Get Out of the Car (and meet some new people this summer)

On October 10, 2015, an incident occurred at the University of Missouri homecoming parade that made national news but somehow escaped my attention. A group of black students protesting systemic and overt racism dating back to 1839, when the university was built as a whites-only institution using slave labor, blocked a convertible in which the university’s president, Tim Wolfe, was riding. Wolfe remained in the car as the small group of protestors interrupted the parade to present a chronological series of examples of ongoing racial injustices at Mizzou, “not an indictment on white folks but. . .an indictment on white structures and white supremacy.”

The mostly white crowd yelled at the protestors and chanted loudly as if to drown out what the protestors were saying. A number of white men and women attempted to move the protestors from the parade route and to form a human chain to block the protest and allow the president’s car to pass. All the while, President Wolfe remained in his red convertible, where he could clearly see and hear the protest. The protest ended 11 minutes after it began when several police officers intervened and asked the protestors to step aside.  

To simplify a complicated story, one of the activists involved in the protest, Jonathan Butler, began a hunger strike to protest the president’s lack of responsiveness to racist incidents, during the parade as well as when other complaints were reported. The hunger strike attracted media attention and put Mizzou in the spotlight.

Nearly a month after the parade incident, Wolfe finally issued an apology for his silence during the parade. “My behavior seemed like I didn’t care,” the apology stated. “That was not my intention. I was caught off guard at that moment. Nevertheless, had I gotten out of the car to acknowledge the students and talk with them, perhaps we wouldn’t be where we are today.” Several days later, after a threatened strike by Mizzou football players calling for his resignation, Wolfe stepped down.

Reading the news articles about this incident and watching video footage of the protest conjured up many emotions in me, but the part that keeps haunting me is the line in Wolfe’s apology: “[H]ad I gotten out of the car to acknowledge the students and talk with them, perhaps we wouldn’t be where we are today.”

I wonder if enough educators today are “getting out of the car:” meeting diverse students where they are and letting them know they are heard, seen, and valued.

I’m can’t say that every school is that racially charged or that most students of color have reached a similar brink of frustration. I do know that 80% of public school teachers in America are white, and that less than half of the 50 million students enrolled in public schools are white.

For the rest of this essay, I’ll be talking mostly to the 80% of us who are white educators, but the rest of you are welcome to join me to make sure I’m not saying anything foolish.

According to Beverly Daniel Tatum in Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?, a 2013 American Values Survey found that “75 percent of Whites have entirely White social networks, without any minority presence.” The same is not true about the homogeneity of other races’ social networks. Apparently, a lot of white people only hang out with other white people.

It’s difficult to understand the way others perceive the world if we don’t get to know them. In order for me to understand the treatment others experience, I need to listen to those people and hear their stories. I need to shut up and quit my whitesplaining (ironic, since that’s what I’m doing right here. . . sorry) so that I can give others a voice. If I know who someone is, I am more likely to connect with them and others who share an identity with them. If a growing number of the students I see every day come from racial backgrounds different than mine, I face some potential challenges in connecting with those students. I imagine some of these students feel like the students at the University of Missouri felt: unseen, unheard, and wronged. I need to get out of the car, listen to them, and let them know that they are valued.  

So what’s a white person to do if they’re among the 75% who only socialize with other white people? I suggest figuring out how to bring some diversity into your social circle. It’s terribly awkward (and, really, just wrong) to collect friends of different races like you are hunting Pokémon, so please don’t go out into the world with a diversity checklist to complete. Consider volunteering in the community at somewhere other than your place of worship (as those tend to remain largely segregated in America today), attending arts events (I love a good talkback after a theatre performance, though I usually listen a lot more than I talk), or finding a group, such as DFW’s Community Conversations, where people meet for the purpose of talking and listening to understand one another’s perspectives.

Making connections like these requires some effort, and there’s no guarantee of success. A less risky way to “meet” some new people is through reading their stories. Take a look at your bookshelf. Was every book written by a white author? Maybe it’s time to step outside the usual to encounter some new literary voices.

