Thank You Notes

Thank You Notes

I’ve never been very good at writing thank you notes. I don’t have an acceptable excuse for this shortcoming; I simply forget to take the time to formally acknowledge my gratitude. I’ve been working on this for a while now, and I’m getting better. At this time of the year, I’m especially mindful of the need to thank teachers for all the wonderful things you do each day.

Thank you for the time you spend—during the school day and frequently beyond—preparing lessons, grading papers, meeting with parents, learning new things professionally, and attending extracurricular activities.

Thank you for making your classroom a student-centered environment where the kids do the thinking and the talking, even when it would be easier and faster just to tell them what you know yourself.

Thank you for taking risks with technology because you know that students in today’s world engage actively when you let them connect online.

Thank you for believing in your students. You may be the only one in their lives who does.

Thank you for having high expectations for yourself and your students.

Thank you, also, for being flexible and merciful. They are, after all, kids, and kids make mistakes and do stupid things sometimes. It’s part of growing up.  

Thank you for spending time teaching your students the “hidden curriculum” of school. Thanks for realizing that there may not be someone at home who knows how to navigate the world of education and that your guidance can help someone sail farther than they would have ever anticipated.

Thank you for making your classroom a safe space for students to struggle.

Thank you for bringing joy to your classroom because a classroom without joy is a dreary place to try to learn.

Thank you for understanding that not all students learn in the same way. Thanks for incorporating WICOR (Writing, Inquiry, Collaboration, Organization, and Reading) into your lessons so that all students have the opportunity to grow in vital learning realms and to strengthen skills in areas of weakness.

Thank you for taking time to pause and let your students reflect on their learning.

Thank you for realizing that rigor doesn’t mean more work or more punitive grading; it means work at a higher cognitive level.

Thank you for praising your students, even when it’s hard to find something to praise.

Thank you for adopting a growth mindset in your classroom and for helping your students develop one.

Thank you for having a sense of humor. It makes the day more pleasant for you, for your students, and for your co-workers.

Speaking of your co-workers, thanks for being a team player. Teaching is hard work, but it’s not a competition. There’s no reason each of us needs to do all the work ourselves.

Thank you for being vulnerable, for apologizing when you make a mistake, for admitting you’re not perfect, and for letting your students know that it’s better to take a risk and fail than not to try at all.

Thank you for viewing assessment as an opportunity for learning, not as an endpoint, a punishment, a “gotcha,” or a means for sorting or ranking students. Thanks for realizing that the most important assessment is daily formative assessment and may alter the path of your instruction.  

Thank you for making good use of your students’ time. Having a well-planned class each day and only thoughtful, meaningful, necessary work outside of class shows them you value their time and aren’t intending to waste it.   

Thank you for keeping up-to-date professionally. Thanks for realizing that we can’t keep teaching the same way because it worked in the past. Times are changing. Students are changing. Our school populations may be changing. We should be changing in response.

Thanks for being a reflective practitioner, for constantly asking yourself how a lesson or assignment went and how it can be better next time. Thank you for asking questions and seeking help when you need it.

Thank you for taking time for yourself to recharge. I hope you find more of that time over the holidays.

Have a wonderful, restful, and well-deserved break. I am thankful for the work you do.

Can Costa's Levels of Thinking Make Me a Better Teacher?

For years I've used Costa’s Levels of Thinking in my AVID, English, and Humanities classrooms to help my students push themselves to higher levels of cognition and to assist them in analyzing their own thinking on assignments and assessments. When going over the results a test, I've asked students to identify the levels of thinking required by the questions that have posed a challenge for them. Knowing what kind of thinking is tripping them up has allowed them to refine their study skills for continued growth. We've written questions together and dissected the questions of others. Costa’s Levels of Thinking have made a world of difference in the way my students learn.  

Recently, I had an epiphany. Not only can Costa’s increase student success, but improvement-minded teachers can use Costa’s to shape and guide their own instructional efforts.  

Costa’s Level 1 refers to the information-gathering stage of thinking. This is the realm of right and wrong answers. Level 1 thinkers simply need to know facts and ideas that others thought of first. Level 1 knowledge is essential for every teacher. Not only must teachers know the nuts and bolts of their subject matter, but they also must understand the state’s essential elements or standards, the district’s curriculum (if such a thing exists), and the rules and policies of the school. Spending time studying lessons on the curriculum database, reading instructional materials, boning up on content, discussing curriculum maps, familiarizing yourself with the textbook, and perusing the TEKS involves necessary Level 1 thinking. Teachers should also be aware of student data: What are the specific strengths and weaknesses of my students, as a class and as individuals?

Effective teachers can’t stop with Level 1 knowledge, though. Level 2 thinking--the kind where you do something with the Level 1 knowledge by applying and analyzing what you know--must take place so teachers can bring instruction to life.

Level 2 thinking for teachers involves customizing the curriculum and standards for their individual campus situations. Teachers consider the needs of their students to determine what instruction needs to look like. Classrooms with multiple ability levels or multiple levels of understanding suggest opportunities for differentiation. In other words, the Level 2 thinking forces teachers to consider how to most effectively implement instruction. It also requires teachers to connect the dots between the elements so that instruction is seamless and has a recognizable direction. Level 2 is the problem-solving stage. It’s all about putting what you know into action.  

More importantly, Level 2 thinking also requires teachers to ask themselves, “Why?” Why am I teaching this content? Why is this skill necessary for my students to learn? Why is the curriculum written the way it is?  What is the thinking behind this curriculum document? When a teacher can articulate the “why” behind the subject matter and curriculum, students will understand the “so what” for the things they’re asked to do.    

Level 3 thinking occurs during and after the lessons are taught. Teachers view their instruction through an evaluative lens. What went well? What didn’t? Why? What do I need to do differently next time? Did my students perform to expectation? If not, how will I need to adjust to remediate or reteach?  Often, I find that as teachers we rush from one activity or assessment to the next and don’t allow ample time for reflection and growth. Level 3 of Costa’s reminds us of the importance of evaluation; it’s how we get better at what we do. The best teachers--like great athletes--are always self-assessing and making microadjustments as they teach, sometimes even in the middle of lessons.

