Literacy Builders

For the Love of Learning

CCSS

The Quintessential Learner

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A couple of years ago I saw the sisters, Gail Boushey and Joan Moser, present at the New York State Reading Association conference.  They shared many great ideas and teaching strategies that day, but the thing that stuck with me most is a story that they told about a chance encounter they had with the late Donald Graves at a conference years before.

 

As I recall the story, Gail and Joan were lingering in a hallway when Donald Graves stopped nearby to take a drink from a water fountain.  As starstruck literacy groupies, Joan nudged Gail and Gail nudged Joan to confirm that they were indeed in the presence of literacy greatness.  Throwing caution to the wind, they decided to seize the moment and strike up a conversation. With the niceties out of the way, the question that they asked Donald was this: So, what are you on about these days?

 

While I don’t recall Donald’s response (in fact, I can’t guarantee that I’ve got these details exactly right, either), that question has always stuck with me. People who commit themselves to learning are always “on about” something.  For example, Jan and I are constantly talking about unraveling the mysteries of children’s reading processes. We wonder if interventions and explicit strategy instruction are the best ways to address poor comprehension and decoding.  Are we missing a part of the big picture? And if so, what is it and what are the better ways to address it?

 

Being “on about” stuff is what drives our curiosity.  It’s what nudges us to stretch and unearth stones that might have otherwise been left unturned. It’s what causes us to read new things and talk to new people.  Lifelong learners are always “on about” something which leads me to ask you: What are you on about?

On Raccoons and Educational Reform

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On Saturday morning, I went outside and found trash strewn all about my driveway.  Cursing the animals that feast on what I throw away, I went about picking up their mess. Eager to get on with the walk that I had originally planned, I hastily lifted the lid of my trashcan to dispose of the waste and discovered this:

Needless to say, I was startled to see a live animal in my garbage can–I screamed, slammed the lid down, and went inside and got my husband. Shaking all over and speaking animatedly about the creature that I had seen, my reaction fed my husband’s reaction. He jumped out of bed and readied himself to protect me from this potentially rabid, wild animal invader. He donned gloves and grabbed a shovel and stood back as he cautiously pried the lid off the can.

When it was open,  we both peered inside at the raccoon balled up atop our refuse.  He didn’t hiss or growl or make whatever defensive noises raccoons are known to make. In fact, he stood eerily still as he stared up at us with helpless, timid eyes.  At that moment, I realized how small he was.  After a night of foraging, he was the baby who was left behind.  And he needed help. He didn’t need me to stand dialing animal control to discuss options and possibilities. He was stuck and he needed me to tilt the can so that he could get out and find his family and go about living his raccoon life.

As the drama of this incident ended in the instant that we pushed over the trashcan, I laughed at both my reaction and its similarity to education. Children peer at us with the same innocent expression quietly asking for our help but instead of simply responding to their needs, we become paralyzed by fear.  If I help in this way, will it align with the Common Core State Standards? And if I do this, is it a tier two or tier three intervention? And exactly how will I measure the result so that I can be sure that it is reflected in my annual review of professional performance?  

All of the changes and educational reforms have us deliberating and questioning our sensibilities when meanwhile, the only way to make sure that children are not left behind is to be the kind of teacher who looks into their pleading eyes and gives them what they need as learners.

Forced Learning

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We’ve each written individual reflections this week, thinking around the theme of habits. Relatedly, I have been reading through Opening Minds, the new book by Peter Johnston, as well as skimming a complementary stack of books dealing with the ways students can choose not to let us teach them. Johnston describes a body of research that explores the ways teacher language helps or hinders student development of self-perceptions that include a dynamic frame. A student with a dynamic frame knows that just because he or she doesn’t feel like a “good” writer today, it doesn’t mean that he or she can’t work on becoming better at writing in order to, eventually, be a “good” writer. Students with static-frames tend to think that they are born as “bad” writers and will always be “bad” at writing. Couple Johnston’s new work with Herbert Kohl’s work, “I Won’t Learn From You (1994),” throw in the learning patterns of four sons ages 4-16, and one creates a tempest of the mind!

One of my sixteen-year-olds never really learned to swim until he was fourteen. He was always resourceful enough in the water to enjoy himself and keep me from worrying, but at fourteen I decided to sign him up for swim team during the summer. I knew he would learn actual strokes and technique, not to mention how to dive, a skill towards which he had adopted a decidedly static frame.