Some of my favorite reading experiences are ones in which I have allowed a person with a cultural identity unlike mine to tell me their story. As a college student on summer vacation reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X, I was uncomfortable, shocked, and moved as I experienced racism through Malcolm’s eyes and felt the source of his indignation. As an adult, digesting Ta-Nahesi Coates’s letter to his son, Between the World and Me, continued to stretch my thinking about race relations, cultural identity, and the struggles black Americans face that I seldom consider as a white male.  Recently, I’ve read a number of young adult novels with non-white characters and authors, each of which has helped me grow in my understanding of multicultural perspectives. In Erika L. Sánchez’s I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, I felt the pains of growing up as a precocious Latina teen in inner-city Chicago. Getting to know Adib Khorram’s hilarious narrator in Darius the Great is Not Okay, who struggles with his half-Persian identity (and general teenage angst) as he travels to visit his mother’s family in Iran, provided some insight into cultural norms unlike my own. Reading Dear Martin (Nic Stone), On the Come Up (Angie Thomas), All-American Boys (Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely), and The Field Guide to the North American Teenager (Ben Philippe) gave me multiple perspectives on what it might be like to be a black teenager today. Understanding another cultural identity, that of transgender youth, is easier for me after reading Lily and Dunkin by Donna Gephart. The 57 Bus: The True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime That Changed Their Lives by Dashka Slater helped me see two sides of an incident from the perspectives of two teens: a gender-fluid boy and his African-American classmate.

Can I claim to be an expert on any of these cultures because I read a few books or met a few people? Of course not. Every individual’s cultural identity and life experiences are their own. Just as I can’t speak with authority about the experience of every middle-aged, white male in America, I certainly have no right to claim a full understanding of the experiences of a group I don’t belong to based on my own interactions, however extensive. But opening my mind and heart as I let others tell their stories develops my understanding and empathy. And, when I learn from listening that something in the system we (and by “we,” I mean people who look a lot like me) have built in our country is corrupt, unfair, or unjust, I can lift my voice along with their voice to do something about changing it.

Fellow educators, I invite you to join me this summer in getting out of the car, meeting some new people (whether in real life or on the pages of books), and joining the conversation. Let others be heard, so that we can make more meaningful—more human—connections with our students, their parents, our colleagues, and all the other wonderful humans in this beautifully diverse country we live in.  

If I Had a Hammer

A hammer is a useful thing to know how to use. If you gave me a claw hammer and taught me to use it, I could do a lot of things: hang a picture, nail together a couple of boards, pry a nail out of something. Once I learned how to use a claw hammer, I might be able to figure out how to use other types of hammers—ball peen hammers, club hammers, sledge hammers—which would enable me to accomplish many more tasks.

As I added hammers to my toolbox, it would be useful to know what each is used for, its strengths and weaknesses, so if a hammering task arose, I could select the best hammer for the job.

But what if I needed to cut a 2x4 in half?

A hammer won’t be of any use in this situation. I would also need access to and understanding of saws—miter, jig, band, hack, hand, circular—so I would know which one would best meet my need.

A toolbox with only one tool in it isn’t much use. Having many tools but no knowledge of how and when to use them is equally useless. Likewise, if I never build anything myself, what’s the use of having tools at all?

These three points relate to much of what we do in the classroom. As we try to equip our students with what they need to accomplish our learning objectives, we have to consider these truths. 

A toolbox with only one tool in it isn’t much use. Sometimes we give our students a tool or strategy, hoping to help them but inadvertently limiting them. In writing, for instance, we might give students an organizational structure or template for writing an essay. When reading, we might provide them with a set of steps for annotating a text. For note-taking, we might teach them a format—Cornell Notes, for instance. Each of these tools is useful and worthwhile in some situations, but when we try to force every student to use the same tool in all circumstances, problems arise. A far better idea is to provide students with several strategies, multiple tools for their academic toolbox. There are many acceptable ways to organize almost any essay. Good readers use a number of annotation strategies to make sense of what they read. And sometimes two- or three-column notes, sketchnotes, graphic organizers, and traditional outlines are more useful than Cornell Notes for certain purposes.  

Having many tools but no knowledge of how and when to use them is equally useless. Suppose we fill our students’ toolboxes with strategies but don’t teach them what to do with them. Suppose we make all the decisions—use this tool for this and this one for this—rather than asking our students to select among a variety of tools and defend their decision. We should share with students the pros and cons of each tool as we introduce it and later let the students decide which to use for whatever task is at hand. I’m a believer that classrooms need to be full of strategic discussions: developing plans, testing hypotheses, creating blueprints for learning, and debriefing often. The teacher can’t be the one doing all the strategizing, though. When students develop the autonomy to determine which organizational structure matches what they have to say in their essay, which annotation method will work best for the type of text and purpose for reading, and which note-taking format will help them achieve their objective for taking notes, they have become independent learners who can handle whatever challenges the world of college or career throws at them. They are master craftsmen and craftswomen who can take charge of their own learning.  