Sometimes, teaching also provides the satisfying Level 3 task of creating. Teachers--individually or on campus or district curriculum teams--take everything they know about learning, content, standards, and students and synthesize all that knowledge to produce thoughtful curriculum units and lessons to engage students and meet their needs. It’s a monumental task that requires the teacher to be simultaneously detailed and visionary.  

I encourage my teacher friends to join me in some metacognition about Costa’s and their own journeys in education. Take stock of the thinking you’re doing and consider what you can do to strengthen any areas of weakness. Let Costa’s Levels of Thinking guide you toward continual improvement. It’s what we’d expect from our students, so I think it’s worth expecting of ourselves.

  

WICOR and Exam Reviews

It's everyone's favorite time of the year: the time when we soon get to put aside new learning and focus our efforts on helping the students get prepared for the joy that is better known as final exam week.  In our haste to finish the semester, we should, of course, never forget the importance of WICOR (writing, inquiry, collaboration, organization, and reading), so I am compiling a little list to help you plan your review activities:

11 Ways to Infuse Your Final Exam Reviews with WICOR

1.  Teach your students how to read multiple choice questions and essay prompts effectively.  Spending some time talking about the language used in testing in your subject area will help them become more effective test takers.

2.  Write your own exam questions.  One good study technique is to ask students to predict questions they might encounter on their exams by writing questions--multiple choice or short answer--of their own.  Writing multiple choice questions might also give students some insight into how questions are written, which could translate to greater insight on exam day.

3.  Have students form in-class study groups.  Give each person in each group a job (scribe, task-manager, researcher, questioner, etc.), and spend some time beforehand talking about how effective study groups work.  You could give each group a topic to review and present their findings with the class.  The students will find this collaborative review a welcome break from the sit-and-get they'll have in most of their classes during review week.

4.  Levels of Questions:  Using Costa's or Bloom's, discuss the various levels of questions on the exam.  Have a class discussion to brainstorm the various ways to prepare for different types of questions they may see on the exam.

5.  Ask your kids to write explanations about what they have learned in your class.  If it's a history class, they can write a monologue from a famous person they've studied.  In biology, they can write a dialogue between an onion cell and a cheek cell.  In math, they can write an explanation of how to simplify a polynomial.   Share the students' writings with the class.  You might even be able to turn this into a "who am I?" game where the class has to guess the topic after the student reads his or her paper.

6.  Help students think about the material on their exam in a variety of ways by creating graphic organizers or analogies.  This is a great group assignment.   Give each group a broad topic (ie. figurative language, mercantilism, symbiosis, reactions) and a large piece of paper (or a computer with PowerPoint) and ask them to come up with a visual organizer or metaphor to explain the topic to the class.

7.  Matching Card Sets:  I've used this before with material that required Level I knowledge (lists of terms, vocabulary, people, events, etc.).  One day in class, I put the students into groups and gave each group a pile of small squares of paper or cardstock (about half the size of an index card).  On one half of the cards, the students wrote the term, person, event, etc.  Then, they created a second set of cards by writing clues or definitions leading to each word on the other set.  On the back of each pair, they put a number or letter to signify that the two should go together.  After the entire set was complete, the students could lay the cards out on the floor, face up, and match the pairs.  They could check their answers by looking at the backs of the cards.  I had the students leave their sets in the classroom so that all students could use them for independent review before or after school during exam week.

8.  Skimming the text can be a great way to remind oneself of the content of a book prior to an exam.  Teach this skill to your students so they can learn how to reread quickly, searching for key ideas and reviewing major concepts while not getting bogged down in picky details.

9.  Create a quiz show.  Split the class into several teams.  Distribute note cards to the students, and ask them to write review questions (and provide answers) for students on other teams to answer during a review game.  Tell them the questions should not be too easy or the other team will get all the points.  Also, you might want to make a rule that if the question is too hard, you--as the head judge of all that is reasonable for students to answer--could penalize the team that created the question.  Use the questions to conduct a game in any manner you prefer.

10.  Another collaborative review game my students enjoy is the tag-team review.  Split the class into two teams.  Then, split each team into pairs of students who will work together to answer a question in front of the class.   [Before class begins, make a set of cards containing broad topics to discuss or essay-type questions, ones that require a longer explanation rather than one precise answer.  Ex.  "What was the Columbian Exchange, and how did it affect Europe?" "Characteristics of Romanticism," or "How to Plot a Point on a Graph."]    Begin with a pair from team A.  Ask them to draw one topic from your set of cards. Give them one minute to huddle and then one minute to stand in front of the class and answer that question or explain that topic together.  (I usually let a pair from the other team draw their topic and have their huddle time while the first group is explaining to keep things moving).  After the minute is up, award the team anywhere from 0-5 points based on the quality of the explanation or response.  Sometimes, I add unpredictable bonuses based on speaking ability (ex. the first group not to begin speaking by saying "Okay" gets a 5-point bonus). The tag-team review is a fun (albeit a bit pressure-filled) way to review big-picture ideas and concepts before the exam.

11.  Talk with your students about time management, prioritizing study tasks, creating a tutorial schedule, and all the other organizational things that will help them succeed as they prepare for exams.

I hope some of these WICOR tips help make your upcoming review week interesting and productive for you and your students.  Hang in there.

O is for Organization

When I was a teenager, I sang in the school choir.  (I took a hiatus for a few years because of some embarrassment issues stemming from a rather late puberty and getting teased for being a ninth-grade soprano, which is interesting character development but not important for this particular example.) In addition to practicing the music we would perform in front of adoring parents snapping Polaroids and wielding camcorders, we also spent what seemed like hours practicing lining up, walking onto the stage, and filing onto the risers. This seemed tedious and unnecessary to me at the time, but hindsight tells me that my choir directors were extremely wise. They knew about the importance of organization.

