K.I.S.S. = Keep It Simple Sister

If you are a teacher then chances are you're experiencing the most stressful August you’ve ever endured. Whether your school is about to open in-person, has already opened, or whether you’re teaching virtually, nothing about the beginning of school is normal this year. Nothing.

With so much to worry about this year (Will I get Covid? Will I pass it on to my loved ones? How do I keep students physically distanced at recess? How can I teach word study with my mouth covered by a mask? What happens when the little rugrats start shooting their masks at each other?) it would probably behoove us to take a deep breath and think about these two questions:

1. What must we ABSOLUTELY get right during the first weeks of school?
2. What can wait?

I’ve learned than when things get complicated, it’s best to react with simplicity. Distill down the most critical concepts and save the others for later.

What MUST we get right?

First, it is imperative that students feel safe and loved when they come to school. Some of our students are extremely anxious about picking up the virus, some have been in neglectful or abusive situations for the past five months, and others are simply “regular” anxious about the beginning of school. Our first order of business needs to be building trust and a sense of community so that these little people can relax. Eric Jensen has shown us that stressful situations release cortisol, and cortisol has distinct negative effects on people’s ability to learn. If our kids don’t feel safe and cared for, all the teaching we do will be for naught.

Secondly, we must create and follow procedures that will make future learning possible. If you are teaching in-person, that means all the new rituals and routines surrounding CDC guidelines: how do we line up safely without touching each other? When do we have to wear a mask? What do we do with our mask when we don’t have to wear it? How and when should I use hand sanitizer? How can I use classroom manipulatives safely? If you’re teaching virtually, students must understand your schedule, create a learning spot at home, and make a plan for sharing devices with siblings and parents.

All of this will be different this year, and it must be taught. Of all the things that are new, I think this is what stresses teachers the most because we’re trying to teach kids something we’ve never done before. Therefore, while this teaching-of-safety-routines is a must, we need to give ourselves grace while we work through it. Tell your students, “This is how we’re going to store our masks when we go to recess today. We might do it differently tomorrow or next week, but if we change I promise I’ll show you how so we can all get it right.” Flexibility is the name of the game for both teachers and students.

Finally, in these beginning weeks of school we must help students become familiar with technology and the platforms/tools our schools are using. Most likely our schools will be going digital at some point this year, or at the very least particular students or cohorts will go digital if they have to quarantine. They need to be comfortable logging in and navigating the platform. This can be done through games, scavenger hunts, and simple assignments that inspire confidence rather than fear in students (and parents!). If your students are beginning the year in a digital format, it’s even more important for them to be comfortable with the technology before you introduce grade-level concepts.

What can wait?

Honestly, deeper content and grade-level standards are not important in these first weeks. Give yourself and your kids a break and instead play games to build community and trust. You might toss in some concepts they learned last year, but make sure they’re easy concepts that your students are sure to have mastered. Nothing provokes anxiety more than being thrown two-digit multiplication when you’re still unsure about addition.

Another piece of the educational puzzle that can wait? Assessments. This may be a bit controversial, especially since we know our students will likely not be academically up to speed due to last spring’s Pandemic Pause. But I still come back to the great amount of stress students and teachers are under right now. Imagine if you were on a mission trip to a third-world country and when you arrived instead of allowing you to settle in, your hosts drove you to the middle of the capital and dropped you off to “assess” your ability to find your way to the mission compound? You’d have done much better if they’d just waited a short while and let you get the lay of the land. The same applies to students. Of course, teachers are constantly assessing in informal ways from day one – speaking vocabulary, behavioral strengths, small motor control, desire to read – and these can still be done during games and routines. Just save the formal assessments until kids have settled in.

"Don't let success go to your head. Don't let failure go to your heart." - Tim Keller 

We know these first weeks of school will be hard. The only thing that’s guaranteed is change. In these times of uncertainty, keep it simple. Love your students and let them know it. Create structure that will allow for deeper learning later. And above all, give yourself grace.

Stress and ADHD

That title may make you think of teacher stress as a result of kids having ADHD, however I'm really thinking about a comment Eric Jensen  made at the 2017 ASCD conference in California. His session was filled with rich nuggets of information, more than I could process at once, so I'm thinking his newest book will contain most of the information he covered.

One particularly fascinating piece was about how the human body responds to stress. Chronic stress, the kind that comes from stressors occurring again and again (think about soldiers in a battle, or kids who are abused or beaten) creates not only physical changes to the brain due to high levels of cortisol (the stress hormone) but also behavioral changes. Kids will generally respond to stress one of two ways: 1) hyper-vigilance or 2) apathy. Kids will either “blow up” at very little provocation, or seem very unmotivated and as if they don't care. It brought to my mind the parents at high-poverty schools who can be extremely difficult to deal with, seemingly quick to anger and “go off” on the principal or teachers. Jensen explained that this hyper-vigilant behavior is an effort to control situations in a life that often seems out of control. If your world is crumbling around you, and it has been for a while, it makes sense that you do your best to take control the best (or only) way you know how.