If I never build anything myself, what’s the use of having tools at all? It’s sad when kids know how to take notes but never need to take them. It’s equally unfortunate to have reading skills but nothing to read, writing skills with no opportunity to try them out on real-world audiences. We need to make sure the tools we give our students are going to be used. With the best of intentions, we often circumvent the actual development of students’ skills by shouldering most of the cognitive work ourselves. We provide fill-in-the-blank essay templates for students who don’t need them. Or we decide not to assign writing at all. We summarize reading instead of asking students to work their way through it; equally shameful, we give study questions and reading guides that students can answer without having to actually read the text. We ask students to take notes for the sake of taking notes rather than taking notes that are necessary to accomplish a learning objective. It’s our obligation to provide students with reasons to use the tools we teach them, to give them something to build with those tools.

With some deliberate planning, we can become educators who equip our students with the right tools, teach them how and when to use them, and then give them reasons to dig into their toolboxes. Before we know it, our students will become handy in ways we never imagined, thinking of new things to build and collecting additional tools on their own to help them build them.

Your Summer Reading Assignment

If you’re like me, you can’t wait for summer to begin so that you can turn off the alarm clock, take a break from workday worries, and relax with a good book. Of course, if you’re like me, then you’re a reader. Reading is a vital part of your life. It’s who you are. You’ve got a long list of books you’ve been planning to read for a while. You have a book recommendation at the ready whenever a friend, acquaintance, or total stranger is in need of something to read. 

Maybe you’re not one of those people who has a pile of books on the nightstand and gets a little nervous when you don’t know what you’re going to read next. Don’t stop reading this. What I have to say is for you, too.  

I’ve been going to the same dentist since I was four. Marilyn cleaned my teeth for 40 years until she retired a few years ago. (Fun fact: I was her patient on her first day of work at that office.) One of the best things about my twice-yearly visit to Marilyn was that she always asked me what I’d been reading, jotted down my book recommendations, and reported back to me six months later to let me know which ones she liked the best. The receptionist and office manager were also readers who also enjoyed my little book talks. We had a wonderful ongoing dialogue about what we had enjoyed reading. It actually made me look forward to going to the dentist.

Working with teens has shown me that the two most powerful ways to get reluctant readers to read are to recommend the perfect book to them and to have a peer recommend a book to them. Even students I have never met before perk up their attention when I ask them what sort of stories they like (usually, I ask what their favorite movies and tv shows are) and then give them a quick book talk about a book or two I know they will enjoy.

My friend Christine tells about her brother, who struggled in school and never willingly read anything until a teacher handed him a Stephen King book and said he might like it. He not only read that book but clamored for anything else King had written.   

There is power in a personalized book recommendation. I think there’s even more power in a book recommendation from someone who is not your English teacher. English teachers are supposed to like reading. But my orchestra director, math teacher, coach, and principal?  If they like it, maybe it’s worth looking at. . .

My summer reading challenge to you is to read some books you can talk with your students about. I have six suggestions for your summer reading:

1.  Read a book recommended to you by one of your students. Or poll the class as a whole to see what you ought to read.

2.  Read a young adult or middle grade book in a genre that you don’t normally read. If you gravitate toward realistic fiction, explore a popular new release in sci-fi or fantasy. If you’re a romance reader, read a sports book. If you like escapism, read something that is grittily realistic.  

3.  Read a book written for adults that you could recommend to a teenager. Some reluctant young readers who don’t gravitate to books targeted to teens find unexpected delight in a book written for a more mature audience.  

4.  Read a graphic novel. Most adults don’t even know these are a thing, yet teenagers flock to the graphic novel shelves in libraries. Search online for the best graphic novels or ask a librarian or bookseller for a recommendation. If you’re one of those teachers who has been telling kids they can’t read these because they aren’t “real books,” it’s time to enter the 21st century.   

