Emotional Baggage

I have a love/hate relationship with one of the key parts of my job as a coach. On the one hand, I love dropping into classrooms to talk with students about what they’re working on or to do an impromptu conference. On the other hand, it feels very much like a “power move” to me, something that only someone of authority, like an administrator, has the ability to do. I worry that it aligns me with the evaluation side of administration, and yet I also feel like I need to see the current instruction happening in the school in order to plan “best fit” professional learning for our staff.

So then imagine my inner turmoil after this recent visit to a second grade classroom. The teacher is conferring with a student at the back table while all the other students are spread out around the room. I bypass the kid closest to the door and sit next to, let’s call her Kayla, who has her feet comfortably propped up on her desk as she reads a graphic novel version of Captain Underpants. “How’s it going?” I ask. “Can you read me a little bit of your book?”

Kayla glances at the book. “Well, I can’t really read the words. I just tell what’s happening from the pictures.”

“Let’s give it a try,” I tell her enthusiastically. “Maybe I can help you with the hard words.” Kayla proceeds to labor through three frames of the text, needing help with many of the words.

“Hmmmm,” I mention after having helped her with supposed and joke. “I’m thinking this book might not be a just right book for you yet. That doesn’t mean it won’t be later, but we probably need to find some books that are a better fit for you.”

Kayla begins to cry. “But I want to read chapter books like the other kids are doing!” she says. “That’s my best friend over there,” she gestures towards a girl reading a Magic Treehouse book, “and she’s reading a chapter book and I want to read one too!” Her voice is starting to get louder.

“Not everyone reads the same kinds of books at the same time, and that’s ok,” I tell her, but she buries her head in her arms and begins to cry loudly. “Let’s try reading one of these other books you have in your bag,” I say as I pull out two books labeled as level 10 texts and then Ralph S. Mouse, which I quickly set to the side.

“Those are baby books! They’re too easy! My auntie says I have to read chapter books to get to be a better reader,” Kayla cries.

“Why don’t you show me how easy they are?” I ask, and I pull out Cookie’s Week and open to the first page. Sure enough, she reads smoothly and accurately, though she substitutes “windshield” for “windowsill” and doesn’t want to hear about that error.

“I want to read chapter books like the others! I don’t want everyone to know I can’t read!” she wails loudly enough for everyone in the class to hear. At this point a blonde girl nearby brings her another leveled reader that apparently Kayla had been reading yesterday. Not helpful. It’s not a chapter book.

“How about this?” I whisper, “What if I can find some books for you that are chapter books that you CAN read? Will you come to the media center with me to find those books?” I’m wracking my brain trying to think of a low-level chapter book – maybe Nate the Great? Ivy and Bean? Did we buy some Hi-Lo books for 3^rd and 4^th grade last year?

It doesn’t matter, because Kayla has completely fallen apart, wailing loudly, bottom lip quivering, hiccupping and gasping for air. Her teacher mouths, “I’m sorry!” to me, shaking her head. Apparently I’m fighting an old battle and have opened up old wounds.

“Why did you come in here?” Kayla wails loudly, “Everything was fine until you got here!”

I feel for Kayla. She was not at all shy about her dilemma – she’s very aware that she’s reading at a level lower than the others, and it’s breaking her heart. She has a vested interest in keeping up appearances, and that involves holding thicker books during reading time and being able to tell her friends that she reads chapter books. If I want to ensure she makes progress this year, this is a critical moment in her reading life. I need to find her books that look hard but are easy to decode.

I quickly walk down the hall and burst into the media center. Fortunately, it’s empty. “I have a reading emergency!” I announce to the media clerk. “Where are your Nate the Great or similar books?” She quickly directs me to the early chapter books and we find a few – Owl Diaries, which might be a bit on the high side, but is a graphic book with heavy picture support; Unicorn and Yeti, an even easier graphic book with three chapters; and two more books with heavy picture support, fairly simple sentence structure, and most importantly - chapters.

I run back to Kayla’s class, where she is still crumpled on her desk, crying quietly while everyone else sits on the rug for writing time. After some coaxing, I convince her to come to a back corner of the room to look at the books I’ve brought. “Are they chapter books?” is the first thing she asks, so we flip through each, looking at the tables of contents and chapter headings. Instantly, her tears dry up.

“Let’s read a few pages of one of these – which one would you like to try?” I ask. Quietly, she chooses Unicorn and Yeti and then she literally crawls into my lap, dries her tears, and begins to read. She still needs some help, and we study the pictures a good deal to understand the context, but after reading four pages, she is beaming. “Thank you!” she whispers.

