Kim has two sons, one in third grade and one in sixth. This week in their public schools in Dix Hills, New York, teachers administered field tests to students. Developed by Pearson Publishers, who has a staggeringly profitable contract with New York to develop its new standardized tests, these practice tests are presumably “in the best interest of children.” Kim’s third grade son was slated to field test ELA questions so Kim clearly communicated her interest in removing her son from any test-related experiences to the building principal and despite keeping him home during testing, her third grade son was actually tested upon arrival at school. Kim’s sixth grade son wasn’t slated for testing, however the seventh and eighth graders at his middle school were. To minimize movement in the halls during the test, Kim’s older son was put into an auditorium with the rest of the sixth-graders to watch MR. POPPER’S PENGUINS. From requirements that teachers lie to students and tell them it was a “real” test to references to MR. POPPER’s PENGUINS as a “science movie,” I wouldn’t have believed this story if it hadn’t happened to Kim. You can read about Kim’s experience on Diane Ravitch’s blog, Parent to Pearson: Let My Children Learn.
Reflections
Shorts
First, watch this short, Bastille, from a collection of shorts about love and Paris called Paris, Je T’Aime (Paris, I Love You).
Bastille, in a little more than five minutes, gave me something that has stayed with me since I saw it in our local, independent theatre in 2007. This story of a man rising to an occasion and becoming his “best self” by pretending his way into it has become a metaphor for finding my way through changes I want to make in my life (Denton, 2007, p. 21). I have thought of this short a few times a week for the last five years, although I have only watched it three times (including the viewing just before linking it to this blog.)
The man in the short became who he needed/wanted to be by pretending. He imagined what the man he wanted to become would do in the same circumstances, and then he practiced that. I can translate this strategy into any dimension of my work on myself. To have a cleaner house, I can ask myself what people who maintain routines for sustaining an orderly environment do. Then I can copy them and practice these routines until I become someone with an orderly home. To become a better mother, I can look at the language of intelligent mothers and consciously assume their vernacular, practicing until I can own this vocabulary myself. If we become our habits, then we become new people by creating new habits, and we create new habits by first imagining them.
When I saw Bastille, its message of pretending toward becoming was not a new idea to me; I have read it in many places. The strategy, however, found a resting place in my thinking after this short became a metaphor for anchoring this paradigm for practice to my daily life. I think about this short all the time and anyone I talk to at length hears about it.
In their session at IRA a couple of weeks ago, David and Meredith Liben recommended using short, complex texts with students as we support them in developing stamina and proficiency in more difficult material. Kim and I have been thinking about short texts vs. longer pieces, and questions have arisen: Can we communicate the power of text with short texts? Can we develop readers using short texts? Can we sustain them or, better yet, teach them to sustain themselves? We think so.
As educators, Kim and I have both appreciated the advantages shorter texts offer, i.e. students can read through the entire piece in one lesson, students can reread them in even less time, short texts are less threatening than longer texts, and brevity can actually increase complexity (consider the haiku, for example). We hope the Common Core encourages educators to give themselves permission to broaden their ideas about what constitutes texts, especially short texts. A painting is really a short text. A video clip is, too. And how would readership change if middle and high school teachers used some of the more profound and/or clever picture books with their students? I would love to sit in on a high school discussion of Jon J. Muth’s The Three Questions, which would naturally connect to reading Tolstoy.
We can say with confidence, however, that the unintended side-effects of abandoning novels, of missing opportunities to connect ideas across longer texts, and of diminishing stamina for reading texts that require patience, are not the intention of the Common Core crafters. We recommend that you embrace short films, short stories, novel and article excerpts, etc. as viable opportunities for students to learn new ways to dig into text and think about ideas. We also recommend that you hang on just as tightly to longer texts, to novels, to read alouds connected over days and weeks, and to intricate ideas that unfold in connections that make a thinking reader whisper, “Wow!”