Do you ever have those days when you think your seventh period class looks like the Hollywood example of a classroom out of control? Either your students are literally bouncing off the walls or they’re drooling face-down on their desks and occasionally snoring. Student engagement seems like a far-flung fantasy. You stand helplessly in front of the class and consider other career options. You silently count to ten and then start over at one, hoping not to blow your top. Most of us have experienced this a time or two. Or daily.

Of course, there’s no simple solution to this, or I would have written about it in a book and retired wealthy. But one way that can help any teacher gain some extra control and carve out a few moments of sanity is to implement some new organizational strategies in the classroom. Classrooms with efficient procedures minimize downtime and maximize student productivity and engagement. When the teacher is organized, he or she appears prepared, and the students respond favorably. Additionally, impeccable organization makes efficient use of time and materials, which inevitably lowers teacher stress.

Organization,the O in AVID’s WICOR acronym, is also vital for student success. When students learn to manage their stuff and their time, they get things done, turn things in, and perhaps even have a few spare minutes after checking off their to-do list to play a video game or text their friends. Just think. If you were transparent with your students about your mid-year improvements in the organization of your classroom, this could spark some valuable conversations about the importance of organization for your students, too.  

Here are a few of my thoughts about some organizational areas that will give you maximum bang for your efforts:

Managing Time:  Do you have a procedure for your students to get them working as soon as the bell rings so you can take attendance and tend to teacher tasks? Do you plan out your transitions between activities so there’s little or no downtime? Kids with nothing to do are kids who run amok. My mom, who was a second grade teacher, knew that, so she kept my brother and me busy. Keep your students working bell-to-bell. Move smoothly between tasks. Set clear expectations for what students should do when they finish work before the others. The more time you spend planning things like this, the more smoothly your class will run.

Managing Materials:  How long does it take you to hand back papers and distribute handouts? Do your students have something to do while this is taking place, or do they wait on you? I have found that passing out handouts and handing in papers across the rows (if you still have rows) instead of from front to back is more efficient, and it keeps the kids facing the way you want them to face. If your class is set up in interactive pods (because that’s how collaboration happens!), have your handouts sorted into piles with the exact number you need for each pod. Or ask one student from each row or pod to get up and fetch the materials for the others. This gives that wiggly student a chance to release some energy. Or how about trying a brain break for the kids while you’re handing things out? You can give instructions that allow students to stand and stretch, jog in place (time them!), or play a quick game of rock/paper/scissors with their table while you move about the room and distribute things. Another option is to deliver the next handout to rows or tables face-down while students are working on something else. When it’s time to transition, ask them to pass the handouts around the table or across the row. I find that it’s easy to alphabetize papers I need to hand back and then ask my students to line up in front of the class in A-B-C order so I can give them their papers as they file past me. This takes no time at all and gives the kids a stretch break, too!

Giving Cues:  What do you do when you want your kids to get quiet and pay attention? I’ve witnessed many effective strategies.  Yelling isn’t one of them (I mean, it works sometimes, but it’s not good for your blood pressure nor for creating a positive classroom climate). One teacher I know says, “Loud…,” and her students know to respond with, “...and clear,” and turn their attention to her. Another says, “Watch me whip,” and her students get quiet after answering, “Watch me nae nae.” Choose something that is fun and that fits your unique personality.

Knowing What Goes Where:  Do your students know where to get makeup work when they’ve been absent? Is there a place where students are supposed to turn in assignments so you’ll be sure to find them? Having clear locations for these two processes to occur solves many problems and keeps things running like clockwork.

Giving Time But Not Too Much Time: Are you aware of how much time it takes for your students to finish an assignment or activity? Do students who are finished early know what they’re expected to do? A good rule of thumb, is to allow less time than you think it will take for all students to finish. Set a timer (perhaps on the screen where the kids can see it). As the time gets close, ask the students to hold up fingers to indicate how many more minutes they need to finish. Adjust the time if needed, and make provisions for those who are finished.

Dealing With Devices: I’m the first to say that handheld devices have an educational place in the classroom, but without a plan in place, cellphones will creep out of hiding constantly and become a barrier to learning. Devise a method for letting students know when it’s okay to use their phones and when they need to stay out of sight.

Posting Important Announcements in a Predictable Place:  Prominently display assignments, due dates, objectives, and other essential information consistently, and make students aware of where to look to find them.  Encourage students to keep a planner, and provide time in class for everyone to record important dates and assignments. 

Having organized materials and procedures is the key to efficiency. That’s how Southwest Airlines gets everyone to line up in an orderly manner and board the plane quickly. That’s how the post office handles long lines and numerous needs without having customers go postal. 

I’d like to give a quick nod to another useful resource if you decide you’re serious about adding some new organization to your teaching life. Two of my outstanding educator friends, Allison Venuto and Laura Blankenship, are creating podcasts that help teachers be more efficient, handle stress, and leave work each day with a smile (or at least not with a frown.) Check out their podcast here. It makes perfect listening on your commute to work.

Best of luck on your new organizational endeavors. I hope that at least a few of these tips will help add some sanity and calm to the chaos.

Academically Speaking

I’ve never been very good at keeping up with the slanguage of the youngsters. My conversational skills are hardly on fleek when I realize I’m not sufficiently jiggy wit’ it to tell the difference between someone who’s your bae and someone who’s basic. Clearly, I’m not fly or legit. My bad.  

Slang and colloquial expressions fall under the broad communicative category of the “casual register.” We speak in the casual register when we’re hanging out with friends and perhaps family. It’s language that doesn’t have to abide by the formal rules of grammar and sometimes consists of short bursts that aren’t “complete” sentences.

For many of our students, the casual register is the only register. Even when they write in school, they reproduce strings of words and not-words that defy traditional grammar rules and don’t approximate standard English.

