Different Paths

I’ve been reading Georgia Heard’s “A Place for Wonder” about reading and writing nonfiction in the primary grades, and in the latest section she’s had the 1st graders brainstorm things they wonder about and then sort them according to whether they’re “research wonders” or “heart wonders” (meaning it’s more opinion-based, such as “What makes a best friend?”). She recounts her conferences with various children and the few questions they’re not sure how to categorize, or which they categorize differently than an adult might. For instance, one little girl puts the card for “How do oceans get made?” into the heart pile, and when Georgia asks why, it’s because to this little girl the ocean is an enormous place of mystery and she has no concept of the scientific aspects of it. Different than many teachers would, however, Georgia and her co-teacher Jen don’t correct her, realizing there’s time later on for this child to discover the potential of research to re-categorize it on her own.

It didn’t matter whether the distinctions were exact but rather that the children understood that there are various ways to go about exploring questions.

(p. 69) That’s a very “free-ing” statement, one that I remember feeling quite often as I read books from the various New York teachers connected to Teacher’s College or Denver’s PEBC – things like, you don’t have to complete a picture book all in one sitting, or it’s ok not to have literacy centers, or think of your day as a menu of options rather than a to-do list. Too often, nowadays, it seems teachers don’t hear enough free-ing statements, and instead feel more tied down by regulations and expectations.

Heard’s quote above caused me to think about my work as a coach as well. In the same way that she and Jen didn’t worry about the correctness of their students’ responses right away and instead gave them room to find them on their own, as a coach my concern should not be that teachers correctly implement a teaching strategy right away as much as it should be about giving them room to think about and explore it on their own. Coaching is more about the conversations we have about our teaching, not a search for one correct way of doing it. If these first graders had the freedom to grow their own confidence in their abilities as researchers, then shouldn’t teachers feel that same freedom to explore what works with kids? I did that for years as a teacher in a school without a coach, and the role I’d have liked the coach to serve would not have been as “fount of knowledge” but rather sounding board for successes and failures; a conversation partner about teaching.

There’s never only one way to do something. As coaches we should be able to encourage teachers to take different paths to common outcomes.

Book Review: "A Place for Wonder"

If you’re interested in learning more about inquiry learning – currently a hot topic in the field – and if in particular you work with the primary grades, check out Georgia Heard and Jennifer McDonough’s book “A Place for Wonder: Reading and Writing Nonfiction in the Primary Grades”.

Georgia ‘s other books are always easy to read, user friendly, and chock-full of ideas, and this book is no different. Georgia follows Jennifer as she teaches first Kindergarteners and then first graders about nonfiction text by first tapping into their natural tendency to wonder about the world at large.

The book is organized into three long chapters: the first chapter explores centers, projects and clubs set up entice kids to wonder about the world around them. Chapter two describes the kids at they tap into their “heart” wonders – questions they have which may not be research-able, such as “Where does magic come from?” and “Why do I love my dog?” Georgia and Jennifer model for the kids how to write from the heart to address these important questions for kids. Finally, chapter three outlines 18 mini-lessons that lead kids through traditional nonfiction writing that explores “research wonders”, including lessons on leads, text features, inferring, formatting options, and elaboration.

The authors include many photos, resource lists, and vignettes of classroom life that make this book an enjoyable, quick read. They make teaching nonfiction writing to primary kids easy and fun!

Purposeful Teaching

Everything we do in a classroom must have purpose. If there’s anything I’ve learned from years of teaching, it’s that we can’t afford to waste a single minute of learning, and that it’s fairly easy to fill every one of those classroom minutes with something meaningful.

Sharon Taberski, author of “On Solid Ground”, says that the day should make sense to kids. For instance, rather than chopping up “reading” into a whole group time, small group time, independent reading times, grammar time, etc., we should subscribe to the workshop approach which involves teaching kids a little something and then sending them off to try it. Within that time we get most of those other goals accomplished. It makes sense to kids and makes sense to us because it resembles what reading looks like outside of school, in the real world.

After hearing Sharon mention that at a workshop years ago, I worked to make my classroom time make sense. I examined everything I did and asked, “What does this look like in the real world? Why am I teaching this and what will kids eventually do with this knowledge?” From those questions evolved a version of math workshop, so that my kids were working first on problem solving and second on algorithms and content knowledge. In Social Studies, it caused me examine our government standards from the point of view of a third grader and realize that to make this meaningful we’d have to act it out in our classroom over several weeks. For writing workshop, I realized that publication, in its various forms, is the ultimate purpose of working long and hard on individual drafts, and so I tried creating more authentic publication options and asked kids to choose writing partners with whom to discuss their progress.

The one area I had some difficulty connecting to the outside world was grammar. Who do I know who discusses past tense verbs over dinner or argues over sentence fragments with friends? After careful consideration, it seems the only good that comes from knowing grammatical terms is the ability to quickly identify the problem within a grammatically incorrect sentence. Whereas my grammar-phile friends quickly realize the two verbs in the compound sentence don’t match tenses, someone without that knowledge mostly just senses that it’s wrong. By knowing how it’s wrong, we can more quickly fix it.

