Reading Workshop Bingo

 At my school we are working on refining our understanding of workshop structure for both reading and writing instruction, but also for math and other subjects as well. As is often the case when an approach gets popular and shows up all over the internet, everyone has differing – sometimes widely different – understandings of exactly what it means to teach using a workshop approach.

I think one of the best ways to work through these sticky parts and clarify our understandings is to dialogue about them. After all, Paulo Freire argued that humans learn by problem solving, and one of the best ways to problem-solve is to engage in dialogue with one another.

In that vein, I recently led professional learning with grade levels during their collaborative planning time during which we played “Reading Workshop Bingo” (see image below) as a way to jump-start conversations about how well workshop was going in our classrooms. The rules were simple: find someone who fit one of the descriptions and have them initial that square, but you could only get the same person to initial a maximum of three times, forcing people to get up and move around.

The teachers were surprisingly competitive, and did not want to compromise their possibility of winning by stopping mid-game to ask their colleagues questions. So we saved that reflection for after we had a winner (no one seemed to mind that I didn’t actually have prizes). Our conversation flowed easily as teachers shared how they’d used their document cameras to make read alouds more accessible, simple strategies for increasing reading stamina, creative ways they’ve used sticky notes, and cute stories about kids newly energized about reading.

We all enjoy participating in games, but even better is celebrating the sometimes simple, sometimes big changes we’ve made over the past few months. It can be easy to get caught up in all the pressures to continually change and to lose sight of the actual changes we’ve already made and the positive effects they have had on our students.

Play some games, engage in dialogue, and above all, celebrate the positive changes we’ve all made as teachers.

Book Review: Understanding Texts and Readers by Jennifer Serravallo

Where has this book been all my life? Understanding Texts and Readers feels like it pulls together everything Serravallo has been working on for the past several years into one clear, very understandable book. It’s definitely worth a book study with a team of teachers or even an entire school.

The information on how texts gradually become more complex in both fiction and nonfiction is ground-breaking. Fountas and Pinnell have done some of this work already in their Literacy Continuum, but Serravallo writes in a much clearer way so the readers doesn’t get overwhelmed, which is often the case when we try to digest F&P’s Continuum. She narrows the focus in Fiction to four areas: Plot/setting, Character, Vocabulary/Figurative Language, and Theme. She does the same for Nonfiction: Main idea, Key details, Vocabulary, and Text Features. She outlines how each gradually increases in difficulty, discussing the major jumps at particular levels. She then follows that up with examples of students’ written responses for each area, showing how readers of increasing level texts should respond in more sophisticated ways. The work she’s done here is eye-opening and will jump-start some great conversations about the types of instruction students need to effectively tackle each increase in levels within these four areas.

Finally, her last section is very powerful in arguing against leveling kids, but instead using levels as just one way of helping match texts to readers. “Be sure to emphasize with kids that there is no such thing as a reader being leveled, and that the level on books are just one of the many things to consider when choosing them. Never refer to children by a reading level. Correct and redirect children if you ever hear them referring to themselves as a level” (p. 214).

This book is a WONDERFUL addition to the professional book canon and is destined to be a classic. If you don’t have it yet, RUN to the book store to get it.

Anticipation Season

It’s that most exciting time of year for teachers, Anticipation Season! School supplies are on sale, new organizer tools have been bought, color-coded charts are being made, and absolutely anything is possible for next year’s class. Actual students haven’t shown up yet, and for those of us who are optimists, this means our dreams are full of bright-eyed, eager children who love to learn and enjoy coming to school.

However, Anticipation and Planning Ahead will only get you so far. Some years, my elation ended on Open House night as soon as I met my actual students. My dreams and extensive planning were revealed for what they really were – unrealistic visions of a perfect classroom. Meeting my students brought reality crashing in – some students didn’t have the money for school supplies, others couldn’t focus long enough to have a conversation with me, and some parents seemed to be mad at me already and we’d just met minutes ago.

The truth is there’s no point in making detailed plans for the beginning of your year. As Eisenhower once said, “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” In other words, we can make loose plans for what we want our students to accomplish based on the standards, but we can’t know how to teach them until we know them. How much do our students already know? What are their strengths? What worries them? What motivates them?

