real world. And though they may whine and question why they have to read, I can think of no better reason than to tell them to take heed, because they can never know when they might need to know what Harry Potter would do. 

The READING Checklist Manifesto

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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?

What You Know Without Being Told

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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

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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

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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.

Stop the Insanity

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I recently attended a conference and heard Lucy Calkins speak about some research being done at Columbia University about the correlation between students’ guided reading levels and the score they get on the state test. While I don’t have the hard and fast data, she explained that they are finding that fourth graders reading at a level N at the time of the test are the ones more likely to get a 2 and the children reading at a level S at the time of the test would be the ones more likely to get a 3 and the child reading at a level V at the time of the test would be the ones more likely to get a 4. She pointed out that the larger scale implication of these findings is that we need to pay more attention to boosting children’s reading levels. Boosting reading levels requires teachers to amp up the small group and one-on-one instruction. It means monitoring students closely to ensure that they are selecting books on their level and being ritualistic and religious about giving kids independent reading time. Lucy mentioned that when teachers start prepping for the test in January and spend three months committed to practice test after practice test it might well be akin to what happens when children don’t read over the summer—they lose ground instead of gain ground.

When I heard Lucy speak these words, I felt a wave of relief. Could it be that we finally have the research we need to say to those purchasing workbooks and wasting school duplicating resources on test prep packets to STOP! We’re doing more harm than good?

In 2006, in his book What Really Matters for Struggling Readers, Richard Allington wrote,

“The best guideline for test preparation would seem to be to practice a couple of days before the test to familiarize students with the test format and to introduce or review, general test-taking strategies. But daily periods of test preparation across the school year seems more likely to result in lower performances because most test preparation involves little, if any, teaching of useful reading strategies or development of word knowledge.”

Allington has obviously known for years what Lucy is trying to make mainstream, but how can we help classroom teachers buy in? I know so many who attribute their students’ successes to test prep. For whatever reason, they don’t see the value in the quality of their teaching.

I have a fantasy of being a school superintendent issuing a dictum that no school dollars would be used to purchase commercially produced test prep materials. I would forbid the practice of using packets filled with short passages and literal level comprehension questions as reading instruction and add that anybody caught disobeying these orders would be written up for insubordination.

Without the support of administrators, teachers will continue to attribute their test results to test prep. The emphasis MUST be on good teaching. Good teaching makes a difference in student achievement. Not Xerox or March to May or whatever other nonsense they publish to “prepare” students for the state exam.

The test is almost here and we are all preparing to breathe a collective sigh of relief. But before next year’s scramble begins again, perhaps we need to rethink this insanity and refocus on what’s really important: Good teachers + Good Reading Instruction = More Proficient Readers. It’s that simple.