As teachers who are preparing our students for the post-high-school world--whether it be college or career--we have the responsibility to introduce our students to a new mode of communication:  the formal or academic register.

This doesn’t mean that we devalue the casual register that may be many students’ preferred (or only) method of discourse. While honoring this aspect of the students’ language, we need to make students aware of when it’s appropriate and inappropriate to use.

Speaking in casual register is probably not a good idea when you visit a bank to talk to a loan officer about securing funds for your startup business.

I wouldn’t advise trying to schmooze a judge or woo a jury with your mastery of the casual register.

There’s probably a study somewhere that shows that the casual register doesn’t get you too far in job interviews.

And if you’re trying to impress a college professor with a bright idea you’ve thought up, expressing it in the casual register is likely to lessen the idea’s impact.

In our classrooms, we should teach students how to use a new register--the academic register--so they can use it skillfully when the situation is right. Not only do we need to introduce the academic register; we also need to practice it. Simply talking about it is not enough. Students need to be able to shift smoothly into the academic register when the situation calls for it.

Last week, I attended an ESL symposium where Dr. Kate Kinsella talked about this very topic. If Dr. Kinsella had her way, teachers would never slip into the casual register with their students and classrooms would become linguistic sanctuaries where the academic register could flourish. Some teachers who like to make students feel comfortable by interacting more colloquially with them may find this a bit extreme. I think, though, that even the most casual among us will concede that it’s our responsibility to teach students how to speak in a way that will increase their odds of future success in a world dominated by those who have attained some advanced education.

So how do we teach our students how to employ the academic register? Here’s a brief list of strategies, many of which I learned from Dr. Kinsella’s presentation:

Model academic register in your classroom discussions. Provide written examples of statements in the academic register, allow students to follow along as you read them aloud, and then ask students to repeat them chorally as a class. This gives your students a chance to hear how scholars put words together and practice hearing themselves do the same.

Make the students speak, and require them to speak in academic register, even in small-group discussions and pair-shares. Don’t accept one-word answers to discussion questions. People who speak in the academic register speak in complete sentences. Before a discussion, remind your students to practice speaking in complete thoughts.  

One way to reinforce responding in complete sentences is to teach students to flip the question. For instance, if the teacher’s question is, “What is one way we can reduce our carbon footprint?”, students can begin their academic-register response with, “One way we can reduce our carbon footprint is….” Depending on the skills and abilities of your students, you may find it useful to display the question and the flipped response so your students have it handy.

Sentence stems and word banks can provide guidelines for academic-register language in discussions. If a student has a handout or card to use, he can refer to the sentence starters and replace “Nuh-uh” with something more appropriate, like, “While I see your point, I think…” or “I understand you think…; however, I believe….”  Giving students lists of transitions to use in various discussion situations provides them with the scaffolding they need to construct increasingly thoughtful contributions to conversations that will sound more scholarly than before.

Noticing academic register in the speaking of others is an ideal way to raise awareness. Using a short video clip of an interview or a TED Talk can provide fodder for discussion about how the speaker communicates as well as about the content conveyed. Let your students see how experts speak and how their method of speaking adds to their credibility.

These are just a few ideas to get you started. Imagine the impact you could have if you were the adult who unlocked this simple secret, one that will open so many doors for your students. It’s, like, totally awesome. It’s wicked.  It’s phat.  Word!

Thanks for all you do to keep your students’ futures full of possibilities.

Craig

I Dare You: Formatively Assessing the Teacher

Formative assessment is all the rage now, and rightly so. It's important for teachers to check on their students throughout the learning process to see how they're doing, to take steps to correct any misunderstandings, to strengthen any weaknesses, and to avoid a costly "gotcha" at the end when the grade counts. Teachers who use formative assessments are in a constant state of troubleshooting; they're adjusting course at every turn to steer their students onto the road to success.

As reflective practitioners, many teachers solicit feedback from their students. The end-of-course evaluation was a staple in my college classes but not so much in the earlier stages of my education. Sometimes--time and self esteem permitting--I polled my own students with a feedback form at the end of the school year, asking them to tell me what went well and how they thought I could make the class better. I vividly remember the elation when students said kind things and being a bit hurt when they were frank about their dislikes. Occasionally, a particularly negative comment gnawed away at me for weeks into the summer.

The feedback I received, overall, was extremely helpful, and I would compile a list of things I wanted to make sure I did differently the following year.

This was helpful for next year's students, but it did little good for the ones who were giving me the helpful feedback. They moved on to someone else's class while I changed for the better.

Why is it, I now wonder, that I never thought of the idea of having my students evaluate me in the middle of the year so I could actually do something about it?  A formative assessment in December would give me some insight about how I'm doing as a teacher, and I could return in January ready to announce any changes that resulted from the students' feedback.

Imagine how awesome it would be for a student to know they had a teacher who asked for their opinions, considered what they had to say, and then did something about it. What a great way to model the way I hope they'd respond to the feedback I give them on essays and assignments!

This would, of course, necessitate having a thick skin. Asking for honest feedback from kids runs the risk of unveiling some answers I don't want to hear. But if I can dish out the comments on students' papers, shouldn't I be willing to hear some of their remarks about me?

I'd also have to carefully consider the questions I ask. No amount of student complaining is going to convince me that writing and reading are unnecessary components of my classroom instruction. And I'm not likely to install a vending machine in back of my classroom, no matter how vehemently the students argue that having snacks would help them learn.
Here's a list of the things I'd ask in a mid-year survey:
_________________________________________________________________________
Answer the following on a scale from 1 to 5 (1 = definitely yes; 3 = sometimes; 5 = never)
1.  Does Mr. McKinney treat you and other students with respect and fairness?
2.  Do you enjoy the class?
3.  Do you feel like you are growing as a learner in this class?
4.  Do you receive feedback about your assignments in a timely manner?
5.  Do you know what to do if you want to improve in this class? 
6.  Is Mr. McKinney available and approachable if you need help?
7.  Is the classroom environment suitable for learning?
8.  Are the homework assignments useful and meaningful?  
9.  Is Mr. McKinney prepared for class on a daily basis?
10.  Do you feel successful in this class?
11.  Do you have enough opportunity to interact with your classmates as you are learning?
12.  Does Mr. McKinney communicate his expectations clearly?
13.  Does Mr. McKinney use class time effectively to help you learn?
14.  Does the use of technology help you learn in this class?
15.  Do you understand what you are supposed to be learning each day?
16.  Do you have the opportunity to show what you are learning in multiple ways in this class?
17.  Do you think this class is challenging enough?    