His sudden enrollment in swimming was met with vocal resistance. He had swimming practice daily, and daily I heard protests ranging from loud complaints–It is unfair for you to sign me up to swim early every day of the summer without even asking me!–to articulate arguments–Really? Is this the kind of mother you want to be? One who dismisses her son’s feelings and opinions?

I did what any mother would do. I resorted to coercion–If you don’t stick with swim team you can’t go to the pool alone this summer. You will only be able to go to the pool when I go with you.

The neighborhood pool is around the corner from our house and going there unsupervised to hang out with friends during the summer is the hallmark of independence. One could take a small notebook to the pool and record, Jane-Goodall-like, awkward, animated, nervous human pubescence as it unfolded on the pooldeck jungle.

Duncan acquiesced, despite the fact that he was grouped with the six- to eight-year-old “guppies” because his skill set was so far below the rest of the swimmers his age and size. As parents do every five minutes, I wondered if I was doing the right thing, but safety prevailed and I needed to know that he knew how to handle himself in the water.

Oddly, one morning he did not resist going to the pool. He got himself out of bed and to the pool without any argument. When he was late returning from practice, I created a reason to go to the pool and touch base with the coach. Was he playing pool hookey? I braced myself for an impending confrontation.

Arriving at the pool, I looked in from afar. I was startled to see him in the shallow end with a host of other “guppies,” each offering him advice on his form. The coach couldn’t resist, and wandered over to offer her advice. The lifeguard had opinions, as well as the parent of a child swimming nearby. Duncan welcomed all advice. He didn’t respond with defensiveness. He didn’t shut down. He tried to follow each direction and then checked in for more feedback–Was that better? Of course, it was.

Duncan swam all year that year. He is built like a swimmer, which coupled with a sense of agency and a perception of himself as a dynamic learner, readied him to work as a lifeguard the next summer. Now sixteen, he is on the swim team during the school year and works as a lifeguard during the summer.

This summer our son, Natie, is nine. I signed him up for swim team without asking him. It seemed a reasonable idea given the way things worked out with his older brother. Once again I was met with constant vocal resistance. Once again I was regaled with concrete evidence that I was not measuring up as a mother. After he hid when I was trying to round him up for swim team, I threw in the beach towel. I told him he could quit or not, that he could do what he wanted either way. I could give his lessons to a friend’s child. I washed my hands of the whole thing and, without outward anger, told him he was in charge of himself. Two days later  we received this note, which I read against the backdrop of his self-directed violin practice:

Dear Mom Dad,

I humbly apoligize for not getting in the car when you told me to and hiding. As a child, you can’t quite expect me to do everything right. I’ll admit that I wasn’t coopertive during that scene. by the way I am kind of starting to like swim team, and I don’t want you to get rid of my lessons. it’s also the same thing with violin. The problem is that I can’t find a time to practice. Manby (?) we can set up a plan.

Yours sincerly,
Natie Burkins

There is little we can do to “make” students learn. Peter Johnston has some advice about helping children change their self-perceptions from static frames to dynamic frames. What percentage of student learning challenges could be met if students were leaning into what we were trying to teach them rather than away from it? And how much of their posture is in response to ours? Helping students reframe their self-perceptions as learners holds great promise for students about to dive into complex text.

The Habit of Thinking

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Every family has its traditions and since my children were little, my husband and I have always made it a point to check in with our two boys at dinner by asking them to share their day’s “best” and “worst.” Through the years, we have been regaled with stories about what happened on the bus, school assemblies, games on the playground, and other highs and lows of their daily lives.  “Best and worst” has become an important family tradition, but as my children grow older, I wonder if reflecting on the day’s events is enough.  Might I need to do more to inspire their conversation and thinking skills? In mulling over my options, I decided to add a new conversation prompt at dinner and follow up “best and worst” with “What’s your new idea?”

When I began this, my children were perplexed.  After sharing a story of a music teacher who all but dashed his best friend’s hope of becoming a musician,  my sixth grade son, Matthew, looked at me with squinty, confused eyes, “What do you mean, ‘what’s my new idea?’” he asked, almost annoyed at the extra work required of this new layer of thinking. But I coached him to think about why that story struck him as the day’s low. As he began to reflect, he quickly shared that his new idea was that there’s absolutely no truth to the adage “sticks and stones will break your bones, but words will never hurt you.” He thought out loud about the pain of a punch versus the power of words and he decided that while a bruise or a bump might last for a week, words can stay with people forever.