Donald Graves, guru of writing instruction, once said, “You are not ready to really teach a kid until you know 10 things about his or her life outside of school.” When we really know our students, we respond to them as individuals and they do likewise. Kids who feel like their teacher knows them and understands them will work much harder than those who feel like a number in a crowd.

How do we learn at least 10 things about our students’ lives? One of the simplest ways is through letters. Smokey and Elaine Daniels have written a great book called “The Best-Kept TeachingSecret”  about the power of written conversations between teacher and student, parent and teacher, and student to student. They recommend, as DebbieMiller did years ago, that teachers ask parents to write them a letter sharing three important things they should know about their child. I found that asking parents for input right away not only gave me valuable insight into their child, but also set up the parent and me to have a closer relationship from the very beginning of school. Asking about their child showed that I cared and wanted to start the year off right.

The Daniels’ also suggest the teacher sending “get-to-know-you” letters at the beginning of the year. While this can feel like a lot of effort for teachers, it is often a highly anticipated event for the children. One of my teacher friends shared a picture of her daughter so eager to read the letter she knew was coming from her teacher that she tore into the electricity bill, convinced her teacher had disguised her letter inside. If kids are this excited about communicating with their teacher before they’ve even met us, think of the power we wield once they’re actually in our rooms. Our every word and action matters.

Enjoy Anticipation Season! It’s a great energy boost during a time when we really need it. But at the same time, think of ways to gather the information you need to make your plans realistic for the students you have this year, who may be very different than those from last year. Your students will thank you for it.

Why aren’t they doing what I taught them?

Recently I spent the morning facilitating a lesson study with K-2 teachers and an afternoon meeting with coaches only to find that both groups were having problems with the same basic idea – lack of transfer from instruction to independent work. For the teachers, they felt they had taught students lesson after lesson about editing writing for punctuation, spelling, and capital usage, but students were unable to correct the work on their own. If teachers pointed out the errors, students recognized them and could fix them, but they weren’t finding the mistakes on their own.

With the coaches, the concern was that the teachers they worked with had watched them model workshop and mini-lessons, but when coaches dropped by classrooms the teachers weren’t necessarily putting the work into practice. Instead, unannounced visits revealed teachers reverting back to the instructional methods they’d previously used.

In both of these cases, instruction had happened, but wasn’t sticking. Why?

There could be lots of reasons, but I wonder if it has to do with the gradual release model not being gradual enough. When we think about “I do” moving into “we do” until finally “you do,” I’m not sure we’ve really thought about the different variations of “we do” deeply enough. Within that large middle section of “we do,” how might we intentionally back off our support in ways that translate to confidence on the part of the learner?

Perhaps part of the confusion lies in how long gradual release should take. I wonder if the teachers discussing writing conventions felt like they had gradually released sufficiently since over the course of the mini-lesson they’d modeled and had kids work with partners? But what if it takes longer than that? Are we building in enough time for kids to discuss their options and work through the difficulties? Do the materials we model with closely match the students’ materials, or are they just different enough to confuse those extra-literal students? Are we giving kids the concrete steps or strategies they need in order to walk through the editing process?

In thinking about gradual release as it applies to coaching, perhaps we’re also cutting gradual release too short. Just because we’re working with adults doesn’t mean those adults don’t also deserve to receive a great deal of “we do” support from the coach.

That might mean the coach co-plans and co-teaches more lessons with the teacher. It might mean asking the teacher to videotape her teaching in order to capture “the work” for you both to reflect on. It might mean building in more intentional reflection time after lessons in order to point out on-the-fly decisions and to look at the resulting student work.

And what about our so-called “you do” segment? Are we really expecting learners, whether children or adults, to apply what they’ve learned in completely solo environments? What if we built in support through partnerships by coaching two teachers instead of one, so there’s a built-in talk-partner for times the coach is not available?

These are just a few of my current ideas on why our work might not be sticking, whether it’s with students or adults. I need to do a lot more thinking about this. What are your thoughts? How can we make sure that the work we’re doing is effective and transfers to independence?