Respond in the space provided: 
18.  Outside of class time, how much time do you spend preparing for this class (homework and studying) in an average week?
19.  What could Mr. McKinney do to help you be more successful in this class?
20.  What else do you want Mr. McKinney to know about you or about this class at this point in the school year? 
  
_______________________________________________________________________________

Being a bit of a technophile, I'd probably create a Google Form for the survey and allow my students to respond electronically so I could compile the data online easily. I could, however, also conduct my survey on paper the old-fashioned way.

Here's the catch. Since I'm not in the classroom anymore, I don't have a class of students to take this survey. So I'm daring you to make yourself vulnerable and conduct a similar survey in your own class in the next two months. The data will give you a clearer picture of how you're doing, you'll have the opportunity to fix some issues in the middle of the year to help your students succeed, and you can even follow up at the end of the year with another survey to see how you've improved. And, perhaps most importantly, you will create a classroom community that honors student voice and will model a growth mindset--something all students can benefit from witnessing in action.

If you take me up on the dare, shoot me an e-mail to let me know how it goes. I'm excited to hear about it!

Hi, Teacher, It's Me

Hi, Teacher, it's me.

I'm the one who sits in the row on the side of your classroom, second seat from the back. I don't sit up in the front with the kids who cause trouble and don't do their work. You and I haven't talked much. I never raise my hand. But I show up every day.  I try to do my work. and I don't like to call attention to myself.  

I don't think I am very smart. Sometimes I think I understand what I'm learning. At other times, I'm not sure.

It helps when I talk about what I'm learning. Sometimes if I can explain it, then I know I understand it. 

But please don't call on me. When you call on me and I don't know the answer, that's the worst. 

I don't want the whole class to know that I'm not very smart.

We spend a lot of time in class talking. "Class discussion," you call it.  You do most of the talking, actually. And two or three of the other kids, the ones who raise their hands or blurt out answers. It's not really much of a discussion.   

Usually, you ask the questions, and those two or three kids answer them. If no one knows the answer, you answer it for us. 

Most days, I can just sit there and listen.  

Are you really tired at the end of the day from talking so much?

You work a lot harder than we do in your class. I don't think the others have figured out that if we just sit there, you will eventually do the thinking for us.

You know what would be helpful? Let me talk through my ideas with a classmate. I don't mind talking with a friend. I just don't want to share in front of everyone before I've had the chance to try out my answer on someone else.

I have another teacher who does this. He calls it "Think, Pair, Share." When there's a big question, instead of discussing it as a class, we first think for a minute about it individually. Sometimes we do a quick write. Then, we share our thoughts with someone else (that's the "Pair" part). After that, the teacher calls on some of us to share with the class. It's not so scary that way. My answer is our answer--mine and my partner's. When the teacher calls on us, it's okay for us to say what our partner said. I feel smarter then.

I hate to say it, but we need to work harder in your class. Not more homework. Homework is a pain, and you can just copy the answers from your friends in the cafeteria before school.  We should work harder in your class.

I may never tell you this, but I like it when you are prepared, when you make us work hard, when you let us talk to one another about what we are studying, and when you fill up the time with interesting activities where we are busy learning.

It's not so fun for us just to listen to you. Believe me, we listen to teachers all day. Try it sometime. It's the most boring thing in the world.

But it's school. Maybe school is supposed to be boring.

The WICOR of Reading: Reading and Collaboration

Many of us think of reading as an isolated activity. We hole up in our comfiest chair on a cold and drizzly Saturday afternoon and immerse ourselves in a good book. Or we confine ourselves to a study carrel in a library and focus our concentration on a textbook or research article. Sometimes, we gather in groups to talk about our reading--as in a book club--but the reading itself is done by ourselves away from others.

The idea of collaboration and reading sharing the same sentence seems antithetical to most teachers; however, to reach the learners who struggle with reading rigorous texts, we have to allow them to tap into the collective brainpower of more than just themselves.

The next time you're tempted to have a full-class discussion over a reading, try to prevent having the "discussion" turn into a dialogue between you (the "expert" teacher) and a handful of your participating students. Allow every student to contribute by incorporating some pair-share or trio-share time prior to (or instead of) full-class discussion. Sharing thoughts and ideas with a partner is safer than talking in front of the entire class. Also, a student who has the support of a partner or group is more likely to feel comfortable sharing an idea of her own (or of a groupmate) when called upon to do so.

Jigsawing is a collaborative strategy you can use with a lengthy text or one that can easily be broken up into smaller parts. Teachers break up a text into parts, assign parts for students to read, and then allow students who read different sections summarize what they read in a group of students who did not read their section. Once all group members have reported on their reading, the entire group should have an overall understanding of the text. I've seen this done with magazine or newspaper articles, parts of a textbook chapter, and even chapters in a novel.

Reciprocal Teaching is a strategy that requires a group to collaborate to make sense of a text by practicing the skills that accomplished readers do automatically. In the full version of the Reciprocal Teaching process, students form groups of five and are each given a role to play while reading the text.

1. Predict:  Make predictions about the text and back that up with evidence. 
2. Visualize:  Create a drawing or other visual representation of important information from the passage. 
3. Clarify: Identify and explain unfamiliar vocabulary words or other difficult-to-understand concepts. 
4. Question: Prepare several higher-level questions for the group to discuss.
5. Summarize: Explain the meaning of the text; give the big picture. 