Later that day as I see her class on their way to lunch she breaks out of line and runs up to me. “I read more of those books you got me! I’m taking them home to my auntie to show her I can read chapter books!”

At the time, I didn’t realize quite what had happened for Kayla. Honestly, for a while there, I thought I’d broken her. There’s nothing quite like a wailing, blubbering reader to make you feel like a conference failure.

But all Kayla wanted is what we all want – to be loved by our friends, which to her meant fitting in by reading the same types of books they had. As a teacher, our jobs are to meet kids where they are while simultaneously helping them with the emotional baggage that comes with being a struggling reader. Thankfully, there are texts that can help with this. But it’s also important to realize that without Kayla’s buy-in and emotional confidence, nothing I said to her about reading strategies would stick. She needs first to feel like she belongs, that she’s in a safe zone with her peers. Once she has that comfort, we’ll be able to work on cracking the nut of finding the skills and strategies she needs as a reader.

Who's In Control?

“Good thinking!”
“I like how you inferred the answer to your question.”
“You’re right!”

These are all things I’ve said to students in the interest of giving them feedback, bolstering their self-esteem, and praising their use of strategies in the classroom. But I’m currently reading What Readers Really Do: Teaching the Process of Meaning Making by Barnhouse and Vinton, and they’re making me question these types of statements to kids.

When we evaluate student’s responses as being either good or bad, we subtly assume control of the learning. We become the keeper of the knowledge, the one who determines if an answer is “right” or not.

For instance, one day during a unit on inferring I read The Three Little Pigs and the Big Bag Wolves to a group of 2nd graders, and led them in using context clues and background knowledge to infer the meaning of unfamiliar words. As I turned a page partway through the book, a picture of the wolves playing badminton in front of their concrete bunker revealed itself to the children. When I read that the characters enjoyed a game of “shuttledore and battlecock” outside their new home, one boy exclaimed, “That’s just badminton!”

Here’s where I messed up. I simply said, “You’re right!”, saw the nods from the other students, and continued to read. However, Barnhouse and Vinton argue that my simple statement positioned me as the “one who knows the answers”. In classrooms where this is the norm, students will continuously search for the “right” answer that will please the teacher. They usually end up thinking there’s only one right answer.

Instead, these authors argue, I should have simply asked, “What made you say that?” That simple statement gives control back to the student and forces him to search within himself to describe his inferring process.

If I’d said that during my read aloud he might have responded, “Well, that’s what’s in the picture.” I imagine, these being 2nd graders, that I’d have to have given some good wait time, or even said, “Tell me more” in order for him to explain that he’d played badminton in P.E. last year, he’d used rackets and the funny little cone-shaped ball, and so he was drawing from his own schema to infer the meaning of the unfamiliar words “battledore and shuttlecock”.

Those simple little words, “What made you say that?” have the potential to be so powerful. They take away the easy answer, the search for the one “right” answer, and force the student to be an active, reflective participant in their own learning. And they force us teachers to dig deeper, listen more, and be willing to accept multiple answers. If school is about teaching kids to think, we have to make room for kids to do just that.

Lucy Calkins and the Power of Feedback

These are hard times for education, there can be no doubt about that. It seems like everyone is under fire and nothing is sacred, even the legendary Lucy Calkins and her almost-as-legendary colleagues at Teacher's College.

At the recent New York Coaching Institute, Lucy Calkins talked with the group about how Teacher's College has stayed alive in these hard times. She had several suggestions, but the one that stuck out the most to me was her first one because of what they discovered as a result.

Lucy suggested that in order to deal with the current negative culture, we need to cultivate friends who aren't literacy geeks. Talk with them, use them as informants, and ask them, "What should I be reading?" Broadening our friendships helps expose us to the types of thinking we might not otherwise encounter.

That's exactly what she did, and in talking to some friends outside her department, she was told about the work of Geoff Petty. He has been examining the effects of feedback and found that specific feedback has the largest effect size of anything teachers do. Good feedback can add the equivalent of TWO years of growth if done well.

The website above has specific findings (in a very readable format) about how to make feedback specific by including medals (positive statements), and missions (ideas for improvement) based on clear goals. Lucy's commented that the difference between an excellent workshop and one not-so-good is the amount and quality of the feedback.

This makes perfect sense. I think about some classrooms I visit, in various schools, where the teacher may be teaching in a workshop format, but it's fairly obvious she's just going through the motions. The teaching is still very teacher-centered or standards-centered rather than student-centered. The teacher tends to view the class as a group rather than as a collection of individuals.

