Thursday, September 26, 2013

Reading is the First R


You may remember my academic crushes on Lucy Calkins, Rick Wormeli, and Carol Tomlinson. Well, I’ve got another to add to my list. Don’t tell my husband, but I’m currently academically crushing on Mr. Kelly Gallagher. Gallagher writes a lot of books to his intended audience of secondary ELA teachers, but I think a lot of what he says applies to us all. After all, don’t most of us teach subject areas that require some reading from our students? And wouldn’t most of our students, regardless of content area, perform better in our classes if we were able to help them improve their reading? Don't forget that reading is the first R in the age-old reading, writing, 'rithmetic equation.

I’ve been reading Gallagher’s (2004) Deeper Reading: Comprehending Challenging Texts, 4 – 12. I find myself stopping every few pages or so and thinking, how could this apply to content areas other than ELA? What would this look like in a science classroom, for example? And so, now that I’m over halfway through the text, my brain is teeming with thoughts and ideas for all of us to help our students grow as readers across the content areas. I’ll be dedicating a bunch of upcoming posts to this topic, but, for today, let’s get started with a baseball metaphor, adapted from Mr. Gallagher himself (he writes a great baseball metaphor about experiencing the game with his daughters; for the purposes of this post, I’ll extend this metaphor to myself – and to my own inexperience with the game).

This summer, I went to a Red Sox game with a friend of mine who really knows baseball. FYI, I really don’t know baseball. We were the Odd Couple of Fenway that day.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’ve got the basics down. I know the batter is going to try to hit a pitch. If he does, he’ll run like crazy to as many bases as he can. The other guys will try to catch the ball and throw it to get this guy out. If he makes it all the way around the bases, his team scores a point. Three outs per team per inning, nine innings. Whoever scores the most, wins.

As Gallagher (p. 2) points out, “it could be said that at a certain level [I] ‘understood’ the game. But did [I]?” My friend sitting next to me saw things going on that I was totally oblivious to. He could watch the interaction between the catcher and the pitcher and he could spot the center fielder realizing what kind of pitch the catcher was setting up for and getting ready for it. My friend could see base runners looking to base coaches for permission to try to steal a base. And so many other intricacies!

To paraphrase Gallagher (p. 3), I watched and “understood” the game on a surface level while my friend watched and understood the game on a much deeper level; “we watched, and yet did not watch, the same game.”

Our students are sometimes reading complicated text the same way I was “reading” that baseball game. They stay on the surface, missing a lot of the more complex meaning of the text. “They can read and ‘comprehend,’ but they do so almost exclusively on a surface level. They miss much of the deeper beauty of the game” (p. 3).

If I wanted to get better at watching baseball, I would never be able to do it alone. My friend would definitely need to teach me how to watch the game more expertly. It’s the same with our students and reading. Simply assigning reading is not going to result in our students improving as readers. We need to teach them how to the read the texts of our content areas in more expert ways so that they get as much understanding and knowledge as they can from them.

How do we teach this? I’m glad you asked! Be on the lookout for upcoming posts with specific strategies and ideas for teaching reading across the content areas!

Friday, September 20, 2013

What's The Message?


There’s an important lesson I learned while taking a Research for Better Teaching Course. RBT (which heads up The Skillful Teacher course – highly recommended if you’ve never taken it!) believes there are a few key messages we must deliver to our students:
This is important.
You can do this.
I’m not giving up on you.

Sounds simple, right? But so, so powerful.

A couple weeks ago, my husband and I were listening to some TED talks on NPR centered around education (yes, I’ve turned my husband into an education junkie like myself – he was the one who actually suggested we listen!). Two of these stories in particular really struck me because they reminded me of the above messages and just how powerful they can be.