5.  Read a young adult novel about a character or by an author whose life experience or background is not the same as yours but that might be similar to some of your students’. One of the best ways to connect with others is to experience life from their perspective. And a great way to connect with a student who may see you as someone who can’t possibly understand them is to talk with them about a book you enjoyed that might relate to their experiences. (Be careful, though, not to assume too much about a student’s experiences. The Hate U Give doesn’t tell the story of every African-American teenager; not every transgender student can relate to Lily and Dunkin; Amy Tan and Marie Lu don’t speak for every Asian-American; and many white, suburban high schoolers’ lives are not like those of the characters in John Green novels.)    

6.  Read an award-winning YA or middle-grade book. Some popular award lists include the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the Maverick Awards (graphic novels), the Lone Star Awards (middle-grade), TAYSHAS List (young adult), Printz Awards (YA), and the William C. Morris Award (YA by a debut author).  

Enjoy your summer reading. I hope it gives you the opportunity to initiate a few conversations next year with your students. If you’ve never read YA before (or haven’t read it in decades), I think you may be pleasantly surprised by what you find.

By the way, I’m always looking for recommendations, so if you read something you like, tell me about it. I will add it to the pile.  

Fix-It Strategies

Stuff breaks.

It’s an unfortunate part of life, but we have to deal with cars that won’t start, computers stuck on the Blue Screen of Death, ice makers that don’t make ice, and cell phones that won’t hold a charge.

Sometimes, when we read, comprehension breaks down, too. We encounter a paragraph with dozens of words we don’t know. A piece of text is too technical for our know-how. We find ourselves at the end of a page and have no idea what we just read.

For many of our students, this happens all the time. We give them texts, ask them to read them, and watch them run into roadblocks. Comprehension breaks down, and they don’t know how to fix it. What do we do in response? How do we help them? Sometimes, we ask them to underline, circle, or highlight unfamiliar vocabulary and other things they don’t understand. That’s a start, but it’s not enough.

Imagine you are having a really bad hair day. You look in the mirror and recoil in horror at what’s atop your head. Your hairstyle is a disaster, and you can’t leave the house looking like this. What do you do? Just point to the problem area? Circle what’s wrong? Merely identifying the problem isn’t going to fix your heinous hairdo.

You promptly take measures to alleviate the problem. Perhaps you apply a different product, take out the blow dryer or the curling iron, splash a little water on it, trim a bit with your shears, or—if none of that works—hop back in the shower and start all over.

You have go-to fix-it strategies when you find yourself having a hair crisis.

You also have fix-it strategies you use when you encounter difficult text.

When a word baffles you, you may look for context clues to determine the meaning, decide how crucial that word is to your overall understanding, look up a definition of the word if you need to, and reread the sentence, substituting that newfound definition for the word you didn’t know.

If you get to the end of sentence and go, “Huh?”, you may return to the start of the sentence and reread more carefully, put it into your own words, identify the most important elements, look at how the sentence relates to what comes before and after it, and read the words aloud in order to hear what it’s saying.    

         

At various times, you might jot notes in the margin, underline to emphasize the most important ideas, scribble a question beside a paragraph, sketch a visual or simple graphic organizer to help you make sense of some ideas, or talk with a friend about the text.

Your toolbox of fix-it strategies is a valuable resource for your students. Merely telling them to circle unfamiliar words or read a confusing passage again leads to frustration. “Look how many words I don’t know. Now what?” “I read it once and didn’t get it. How is reading it again going to help?”

We must talk with students about when to know whether a word is worth looking up and what to do after they look up a definition of an unfamiliar word. We must show them how to reread with a new intention to clear up confusion. We have to provide them with as many strategies as possible and help them to determine when each one is useful. Having strategic talks with students about reading builds stronger readers. Filling in the meaning for them doesn’t help them build skills of their own; they’ll be helpless when their comprehension breaks down without a teacher in sight.

Fix-it strategies aren’t confined to the literacy realm. We have math strategies, problem-solving strategies, critical thinking strategies, decision-making strategies, and study strategies—just to name a few—our students can benefit from.

Don’t leave your students stranded without a plan to fix their broken-down learning. Stuff breaks. Make sure your students understand that difficulty is a normal part of learning, but provide them with some tools to help them steer their way back onto the road to success. 

