Literacy Builders

For the Love of Learning

Reform

Pruning the Educational Landscape

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If you’ve been in education long enough, the refrain, “The pendulum swings again,” is not new to you.  With the Common Core State Standards, many teachers have expressed a concern that as we usher in this new era, we’re saying good-bye to our latest and greatest and moving on to yet something else that is new.  I share this concern and I’ve been watching this unfold very closely.  I have a lot questions, and one of my biggest is about the suggestion that all students need to read grade level complex text and the way in which to go about this is through close, careful reads.  I come from the school of strategy instruction.  I’ve taught children how to connect, infer, question, determine importance, visualize, and synthesize with success.  The suggestion that I abandon this practice in exchange for something that seems to be brand new to the educational landscape makes me say, “What gives?”

What gives is the need for me to be open minded.  If this is the new educational dictum, then before I can criticize it, I need to really understand it.  I need to carefully consider what I don’t understand about close, careful reading, and I need to understand what’s behind the suggestion that this practice could potentially help solve the problems that ail American schoolchildren when it comes to comprehension. And so, I have been on a quest to learn everything I can about close reading.  I have watched and rewatched the EngageNY videos about the Gettysburg Address and Letters from a Birmingham Jail.  I have scrutinized the Feynman text and I have read and listened as people who know way more than I do about reading explain the rationale and justification behind it and I confess, I have stumbled upon some new understandings. The first being this idea that if children are going to be successful on state assessments, the first time they see grade level text cannot be the day of the test.   Now, I don’t mean to imply that the authors of the Common Core are only about good test scores, but I think it’s fairly safe to say that they are about improving reading proficiency.  The contention is that in our classrooms, we don’t do enough to create dissonance and when students don’t have ample opportunity to puzzle through the complexities of complicated text, they don’t stretch as readers.  Instead of working in zones of proximal development, we create zones of maximum comfort and like an exercise routine that isn’t adjusted when a certain comfort level is achieved, growth stifles.  We don’t get the results we are looking for.
So this idea of stretching a reader is an ideology that I share with the Common Core so I found myself very willing to experiment with close reading. Part of the theory suggests we shouldn’t provide students too much information about the text before actually reading it because doing this takes away the need for students to attend closely and puzzle out what the text is really saying.  This idea intrigued me because I’m so conditioned to preview and provide background knowledge but I decided to suspend what I know best and give it a try. And I have to say, I’ve noticed some interesting things begin to happen.
In the past, as I prepared students to read, I would often invite them to share their experiences and talk about their connections to what they thought they were going to read about.  Students would get super excited and we’d sometimes have interesting conversations, but there were also plenty of occasions when I felt like I was running interference trying to get the students back on track because the conversation had taken a serious detour from what the text was really about.  In addition, these pre-reading conversations would often eat up a lot of time.  Once upon a time, I thought it was time well spent. But since I have backed off from activating schema, I have found myself entertaining far less extraneous conversation about text.  Because there is less idle chatter, there seems to be less “noise” interfering with students’ understanding. On many occasions I’d observe students answering questions based on what they knew rather than what the text actually said.  I’m seeing a lot less of that now and it’s the result of a simple change.
My little experiment has taught me many things, mostly about close reading, but also about change.  Skepticism is a knee jerk reaction to change.  So is dread. Cynicism. Criticism.  When I first encountered the Common Core, I was suspicious that as educators, we were “being forced into a brand new educational landscape.” As I become more familiar with the Common Core, its shifts, and ideals, what I realize is that we’re not creating a brand new landscape so much as we’re pruning the one we already have. While we can hope that the greatest outcome of the Common Core will be better readers, writers, speakers, and listeners; the more immediate outcome will be reflection.  This document will force us to “closely read” our curriculums and teaching practices.  It will force us to try new things and in pruning the landscape, we may actually begin to create a new—and better—landscape for the 21st Century.