Lucy asked us to examine our workshops and ask ourselves, "Does it appear that the students know that their writing should be getting better each day? Do they understand that they're supposed to be a better reader in October than they were in September? Do they know that their partner conversations should be improving, and their reading logs and revision techniques should be building upon each other?"

Too many times we aren't explicit enough about how we expect students to learn in our classrooms. We hide the running record from the child and use it merely as an assessment rather than also as a teaching tool. Or we teach a concept without explaining how this will help them as a reader or a writer.

Students deserve for us to help them set honest, specific goals and to help them towards those goals by continually offering feedback on their progress. Wouldn't we all appreciate this honesty regarding our own work?

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.”

Listening

The importance of listening has been underestimated in the job of coaching, in my perception. Too many people think a coach's job is to impart wisdom about literacy to teachers. The thought is often that the coach is the expert in their academic area and so must convince the other teachers in her building to come around to the "correct" way of teaching. The coach then works her heart out leading after-school professional development sessions and scheduling modeled lessons, but ends up frustrated by the end of the year when only a few pioneers, the teachers who will try anything, are applying her strategies. The coach grumbles, makes plans to readdress it next year, and the cycle continues. After a few years of this, the coach begins to believe either a) "there's something wrong with these teachers" or b) "there's something wrong with me" and in either instance wants to quit. Sometimes they do quit, but continue to remain in the position of coach.

Granted, there can be lots of reasons that coaching doesn't "work" at a school. But I think a huge part of a coach's success has to do with his or her willingness to listen to the teachers she works with. And by listen, I mean truly listen. William Isaacs says we have trouble with this because:

If we try to listen we find it extraordinarily difficult, because we are always projecting our opinions and ideas, our prejudices, our background, our inclinations, our impulses; when they dominate, we hardly listen at all to what is being said.

I don't know how many times I've done this, but I know it's a lot. In his book "Dialogue - the Art of Thinking Together", Isaacs says "People do not listen, they reload". I have been guilty of this many times in my life, ignoring the person talking to me in an effort to pre-argue my point in my head so I can jump in at the earliest opportunity to get that point across.

And yet those people in my life that I value most are the ones who I feel have truly listened to me. The childhood teachers I felt closest to were the ones who made me feel cared about and listened to. The leaders I've worked for whom I most respect were the ones who respected me right back by listening to my opinion - really listening, and considering what I had to say.

As coaches, we should be offering that focused listening to the teachers with whom we work. If we truly listen, then oftentimes we'll learn something. And when people feel listened to, more likely than not they'll be more willing to listen right back.

Delicate Dance: Teacher Conferences

This past week I’ve been following up some earlier professional learning on guided reading by offering to give feedback to teachers one-on-one as they work with a small group of kids. It’s always intimidating for teachers to be observed, mainly for reasons that I’ve already written about: teaching is a profession where we think for a living, so any comments on our actions is really a comment on our character.

I’ve tried to help by avoiding the “O-word” (observation) and instead have phrased it as “offering feedback”, and I’ve been using the same form with the teachers that they used with me when they observed me working with a group of students during our professional learning.

Working one-on-one with teachers is some of the most delicate work we do as coaches. A slightly different choice of words can be the difference between building confidence or building a wall between the coach and teacher. I always try to think of how I’d feel sitting in their chair if someone came in making suggestions, and it’s helped me to realize how innocent I often am of the judgmental way words can sound. I’ve found that using the words “I wonder” has helped. As in, “I wonder if you’d tried a meaning-based prompt here if he would have figured out the word sooner?” or “I wonder if he’s waiting for you to provide most of the help? What do you think he’d do if you just waited him out?” The trick, of course, is to truly wonder about whatever I’m asking. People can smell a fake question a mile away and nothing turns people off quicker than feeling manipulated.

The other thing I’ve discovered about individual conferences with teachers comes from the wisdom of Donald Graves, writing workshop guru. He has always said, “Teach the writer, not the writing. Focus on one important thing that will make this child a better writer after the conference is done.” Helping a teacher home in on one big thing that can help them with many students, not one particular student is critical. But this is often difficult if there are a plethora of “next steps” to address. By choosing one, and not overwhelming the teacher, the time spent in conference will be well worth it.

Graves also says, “The student should leave the conference wanting to write.” If we use the right language, and can be transparent with our feedback, teachers will leave our conference wanting to teach.

