Confidence

Several years ago I went to New York for a week-long conference at Columbia University. I was really excited, but also a little nervous because I was going by myself and I wasn’t sure how I’d spend all the off-time. “Surely I’ll meet other people to have dinner with,” I thought. “I can’t be the only person going by myself.”

Well, I was. Or at least it felt that way. Somehow when we formed smaller groups, the people I was with didn’t exude the Southern charm I’m used to. My comments about our projects were met with silence or sometimes covert glances and raised eyebrows. My questions about local school acronyms were ignored. When I called to take one of them up on a dinner invite, it seemed she was staying in that night instead.

I spent the better part of the week wracking my brain trying to figure out how I’d offended these people, what I must have said in the beginning to turn them off. Later, a friend of mine suggested it was probably my Southern accent – they just assumed any idea I had was the equivalent of a trailer park tattoo since most likely their only exposure to Southerners was as reality show purveyors of moonshine.

Perhaps something like this has happened to you – people pass judgment on you and you then spend an inordinate amount of time wondering what you’ve done wrong. The episode in NY made me feel insecure and unsure of myself, but why is that? Why didn’t I just blow it off and stay confident of the strength of my ideas? A great book I’m reading right now explains my reaction to this whole episode. Carol Dweck has written “Mindset”, about fixed and growth mindsets, and one tiny section caught my eye because it rang so true for me.

Women, she says, are used to being fed positive feedback as children. Generally, girls are treated somewhat gingerly by teachers, parents, and each other. “You’re so helpful!” we hear, or “I think your dress is pretty.” Boys, on the other hand, are often treated rougher and told to “buck up” and not cry. They easily call each other “slob” and “moron.” Girls, on the other hand, don’t call each other names (at least within hearing distance).

The result is that boys learn early on to brush off others’ opinions of them because so often they’re done in a teasing manner. Girls, however, learn to trust other people’s estimates of them. So much of what we hear is positive or at least very likely true (we hope), that we end up very vulnerable to other’s opinions. As Dreck says, girls think “Gee, everyone’s so nice to me; if they criticize me, it must be true.”

What’s the lesson here? It’s certainly not for girls to begin calling each other names in an effort to grow tougher skin. But perhaps when we’re faced with unfounded negative comments we can take a page from the boys’ playbook and practice some positive self-talk. In New York, I should have re-centered myself, been a bit more assertive about my ideas, and perhaps even asked what they felt I’d done wrong. At the very least, I shouldn’t have let it discolor my week the way it did.

Half the battle is simply being aware of the social patterns that impact our perceptions. The other half is in our response.

Identity Crisis

How does a teacher early in her career decide who she’s going to be? My first year I had grand ideas of changing the world, but quickly learned it took all of my time just to keep my head above water. I kept telling myself, “It’s ok. I’m only a first year teacher.” And later, “It’s alright, this is only my second year.” But by the third year, I was really beginning to doubt myself, and definitely by the fourth year I was pretty sure I was irreparably damaging the tiny souls in my care. “What’s wrong with me?” I’d silently scream to myself. “It’s already my fourth year and I still don’t know what I’m doing!”

Fortunately, sometime during that fourth year, an experienced teacher at a county-level meeting reassured me this was completely normal. No one else had bothered to explain that self-doubt comes with the job. Instead, when I looked around me I saw what appeared to be confident, organized, experienced teachers who never doubted their next steps and always had their plans ready for next week. Granted, their plans involved basal texts and grammar worksheets, but at least they left on time on Fridays and could joke around with the principal. “Maybe I should just be the kind of teacher who pulls the same Leprechaun file out for March each year,” I thought. “Just go ahead and buy the polyester pantsuit and a pack of red pens."

After recently talking with young teacher also caught in the 4^th-year slump, I’m beginning to think this is a natural stage creative teachers must go through. Perhaps it’s an identity crisis, a search for your true self, which occurs when you realize that it’s not easy to become the larger-than-life teacher you’d set out to be when you were a wide-eyed undergrad. You wonder: if that remarkable teacher you intended to become hasn’t arrived yet, maybe it won’t ever happen, and instead you should begin to look around to find another model to settle for.