However, doesn’t it seem that the ability to label the parts of written language should come after you’re fluent with the act of reading and writing? We wouldn’t teach a kid all the intricate parts of a bicycle and train them on maintenance and upkeep before ever letting them get on and ride. No, instead we let them enjoy the act of riding, get comfortable riding in circles in the cul-de-sac, brave the world without training wheels, and maybe even take off through the bushes on an off-road excursion before pulling them aside for a basic maintenance session. Actually, that session usually occurs out of necessity after the first mechanical problem renders the bike unusable.

It seems the same process should happen with grammar. Let kids enjoy writing, become fluent with it, and even begin to experiment with writing off the beaten path. They’ll gain real-world knowledge about what writing is for; experience the joy of communicating emotions with peers until WHAM! – They experience a mechanical problem and suddenly the need for grammar is obvious, even to them. They’ll be ready to try out more specific nouns, interesting verbs, and purposeful sentence fragment because the ultimate goal of writing – to communicate with others - will make sense.

And shouldn’t everything we do in the classroom make sense?

Pay for Performance

The big item on my mind today has been PFP, based on an article in the AJC. They reported that Georgia teachers will begin participating in PFP this coming fall – at least the 26 districts that opted in to RTTT here .

I’m conflicted about it. On the one hand, this morning I read this interview of Bill Gates and the head of the American Federation of Teachers in which he said that 25% of teachers are very good. Many teachers are not, granted. I’ve worked in two very good school systems which have probably given me a skewed view of education – I think education is much better off than it probably is because of the high quality of teachers I’ve had the privilege to work with.

That being said, if only 25% of teachers are top notch, how does that compare to other professions? What percentage of doctors or lawyers or computer techs would be considered to be “very good”? For that matter, how do we decide what “very good” looks like? If we continually make more teachers “very good”, wouldn’t the bar continue to rise, so that we’ll never have, say, 80% of teachers reach that mark? It’s a moving target, right?

The same goes for student achievement, I’d think. As more knowledge enters the world and as our expectations for what students should be able to do increases, the bar for what we consider an “average” student to be will rise. Fareed Zakaria says that the past few years hasn’t been a case of America falling behind in the world (he was talking economically, but I think it applies to education too). Instead, he says it’s the phenomenon of “the rise of the rest”. We’re not necessarily falling further behind, it’s just that the others are beginning to catch up.

Now, that doesn’t mean I think there’s not progress to be made. Ironically, the very system that was created to help us increase our standing in the world has done the most damage – Bush’s NCLB legislation relied so heavily on standardized test scores that the last 10 years has seen an over-emphasis on linear, narrow-minded thinking, both in children and in the educators who teach them. We’ve come to worship correct answers instead of embracing the idea of failure. We need to be open to failure in order for growth to occur (this makes more sense after seeing the previous clip). And that’s not happening in our current school culture.

My question is: Will teachers be open to failure with pay for performance? In other words, will they be willing to try a new instructional strategy if their pay is riding on the progress their students make? Or will they stay inside their instructional box because it’s worked so well in the past?

I understand that education needs to be improved. I even agree that good teaching should be rewarded and also emulated. Perhaps education needs to become a capitalist endeavor, where success is met with monetary reward and comparison of scores from this year and last creates a competitive edge. For me, the jury’s still out. But like it or not, a verdict is coming soon.

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.

Pet Lessons

Recently I was riding my bike along the wooded path my husband and I have built on our property. It’s not a long ride at this point – much less than a mile – and so I tend to ride in circles and figure eights, frontwards and backwards, in an effort to get a workout without getting bored.

I’ve learned that my two dogs are not equally suited to joining me on my afternoon rides. My Border Collie always starts the ride with me, but as we begin our second lap she soon realizes she can cut corners and wait for me, or better yet, cut bait and go straight home to wait on the porch. She’s willing to go for part of the journey, but she’s not wholeheartedly committed.

My elderly Labrador Retriever, on the other hand, is such a people-pleaser that he would run himself into the ground following my every step. He struggles to keep up at times, but refuses to stop and wait or to sit out a single lap.

It occurred to me, on a recent ride, that coaches encounter people of similar disposition in our daily effort to create change. Some of the teachers we work with are eager to please and will try much that we ask them to with very little complaining. They’re open to new experiences and are optimistic, and yet we need to be careful not to ask too much of them for fear of running them ragged.

Other teachers are more like my Collie: cautiously optimistic, but quick to head back home as soon as it looks like our efforts at change are regressing and becoming circular in nature. If we can show what’s in it for them, they’ll stick with us. Otherwise, they’ll leave us to do the work while they watch from the sidelines.

And then there are the cats. They refuse to follow at all, but create their own path. Some of them are housecats and are perfectly comfortable sitting in the windowsill taking a nap. We could tie a rope to our bike and drag them along, but the cat would not be convinced and we’d each most likely end up nursing serious wounds.

What’s the lesson I learned? Perhaps this: take care not to ask too much of your Labradors, demonstrate to your Collies what’s in it for them, and never take a cat on a bike ride.