But Jensen also made another provocative comment: this hyper-vigilance due to chronic stress can look like distractibility, impulsivity, and hyper-activity. In other words, it looks just like ADHD. How many of our poverty students are being diagnosed with ADHD (or being blamed for having untreated ADHD) when in reality they may be under chronic stress? Are we treating the wrong problem?

Eric has several recommendations for addressing student stress in schools:
1. Relationship building
2. Giving students more choice and control
3. Teach stronger coping skills
4. Learn to manage your own stress (as teachers)

Would we have fewer students with ADHD in high-poverty schools if we followed these recommendations? What are your thoughts? Add your comments below.

4 Key Ways to Teach A Concept (Part 1 – students)

Lately I've talked with a few teachers who are confused about the messages they're hearing about current “best practices”. On the one hand, they hear that they're supposed to allow students to struggle and become more comfortable experiencing failure . On the other hand, their principal has docked them for conducting lessons that consist of too much questioning and not enough explicit modeling. How do they know what to do?

As always, Lucy Calkins and her colleagues have words of wisdom to offer. In the “A Guide to the Reading Workshop” that comes with the Units of Study boxed kits, they describe four key ways that we can teach a concept to others. As an example, they describe asking people to teach a partner “how to put on your shoe.” When we teach our partner, we usually default to these four main methods:

• Demonstration: This involves explicitly modeling the targeted skill or strategy. The teacher should think aloud as he models, talking through the steps and possible misconceptions or confusions along the way. A teacher demonstrating how to put on your shoe would think aloud about the process: “Oops! I need to point my toe more to make sure the tongue doesn't get in the way. Now I'll slide my foot forward…” Calkins argues that demonstration should be included in 90% of our mini-lessons.


• Guided Practice: We provide guided practice by working alongside a student as they attempt the skill or strategy, offering guidance and feedback as necessary. This shifts the responsibility partially onto the student, while allowing the teacher to actively teach. The shoe-teacher would coach the student by giving pointers: “Make sure to hold the back of your shoe while you point your toe.”


• Explicitly telling and showing an example: I had to really think about how this was different than demonstration. After some thought, I realized that demonstration includes sharing the teacher's thinking aloud about a process, whereas explicitly telling has more to do with simply telling students a procedure. The shoe-teacher might have a chart with illustrated steps, and describe each step without actually modeling the procedure or sharing her own struggle with the process: “First, you should lift up the tongue, next you should point your toe, third you should…” There are times when this method is sufficient, but generally not if the concept is a difficult one.


• Inquiry: In this approach, the teacher is not modeling at all, but instead asks the students to discover the answers themselves. “How do YOU think we could put on our shoes? Go ahead and discover by trying some different ways.”

A few weeks ago, I realized the subtle differences between these methods when I attempted to teach a group of 5th graders a way to find the main idea by looking for vivid language that revealed the author's point of view. The lesson flopped. Afterward, I realized it was because I didn't strongly demonstrate the key strategy I wanted kids to practice – determining which words in the article qualified as “vivid language.” Instead, I simply “told” the kids the words I was going to highlight: “This word frigid helps me imagine how cold it was, and when the author says the people were bundled up in the cold, that's another vivid word.” I was just telling and showing them the words I would highlight as “vivid” without clearly thinking through what made them vivid.

Instead, I should have been much clearer in my thinking aloud to make it a true demonstration lesson. If I had talked about visualizing the scene, and thought about which words were helping my mental picture become clear (frigid, bundled, miserable) and which were not (Wednesday, temperature, people) then the students might have understood better how to apply this thinking to their own reading. They needed to hear more about the process I used WHILE I tried the strategy, when instead I merely told them what to do.

If you're finding that some of your lessons are flopping like mine did, take a look at how well you're modeling the work you want kids to do. It helps to actually do the task or use the targeted strategy beforehand with an adult-level text while you pay close attention to your own thinking processes. Make sure you're going beyond simply telling.

Open up your head, and let your kids see the processes strong readers and writers use.

Have you tried this before? What works and what doesn’t? Share in the comments below.

Savoring the Struggle

I've been reading a lot about inquiry learning lately, and the power of letting learners discover knowledge for themselves. This is true for learners of all ages - people from age 2 to 92 tend to remember and understand more deeply that which they had a hand in creating. A first grader who “discovers” that even numbers can be modeled by creating two matching columns of blocks to model a number will have a much deeper understanding than the child who memorizes, “2, 4, 6, 8…” The middle schooler who starts an interest-bearing savings account and the 35-year old who rebuilds his truck engine both learn life skills at a much deeper level than by simply reading a book about these events.

The key to inquiry, however, is struggle, and that something that's very hard for us teachers to allow. Letting a child struggle to accomplish something that we could help them solve with one or two well-placed comments requires patience and trust that eventually the student will master the task. It comes from a misunderstanding of where the learning is occurring - we tend to think the learning happens at the very end, when the math problem is solved, the engine is put back together or the savings account results in a longed-for purchase. But in reality, learning occurred during the period leading up to the final event. Without the struggle beforehand, facts are merely memorized and soon forgotten. No lesson is learned.

