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.