Here’s a summary of the first:
An education scholar in India was conducting a study on just how much children will teach themselves when presented with a challenge (you’re going to have to forgive my lack of specifics here – we listened to this in the car, and I only had a napkin to jot my notes down on!). After he plunked down a computer in the middle of a remote Indian village and discovered that children were teaching themselves English just to be able to use the computer, he began adding challenges. At one point, he asked the children (we’re talking elementary school-aged) to research and make some conclusions about some pretty complicated aspects of DNA (and trust me, he was not “dumbing” anything down; he was using what seemed to me to be college-level language and questions with these kids). Once he presented them with this challenge, they were on their own. After seeing that they immediately dug in, he soon asked a local 20 year old girl – with no background or interest in DNA – to just hang out with them while they worked on their research. She wasn’t to guide or teach them in anyway, but was to act, as the scholar put it, as “the Granny” – simply standing behind or beside the children and making statements like, “Wow! You know how to do that?,” “You can do that type of research on this computer?,” “I’m so impressed,” etc. What the scholar found was that this worked! Although she wasn’t able to provide any sort of instruction or help, just her words of praise and encouragement allowed the children to move further along with their research and findings.

[Note: In NO WAY I am suggesting that students don’t need us to teach them. I’m merely pointing out what a long way certain messages can go to help our students achieve.]

Here’s story #2:
You may have seen video footage of this TED talk before. A beautifully sweet, instantly likeable, grandmotherly teacher speaks about some of her approaches in the classroom through her years in education, the message always that she is not giving up on her students and will not allow them to give up on themselves.
My favorite part of her talk is when she describes how she marks a grade on a 20 question quiz. One of her students got 18 of the 20 questions wrong. But, on his paper, instead of writing -18, she wrote +2. Why?
Because -18 is insurmountable. Any student looking at that would instantly feel hopeless and may very likely just give up. But +2 gives some hope. At least that student is now presented with something positive; at least the focus is now on the fact that he got 2 right.
She describes how the student would ask, “Is this an F?,” to which she would reply that yes, it was. But her ability to get the student to focus on the +2 as a starting place for improvement instead of on the -18 as a starting place for giving up is noteworthy. And, I’d say, effective.



As educators, we hold a lot of power. What we say, how we say it, what we write on students’ papers and quizzes and tests – all of this can have a huge impact on our students. We need to consider our messages carefully, and be sure they have a positive impact on the growth of our students and their learning.



Thursday, September 12, 2013

TEACH!


 Last Friday night, CBS aired a special documentary called TEACH, following the classrooms of four teachers through some triumphs and through some struggles. There has been some controversy surrounding the film (it was made by some of the same people involved with Waiting for Superman, which has its own controversy surrounding it; some felt there should have been more of a variety of content areas and teacher ages represented in the film; some felt it was an advertisement for Khan Academy; etc.), but I won’t be delving into those areas. In fact, as a disclaimer to this post, I’ll let you know right now: I loved it. I thought it was a genuine depiction of the realities of teaching – the pressures we face, the obstacles we have to strive to overcome, however insurmountable. And this post details what I loved most about the piece: teacher reflection and growth.

[SPOILER ALERT: If you haven’t seen TEACH yet and you’re planning on it, you may want to postpone reading this post! TEACH just became available on iTunes, I believe, so you can check it out there.]

The four teachers depicted in the documentary were real teachers. And real teachers make mistakes. (Yes, let’s admit it. We do make mistakes from time to time.) And these teachers made mistakes. But the great, inspiring take-away was that these four teachers, often with the help of a mentor, reflected on their practices and on their mistakes, grew from the experience, changed some things around, and ended up with some great results for their students.

Keeping the Class Student-Centered
One of the teachers in the film was a high school AP history teacher. Much loved by his students, who seemingly clamored to enroll in his class, he learned the hard way (during a class that was being observed by his graduate school education professor, no less!) that his class was too teacher-centered. Numerous times throughout the lesson (which was largely lecture-based) he asked the class some variation of the question, “Does everyone get this?” Each time, he was met by crickets. And each time, he proceeded along with the content of his lesson, presumably taking his students’ silence for a “Yes, we get this.” It’s easy to fall into this trap, especially when we feel we have to keep moving on with our lesson. But we should never take a class’ silence for understanding (nor should we take one student’s “Yes” as the answer for “Does everyone get this?”). In working with his graduate school professor, this teacher realized his lessons needed to be more student-centered in order to get them more involved and to aid in checking for understanding. Soon, he was having his students work in groups to brainstorm, problem solve, and create. A plethora of voices filled the air of his classroom, and you could see the learning taking place.