Coixet, Isabelle. (Director). “Bastille.” Paris, Je T’Aime. Ossard, Claude & Von Schenk,
Burkhard (Producers). (2006). Paris, Je T’Aime. First Look Studios: Thousand Oaks, California.
Denton, Paula. (2007) The power of our words: Teacher language that helps children learn.
Turner Falls, MA: Northeast Foundation for Children.
Liben, David and Meredith Liben. (2012). “Text Complexity and the Common Core Standards:
What’s a Practitioner to Do?” IRA 57th Annual Convention, Chicago, April 29-May 2,
2012: Celebrating Teaching.
Writing the Standards in Haiku
Let’s face it, reading the standards isn’t like reading The Hunger Games. The Common Core is dense and saddles educators with the same requirement the standards demand of students: close, careful reading. As a teacher educator, I feel the full weight of this responsibility. If I don’t fully understand what the standards are saying, I will never be able to help others implement them with fidelity. So this charge has launched my mission to develop my own deep understanding of the standards, setting me on a course of finding ways to interact with the Common Core and expand my ways of knowing. This quest has led to many ahas but none of them compare to what happened this week as Jan and I explored the Common Core through the lens of poetry.
Poets relentlessly pursue words that convey just the right image or tone or emotion. As I considered this, I realized that as educators we are all working to understand the standards with the insight of a poet and when I mentioned this to Jan, she wondered out loud what would happen if we tried to write the standards in haiku.
The standards in haiku? That was a novel thought. I certainly hadn’t experimented with that lens for close reading so I decided to give a try. I turned to the reading standards and randomly chose number four:
Interpret words and phrases as they are used in a text, including determining technical, connotative, and figurative meanings, and analyze how specific word choices shape meaning and tone. (Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts, p.10)
I read it. I read it again. I asked myself, “What is that really saying?” And then it occurred to me: If I wanted to translate those words into a seventeen syllable verse, I needed to do more than read and reread the anchor standard: I also needed to consider what the standard meant at every grade level in both literary and informative text. I set to work, and after revising several times, I arrived at this poetic interpretation:
Take note: words matter.
Careful choice shapes tone, meaning.
Is a rock a rock?
I continue to revise the poem, looking back and forth between my words and the words of the standards. I still wonder if I have captured the essence of this achievement goal, making me realize yet again the focused lens haiku provides for closely reading the standards. In fact, it worked so well, I would recommend it to any educator wrestling with understanding the standards. We invite you to try your hand at writing the standards in verse and to share your poems with us. Tomorrow we will post the latest versions of our haiku for the other nine reading standards.
Common Core Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects. Retrieved from http://www.corestandards.org/assets/CCSSI_ELA%20Standards.pdf
Matters of Consequence
If you were to say to the grown-ups: “I saw a beautiful house made of rosy brick, with a geranium in the windows and doves on the roof,” they would not be able to get any idea of that house at all. You would have to say to them: “I saw a house that cost $20,000.” Then they would exclaim: “Oh what a pretty house that is!” –The Little Prince
A man crashes his airplane in the Sahara. He wakes to find a little prince from another planet with him in the desert. The little prince anxiously explains that he has a rose bush that he loves and has left behind on his home planet. The prince is afraid that his sheep will eat his beloved rose bush in his absence and he grows increasingly distraught at the prospect of the bush’s demise. The pilot, involved in his efforts to repair his plane and concerned for his own survival, is annoyed by the prince. In ever more distress, the little prince asks the pilot a barrage of questions about the thorns on his rose and what purpose they serve, and the pilot, increasingly distracted, responds without thinking. Shocked by the response, the little prince asks the pilot if he really believes what he is saying. The pilot responds in frustration:
“Oh, no!” I cried. “No, no, no! I don’t believe anything. I answered you with the first thing that came into my head. Don’t you see—I am very busy with matters of consequence!”