I'm reminded of a first grade teacher I knew many years ago while I was a reading specialist. I worked with several students from her class, and they would sometimes say, “Don't give me the fish!” while reading a text. When I asked the teacher to explain this, she told me that every year she would very dramatically act out the proverb “Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day - teach a man to fish and you'll feed him for a lifetime.” She created a story from it, complete with a poor, bedraggled man becoming rich from all the fish he'd learned to catch.

She then connected it to the culture they were creating in their classroom - they promised each other that they would never “Give each other a fish” but instead would find ways to teach each other along the way. She told me the parents had been especially guilty of “giving fish” by providing the hard words during nightly reading, but the students soon put an end to that by teaching the parents to prompt them with strategies.

I've never forgotten that teacher's important lesson to her first graders. I unabashedly stole it to use in my classroom for years afterwards. Those kids knew the power in the struggle. They knew that being given a difficult word or told a math answer took away their right to learn for themselves. Allowing our students to struggle isn't easy, but it's the best way to ensure they truly learn.

Quietude

I once had a second grade student – let’s call her Amy – who was quiet and shy, even thoughtful, and not the kind to get noticed. She lived on a farm near the school, and when I came for a home visit, she asked me to bring my mountain bike so we could ride through her cow pastures and see the fish pond. She wasn’t any more animated that she usually was in class, though her quiet pride in her pets, her bike, and her family was evident in every blush and downcast glance.

Amy’s parents were worried because she was quiet and slow to respond in conversations. Her reading was progressing at a normal level, but she read still slowly and shyly, even in one-on-one conferences. To all outward appearances, she was simply someone who liked to think and take her time with it, and in today’s rushed world, she stood out.

I recently read a book that helped me better understand Amy, and myself, at the same time. Quiet: The power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking by Susan Cain describes the American admiration of gregarious, friendly, talkative people and its detrimental impact on the 1/3 to ½ of us who are introverts. Our Extrovert Ideal rewards quick action over careful thought and admires charismatic leadership over quiet strength. It explains why Amy’s parents and many others like them worry that something is wrong with their child if she only has a few close friends and prefers to read or play alone instead of attend parties and participate in team sports.

Cain’s book helped me realize that introversion is determined from birth (4-month old babies who were highly reactive to unusual stimuli later turned out to be introverts who preferred the solitude of their minds over the activity of crowds) and that it can be a gift rather than something to be embarrassed about. She describes a number of introverts who pretend to be extroverts for periods of time but who then find quiet times to decompress later. A surprising number of apparent extroverts are really introverts who are faking it for something they love (e.g. radio talk show hosts, beloved professors, presidents). As Cain says, “Sometimes it helps to be a pretend extrovert. There will always be time to be quiet later.” In the next breath, however, she says, “But in the long run, staying true to your temperament is key to finding work you love and work that matters.”

Until I read this book I had no idea how I, too, had subscribed to the Extrovert Ideal to the point of even feeling bad about myself for avoiding small talk and preferring to spend Saturday at home reading a book. I also realized that I’d set up my classroom to promote this ideal by encouraging group work without leaving room for individual projects, and rewarding the quickest and loudest responders in class discussions without leaving sufficient wait time for the more contemplative students.

One third to one half of our classrooms are filled with introverts like Amy. How can we make room for them to make the most of their natural temperaments?

 

September 11

Ten years ago on this date I was recovering from a head injury and teaching struggling readers when I got news of the terrorist attacks. I’ve written before of the head injury I’d received only 3 months earlier, and while I’d improved a great deal from the initial trauma, I was still nowhere near my former self.

During the past months I’d relearned to read and comprehend again, though my stamina was weak and I’d easily get headaches. I’d studied the school yearbook before returning for preplanning in an attempt to relearn the other teachers’ names, and by now I could remember almost everyone. I still had difficulty finding the words I needed to express myself, but I’d found words came more easily if I relaxed and tried not to become self-conscious about my awkward pauses. I was able to multi-task and hold internal dialogue with myself, two actions that served to make me feel more normal. Overall, I had hope that I was on the mend, and that I might heal completely and return to my former self, although with no prior memory I didn’t know if I’d recognize myself when I got there.

And then 9-11 happened. The television was filled with images of the towers falling, dust-covered people running, family members holding photos, and hospital workers waiting at the loading docks with sheet-draped rolling chairs for the victims who never came. I donated blood when we still thought people would be pulled from the wreckage. I sat crying in front of the TV, broken hearted but unable to change the channel. In those first days it wouldn’t have mattered – there was nothing else on. TV pundits declared the end of humor and irony. Flags appeared on every car, and people I didn’t know talked about the tragedy in the grocery store and restaurants. It felt like the nation’s heart was breaking, and we all drifted through the hours heavy hearted and dazed.

For me, however, the tragedy had an unexpected result as I found myself drifting backwards, the cognitive progress I’d made virtually disappearing. Suddenly I found myself forgetting everyone’s names, unable to express how I felt, and uselessly searching for words I’d learned months before. My head hurt more often, and I spent time staring off into space with no internal thoughts, something I’d not done since weeks after my accident. It felt like I’d taken several steps forward only to have the immense sadness and stress of 9-11 take me backwards.