When the group meets after reading the text, each member of the group shares his or her work in reviewing the text from the assigned perspective. Switch roles each time the students meet to discuss. With time, students will begin to incorporate these strategies automatically as they read. 

As I have often mentioned, when students struggle with a text, they need to learn to stop, troubleshoot, question, and summarize. A variation of the Reciprocal Teaching strategy asks paired students to read together a piece of challenging text that has been chosen and "chunked" into parts (a paragraph or a few paragraphs per chunk) by the teacher. One member of the pair is partner A; the other is B.  Partner A reads the first chunk aloud. Both students may mark the text for some teacher- or student-selected elements as they read. They may also add their own thoughts and questions in annotations. Partners A and B share their text markings and questions. Then, Partner B summarizes the chunk of text.  Partners switch roles and continue reading, annotating, discussing, and summarizing the next chunk. Proceed until pairs have finished reading the text.

Teenagers are social creatures. They enjoy sharing with one another, and they learn when they discuss information together. Often, a peer can explain something more effectively than an adult can because they speak the same "language" and--because they share a relatively equal level of expertise--can communicate their learning to one another in a way that makes sense. 

Consider ways you can add incorporate collaborative components into your classroom reading activities. You'll increase student engagement, and your students will practice skills that will help them when they someday have to go it alone. 

Thanks for reading my four-part series on Reading and WICOR.  I hope I've given you something to think about as you design experiences that enthrall, challenge, and support your students for reading success. 

  

The WICOR of Reading: Reading and Inquiry

Peanut butter and jelly. John and Yoko. Hayrides and Claritin. Reading and inquiry. Some things just go together well.

Effective readers practice inquiry all the time, perhaps not even aware they're doing so. We make predictions. We pose questions in our heads. We challenge an author's basic assumptions. We examine the validity of claims. We judge based on self-created standards of good and bad or effective and ineffective. We connect our reading to our own lives, to the world around us, and to other things we have read.

Students who struggle with reading often accept what they read at face value and don't dare to engage with the text at a higher level. It's our job as teachers to hold their hands as they wade into the waters of inquiry so they can eventually swim on their own.

Inquiry connects to the act of reading before, during, and after the reading itself occurs.

Before reading, teachers can pose an open-ended question or scenario for students to discuss to make their minds and/or hearts receptive to what they're about to read:

What would happen if you had to leave your family and survive on your own?
Which is better: a life without stress or a life with some stress? Why?
What makes a good scary story?
What are all the things in your possession that are made from plants?
How important are material possessions in achieving popularity?

Questions like these get students thinking about a topic and prepare them for some reading that connects in some way to the subject.

During the reading itself, students can be encouraged to interact with the text by writing their own questions in the margins or on sticky notes. Or ask them to keep track of the thinking they're doing as they read and share that with the class afterwards. Your students may also benefit from hearing you do a Read-Aloud/Think-Aloud in which you read the text to them and comment aloud about the things you're thinking and questioning as you read. Letting them witness a model of what's going on in an effective reader's head helps your students fill their toolboxes with strategies they can use as they read independently.

After reading, your options for inquiry are plentiful. I'm always a champion for using Costa's Levels of Thinking to compose questions for further discussion. Your students will quickly find that Level One questions (the ones with right answers) don't generate much discussion, but they may be essential questions to ask to check for literal understanding. Also, I like to remind students that if a discussion is boring after they wrote the questions, that's their fault. Next time, they should work to come up with some questions worth discussing. For optimal pairing with the reading, remind students to write questions that require revisiting the text to support an answer.

I have had good luck asking students to write questions they'd like to ask the author of the text. If the author is alive and reachable via social media or e-mail, you might have fun selecting the best questions from your class and asking the author directly. Getting a response from a living writer makes the learning come alive and prompts student interest in the text. To "tech up" your classroom, consider using a website like Tricider to allow students to comment or vote on one another's questions to select the best ones.

For general inquiry-based discussions after reading, try circling up the chairs for a Socratic Seminar over the text using student-generated questions. You can find scads of resources to help you conduct Socratic Seminars on the internet, the AVID website, and YouTube. Remember that the purpose of a Socratic Seminar is to foster genuine collaborative discussion to deepen the class's understanding of what they read. If the topic of the reading lends itself to a debate format, consider a Philosophical Chairs discussion instead. Whatever you do, make sure you leave time to debrief the process of the discussion itself at the end; that's the only way to improve the quality of future discussions.

One of the top skills employers seek in management-level employees is the ability to ask questions. By bringing inquiry to the forefront of your classroom, you're not only preparing your students for the rigors of the work world but you're also handing them the key to increased reading effectiveness and the ability to learn on their own. What could be more important than that?

The WICOR of Reading: Reading and Writing

Writing is an essential component of WICOR and a good way to reinforce the skills we're trying to teach our students who encounter struggles with reading.

This week, I turn my attention to the relationship between reading and writing and showcase a few ready-to-use strategies that can help you achieve success with challenging texts in your classroom. 

1.  Cornell Notes:  Cornell Notes are a cornerstone of the AVID classroom, not because there's anything magical about the two-column notes themselves but because they help students understand the kind of thinking required for learning. When you ask your students to take notes in the right column of Cornell Notes, you want them to record the main ideas and supporting points in the text. This aids with meaning-making; students have to sort through the text to sift the main points out of all those words and succinctly summarize them in note form. The most helpful teachers will provide students with an Essential Question to guide their reading or even a reading prompt. After the note taking occurs, ask students to enter the note making phase of the Cornell Note-taking process in which they revisit their notes, highlighting, underlining, or circling main points and key terms, crossing out information that turned out to be irrelevant or unnecessary, and chunking the notes into sections. Then, ask them to write some questions in the left margin, preferably higher-level thinking questions using Costa's Levels of Thinking or your taxonomy of choice. Students can spend some time discussing those questions in pairs or small groups or using the questions to guide a full-class discussion or Socratic Seminar. Finally, conclude the process by asking students to synthesize their thinking at the bottom of the page in a summary that answers the Essential Question. This multi-step process requires students to revisit the text at different cognitive levels and helps the learning stick. By jumping through these hoops, students have made friends with the text and can use their new-found learning for whatever the next part of your curriculum requires. 