Reading Volume in the Age of the Common Core

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Back in November, I worked with a group of fourth grade students on how to determine the main idea of a passage.  We worked with a passage about forest fires that read as follows:
Some fire is a natural part of the life of a forest.  Fire cleans out dead brush by burning it to ash.  Then animals that live in the forest can find food more easily.  New plants and trees have more room and sunlight to grow.
From Fires and Floods by Kate Waters, p 11
When students finished reading, I gave them the following question:
What is this passage mostly about?
A. How fires destroy forests
B. How fires can be helpful
C. How fires help animals
D. How fires clear away dead brush
The students collaborated and wrestled with each of the responses and then we gathered to sort out which response was the best one. After some debate and discussion, the class decided that the right answer was B. 
Sitting off to the side, there was one little boy who wore a puzzled expression.  He squinted his eyes, tilted his head, raised his hand and voiced his vehement objection, “Mrs. Yaris, there is no way that the answer can be B.  This is about fire and I know that fire makes smoke and when smoke goes up into the sky, it makes holes in the ozone layer and that causes global warming.  Global warming is bad.  Fires aren’t helpful.”
Take a moment to digest this story.  Think about what this child is doing as a reader and then think about what went wrong on his path to answering the question correctly.
As you do that, allow me to tell you one more story. 
Last week, in my post titled The Reading Advantage, I wrote about the importance of reading volume and it sparked a lot of conversation in the twitterverse and among my local colleagues.  As I chatted with classroom teachers about what gets in the way of allowing ample time for students to read, the conversation kept coming back to “the curriculum” and concerns about being in compliance with “the Common Core State Standards.”  One teacher even shared that in “shifting curriculum and instruction to meet the new demands of the CCSS,” she felt like she was sacrificing what she “innately knew was good teaching and learning.”  She felt like the Common Core didn’t allow room for creativity in teaching and certainly there would be no room for reading volume.
When she said this, it surprised me.  My reading of the Common Core had led me to believe that reading volume was central to achieving the goals of this document but yet she planted enough doubt to force me to go back to look again.  As I reread, I encountered line after line, paragraph after paragraph that spoke both directly and indirectly to this issue of reading volume: 
From the College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards for Reading:
“Through extensive reading of stories, dramas, poems and myths…”
Appendix B, page 3:
“There is also evidence that current standards, curriculum, and instructional practices have not done enough to foster independent reading of complex texts so crucial for college and career readiness, particularly in the case of informational texts.”
The bottom of page 3 of Appendix A discusses the “general lack of reading” and goes on to attribute the “deterioration of overall reading ability” to “the problem of lack of reading.”
Also on page 4 of Appendix A:
“To grow, our students must read lots, and more specifically they must read lots of ‘complex’ texts—texts that offer them new language, new knowledge, and new modes of thought.”
Surely, if I looked hard enough, I could cite other examples but in going on this quest, I began to wonder if some educators are reading the CCSS in much the same way that my fourth grade student read the text about fire.
His response to the question about main idea was rooted in his background knowledge.  While extensive and impressive, he wasn’t using what he knew to support what he was learning. His response was based on his reaction to the topic. And because of that, he got it all wrong. 
In thinking about implementing the CCSS, we need to carefully consider the way in which we have read this document.  Are our understandings of the Common Core based on what we know?  Or, are they based on close, thorough readings of the text itself?  If we allow our background knowledge to drive our understanding, like my fourth grader, we run the risk of getting it all wrong. 

In the Face of Fear

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Today, I’ve been working on organizing and outlining some of the ideas that I have for what I dream will one day become a book for teachers about teaching literacy.  Broad topic, I know.  But right now, I’m in the gathering and envisioning stage of my writing process.  I’m relishing going back through the volumes that I have been collecting over the years and reacquainting with my old thoughts and experiences as a teacher.  I find myself making notes in the margins and asking myself questions.  My questions prompt me to want to write more and when I do, I find myself thinking about things that surprise me.  Writing more leads me to new a-has and I get excited…and then worried because I wonder, where does this process end?  How could I possibly write an entire book if my thinking keeps changing and growing as I springboard from one idea to the next?  In some ways, the process is exhilarating and liberating but in other ways, it’s absolutely paralyzing.    I’m so scared, I want to put away my notebook and binder and pen and start scrubbing toilets.  Anything has got to be better than this, I think as I turn my head toward the bulletin board next to my desk and read the quote from Eleanor Roosevelt glaring at me from the center:

                                                     
Do something every day that scares you.
                                                           
As those words wash over me, I recognize the feeling in the pit of my stomach: fear.  I’m trying all sorts of new things this year webinars, videos, writing a book.  All of these things cause my body to surge with anxiety because they’re new and quite frankly, I don’t know if I’ll be good at any of them.  But when I hear the echoing voice of negativity, the trite old saying, “nothing ventured, nothing gained” pops into my head and I soldier on.  I am dedicating this year to dissonance and discomfort.  I am going to try these things that scare me.  My question for you is this: Will you join me? What will you do this year that scares 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.