Now that I’ve fully recovered I realize what an important lesson I learned during that time. When truly learning something as if for the first time, the importance of one’s environment can’t be overstated. Fortunately for me, everyone understood how the sadness affected us all. But our students, whom we expect to comprehend textgs or utilize new vocabulary, might be under very similar stress to what I was feeling; although it might be from a source no one else knows – an impending divorce, the death of a beloved pet, or a parent hauled off to jail. How many of our students do we feel may have learning problems when in reality they are experiencing the same cognitive stress I was? How many of our students experience this stress at home on a daily or weekly basis?

It comes down to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs . In stressful situations the body prioritizes, and survival wins every time. Learning something new takes a back seat. Stress, whether from anxiety, depression, or extreme sadness, affects our ability to learn. This applies to classroom-induced stress as well – teachers who create stressful environments for their students, either intentionally or unintentionally, change their students’ abilities to learn.

After 9-11 the country gradually began to heal, and I did too. We all were left with lessons learned from the experience. As for me, I learned of the delicate balance that exists between our heads and our hearts.

Head Injuries and Epiphanies

This week marks the 10-year anniversary of the bike accident that temporarily took away my ability to read, and permanently taught me a lesson. I wrote about it here on Reading Rockets the summer it happened. Grateful to have recovered and mindful of the lessons learned.

Second Language Learning

Recently I spent about three hours visiting our Kindergarten Spanish immersion classes, listening in with what little Spanish I have, but mostly observing the teaching moves of the teachers and the engagement of the students. It was similar to watching a movie with the sound off - I noticed different things than if I'd completely understood what was going on.

Three things really stood out to me:

1) When I didn't understand the language, the importance of gestures took on a whole new meaning. If the teacher asked a question, she pointed at the chart to help the children see the source for the answer. When counting tens strips on the calendar, she exaggerated the counting motions. When reading aloud a book, she pointed at the part of the picture she was discussing and made "guitar-playing" motions when an unfamiliar instrument was mentioned. As a second language learner, I relied heavily on these clues to understand what was going on.

2) Repetition of concepts and terms took on a whole new level of importance. At one point the kids sang a song and I had no idea what the song was about. I did notice that at one verse the kids shouted, but otherwise it was a wall of sound to me. As a student I might have mimicked some of the words, but had very little understanding. However, after the song the teacher pulled up a small student and repeated words from the song while pointing between her short companion and her taller self, helping me to understand that the song was about opposites. She did this multiple times, asking the students to repeat after her. The same with the calendar pattern of small, medium, and large balls. The kids made small, medium and large circles with their fingers over and over, all while repeating the words after her. I began to understand the concept, and was even able to say the words, though I need more repetition because I can't recall them now.

3) Finally, being surrounded by an unfamiliar language was exhausting! I found I spent the first 10-15 minutes concentrating well, but after that I began tuning out, looking around the room for something I could more easily understand. As I spoke to the other observing teacher in English about what I was seeing, I realized I was doing exactly what we get frustrated with our ELL students for doing - mentally drifting, talking off-topic (or even on-topic, but just not listening to the lesson), and missing the intent of the lesson. No wonder students with very little English appear to have attention deficit problems - simply attending to what sounds like Charlie Brown's mom ("Whaa whaaaa whaaa whaa") is very tiring!

Not many of us get the chance to experience life as an ELL learner, and yet MANY of us have ELL students in our classrooms. If you have the chance, I'd urge you to put yourself in this position and then stand back and watch your own reactions. It's enlightening, and could have an immense impact on how we work with the second-language learners in our schools.

Creating Grade Level Inquiries

As teachers, we're constantly running into problems in the classroom. Problems that, unfortunately, can't always be solved in the same ways from year to year. Teaching is a constantly evolving art form requiring us to be flexible and creative as we figure out why Jose isn't learning letter sounds or why Suzanne always ends up with a stomach-ache at math time or why Itzel's handwriting is illegible despite weeks of interventions. It's what makes coming to work interesting and, by this time of year, intensely frustrating.

While in New York not long ago for the Teacher's College Coaching Institute, I attended a break-out session with Shanna Schwartz about creating grade level inquiries to help us solve these types of problems. She walked us through a 5-step inquiry that a grade level team at a NY elementary school had undertaken after they'd noticed the volume of writing in January was lower than it had been in December. Shanna's steps, and the NY teachers’ example, follow:

1) We observe - The second grade teachers looked at student work and put numbers to what they saw. Rather than just say, "They're not writing as much", they noticed that students were writing on average 3-4 sentences in January when in December they'd been writing 8-9 per day.

2) We raise questions - They asked, "Why did they write more last month than this month?

3) We come up with hypotheses - The teachers realized that they'd changed genres, from fiction to persuasive, and so hypothesized the students needed more knowledge of the genre. They also hypothesized that students needed higher level models of good persuasive writing to raise the quality of their writing.