The 360 Degree Classroom
A secondary math teacher shown in the film struggled with a range of student abilities present in her class. Even more so, she struggled with not being able to easily watch her students in action, to observe them doing math in the moment. Working with the assistant principal, she took on the challenge of trying out a 360 degree classroom. Whiteboards were installed across all four of the walls of the classroom. Students were handed a marker and an eraser as they entered the room. And, (presumably after a whole class mini-lesson) students left their desks behind as they each found a place at one of the four wall-length white boards. The teacher left the front of the room behind, and stood directly in the middle of the room, where she could pivot and turn, watching her students work through a math problem. This helped her identify to whom she needed to go first with support, and who was progressing along independently. Once again, the learning was visible and the students engaged.

Tapping Into High-Interest
A third teacher portrayed in the film was an elementary teacher struggling with reading instruction. Some of his students were grade levels behind where they needed to be. It was even harder to motivate some of these students not only due to their low reading skills, but because these difficulties had made them dislike reading so much. During a post-observation conference with his principal, she simply asked him, “When you were a kid, what would make you want to read?” In the next segment of the film, we hear this teacher asking his students what their hobbies are, what their lives are like, what they want to be when they grow up. And we then see him scouring through books in the library, later bringing a stack of books into the classroom. Standing amongst his students, holding up book after book and quickly describing it (“Who has trouble with their friends? Who wants to be a chef when they grow up?”), he is pelted with excited shrieks and raised hands. Everyone was thrilled to begin reading these high-interest books. It was certainly one huge step in the right direction.

The Flipped Classroom
The fourth teacher shown in TEACH was a math teacher (if memory serves, middle school or upper elementary) from Idaho, which is piloting the use of Khan Academy in some of its classrooms statewide. Khan Academy is a tool for flipping your classroom – instead of conducting the lesson in front of all your students, students access the material from the (free!) Khan Academy resources online. The class time is now freed up for small group work, intervention groups, etc. But it may not be as easy as it seems, as this teacher at first experienced. By the end of her first month with the program, she was ready to give up. She missed her place at the front of the room, she wasn’t sure what her role was now, and students were not improving their math skills. I wish she had had someone in her building or district who could have coached her through this (as we see in the above stories). But, luckily, she did reach out to a Khan Academy mentor, who helped her to look at her student data from the program the night before the next class, so she could see in advance who was struggling and she could plan to meet with certain groups of students to intervene. Her relief to understand the benefits of the program better was evident, and her class began to soar. Some students were even accessing Khan Academy when it wasn’t assigned, just to do some extra work on their own!



The amount of honest reflection, the help from a mentor, the willingness to try something new, the ability to grow as a professional: these are the qualities that most impressed me about the teachers in TEACH and the qualities that most impress me about all good teachers. I’m thrilled to be working as an instructional coach because it gives me the opportunity to help teachers do the hard work of the reflective practitioner.


Wednesday, September 4, 2013

The First Days Are Critical



“The First Days Are Critical.” This is a chapter subtitle from Harry K. Wong and Rosemary T. Wong’s famous The First Days of School (2005), a book that every new teacher was handed in the first district I ever taught in. While in retrospect I calmly agree with this advice, when I first saw it in print as a brand new teacher, I was horrified. Horrified because I didn’t read that particular chapter until the second week of school, and I thought for sure all hope was lost.