You are What You Read

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On Friday, October 29th, Scholastic is launching You Are What You Read, an initiative for people to think about and reflect on which five books have shaped their lives. When I first read about this, I was intrigued. I found myself thinking back over many, many years trying to figure out which books have molded me into the person that I am. My memories of childhood reading are somewhat limited because I was a sporadic reader. When I’d finished Beverly Cleary and Judy Blume by fourth and fifth grade, I didn’t read again till eighth grade when I discovered V.C. Andrews. After that, I didn’t read again until I was a sophomore. At that time I got into The Clan of the Cave Bear (Amazon Affiliate Link) series and fell in love with Ayla and all things Neanderthal (maybe that explains my high school boyfriend?)

But shaped me as a person? Certainly these books entertained me, but they didn’t leave me in a state of pensive reflection. In fact, I can’t help but think that as a child, reading was a bit passive for me. When I finished a book, I slammed the cover shut and when outside to play. It has only been in adulthood that I have discovered the lingering effects of reading. Now, it seems that everything I pick up moves me and changes me in both small and big ways. Now, narrowing it down to five is difficult. However, after much thought, these are the five titles that make me who I am:

Who Moved my Cheese by Dr. Spencer Johnson
Who Moved My Cheese (Amazon Affiliate Link) came into my life at exactly the time I needed it to. A few years back, my career felt at a crossroads. My children were reaching school age and I wondered if I wanted to go back into the classroom or continue working as a staff developer. As a staff developer, I felt I had been talking the same game for five years and what I had to offer was getting stale. Who Moved My Cheese gave me a new way to look at and think about making change and helped me to realize that my block of cheese was whittling away and the time had come to find new cheese. Reading this book unleashed in me an intense quest for new “cheese” that I am hoping never ends…

What Really Matters for Struggling Readers  (Amazon Affiliate Link) by Richard Allington
On my quest for new cheese, I found this book. Never has one book ever clarified in such simple terms what needs to change and happen in order to help children on the path to greater reading proficiency. In this book, Richard Allington spells out what children need to become more proficient: Books that match their ability level, practice (lots of it), and expert guidance. As far as books go, for me, this one was transformational. Now, every lesson I teach mirrors these tenets.

Outliers (Amazon Affilate Link) by Malcom Gladwell
Richard Allington told me that practice is really important if we want to help children become more proficient readers, but in Outliers, Malcom Gladwell sealed the deal. I have always felt a bit envious of the super talented and the super successful. Why not me, I’d wonder and shake my head at picking the short straw in the “gifts” department. Nothing has ever compelled me more or helped me to reach new understandings about how the cards fall more than Outliers. Malcom Gladwell helped me to realize that talent and success are more the result of hard work and proximity than they are luck of the draw.

A Whole New Mind (Amazon Affiliate Link) by Daniel Pink
In the way that Malcom Gladwell helped me to think differently about success, Daniel Pink helped me think differently about everything. As I read this book, I felt a call to action. While I think Daniel Pink meant to speak to a wide audience of service providers and business people, I couldn’t help but wonder what we need to do differently in education “to think outside of the box.” Daniel Pink showed me what can happen when we think and do things differently. The results can be transformational. I embrace reform because of this book.

Hey World, Here I Am (Amazon Affiliate Link) by Jean Little
In the spirit of looking with “a whole new mind,” this is the book that never ceases to surprise me of its potential. Of all the books I have listed here, this is the one I have known the longest. It has been a text that I have used since the inception of my career. It is filled with stories that I keep going back to for the purpose of demonstrating absolutely everything and anything I need to. Every time I read these little vignettes, I see new possibilities. I love it because I couldn’t teach without it.

So, these are the titles that have shaped me. Now I want to know, which titles have molded you?