4) We try something - To help with creating higher level persuasive writing models, the teachers found mentor texts in the real world, such as book reviews on Amazon and restaurant and movie reviews in the paper. They created exemplars (great examples of persuasive writing) for students to study, and kept them in front of students for the duration of the study. Finally, they intentionally demonstrated their own persuasive writing in front of students during mini-lessons. In addition to this creation of higher level models, they also had the students formulate volume goals by drawing a smiley face on the line of their paper where they planned to write to each day.

5) We reflect and adapt - After a period of "trying something", the teachers re-evaluated where their students were, again putting numbers to the results. They found a marked difference in the amount the students were writing. After discussion, they decided the results had more to do with creating better models of persuasive writing and less to do with the daily writing goals. Their conclusion: They needed to use better models with all future writing genres. The learning from this inquiry study needed to expand beyond just this writing unit.

In the future, with the rise of teacher accountability and Race To The Top, we'll be asked to reflect on potential solutions to issues as part of our yearly evaluations. This version of the scientific method is a simple yet effective way to solve the problems we so often experience as teachers.

Self-fulfilling Prophesies

Years ago I worked with struggling students as a reading specialist in a neighboring school district, and while my main job was to recover them as readers, as spring approached I'd also end up preparing them for the yearly high-stakes exam. One fourth grader (let's call him Mitchell) taught me a lesson about text anxiety that I've never forgotten.

The exam was still weeks away, and while I knew much of what we'd learned about reading strategies would transfer to the test, I felt the need to do some specific test-taking strategy work as well. To begin the process, I asked the kids in the small group I worked with what their thoughts were regarding the test. Were they worried or nervous about how they'd do?

Mitchell, who frankly had struggled much of the year with impulsivity when it came to decoding words and comprehending text, surprised me by telling me he wasn't worried at all. This was the first time I'd ever heard a student say he WASN'T nervous, so I asked him to explain.

"My teacher says she's been teaching us all the stuff we need to know for the test all year long," Mitchell stated. "She said she's not worried about the test and that we shouldn't be either. I know I'm going to do a good job, because she's... what's the word? Confident! She's confident in me."

Sure enough, Mitchell exuded peace about the upcoming test. Not over-confidence -- he was still willing to listen to my pointers about test-strategies -- but there was no fear evident in his demeanor over the next few weeks.

It's possible that on the day of the actual test Mitchell did end up experiencing some butterflies and self-doubt. But what's interesting is that the text anxiety that typically can be debilitating to struggling readers did not affect his ability to learn in the weeks preceding the test. All because of the confidence his teacher inspired in his own abilities. She gave him power over his fears by attributing his likelihood of success to his previous hard work. This self-efficacy made him work even harder instead of giving up, like so many struggling students do.

It's an interesting lesson in how powerful our role as teachers can be, and I've never forgotten it. To paraphrase Henry Ford: "Whether your teacher believes you can do a thing, or not, she's right."

Reading Behaviors

So much of reading goes beyond simply teaching skills, sounds, and words. Teaching reading is really about teaching a child to think. And since the results of thoughts are behaviors, we’re really teaching kids how to behave towards text.

The past few weeks I’ve been perusing the latest results of our school’s reading assessment, the DRA (Developmental Reading Assessment). I’ve been looking at each child’s assessment and, particularly for those who’ve fallen behind, tried to get inside their heads to see what’s holding them back. If I think I have a suggestion that might work with a child I leave a sticky note on the folder with ideas the teacher might try in guided reading groups.

With students who are having trouble decoding the words I’ve noticed a few trends. For the most part, the kids who have not made progress are the ones who are not self-correcting their errors. They’re not monitoring their own reading, and the result is either kids who read words that make no sense and yet they keep reading (reading trellis for turtle) or they read words that do make sense but that don’t match the text (reading chick for hen). The former kids aren’t asking themselves, “Does that make sense?” and the latter kids need to ask themselves, “Does that look right?”

Of course, if they’re not asking those questions, then we need to be the one to do the asking. We should be like a broken record, constantly reminding them that reading has to make sense AND it has to match the text. The hope is that with enough reminding, they may begin to hear our voice inside their head as they read and begin asking themselves the questions.

It reminds me of the behavior modifications I used to use with one of my impulsive second graders years ago. His name was Cody (a pseudonym) and he was as distractible, hyper and impulsive as they come. But he had a heart of gold and whenever he got in trouble he was crushed. I could tell that he’d begin the day with the best of intentions, and then suddenly it was as if he just found himself playing with soap in the bathroom or having a pencil “fight” with his best friend. When I scolded him he’d hang his head and apologize profusely, hoping I wouldn’t call his parents.

My plan for him was to interrupt his shenanigans as early as possible and ask, “Cody, is this a good decision?” and help him decide on his own to change his behavior. I said it often enough that by mid-year he began stopping himself, sometimes after the bad behavior had started, with “the question” ringing in his head. He’d cut is eyes over at me, grin, and go back to what he was supposed to be doing. It didn’t happen every time, maybe even most times, but once he started self-regulating his own behavior, I knew he was on the right track.