The Chameleon Effect

When I was six years old, my family moved from the big city of Memphis, TN, where my dad was an accountant, to the western North Carolina mountains. Back in the 70s, there weren’t many “ferreners” in the mountains, and we stood out like a tick on a beauty queen.

When I got a little older, I noticed an interesting phenomenon. Anytime we stopped for gas at the local full-service station, my dad would always get out and talk to the owner. That wasn’t the interesting part. Rather, I was fascinated to hear my college-educated father pick up the country twang of the locals while he leaned on the fender talking about the weather, wild hogs, and deer hunting, which I was not aware that my father did. His entire demeanor changed in that situation, and I realized at some level it was necessary to try to fit in.

It turns out that this is called the Chameleon Effect, and we all do it. We tend to adapt ourselves to the surrounding social environment by changing our speech patterns, gestures, posture and behaviors to match those around us.

This morning I was in a 5^th grade classroom in which the teacher has built an amazing sense of community. She is constantly encouraging kids, celebrating their accomplishments, and having them set individual goals. As I was visiting this morning, I overheard one of her boys pass by her and whisper, “I love you!” to the teacher. She smiled and whispered it right back to him.

How many 5^th grade boys do you know who willingly tell their teachers they love them? This boy’s outward show of emotion is a direct result of the Chameleon Effect – he is taking on the same behaviors he sees modeled in his teacher. We’ve all observed it – students with a sarcastic teacher are much more likely to make biting comments to each other. “Good” students will suddenly become trouble-makers when put with a teacher with a loose management style. We see chameleons when upper elementary students must change their demeanors multiple times a day as they transition between classes and teachers with very different styles.

The good news is that kids are listening and watching. The bad news is… kids are listening and watching.

We must be incredibly tuned in to our demeanors and how we interact in our classrooms because, like it or not, we will have a couple dozen chameleons mimicking our actions. Studies show that, “if teachers ask lots of questions that everyone knows they already know the answer to, then often students ask teachers questions they tend to already know the answer to – questioning becomes a performance rather than an inquiry” (Hattie & Zierer, 2018, p. 137).

Do you feel like your kids aren’t listening to you? Is it possible that you’re not listening to them?

Do you kids love being at school? Are they picking that up from you?

This is one reason that establishing community is so incredibly important in classrooms. It’s not just a feel-good fluffy thing. It actually changes student behaviors and thought patterns as they mimic us. Hattie & Zierer say, “the more intense our relationships are, the more closely we imitate each other” (p. 137). It’s worth examining our students’ behaviors for what we wish were different, and then considering how we might model those behaviors when we interact with them.

Your students are chameleons. What types of behaviors do you want them to take on when they enter your classroom?

Hattie & Zierer (2018). 10 Mindframes for Visible Learning

Let's Do Away With Right and Wrong

“I don’t know if this is the right way to do guided reading, but…”

“This is probably wrong, but what I do is…”

“Am I doing _______ (insert instructional approach here) correctly?”

If I had a dime for every time I heard someone say variations on these statements, I’d be able to go on that dream beach vacation I’ve always wanted.

Many of us teachers joined this profession because we were good students – we liked school, we felt comfortable there, and we want to replicate the joy of learning we felt growing up. And that’s a good thing! But being a good student oftentimes means we are people-pleasers who honor authority figures. We want to do the “right” thing the “right” way. Bless our hearts, we believe there actually IS a right way to do everything.

The other day I heard a coach friend of mine laughingly describe her first year of teaching. She bargained with her boyfriend – if he would just stick with her during this difficult first year, she agreed to get married, because after that she would have her first year of plans made and she could fall back on them from then on. Five years into it, her then-husband wanted to know why the heck she was still staying late at school and working on weekends – hadn’t she figured it out that first year or two?

One of the most unsettling realizations we can have as teachers often comes within the first 5-10 years of teaching, when we realize that Teaching Is Not Something You Master. There is never One Right Way to do anything.

Stephanie Jones, professor- and coach-extraordinaire, worked with a group of us coaches several years ago. Among the most impactful concepts she shared was letting go of “Right” versus “Wrong” and instead considering what each decision Allows and Shuts Down. 

