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.

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.

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.

The Fog of Teaching

I’ve spent the last couple of days at a “retreat” for one of our grade levels where we have spent very valuable time discussing the meat of what we do as teachers. We’ve interspersed really deep discussions about curriculum and instructional strategies with hilarious stories of bathroom mishaps and “the things children say”. It’s been both intense and relaxing, and we’ve gotten an incredible amount accomplished.

If only teaching could always be like this.

Unfortunately, too often we can’t or don’t spend time discussing the “meat” of our teaching with our colleagues because the clutter of daily school operations gets in the way. Meetings become clogged with lists of complaints or field trip details and organizational tasks take up the planning time we could so much better use to reflect on our teaching effectiveness. And no one knows better the flustered feeling one gets when eight kids need to go to the bathroom, someone spills their drink on the carpet, and the technology won’t work, all as the principal enters the classroom with her clipboard for an observation.

The best teachers are able to teach on the fly and adapt as needed, but for many teachers daily life in the classroom can feel very much like “the fog of war”. I think of it as the fog of teaching.

The fog of war is described as the degree of uncertainty and lack of situational awareness that occurs in a large battle. It’s the confusion that tends to stop forward progress and sometimes even cause instances of friendly fire. In the classroom, at least, we don’t have to worry about fatalities due to the fog of teaching, but there are casualties. If we succumb to the sense of confusion we feel in the midst of the daily bombardment of information and operational/classroom management requirements, then we lose our forward momentum and the vision of where we’d like our students to be.

How do we prevent the fog of teaching? In actuality, I don’t think there’s a way to completely avoid periods of time during which the fog descends. There will always be report card weeks that fall on a full moon and a holiday weekend. But for the times in between, we have got to set aside sacred time to discuss the meat of teaching. We have to ignore the operational and discipline issues in order to focus on the curricular and instructional decision-making that is at the heart of teaching, and then share these ideas with our colleagues. Just like a soldier working through the sleep-deprivation, harassing orders and harsh conditions of boot camp in order to condition himself to think clearly on the battle field, as teachers we have to force ourselves to maintain intentional practices even in the most adverse of conditions. Otherwise, we’ll all just wander around in a fog.

"Commander's Intent" in the classroom

When I was a new teacher, the first few years of my career, I remember struggling with the tone of my classroom discipline. I started out with the intention of being like those favorite teachers I remembered from my own childhood – so likeable and strong of character that we students would do anything to please them. But without much idea of how to make that happen, I found myself gradually reverting to a list of rules for kids to follow: keep your hands and feet to yourself, clean up your own mess, walk in the hall, raise your hand when you want to speak, etc. I had an elaborate system of rewards and punishments to enforce these rules, and it worked. My kids were well-behaved. But I was exhausted. And my bank account was dwindling as I spent more and more on prizes to entice the kids to follow the rules.

I began to value the good behavior of the kids more than the evidence of their learning, and became annoyed by eager interruptions and messy activities. Around my second or third year of teaching this newfound power to control behavior began to seriously conflict with my beliefs about active learning for kids. I had to make a decision about which I valued more.

Fortunately, I moved to a new school with an experienced principal who helped me realize that I didn’t need to spend quite so much energy on discipline if my instruction was strong in the first place. Kids who are engaged and challenged are rarely off task.

The number of rules, rewards, and punishments does not determine the quality of classroom management, she taught me. Rather, rely on something the army calls “Commander’s Intent”. The army famously believes that “a plan never survives its first contact with the enemy”. Therefore, a group of soldiers is advised of their commander’s intent for a specific battle: “defend the south side of the village” or “take control of that hilltop”. When the inevitable manure hits the metaphorical fan, every soldier in the group is able to adjust and make decisions on the fly because they know their commander’s intent – the ultimate goal of this battle.

The same applies to a classroom. If the teacher’s intent is made clear in simple terms – “be kind to others” or “we’re all here to learn” – then when troubles arise, students can be taught to make all decisions around that one principle. If Billy is interrupting classroom discussions by sharpening his pencil or calling out, he’s interfering with others’ learning. The same applies for bullying, running in the hall, stealing, not completing work, etc. One simple rule can summarize the intent of an entire discipline plan, and all decisions thereafter revolve around it. It’s simple for kids and for the teacher, and it gets at the heart of why we’re at school.

Think about the message you send to your students each day in your classroom. What do you think they believe your commander’s intent to be? Is it the message you want to send?