We want the same thing for our readers as well. We want to prompt them with self-monitoring cues so often that they begin internalizing our voice and hearing it even when we’re not there. Does that look right? Does that make sense? These questions should constantly repeat themselves inside our students’ heads as they read.

These stuck kids aren’t always kids who need more phonics, or more sight words. Many times, they simply need to be taught how to think about text.

Underlying Messages

Last month, at our monthly instructional coach meeting, we had a fascinating discussion revolving around Peter Johnston’s book “Choice Words” and the implications not only for our interactions with students, but also with other teachers.

Johnston argues that how we speak has as much impact as what we say. For instance, saying to a student, “How did you go about solving that?” implies an underlying assumption that, “You’re the kind of person who solves things, and I’m interested in hearing how you did it. I value your ideas.” Or simply using wait time sends the message that we believe that the child is capable of coming up with the answer, and we won’t give up.

On the other hand, when we jump in too quickly to prompt a student when they make an error, the underlying message is that we believe they need support and are incapable of solving the problem on their own. Over time, this creates the kind of passive child who puts for little effort because she knows the teacher will do most of the work for her.

As coaches, we discussed this language, and the underlying messages in what we say, as it regarded students. But then we took it a step further and looked back at what we’d read as it relates to our work with teachers. What do our underlying messages say to teachers, and do they match our actual words? Do our words imply a partnership approach with teachers, or do we send the message that we are the experts, the ones who know best? For instance, saying, “I’m so proud of you!” instantly puts the two people talking on unequal footing. Or by saying, “We have to do running records every two weeks” places this assessment in a negative, mandated context. How often do we use wait time with teachers instead of jumping in quickly to provide support? What messages might that send about our confidence in their opinions?

My favorite quote of Johnston’s comes near the end of this fascinating book:

The way we interact with children [and adults!] and arrange for them to interact shows them what kinds of people we think they are and gives them opportunities to practice being those kinds of people.”

Skills and strategies

Over the past few months I’ve had many instances when teachers have come to me frustrated with the lack of progress they see in a particular student. Regardless of the grade or age of the student, the conversation often sounds like:

“I’m about to pull my hair out with X! We have worked on short vowel sounds [or silent e, or blending, or sight words] until I think I’m going to scream! He’s still at a DRA __ after all this time and so now I’m starting to think it’s a processing problem [or attention problem, or issues with home life, or laziness]. Can you PLEASE help me??”

Usually I ask to see the student’s running records and together the teacher and I begin analyzing the student’s errors. During this process, I’ve come to two realizations: 1) many teachers are not very comfortable analyzing running records, and 2) the tendency in analysis is to look at skills the student is missing rather than also taking into account behaviors the child is missing.

The two points are obviously related. In the past, I think we’ve “covered” analyzing running records in the same quick, all-inclusive manner that the Red Cross uses when questioning you before you give blood. “Do you asdflkjl? In the past 3 months have you lksleksjfl? Do you now or have you ever had awoiuo, weoioux, or qoiuoxghr?”

Well, maybe not that quickly. But we make the mistake of assuming the listener has as much experience with this task as we do, and so we don’t slow down and really delve deeply into the purpose of “records on the run”, which is to put ourselves in the place of the reader and open up his or her head. We really want to be able to see the text as the reader sees it, and from there determine what the reader knows and needs.

Which brings me to point #2. Too often we look only for the skills we believe a reader is lacking. But skills are only half the story. What a reader does with those skills – the strategies he or she employs – determines whether a reader is successful or not. Oftentimes a teacher and I can put our heads together and realize that what the student reads is complete nonsense. This student needs to ask himself, “Does this make sense?” and begin to self-correct his errors. Other students are obviously not using picture clues and would become much more efficient readers if only shown how.

I propose that we use a form like the one below when analyzing student reading:

What is this child definitely able to do?
Skills:
Behaviors:

What would be most helpful for this child to learn next?
Skills:
Behaviors:
Perhaps by changing the way we look at students, we can change the way they look at text.

Verbalizing Our Strategies

In our elementary building we have quite a few students who are in the 2nd or 3rd Tier of RTI instruction, and we usually pull the students needing the most individualized attention during the morning breakfast period, when students are arriving for the day. Several of us work with these students attempting to fill the gaps they have in their reading knowledge, and the other day one of these teachers asked me for specific advice about her work with a student. Her question was a good one: is it important that he be able to discuss the strategies he’s using, or are we just striving for him to use them, regardless of whether he can name what he does?

It’s a question that’s been discussed in the comprehension instruction texts, such as “Catching Readers Before They Fall” and by Harvey and Goudvis in “Strategies That Work”. When I think back over my own reading, I realized that even though I was a proficient reader as a child, I had no idea about the comprehension strategies themselves. I was not consciously aware of how I inferred details or when or with what evidence I synthesized textual implications, and I didn’t even pay close attention to my inner questions, though I must have had them. I do remember being aware of visualizing, however, and realizing that my inner movies were merely compilations of my memories of places I’d actually been.