***
Teachers wrestle with distributing instructional time among competing “matters of consequence.” Even under scrutiny and pressure to adhere to linear and categorical models of instruction, there remains a commitment among teachers to teach children to think. Think about words, ideas, stories, even about challenging concepts, such as justice or peace or the ways they plan to change the world.
The complication, of course, is that district, state, even federal instructional directives largely focus on discrete content rather than ways of thinking and knowing. “Others” have decided that particular instructional standards are the matters of consequence in classrooms. And the district, state, and federal others are interested in numbers: percentiles, rates, and scores.
Much like the quote from The Little Prince that opens this essay, teachers say to the others, “I have a student who loves to read. He has favorite authors and he carries books with him everywhere. He reads when no one asks him to. When I see him, he begs to read me his favorite passages. He laughs and cries at the places the author intended, and he is happiest when he is reading. Will you come meet him?”
But the others cannot get an idea of the boy at all. They do not understand. The teachers have to say to them, “There is a boy in my class who scored in the 98% percentile in reading on the standardized test.” Then the others would exclaim: “Oh, what a smart boy! We want to meet him! You are a wonderful teacher!”
While smart teachers fight to commit to instruction that is rich and deep, we cannot escape the details of measures and the public pressures of others. We are overwrought by rubrics. We are in a quandary over questions others have decided are essential. But we find points of instructional meaning, even when the directives we receive make little sense, rather than deciding not to believe in anything. We want to continue to read beautiful books, ask questions that don’t have one answer, and show children ways to think about tremendous and beautiful ideas. But we feel pressure teach as if we are preparing for some timed, physical fitness test on live television, and we sometimes find it hard to think of anything else. This might please the others, but it doesn’t do much for the the boys and girls, or teachers.
If we say to the most beleaguered teachers, “Read this book. It might change your life or the lives of your students,” then they are overwhelmed. But if we say to these teachers who have almost forgotten that they love children’s literature and open-ended conversation, “Teaching with this picture book will help your students meet standard ERA172BT376.47…m.” Then they respond with relief, “Ahhhhhhhhhh!” They do not believe that higher-order thinking is unimportant. But they are tired, and searching for a way to satisfy the others while also honoring themselves and the students for whom they work.
***
The little prince begins to sob as he imagines the violence the sheep might commit against his rose bush, and the pilot realizes his insensitivity and describes his thoughts:
The night had fallen. I had let my tools drop from my hands.
Of what moment now was my hammer, my bolt, or thirst, or death? On one star, one planet, my planet, the Earth, there was a little prince to be comforted. I took him in my arms, and rocked him.
***
Sometimes, when it seems the educational leaders and policy makers have gone amok, we are inclined to let the instructional standards drop from our hands and ask, “Of what moment now are standards or rubrics or standardized tests? We want students to develop literate identities and articulate their own important understandings. We have to teach them to feel, to think, to love, to question, to connect, and to create proficiently.” This is the truth.
But we see the other truth, too. We often understand the efforts of the others, working to help us teach intentionally, analyze the instructional standards, and look critically at how our teaching translates into learning. Most educators actually believe in standards. Who is not in favor of focusing instruction, aligning what we teach with what we test, or lifting expectations of students? Who doesn’t want ALL children to become proficient at reading and writing? And this, too, is truth.
So we have to figure out how to marry both worthwhile endeavors: teaching the instructional standards and teaching everything else. We have to make a hard case for read aloud, for dialogic discussions, for social justice, for teaching children to think, for talking before writing, and for showing children in lots of different ways that they are matters of consequence. We need to articulate both a rationale and practical ideas for teaching children the instructional standards while also doggedly defending creativity, independent thought, higher-order thinking, and every one’s right to change the world.
Note: This blog was originally published at www.janmillerburkins.com. and also appeared at http://engage.reading.org/READING/Blogsnbspnbsp/BlogViewer/?BlogKey=f4f9af7d-92db-477a-af8f-a60782d6f991
