Literacy Builders

For the Love of Learning

Reading

Change Happens

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As recently as 2007, email was a very small part of my life. I’d check in every third day or so to clear the spam and read the occasional note I’d get. But then it started to happen in my work life that people would say, “Did you get the email I sent you?” Shamefully, I didn’t and I realized I’d better start checking a bit more frequently.

Next, I started checking my email at the end of each day. By and large, I was keeping up with the updates people would send me and I was feeling pretty in the loop…until, I started missing the things people would jot off in the morning that I needed to know for that day.

From that point on, I checked my email morning and night. In fact, I now have a Blackberry so I can check it between classes and during lunch too. Never will I be out of the loop again.

The issue of assessment keeps coming up in the conversations I have been having with teachers.
They are jazzed up and excited about new ways to get students thinking and talking and responding thoughtfully in reading and writing but yet, they are afraid. They wonder, “How will I assess this? Our report card asks for letter grades or numerical percentages.”

And so, they retreat from good teaching practices because they cannot reconcile how to make their teaching match their report card.

I have begun thinking that assessment is a lot like me and email. At first, it was what it was. I didn’t have a lot of reason to change. It worked for me the way I needed it to work. And then it didn’t, so I tweaked it and it was working again. Then it wasn’t working, so I changed it a lot and now it runs like a well-oiled machine.

The same thing has to happen with assessment. It is important to remember that report cards and assessment practices are no more than ink on paper. They derive from conversations that have happened at some point in the past by some group of thoughtful professionals. When things aren’t working, it’s time to start having conversations to think about what is working and what isn’t working. Granted, the change may happen slowly, but change happens.

And most of the time, change is for the better.

The Shroud of Secrecy

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This weekend, my brother was a vendor at a local woodworking expo. As a show of moral support, I stopped by to see him. As I made my way through the crowd (and it was surprisingly crowded), I stopped to admire all sorts of beautiful, one-of-a-kind works of art.

In the far corners of the room, I noticed large groups of people gathered to listen to what other hobbyists and professionals had to say about perfecting finishes or more precise saw cuts. All those folks recognized there was information out there to help them do what they do better. They embraced the opportunity to learn.

One day during the week past, I presented a mini workshop at a nearby school district. The crowd was respectful and listened politely. When we broke out into groups, a teacher asked me, “Did our administrators tell you we don’t know how to teach reading?”

This question left me dumbfounded. I didn’t know what to say.

This is not the first time I have met a teacher suspicious of a professional development initiative. Instead of learning being an opportunity, it is an insult. They are curiously suspicious, loathe to admit that there might be gaps or things that they don’t know about teaching.

The woodworkers reminded me that we all have things to learn about our craft. Just like they don’t attend seminars because they are incapable of creating beautiful things out of wood, teachers don’t attend professional development because they don’t know how to teach children.
Beautiful, one-of-a-kind works of art are the culmination of study, practice, and reflection. If we want a masterpiece, we’ve got to embrace every opportunity to learn.

The Turtle and the Hare

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In a blog titled Book Emergencies, I introduced you to my now fourth grade son Matthew, my feast or famine reader. On some occasions, he devours books, on others, he nibbles his way through them. Last month, Jeff Kinney’s Dog Days came out and when he got his hands on it, he read it in one day, staying up late to finish it. Since then, he has merrily returned to Lego magazine and his fifth reread of Club Penguin pick your own ending. In a conversation with other teachers, I affectionately referred to Matthew as “my turtle,” the one content to plod along slowly, slowly, slowly.

My other son, Nathan, is “my hare.” He’s a first grader who wants to read everything. He’s dying to read “chapter books.” In fact, very often he will pick up a Magic Tree House book and read several lines and not make a mistake.

Hallelujah, right?

Wrong. I am worried about Nathan, too. Sure, he can say all the words in Magic Tree House but he works awfully hard at it. All of his energy is poured into decoding and by the time he reaches the end of a paragraph, do you know what he has left for understanding? Zilch.

Matthew, on the other hand, understands everything. Recently, he read Amber Brown is Not a Crayon, another book below his “level.” Yet, as he read this story, he talked about how Amber is “forgetful” (like him, he added) and Justin is feeling “awkward” about moving. When he finished he told me that this book is “a lot like that saying ‘If you love something, set if free.’”

When he told me this, I nearly fell off my chair…and as I hit my head, a thought occurred to me. So, he reads all this easy stuff, but he gets it. In fact, not only does he get it, he goes deep.
Hmmm. Maybe Aesop was onto something when he told us about the turtle and the hare. Maybe slow and steady really is the way to win the race.

Unwrapping the Gift of Understanding

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This week, I began a conversation with a fourth grade reader with, “So tell me what you know about the main character.” He said, “Well, she has a friend named Justin and has a mean girl named Hannah in her class.”

Do you notice? These are peripheral details about the character in his book.

So I probed further. He went on to tell me about what happens in her class and her teacher’s name and then after I prompted a third time “anything else you can tell me about her?” the floodgates opened. He told me that his main character is forgetful (like him, he said), she thinks she’s mature (which she’s really not, according to him), and she’s the kind of character who’s always getting into trouble.

For me, the lesson in all of this is that it took time to get this reader to a level of understanding that got him excited. I had to ask him three times to think about his character. With each probe, he thought about the character more. Slowly but surely, he arrived at new and deeper understandings about his character.