2.  Metacognitive Reflection:  In my last post, I addressed the idea of explicitly teaching students the things that good readers do. One way to make these processes become routine practices for your students is to ask them to reflect on the thinking that went into their reading of a text. How did they approach the process? Where did they encounter difficulties?  What did they do when they realized that understanding was breaking down? Asking students to reflect in writing about the process of the reading itself is challenging for them but can lead to fruitful discussion--full-class or one-on-one--on the "how" of reading. By making students aware of their thinking, you can cause real change in their reading behaviors, and perhaps the next reading assignment will seem less daunting.  

3.  Quickwrites:  I'm a big fan of using ungraded quickwrites at every stage of the reading process. Sometimes, I find it's useful to have students write about what they already know or want to know about a topic before they read. Or pose a question that piques their interest on the topic and whets their anticipation to know more. I've also used quickwrites during reading, asking students to stop in the middle of an article, chapter, or fictional text to write about what they already know, what questions they have, and what they anticipate they will discover as they continue reading. After reading, quickwrites are a handy tool to help students clarify their thinking about a topic before discussing it with others. As the name implies, these writings should only take a few minutes, and grammar, spelling, and all those other English teacher concerns aren't important. The purpose of the quickwrite is to generate thinking and get students' ideas down on paper. I've also found that routine quickwriting helps students get used to writing on demand; consequently, the ideas flow much more easily later on when they're asked to share their thoughts in writing on a standardized test or other on-demand essay later on.

4.  Annotation: Teaching students how to annotate a text--whether informational or literary--requires the students to write. Frequently, students think that marking a text only requires underlining, highlighting, or circling words and phrases. The teacher who wants to make big strides helps the students understand that the real power of annotation lies in the comments, questions, and thoughts you jot in the margins as you read. Teach your students how to annotate thoughtfully, and you will see their comprehension skills soar.

5.  Gist Summaries:  Summarizing is a notoriously difficult skill for learners. Ask any fifth grader to tell you about a movie she just watched, and you'll likely hear a scene-by-scene rehashing rather than the succinct summary you hoped for. One method I've found helpful is the Gist Summary. After reading, ask students--individually or in pairs--to sum up the main idea of the text in 25 words or fewer. Sometimes, it's helpful to brainstorm key words as a class prior to writing the summary to give struggling students a word bank of important points to add to the summary. 

6.  Learning Logs:  Learning logs combine summary and reflection. After reading, ask students to explain what they've learned, how they learned it, and why it's important. It's a more formalized version of the quickwrite or metacognitive reflection mentioned above. I've seen two-column learning logs with "what I learned" and "what I thought about it" on the two sides. I've also seen logs that look like journal entries. The format is up to you. The thinking is what's important. 

7.  Exit Cards:  Formative assessments like exit cards allow you to monitor effectively whether your students are "getting" the reading you're asking them to do. If students are spending class reading, ask them to write a three-sentence summary or a gist statement as a ticket out of class when the bell rings. You can stand at the door and collect them. It'll only take a moment to flip through the exit cards to determine whether students understand the reading or whether more discussion and debriefing is needed tomorrow. 

8.  KWL:  One more prior-to-reading strategy for informational texts is to create a three-column chart called a KWL.  In the left column, students write what they already Know about the topic. The middle column is where they write what they Want to know about the topic. And the right column is where they will write what they Learned about the subject from the reading. I recently saw a variation on this: a two-column chart with "Know" on the left and "Questions I have about the topic" on the right. Both types of charts help students activate prior knowledge, develop anticipation for the reading, and prepare them to dive into the text with a learning mindset.   

From the list above, just a smattering of many possibilities, you can see that writing can be one of your best allies in helping your students process challenging text.

Next time, I'll examine how inquiry (the I in WICOR) can be equally helpful.

The WICOR of Reading: Reading and Organization

In my last post, I examined some of teachers’ frustrations and the causes of students’ inability to read effectively or their reluctance to do so. I promised that this week’s follow-up would include some AVID-approved strategies for addressing the issue. Instead of writing one enormous e-mail that you’d take one look at and delete, I’m breaking this into four chunks--pairing Reading with the remaining letters of WICOR (Writing, Inquiry, Collaboration, and Organization).  I’ll begin at what seems to be a sensible jumping-off point:  Reading and Organization.

 

The WICOR of Reading: Part 1--Reading and Organization

 

Things go more smoothly when there’s an organizational scheme. I tell myself that every time I open my Google Drive or hunt for an important item I received in the mail at my house and put somewhere I'd be able to find it later. It’s true about reading, too. By employing strategies associated with the “Organization” component of WICOR, teachers can coach their students to reading success.

 

Organization can refer to helping students develop structures and procedures for managing time and materials, but it can also refer to providing students with strategies for tackling the tasks and surmounting the challenges they will encounter in school and in real life.

 

Here are a few strategies and thoughts about the relationship between reading and organization:

 

1. Throw Out the Worksheets and Equip Students with Real-World Reading Skills:  One way teachers strive to “help” their students read is to provide them with worksheets and study guides that direct them to the most important take-aways from whatever they have been asked to read. I’ve yet to see any research study or reading guru who thinks this is an effective practice. This attempt at organization may allow students to locate a handful of facts in a text, but it does nothing to teach students to look for the main idea, to sift facts from opinions, to make inferences about an author’s claim, to determine the meaning of words or terminology in context, or to follow a flow of ideas in a text. Teachers who force their students to read text on their own may encounter resistance from students at first, but this is only because you’re asking them to do something difficult. You’re like a physical therapist asking your client to perform a painful muscular movement that is essential for recovery and progress; your client will curse you as you do what you have to do to make him better.