I said that in retrospect I agree with the advice, and I do. However, I also think we need to pay attention to the book’s title, The First Days of School, emphasis on days. Plural. Now, as I type this it is officially the fourth day of school in the district where I’m an instructional coach. So, my advice is – don’t despair. Don’t despair if you haven’t set up all your expectations, procedures, and routines just yet. Believe it or not, we are still within the first days of school. Now is the time to dive in to some critical work that will help shape up how your classroom runs for the entire school year.

(Note: Sometimes we don’t get off to a wonderful start with our procedures, routines, and expectations. I’m here to tell you that, although it is honestly much easier to begin such work at the very beginning of the school year, you can establish such things at any time during the school year. But that’s a story for another blog post.)

So, what types of things should we be focused on establishing during these first, critical days of school?

Procedures & Routines
Now is the time to establish with your students how they will pass in homework, where they will sit – or stand – during certain portions of class or of the school day, how transitions during a lesson or between lessons will function, how they should interact with one another and with you, how they should participate in class….
But my biggest piece of advice is not what your procedures and routines are, but how you teach them to your students. Yes, I think you need to teach these to your class, not just tell your class about them. This means you need to discuss the purpose of routines and procedures with your students, model behaviors for them, practice (and practice, and practice, and practice) using a gradual release of responsibility structure. All too often, we tell our students what the routines and procedures are, and then briskly move on to the content we’ll be teaching, expecting that they all understand the routines and procedures and can follow them perfectly. We wouldn’t expect this kind of super-quick mastery of content knowledge, so why do we expect it in other areas such as this?

Discipline
I’m going to let you in on a secret: if you establish really strong procedures and routines, you’ll deal far less with discipline issues. The same goes for having strong, detailed lesson planning: if you’ve thought out your lesson, ensuring that, within it, students have opportunities to actively engage with the material and if you’ve anticipated any potential bumps along the road, you’ll again deal far less with discipline issues.
But even in the most ideal of classrooms, every now and then a discipline issue may crop up. If it does, it will behoove you to discover ways to deal with consequences without stopping the instruction and learning that’s occurring in the classroom. Often when dealing with a discipline issue with one student, a teacher can lose focus on the lesson, and can find him- or herself losing precious time engaging with this one misbehaving student. Finding ways to avoid this trap are key. Are there non-verbal cues or signs you can give to this student? Can you use teacher tools like proximity to send a message without stopping your instruction?

Consistency is Key
With procedures and routines, and with discipline when it pops up, we must be consistent. Sometimes this is easier said than done. Sometimes being consistent requires a lot of effort and attention to detail on our parts, and some days it just feels easier or more manageable to slide away from the systems we’ve created. Avoid this temptation! Our students need to experience consistent procedures and routines, or they will very quickly get the message that these structures are not really all that important and they’ll begin to stop adhering to them. Which will most likely bring up some discipline issues, or at the very least, waste some of our precious classroom time.

The Structure of Lessons
Establishing a structure to your lessons that both you and your students can depend upon can really enhance the learning that occurs in the classroom. Will there always (or, at least, quite often) be an activator that will either review previous learning or that will scaffold students towards new learning? A summarizer that will help both you and students assess their comprehension of that day’s lesson? A workshop structure for particular parts of the day that will always allow time for direct instruction, gradual release, work time, and debriefing?
None of these suggestions are made with the intent of a stale classroom where everything is the same, day in and day out. Mixing things up can often engage our students’ minds and interest levels. But there’s a LOT to be said for consistency within the structure of our lessons. It can keep us teachers on our toes, determined to stick to a structure we know works, and it can be very helpful for students to know what to expect and to establish a pattern for learning. Rather than “mixing up” the entire structure of a lesson in order to allow for some variety (it is the spice of life, after all!), try instead, for example, to vary the types of activators and summarizers you use (don’t get too stuck in the “ticket to leave” rut, but explore some other options).


All of the above suggestions are really quite broad, aren’t they? 
If you’re looking for more detail on any of the above, including specific examples and suggestions, let me know. I’m happy to dedicate future blog posts to this, or to provide one-on-one coaching in these areas.

Enjoy these first days of school!