I was struck by how a simple question had the power to elevate the quality of our conversation and wondered if I had stumbled upon beginner’s luck or if, perhaps, I was witnessing the beginning of a shift. Since beginning this ritual of asking, “What’s your new idea?”, we have had many interesting dinnertime conversations. We have talked about society’s infatuation with movie stars and have formulated the idea that perhaps we need to choose our idols carefully.  “Wouldn’t it be better,” my third grade son, Nathan, thought, “if we admired scientists and inventors and other people  who help to change the world?” On another occasion, my older son Matthew described his plan to construct a Lego universe, sharing that his big idea was that he’d need to create a capital city because after all, “all roads lead to Rome.”

As we’ve habituated reflecting on our living and learning, I’ve noticed that the practice of asking, “what’s your new idea?” has begun to spill over into other aspects of my children’s lives.  One night, my older son announced that his summer reading plan would involve rereading the Harry Potter series.  This time, he decided, he would read it much slower and flip back and forth between the pages to find how things connect. (His plan, I swear!) He told us that he had already begun to do this and “he had a new idea.” As he read, he noticed that when everybody else was referring to Voldemort as “You-Know-Who,” Dumbledore’s position was “…I have never seen any reason to be frightened of saying Voldemort’s name” (The Sorcerer’s Stone, p.11) which made him think that there might be some sort of mutual respect between Voldemort and Dumbledore.  It is his plan as he continues to reread to follow this theory and see if he finds other places that support this idea about Dumbledore and Voldemort’s relationship.

Time has helped me to realize that our dinnertime conversation is a shift.  In fact, it is a shift that mimics the fourth shift of the Common Core Standards that emphasizes text-based responses.   When I ask my children “what’s your new idea,” I am prompting them to regard their lives as text and question, analyze, interpret, evaluate, and integrate new ideas.  No matter whether individuals do this by thinking about what happened on the playground or closely reading the words or illustrations in a book, the benefit remains the same: they develop a habit for critical thinking. As a conduit to problem solving, innovation, and creativity, critical thinking leads not only to infinitely more interesting dinner conversation, but also to a higher achieving student body and even better, to a more insightful citizenry.

Shorts

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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

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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

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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

 

Asking “Good” Questions

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In a recent presentation at the Nassau Reading Council/Long Island Language Arts Council Spring Conference 2012, Kate Gerson, Senior Fellow with the Regents Research Fund in New York, spoke in depth about text-based questions and the need for close readings of text. In her presentation, she explained, “A good question is one that allows you to stay with the text.”

To give context to her assertion, Kate invited the educators in the audience to explore the impact of text-based questions by sharing a series of questions about Abraham Lincoln’s The Gettysburg Address.

One set of questions she posed was this: What does Lincoln mean by “four score and seven years ago?  Who are the “founding fathers?”  The footnote on the handout defined “score” as twenty, and there was buzz in the room as people talked about their responses.

But as people talked, I went back to Kate’s comment: “A good question is one that allows you to stay with the text.”

Once everyone had done the math and listed the founding fathers, the conversation stopped dead in its tracks. “Where are we supposed to go from here?” I wondered.

So I asked Kate to clarify the thinking behind this question because to me, while it is based on the text, it seemed rooted in background knowledge that some readers may bring to the text, but others may not.  She disagreed, she felt that this question lent itself to a rich discussion about Lincoln’s intentional choice to refer to this historical event—and that’s when I thought again about Kate’s words, “A good question is one that allows you to stay with the text.” And it occurred to me that Kate’s intent may have been good but she didn’t really ask the real question. Based on her response, she seemed to be asking “Why is mentioning ‘the founding fathers’ important to Lincoln’s message in the Gettysburg Address?”

Asking “good” questions is hard work.  Few would say that it comes naturally which means that if we aim to develop “close read” units of study for our students, then we must change the way in which we plan and prepare.  We can no longer pull books off the shelf a half hour before we intend to use them or come up with questions off the cuff as we share text with students.  Close reads require thought, reflection, intention, and revision.  To add to Kate’s comment “A good question is one that allows you to stay with the text,” I would say, too, that a “good” question is borne in the company of colleagues and unless we are working collaboratively with others to develop “good” questions, we may find we aren’t asking the questions we intended. Perhaps, instead of “good” questions, we should work together to ask “better” questions.