When I shared this experience with a group of colleagues, one teacher observed how this reader’s thinking unfolded in layers, “like opening a gift,” she said. Ever since she said that, I can’t stop picturing this in my head. Presents get better and better as you unwrap them. We’re eager to open the box and tear the pretty paper but once we see what’s inside, that’s when we really get excited. Understanding is a lot like that. It doesn’t always happen in teacher time with the first question we ask. Sometimes, we have to keep going.

Simplifying Book Choice

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At this time of the year, I am privy to a lot of conversations about book choice. Helping match readers to books is one four guiding principles of good reading instruction closely linked to two of the other tenets: read more often, read more pages. It seems so simple: The sooner we empower children to make good choices, the quicker we send them on their way to greater reading proficiency…

If only it were that easy.

In reality, book choice is layered with perplexing issues. From book shopping to abandoning books to figuring out what interests you as a reader, it is a topic that needs to be visited and revisited.

Recently a group of teachers presented me with a logistical problem centering on book choice: When is the best time for students to go book shopping? Do I send them all at once or should I send them in small groups?

In the third grade classroom that I visited today, the children normally shop for books on Monday (the day of my visit). Instead of worrying about managing a class full of students mulling around the library all at once, I brought two strips of poster board with me. One was labeled “still reading,” the other was titled “need new now.” As I entered the classroom, I invited the children to jot their name down on an index card and passed around my poster board strips and asked them to clip their name to whichever title best applied to their needs as a reader. In less than two minutes I knew that Evan and Kirana needed to shop for books and the rest of the class was comfortably settled with what they were reading. We got busy with our mini lesson and our workshop went off without a hitch.

In response to those teachers who ask, “When is the best time to go book shopping?” I respond, “whenever they need new books.” When it becomes an issue that children are without books or always in need of a new book, those are the layers I eluded to before—we address them as the need arises.

Guiding Principles of Good Reading Instruction

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How do we help children become better readers? This question drives many of the conversations that we have during the course of the year. Inasmuch as it is a national discussion, it is also a district, building, and parent discussion. Everybody wants to know: how can we help children to read better?

As long as we have children who struggle, there will always be ongoing research to fine tune our understanding of how children learn to read. In the meantime, there is already a great deal of research that addresses this very important issue. When I think about how to help children become better readers, I think in terms of four guiding principles:
1. Create opportunities for children to read more often
2. Encourage children to read more pages
3. Help match books to readers
4. Provide expert instruction

If you find yourself questioning how to help children become better readers, consider planning instruction according to these principles. The first two tenets speak to reading volume. As you plan reading lessons, ask: Do I provide time for practice? How much are my students actually reading? Couple that with “Are my children reading books that are too hard?” and you have addressed three quarters of the reading puzzle.

Broken down like this, teaching everybody to read doesn’t seem like such an insurmountable task.

Good vs. Great Instruction

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This week when I visited a teacher to do a demonstration lesson in reading workshop, the teacher said, “I love it when you come in because it gives me time to watch my students. When you teach, I notice things about how they respond and how they think that I never noticed before.”

This conversation continued and we talked about how those noticings influence our teaching decisions. Who needs to learn what? How should I group them? Who’s getting it? Who needs follow-up?

Our jobs as teachers demand a lot from us. At the end of each day, we are all worn pretty thin from teaching seven different lessons, managing behavior, and ushering students to and from the far corners of the buildings we work in. There barely seems to be enough time to get through the plans we made for our immediate day let alone making time to reflect on them.

But I can’t help but remember what my colleague said, “I notice things about how they respond and think.” These revelations help us to plan instruction that makes a difference in children’s learning. Granted, it is easier to turn to the teacher manual and deliver the lesson that comes up next in the program but can we neglect to factor in what our observations and experiences tell us about what children need to know?

Teaching is a frenetic business and while I hate to add one more thing to an already full plate of things to do, I ask you to think about making time to reflect. What we learn might be the difference between good and great instruction.

Our lives as teachers are busy. Very busy. We know that good instruction relies on us reflecting on what our students need as readers and writers; however, when do we do that? On our prep? During lunch? In the car on the way to and from school? It seems like everything needs to fit into the cracks if it is going to get a check on the list of things to do.

A Struggler or A Reader?

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On Tuesday, I was working with classroom teachers using the Fountas and Pinnell Benchmark Assessment System for the first time. We were in awe at the amazing information we were learning about students. One of the teachers shared an observation she had made about one of her strugglers. She said, “It was so strange. Every time she came to a word she didn’t know, she kept looking at me. She wanted me to give her the word.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. I had just finished reading What Really Matters in Fluency by Richard Allington. In that book he warned that the tell-tale sign of a child who has been “remediated” is one that exhibits just that behavior! These readers are often interrupted by well-meaning adults who want to “correct” their miscues. Instead of learning to monitor their own reading and developing strategies for solving unknown words, strugglers learn to let other people do the work for them.

The bright side of this story is that the Benchmark Assessment invites “talk” about each book that the child reads. During the assessment conversation, this reader shared how she pictured the red eyed tree frogs. We shared our response to her response. She lit up. No longer did she seem meek and unsure of herself.

As I reflect on this experience, I am realizing that we often make the mistake of emphasizing the struggle with struggling readers. I am wondering how we can shift the emphasis to reader and in doing so, help children emerge more confident and proficient?