Every decision you make as a teacher (as a human, really) allows certain things to happen and shuts down other things. For example, consider the way you set up your classroom. You might push your students’ desks together in groups – this allows for more teamwork and better table-space for project work. But it shuts down some students’ ability to easily see the board (if their back is facing the front) and it might encourage student talk during those times you’d rather they listen to you.

Or think about strategy-based reading groups, which is when you meet with kids reading at different levels and teach them a strategy before conferring with them individually. This approach allows you to provide targeted instruction regardless of reading level, thus giving you flexibility in forming groups. But it might shut down a common conversation that would be easier if everyone had a copy of the same book.

In other words, strategy groups aren’t “wrong,” but they’re not always “right” either. You make your decision as a teacher based on what you want to allow for your students at that moment. The key is understanding that every decision you make simultaneously allows and shuts down certain things.

Unfortunately, we will never Arrive at a point in our careers where we have this thing all figured out. We will never create the ultimate set of plans to save from year to year that will suffice for all students all the time. We will not find the One True Way to teach.

The sooner we realize this and embrace the messiness of working with young minds, the sooner we can be kind to ourselves and find the joy in teaching.

Correcting the Fundamental Attribution Error

It turns out that we’ve all made a critical error. And not just any error, but a fundamental attribution error. If it sounds terrifying, well, that may be only slightly off the mark.

I read about this error in Richard Nisbett’s book Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking  in which he describes “scientific and philosophical concepts that can change the way we solve problems by helping us to think more effectively about our behavior and our world.” It turns out that we are not nearly as smart as we think we are.

Our problem is that we tend to attribute other people’s successes and failures to personal dispositions while we discount the context or circumstances that may have contributed to them. For instance, we might think of Todd as a lazy student, or of our co-worker Susan as standoffish and rude, or of Bill Gates as incredibly brilliant. We don’t take into account the circumstances that may have led to our perceptions. Nisbett digs into the Bill Gates story to reveal that when he was an 8^th grader his parents transferred him to a different school because he was bored. His new school happened to be one of the very few schools in 1968 that was connected to a mainframe computer. This lucky break meant that he was able to log time on the computer and even test software for a local company. From there he began sneaking out of the house at 3am to spend time at the University of Washington computer center. If Gates had not transferred schools at that critical time, would he have become who he is today?

Nisbett states, 

“Behind many a successful person lies a string of lucky breaks that we have no inkling about” (p. 35). 

We tend to assume it was the person’s characteristics rather than the surrounding circumstances that made them succeed or struggle.

The kicker is that we do the opposite with ourselves – we, having the luxury of an intimate knowledge of our own circumstances, tend to give ourselves a break when we experience failure. We attribute our problem not to a personal traits, but to the situation. “Well, I would have gotten that job if I had not gotten a cold – I just wasn’t at the top of my game” or “The teacher doesn’t like me” or “The requirements aren’t fair.”

The truth is, contexts and situations have a great deal to do with our behaviors. While we tend to think other people behave the way they do because of some innate characteristic (e.g. laziness, brilliance, greed) the reality is that life is a series of circumstances that make us into the people we currently are.

This Fundamental Attribution Error has huge implications for teachers when we think about how we approach students, parents, and even our fellow teachers. I’ve been guilty of thinking Parent A “just doesn’t care” about their child’s needs in school, or that Teacher X just has a chip on her shoulder, or that my administrator is rude. But if it were me in those exact same circumstances I would cut myself a break by understanding how the current situation is making me appear as if I don’t have time for my child or that I’m too busy to socialize and be friendly with my co-workers or that my fracturing marriage is spilling over into negative interactions at work.  

The bottom line is that we need to give each other a break. It can be hard to catch yourself doing this but, fittingly, it’s easier to catch someone else in the midst of committing the Fundamental Attribution Error. Once you begin to see it in others, you can notice it in yourself.

Does this strike a chord for you? Do you notice yourself doing this with others? Have you discovered ways to catch yourself in the act of judging others and halt the judgment? Share in the comments below.

We're Never Using Scissors Again...

The other day I was working with a group of Kindergarten teachers, otherwise known as the saints of the teaching world, when a second-year teacher gave me some words of wisdom that I think God intended me to hear. She lamented that the first time she tried to have her students use scissors it was a disaster. So much so that she went home and told her mom, a retired Kindergarten teacher, that they were never using scissors again. Ever.