I’m not sure what brought me out of that slump – it’s been too many years ago to remember the details – but I do think it might have had to do with a change of scenery. I moved schools and separated from my more traditional teammate. I also joined some county-level committees that gave me a wider perspective, but more importantly allowed me to see even experienced teachers were still struggling to nail down this profession. And probably most importantly, I found an unofficial mentor, a neighboring teacher who was ten times more creative than me. Sherry gave me someone to emulate and motivated me to become more than who I was. She served as my “mentor text” and reaffirmed my budding beliefs in student choice and active learning that had almost gotten squashed during my earlier years.

Perhaps you’re a new teacher hitting that identity slump, wondering if you’ll ever be the teacher you’d aspired to. Or maybe you have passed that rough patch and feel fully vested in the identity you’ve carved out for yourself in this difficult profession. In either case, reach out to each other. Lord knows we all need support.

Explicit Coaching

Recently I overheard a coach conferring with a teacher about a lesson the teacher wanted to see modeled. “What I’d really like to see,” she said, “is how to work with my stronger readers on the reflection and interpretation questions similar to those on the DRA. Could you work with a guided reading group on that?” The coach agreed and set a date for the lesson.

I waited for more conversation to happen, but none did. I thought the coach might probe for what specifically the kids were having trouble with, or she might think aloud about how she could address these higher-order skills in a guided reading group, how she might model thinking aloud to the kids or think through which book to use. But none of this happened – the conversation moved on to other kids in the class who struggled.

Perhaps this coach and teacher will meet again before the modeled lesson, but it made me realize that one of the hardest parts of coaching, especially when we’re new to coaching, is remembering that we’re not there to teach the students. We’re there to make our teaching moves explicit to teachers. We have to make the implicit explicit, and that’s not always easy.

Many of us are “unconsciouslycompetent” – we’ve been teaching effectively for so long that we’re no longer conscious of why we do the things we do. We teach like we drive – automatically, effectively, and unconsciously. Perhaps one solution is to practice narrating our driving on the morning commute: “See what I did just then? That truck up ahead put on its blinker to pull into the deceleration lane, so I automatically glanced in my rearview mirror. I need to know how close someone might be following me before I apply the brakes.”

In the classroom this might mean saying, while modeling a reading conference, “At this point, I’m deliberately ignoring the minor oral reading errors I hear in order to keep the focus of the conference on comprehension. Otherwise I run the risk of overwhelming the student with too many teaching points.” These types of automatic, subconscious decisions are what highly-effective teachers do, but if we don’t lift them to a conscious level then some teachers may continue to be left in the dark.

Effective coaching makes implicitly good teaching explicit. It’s about sharing our thinking in the midst of the acts of teaching. That includes sharing the thinking that goes into planning instruction, the myriad small moves that happen in the course of a lesson, and the reflection after a lesson is complete. As coaches, we must move beyond unconscious competence into becoming reflectively competent.

Cranking up the rusty wheels

It has been entirely too long since I’ve written a post. I can whine and complain about how complicated my life has been, but the reality is that writing is like exercise – difficult to get motivated about starting, but surprisingly cathartic once I’ve taken the plunge.

Recently I was at a seminar where one of the round-table discussions centered around writing strategies. Most interesting to me were the strategies people use to convince themselves to write. One lady always stopped writing in the middle of a sentence, so that she’d have a thought to begin with the next time. The man beside me said he always goes somewhere across town to write – a coffee shop or a park – because once he’s there he can tell himself he has to keep writing to make the trip worthwhile. The woman leading the session rewarded herself for writing by bribing herself with Solitaire games – for every page or so written she’d allow herself to play three games.

It’s interesting, I think, that we must entice ourselves to write. I don’t hear people talk of strategies to get started with reading, or ways to manage reading a book so you’ll pick it up the next time. Even when you’re reading for an assignment, it’s much easier than writing one. Is it because it’s a type of Breathing Out that requires us to actively produce thought rather than merely absorb another’s ideas?