Addressing Classroom Management

Jim Knight, in his book “Instructional Coaching: A Partnership Approach to Improving Instruction”, says there are 4 Big Areas that coaches should focus on when working with teachers: behavior, content knowledge, direct instruction, and formative assessment. What’s different in how he describes these areas, however, is that he states they should be addressed in sequential order. In other words, if a teacher expresses a desire for help with her writing instruction, as a coach you must first help her to analyze her behavior management system to see if it’s effective and be sure she has a strong understanding of the content knowledge that’s needed for successful writing workshop.

As I was discussing these ideas with another coach the other day, she almost jumped out of her chair in agreement as she realized why a particular coaching partnership had not worked well in the past. As she and the teacher had worked to improve guided reading instruction in her classroom, the coach had tried to ignore what was for her a huge elephant in the classroom – the complete off-task behaviors of the students at literacy centers: some students were huddled in the classroom library with the hanging chart stand blocking the teacher’s view from what the students were actually doing, another group of students was sitting on the rug tossing marbles into a plastic cup for no discernible reason, and other students freely roamed the room looking for other things to do, all as the noise level made hearing the guided reading group difficult. At no time did the teacher redirect the students, however, since she felt perfectly comfortable with their activities and the noise level.

In this particular instance, the teacher lacked both the content knowledge regarding the purpose of literacy centers (more than just busy work for students while the teacher conducts small groups) but also the necessity for consistent rituals and routines to focus students and maximize learning time. For the coach to be truly effective in helping this teacher improve her instruction, she was going to have to address the classroom behavior first, and then provide her with the content knowledge she needed. Simply going in and modeling a guided reading lesson would not be enough.

As coaches, sometimes we feel that behavior management is a personal decision by the teacher – some teachers are more lenient than others, and comfort levels with noise differ. I agree that there are certainly many ways to organize classroom behavior, and no one way is the “best” method. But if we are to be truly effective as coaches, and if students are going to benefit from the teacher’s instruction, we’re going to have to become more comfortable discussing classroom behavior with the teachers for whom it is a problem.

Finding Flow

Recently I’ve been rereading “Finding Flow” by Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi (“chick-SENT-me-high”). It’s an easy read, conversationally written, and in it MC discusses a phenomenon he calls “flow”: the feeling one gets when an activity is so enjoyable that one becomes caught up in it and loses all sense of time. Experienced chess players, surfers, and violin players all report experiencing this feeling, but so do regular people driving to work, traders on the floor of the NY stock exchange, and students preparing a difficult school project. Runners call this feeling “runner’s high”. Others call it being “in the zone”.

These flow experiences happen when an activity is challenging and the person doing them has a high set of skills to accomplish it. Both high challenge and high skill set must be present to experience flow. If the challenge is high but the skill set is low, the person experiences anxiety – the task is too hard. If the challenge is low but the person has a high skill set, she feels relaxed. If the experience is low-challenge and low-skills, then the person feels apathetic. Housework, watching TV and “just laying around” fall in this category.



MC argues that flow experiences are what make life enjoyable. He says:

“A person in flow is completely focused. There is no space in consciousness for distracting thoughts, irrelevant feelings. Self-consciousness disappears, yet one feels stronger than usual. The sense of time is distorted: hours seem to pass by in minutes. When a person’s entire being is stretched in the full functioning of body and mind, whatever one does becomes worth doing for its own sake; living becomes its own justification…..It is the full involvement of flow, rather than happiness, that makes for excellence in life.” [p. 31]

Reading this has made me reflect on my own flow experiences. I’m fortunate enough to experience flow many times at work – when a situation is at the cutting edge of my capabilities, and yet I feel that I’m able to do it well, I get “in the zone” and time seems to pass by in the blink of an eye. MC argues that flow experiences tend to occur when the goals are clear, and feedback is immediate and relevant. In other words, you’ve got to be working at the cutting edge of your abilities on a challenging task, know what’s expected of you, and be receiving feedback to allow you to adjust your actions as necessary.

How many of you or your co-workers experience flow at work? MC states that up to 40% of the population never has this experience. It seems a shame that some teachers might miss the opportunity to consistently feel that focused energy that comes from being “in the zone” and seeing “the light bulb go off” when teaching goes almost perfectly.

I’m still working through what this means for me as a coach. But couldn’t we increase the number of teachers who find flow in teaching? It would require that we be the sounding board to help them define their goals, and offer them honest, immediate feedback to help them adjust their instruction mid-stream. The alternative of living a work life without flow seems unacceptable.