Her mom gave her some advice, which has been reverberating through my mind ever since: The first time you do ANYTHING with Kindergarteners, it’s a disaster. Just expect it. And know that it will get better the more you do it.

I think that advice may not be just for Kindergarteners. It may apply to any person, or group of people, no matter their size.

I think about the first time I tried to ride a Razor scooter – I’m lucky I didn’t end up at Urgent Care with a tree-shaped dent in my forehead. Or the first time I modeled a lesson in front of a teacher – the lesson went too long, I hadn’t planned out EXACTLY what to say during the think aloud, and the kids left the lesson confused and befuddled.

I brought up this scissors story to a different group of teachers during a lesson study in which we decided to try revision stations from Kate Messner’s Real Revision . We planned each station, prepared the materials, and tried to anticipate students’ confusions. But the teachers were still worried that it wouldn’t work. Well, guess what? The first time, it probably won’t! It might even turn out to be a complete Kindergarten-Scissors disaster. But that doesn’t mean there’s not value in the attempt.

If we gave ourselves room to have a nuclear-meltdown disaster every time we tried something new, and just expected it to not go well, then I’m guessing we might be pleasantly surprised at least half the time. And that’s a WAY better feeling than the anxiety and frustration that comes with expecting perfection and not getting it.

Some might think this is a pessimistic way to look at things, but I actually think it’s the opposite. It’s giving yourself permission to flop at something the first few times you try it, to expect it to be less than perfect. And to be optimistic that it will improve a little, with every future attempt.

Expecting disaster could make us more daring and willing to try a new strategy. And in the process we might end up being kinder to ourselves.

Which Matters More -- Type or Amount of Scaffolding?

When reading with a student, which matters more – the amount of support you give the child when they encounter a difficult word, or the type of support you give?

The answer might surprise you. In an article in the March/April issue of The Reading Teacher, Emily Rodgers describes her study of 10 Reading Recovery teachers and the level and type of scaffolding they provided students as they read. They separated the teachers into two groups – teachers who tended to have results above the national average for Reading Recovery and teachers who tended to have results below the national average.  To assess the level of support they evaluated teachers’ use of Wood’s (2003) tutoring rule: “When the learner runs into difficulty, the teacher should increase the amount of help provided, and when the learner experiences, success, the teacher should decrease the amount of help” (Rodgers, 2017, p. 527).  Rodgers found that there was no significant difference between the two groups of teachers. All teachers adjusted the level of their instruction appropriately about 61% of the time.

Rodgers did, however, find a very significant difference between the two groups of teachers regarding type of support they provided. Students (and all readers, for that matter) use three cueing systems as they read: meaning, structure, and visual cues . Proficient readers simultaneously use multiple cues, while struggling readers tend to overuse one or two cues, often due to the instruction they’ve received (Schwartz, 2005).

Rodgers found that high-performing teachers were eight times more likely to intentionally vary the type of support they gave in response to students by prompting them to use the missing cueing system. In other words, if a student over-relied on meaning cues (by misreading pony for horse or swing for playground) then these teachers prompted them to use more visual cues. If the reader overused visual cues (by saying visually similar nonsense words such as payund for playground, for instance) then the teachers prompted them to attend to meaning. This attention to the readers’ MSV errors and intentionality about their teaching response resulted in much higher success for students.

It seems simple, right? Simply notice what the student is not doing, and prompt them to do it. But Rodgers cautions that we tend to find our “favorite” prompts and reuse them over and over again without regard to the child in front of us.

She also cautions that just because there wasn’t a significant difference between the amount of support provided by the two groups of teachers doesn’t mean that we should stop adjusting how much support we give. All students in the study made some progress, and that could have been due to the teachers’ varying amount of support. Of course, if we don’t vary how much support we give, we will likely cause frustration in the student, which can be detrimental.

I found this interesting, because I’ve written before  about amount and type of teacher scaffolding, but this study forwards the notion that tailoring our prompts for students to the quality of their miscues is by far the more important to attend to.

What about you? Does this change your thoughts about how you confer with your students? Or how you work with small groups of students? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.