At any rate, I’m going to work at playing games with myself to be a more active writer. One idea I liked from the round-table discussion was not writing every day – maybe just every other day, the ones with the letter T in them. I’ll promise myself that I only need to write one paragraph, and if I write more then that’s just icing on the cake.

Confessions of a Plot Junkie

After reading “What Readers ReallyDo” by Dorothy Barnhouse and Vicki Vinton, I’ve realized that I really don’t understand how to read deeply. Sure, I can identify the theme of some obvious books, such as “Unbroken” by Laura Hillenbrand, a story about an Olympic runner who joins the war effort and is shot down over the Pacific, captured, and lives as a prisoner of war for several unbearable years.

But then again, the theme of that one is in the title.

Most books, I’ve discovered in looking back over my reading journal, I read just for fun. I am what Lucy Calkins calls a “plot junkie”. I rarely read for deeper meaning, to really get at the message the author is trying to send.

One of my friends, upon finding out that I’d also read “Water for Elephants” exclaimed, “Oh! Didn’t you think the Russian elephant being beaten for not following English directions was like the second language students in our schools?”  What??  No! I thought it was a love story.  What else have I been missing?

Now that I’ve read Barnhouse and Vinton’s book, however, I’m determined to turn over a new leaf. Each chapter in their book describes in detail how to teach students to pick up details in the beginning of a new book, how to look for a pattern within a text and infer possible meanings and author’s messages, and how to evaluate a book for its relevance to one’s own life.

So with that in mind, I dove into Yann Martel’s book “Beatrice and Virgil”. He’s the author of “The Life of Pi”, another book I read at a purely surface level and which I plan to reread now that I’m in rehab for plot addiction.

What I found out about this new “reading me” was that I needed to read slower, more intentionally, and with much flipping back and forth of pages to previous elements of a pattern I felt building. I needed to stop and restate in my own words an overview of what was happening and what I felt it meant. It would have been helpful to have a discussion partner at this point.

And what I found was depth. The old me would have abandoned this allegorical book or pushed through only so I wouldn’t have to confess to giving up, but with a scowl on my face while exclaiming, “This book is too weird!” Instead, I found that I was able to determine it was about the Holocaust before the author came right out and told me late in the book. I connected events that the old me would never have realized were related, and I even thought deeply about why the author chose to name the characters as he did.

The next step in my rehab process is to spread the word to others and convince them there’s more to books that just the plot. Of course, perhaps you’re the kind of person who already reads deeply and easily anticipates the author’s intent. Or maybe you’re in denial.

Either way, come on and join me – the first step is admitting we have a problem.

Pineapple Implosion

Testing mania has officially reached the pinnacle of absurdity. In an effort to make every square peg of text fit into the round holes of standardized tests, and the seemingly parallel goal of sucking every bit of enjoyment out of the act of reading, New York recently tested students on a tongue-in-cheek fable written by Daniel Pinkwater. He’s the author of books such as The Hoboken Chicken Emergency , Adventures of a Cat Whiskered Girl and Mrs. Noodlekugel , none of which I’ve read. However, it doesn’t take a genius to recognize his books contain an offbeat sense of humor that appeals to boys, quirky kids, and the creative right-brainers of the world.

Take a look at the passage from the test and the subsequent questions. How would you answer them? I’ll wait while you go visit the site….

Thoughts?

Here are mine: reading on a standardized test is not the same as reading for enjoyment or for intrinsically-motivated information-seeking. When we read test passages we’re searching for the one right answer – by definition we’re not allowed to think outside the box or answer divergent questions. The most successful test-takers see it as a game where they try to “beat” the test creators.

“The Hare and the Pineapple” is not a story intended for literal comprehension. It would be like giving a college student their final exam on an episode of Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show or treating Saturday Night Live as if it’s a documentary on American life from PBS. The fact that the Pineapple story was treated with such seriousness makes me feel that we’ve lost sight of our purposes. Not to mention our reason.

Standardized tests can give us some good information. But it can’t take the place of reading for enjoyment, and it certainly shouldn’t kill it. Please – leave some stories for kids to enjoy for the pure fun of reading, and give us at least a fighting chance of creating readers out of the students in our classrooms.

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.