 

2. Talk to Students About What Effective Readers Do:  I’m an effective reader. Most of you are, too. Sometimes, we forget that the things that seem to come naturally to us aren’t always second nature to our students.  They don’t know that effective readers expect text to make sense, adjust their reading rate in response to the difficulty of the text, reread when comprehension breaks down, summarize, form mental pictures, and use context clues to sleuth out the meaning of unfamiliar words. It’s okay to talk with students about what you’re doing as you read--even to do a “Read Aloud/Think Aloud”--or to make them practice the skills more overtly as they read until the skills become automatic.

 

3.  Marking the Text: Marking the text while reading is one way to provide some structure for your students. Ask the students to underline key points, to circle important characters or terms, to write annotations--gist statements, questions, predictions, connections--in the margins as they read. Don’t go overboard; you don’t want the complexity of the text marking strategy to get in the way of comprehension.

 

4. Provide a Reading Prompt: We often assign writing using prompts that direct student work and state our expectations.  Seldom do we think about providing a reading prompt to do the same thing. A reading prompt establishes a purpose for reading and informs students what to focus on as they read. With a reading prompt, students don’t have to be psychic as they try to guess what the teacher wants them to get out of the reading.

 

5.  Consider Text Structures:  Textbooks, articles, editorials, poems, stories, and even novels have organizing patterns.  Asking students to pay attention to and analyze the organization schema writers use will not only help them learn to make meaning from texts but may also cause them to be more deliberate about creating effective organization in their own writing and thinking.

 

6.  Make Time for Reading:  What you make time for is an indication of what you value. If you want to communicate to students that reading is important, make time for reading during class. Daily is best. Or at least several times a week in English classes. In my experiences visiting English and reading classes in the district, the most cheerful and enthusiastic student readers are in classes where the teacher asks them to read daily and reads and talks about reading with them.

 

Stay tuned for Part 2. . . . Coming up next week, I will examine the connection between writing and reading.

 

Why Don't Kids Read?

One of my favorite letters in WICOR is the R, which stands for Reading.  Reading is an essential skill for success in school.  It’s an essential skill in life.  I hope that the surgeon giving me a transplanted heart has read her medical textbook as well as current medical research.  I hope the CPA preparing my tax returns has read the current tax laws.  I hope that my students read the chapter I assigned for homework last week. 

Unfortunately, a cry of distress heard from teachers around the world (translated into English for the purposes of this e-mail) is “Kids today can’t read!”  Alongside that is its not-too-distant cousin, “Kids today don’t read!” 

This week’s Wednesday WICOR blog is a top-ten list devoted to answering that question:  Why Don’t Kids Read?  

Why Don’t Kids Read?

1.  They’ve never had to.  School has provided them with fill-in-the-blank worksheets, study guides, and study questions that allow the students to scan a text for boldface words or important phrases rather than trying to make meaning of the text.  The person who made the worksheet did all the comprehending for the students instead of making them do it on their own.

2.  They’re out of practice.  Like any skill, reading requires practice, and the less they read, the more their reading muscles atrophy and they become comprehension weaklings. 

3.  It’s not fun.  Believe it or not, most teenagers do not find reading about the of development of ancient civilizations in Mesopotamia to be as thrilling as updating their Instagram, meeting their virtual friends online for a game of World of Warcraft, kicking a soccer ball, or IMing their BFFs. Some teens have discovered the joys of pleasure reading—hopefully an ever-increasing number in Plano due to self-selected reading being done in  English classes--, but that’s generally a well-kept secret in the adolescent world.

4.  It’s hard work.  Reading, especially the kind we expect in rigorous high school and college courses, does require some effort.  Struggling to follow a complex argument, grappling with a challenging sentence construction, and wading through some dense academic verbiage are all aspects of the reading adventure, and some people are not up for the challenge.

5.  They’re easily discouraged.  (See 4 above). When the going gets rough, some teenagers find it’s easier not to try.  

6. They don’t expect the text to make sense and aren’t willing to struggle when necessary to figure out what it means.  If I had a dollar for every time I head a student say, “I read it, but I didn’t understand it,” I could retire now.  Another favorite response:  “This chapter doesn’t make sense.”  Really?  It’s amazing that the professional textbook writers wrote something completely nonsensical and got it past the professional editors to have it published.  Really?   

7.  They don’t have reading role models.  Recent literacy studies indicate that pleasure reading is at an all-time low; in fact, a 2007 NEA report indicated that nearly 50% of all Americans ages 18 to 24 read no books—fiction or nonfiction--for pleasure, and overall adult readership is declining across the age spectrum. If students don’t see people they admire reading and talking about their reading, they have little incentive to try it on their own. 

8.  Some of them actually have legitimate reading impairments or difficulties.  Reading problems are widespread and diagnosed with increasing frequency. Unfortunately for these students, texts probably aren’t going to vanish from academia immediately, so they have to find modifications and adaptations to help them succeed on reading-related tasks. 

9.  They do read—just not books and articles.  Leisure reading today involves reading text messages, websites, blogs, status updates, and the captions scrolling across the bottom of the screen during the Academy Awards pre-show telecast—text which is short, to-the-point, quippy, and probably not laden with SAT-worthy vocabulary or challenging sentence structures.  In the world of academia (for which we are allegedly preparing our students), sometimes one has to read something longer than 140 characters, something that won’t fit on the screen of a smart phone.      

10.  Reading requires sustained concentration, and students have so many distractions these days.  In a world full of sound bites, white noise, music video-paced editing, and 3D high-tech spectacle, reading is decidedly less glamorous and flashy than what students do in their leisure time.  Reading requires the reader to provide his or her own special effects.  Doing that requires the undivided attention of the entire brain. Ouch.        

 

Stay tuned:  Next week’s blog will give you some AVID-approved strategies to help you begin solving the problem of why your kids can’t or don’t read.

 

I hope you carve out some time for pleasure reading this week!

Craig