The same goes for grammar rules, as far as that goes. I still don’t know what a gerund is, and as a child I wasn’t aware of compound complex sentences or dangling participles when I wrote. I just knew it didn’t sound right. However, once I did learn the names of these parts of speech during high school and college, it allowed me to more clearly analyze the errors I was making. By having this explicit knowledge of grammar I was able to name what was wrong with my writing and more easily correct it. Once I knew a dependent clause was supposed to have commas at either end, it was easy to make my writing more understandable to others.

Perhaps the same is true for comprehension strategies. Proficient readers aren’t aware of their use of these strategies, but they feel their absence when they encounter difficult text. Explicit knowledge of these strategies comes in handy once a comprehension problem rears its ugly head.

Even proficient readers will deal with difficult text at some point in their lives, and they can clarify their misunderstandings of the text if they have an understanding of what to do. They may realize the need for more background knowledge when reading a confusing college chemistry text, or they might realize that the technical manual they’re reading for work isn’t making sense because they are reading too quickly and without internal questioning. Being able to name what they are not doing will enable them to change their behavior.

The students we’re working with in the mornings have been struggling for quite some time with decoding and/or comprehending texts. It may be that they struggle because no one has taken the time to explicitly show and name for them the strategies that proficient readers use. The least we can do for them is name them, and give them the tools they need for when the inevitable reading problems arise.

Underlying Messages

A couple of days ago I was given the name of a struggling student I’ll be providing with reading interventions during the coming year. I haven’t met the boy yet, but I know he’s a fifth grader and so I anticipate that along with his difficulties in reading will come a great deal of other emotional baggage that has accumulated over the years. I expect that he’ll be dreading the beginning of school (though he has no idea that his homeroom teacher this year is one of the best in the business). He’s probably expecting to be pretty quickly discovered as a failure and is perhaps already making plans on how to avoid the difficult work headed his way by either clowning around with his peers, claiming sickness or excessive bathroom breaks, or simply melting into the background and becoming invisible.

Working with older students who have struggled with reading is always more difficult than the younger ones because they come as damaged goods. Their self-concept has been torn down and unevenly grown over with scar tissue. They still want desperately to do well, but they no longer believe they can.

I’m reminded of something I learned about working with this type of student from a wonderful friend of mine, Sherry Boone. After I relayed to her a story about a successful tutoring session with an older struggling student and my effusive praise for him on his progress, she gently chided me for my overt enthusiasm. She explained that it’s not just what we say, but how we say it that matters more. When I was excitedly saying, “You did it! You figured out that big long word!” my underlying message was conveying not just excitement, but also surprise. He was hearing, “You did it! And I didn’t think you could! I’m so excited because you surprised me with your progress.”

Instead, if we praise a student calmly, the message we send is more reassuring: “You did exactly what I knew you could do all along! I’m not at all surprised that you made progress because I’ve been expecting it.” In our work with older students, we have to work twice as hard on their attribution theory or, in other words, to whom these students attribute their success. Too many times, kids who struggle with reading see themselves as helpless regarding school. They can’t seem to do anything successfully, and if they do they tend to attribute it to luck. “Oh, I just guessed at that word. I didn’t do anything intelligent or strategic or intentional. It was a lucky guess.”

Our job as teachers is to combat this attitude and give the struggling reader control over reading so that he can begin seeing himself as the type of person who knows what to do once a difficult reading situation is encountered. And once empowered, they will no longer feel the need to be invisible in our classrooms.

One-minute Fluency Measures - Skewed Views

I just finished reading “One-Minute Fluency Measures: Mixed Messages in Assessment and Instruction” by Theresa A. Deeney in the March 2010 issue of “The Reading Teacher”. She has some excellent points, among them:

One-minute fluency measures (such as the DIBELS Oral Reading Fluency or ORF and AIMSweb) only measure rate and accuracy, but they don’t measure what are arguably two other very important aspects of fluency: prosody, or what we’ve traditionally called expression, and comprehension, which has a recursive relationship with fluency in that readers who comprehend what they read usually end up sounding fluent, and readers who sound fluent are more easily able to comprehend their own reading. Since traditional short fluency measures don’t measure prosody and comprehension, our working definition of what fluency actually is has gotten skewed. She argues that we’re confusing fluency assessment with fluency instruction, and because we’re focusing only on rate and accuracy, that’s what we end up teaching as well. In an effort to increase the scores on these quick assessments, we give students more short texts to practice reading quickly and accurately. Students end up with a skewed message about what reading is and how to know when you’re good at it.

Her other point about one-minute fluency measures is that they don’t take into account the need to develop reading endurance in students. She demonstrates this using the readings of eight students reading at least one year below grade level. Each of these students was able to read within the recommended guidelines for accuracy and speed on a one-minute reading. But when asked to read for longer periods (4-5 minutes) most of the students read much slower and much less accurately. Her point is that we’ve helped improve readers’ speed and accuracy on short texts at the expense of these same qualities on longer texts. Some students were able to keep their accuracy fairly high over time, though their speed decreased. These students most likely needed practice reading longer texts and developing stamina. However, some students decreased both in their speed and their accuracy, indicating the problem might lie deeper. The reader has evidently not become automatic in her word recognition and would need help with either sight words or decoding unfamiliar words. To determine this we have to go deeper than typical one-minute assessments allow, and do a miscue analysis on the selection.

One-minute fluency assessments have their place – they allow us to see which students need further work on rate and accuracy. But they don’t tell us how the reader does on longer texts or why the student might be having difficulty. As always in education, we have to find a balance. In this case, we need a balanced view of the definition of fluency and the causes of dysfluency.

Book review: "The Book Whisperer"

I just finished "The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child" and it makes me want to not only soak up as many books as I can read, but also to grab a nearby child and book talk them into reading as many books as they can as well. It's obvious from this book that Miller is a lifelong reader who is passionate about convincing children to be the same. She is a sixth grade teacher whose classroom rivals the school library in diversity and size. She expects her kids to read 40 books during the year they are with her, and though some don't make it (the fewest any child has read over the year is 22 books) they usually end up reading MANY more books than they had the previous year. She dedicates 30 minutes per day to independent reading for her students, and spends the other 60 minutes of her period on instruction. If I could find one fault with her book it's that I wish she'd spent more time on describing the instruction that happens in her classroom during the 60 minutes her kids aren't reading. Perhaps she's leaving room to publish another book at a later point in time.

She does go into accountability measures she uses to track student reading, her requirements that students read a variety of genres, and how this devotion to reading translates into test scores (her students regularly do very well on the Texas high-stakes assessment). She also addresses many traditional practices such as round robin reading, incentive programs, and book reports, and I think she does a marvelous job of justifying why she doesn't do them and describing her alternatives instead.

This is a wonderful book, particularly for upper grades teachers who want insight into how workshop can look for their students. She writes in a very readable, convincing style. Now if she'll just come out with her sequel!

Allington's Six Ts of Effective Instruction

Dick Allington is brilliant. He’s a wonderful researcher, but I consider his most brilliant feat to be making the research that’s out there so completely accessible to the rest of us.

He has written about the “Six T’s of Effective Instruction” before, but I think it’s worth summarizing here because it’s so brilliant. The excerpts below are all from his chapter “What I’ve Learned About Effective Reading Instruction From a Decade of Studying Exemplary Elementary Classroom Teachers” in “RTI in Literacy – Responsive and Comprehensive”.

Allington argues that good Tier 1 literacy instruction has 6 common features:

• Time: Exemplary teachers balance out true reading and writing in their classroom as compared to “stuff”, which is what Allington calls the activities such as worksheets, test-prep, dictionary skills, etc. that aren’t real reading. In many classrooms it’s not unusual for children to spend only 10% of their day actually reading or writing, whereas students in exemplary teachers’ classrooms spend around 50% of their time really reading and writing. That’s approximately 150 minutes out of a 300 minute school day.
• Texts: “Students need enormous quantities of successful reading to become independent, proficient readers. By successful reading, I mean reading experiences in which students perform with a high level of accuracy, fluency, and comprehension.” Students need texts that they are able to read.
• Teaching: It sounds simple, but students need to be taught. Too many times, what teachers do instead is assign and assess. Allington promotes “the notion of active instruction – the modeling and demonstration of the useful strategies that good readers employ.” We can’t expect most kids to learn how to comprehend or decode or read fluently without being explicitly shown how.
• Talk: “We observed the exemplary teachers fostering much more student talk – teacher/student and student/student – than has previously been reported. In other words, these exemplary teachers encouraged, modeled, and supported lots of talk across the school day.” These teachers tended to ask more open-ended, thought-provoking questions than less effective teachers.
• Tasks: “Another characteristic of these exemplary teachers’ classrooms was greater use of longer assignments and less emphasis on filling the day with multiple shorter tasks.” The tasks these teachers asked students to engage in integrated multiple skills and strategies the students were taught, rather than isolating them. The researchers also found that students exhibited less off-task behaviors and more engagement because of the longer tasks.
• Testing: “Exemplary teachers evaluated student work and awarded grades based more on effort and improvement than simply on achievement.” In other words, teachers were looking more at the process the students underwent rather than the product. Struggling students were rewarded for growth and improvement in learning, and teachers often used rubrics to help students see their progress towards their learning goals.

Allington’s Six T’s provide us a succinct way to evaluate our own instruction and whether we’d measure up to the exemplary teachers he studied. When scientists are seeking the answer to a problem, the first thing they do is research to see if anyone else has found the solution. It seems that Allington has done the research, and now it’s just up to us to use it to adjust our own teaching.

She sees his face
staring from the old class picture
Surrounded by smiling 7 year old cheesy grins
his face is blank, his eyes empty
Why didn’t she see it then?
Did she do enough?
She wonders where his face is now,
years past the frozen picture moment.

The universal teacher’s prayer:
please let him be happy now,
Was some other teacher able to reach in
and turn the key that opened him?

~Heather Wall