Thinking Aloud While Reading Aloud

This week's post focuses on one of my favorite topics: READING! Many of our students are proficient decoders of text (they can read the words in a paragraph) but are at a loss when it comes to making meaning of what they read. You may not consider yourself a reading teacher, but you’ve done more reading than anyone else in your room and are therefore the expert. In whatever class you teach, modeling the thinking a proficient reader can help your students understand the work that good readers do. By practicing these deliberate strategies to interact with the text, students can begin to develop habits that will make them more effective readers. I'll call this strategy Read Aloud/Think Aloud!

As you read a story, and article, or a chapter from your textbook with your students, tell them you are going to read the text to them and say aloud the thinking you are doing as you read. Below are two examples of what you might read and what you might say in doing this activity. The first example comes from a 10th grade World History textbook; the second is the opening of a classic short story. I've italicized the "think aloud" portions of the teacher script; the other parts come from the texts themselves:  

An Agricultural Revolution  "Revolution" means "change," so based on the title of this section, I predict I'll be reading about some sort of change in farming methods.

     By 1000, Europe's economic recovery was well underway. The year 1000 is about midway through the time period of the Middle Ages we've been reading about. I recall that we read in an earlier chapter about the feudal system and the manor economy, which was based around serfs and farming. Feudalism, I already learned, was a factor that began the recovery the book refers to.  It had begun in the countryside, where peasants adapted new farming technologies that made their fields more productive. The result was an agricultural revolution that transformed Europe.  

    New Technologies:  I don't usually think of technology as something they had in the medieval times. I wonder what things the book is calling "new technologies."  By the 800s, peasants were using new iron plows that carved deep into the heavy soil of northern Europe. These plots were a big improvement over the old wooden plows, which had been designed for the light soils of the Mediterranean region.  The book makes lots of distinctions between different sections of Europe; here it talks about the different farming tools needed for different regions. The northern part of Europe at this time in history seemed to lag behind the southern, Mediterranean region. Perhaps that's because of the power of the Church in Rome.   Also, a new kind of harness allowed peasants to use horses rather than oxen to pull the plows. Because faster-moving horses could plow more land in a day than could oxen, peasants were able to enlarge their fields and plant more crops.  I'll bet horses also eat less than oxen since they are smaller. That had to save some money for farmers.

    A peasant might look up and see another new device, a windmill, turning slowly against the sky. Where there were no fast-moving streams to turn a water mill, the power of the wind had been harnessed to grind the peasants' grain into flour.  So. . .to summarize, the three technologies they mention in this section are iron plows, horse harnesses, and windmills. If I'm taking notes on this section, I'd want to list those three main points under the heading "new technologies."

                                              (Prentice Hall World History 197)

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An example from literature:

She was one of those pretty, charming girls, born, as if by an accident of fate, into a family of clerks. First of all, I think it's interesting that the author begins this short story with "she," not even telling us the name of the woman the entire paragraph—and perhaps the entire story—is about. Second, he describes her and mentions that she was born "as if by an accident of fate." I wonder if that's her opinion of herself or the author's opinion of her. And I assume that a family of clerks is not a wealthy family, which might be the problem.   With no dowry, — The footnote says that a dowry is money or property a woman brings to her husband at the start of marriage; that confirms my suspicion that a family of clerks is poor. —no prospects, no way of any kind of being met, understood, loved, and married by a man both prosperous and famous, she was finally married to a minor clerk in the Ministry of Education.  That’s a long and somewhat confusing sentence; I think I need to read it again to make sure I can put the pieces together. With no dowry, no prospects, no way of any kind of being met, understood, loved, and married by a man both prosperous and famous, she was finally married to a minor clerk in the Ministry of Education. Reading it a second time really helped. At the end of the first paragraph, I get a pretty good idea of the mental state of this character. She's sad because she didn't get to marry a rich guy. And he works for the Department of Education. They'll never have any money. And money seems to be the thing she thinks will buy her love and happiness. Since the story is called "The Necklace," I predict it's going to have something to do with an expensive necklace the woman wants.  

    She dressed plainly because she could not afford fine clothes, but was as unhappy as a woman who has come down in the world; for women have no family rank or social class.  Family rank and social class seem like things people were more concerned with in the past. Today, I think people care more about how famous you are, and wealth doesn’t necessarily mean you have any class at all. I remember in the author's note in the textbook that this story is taking place in France in the 1800s, when someone might be concerned with her own family rank. With them, beauty, grace, and charm take the place of birth and breeding. Their natural poise, their instinctive good taste, and their mental cleverness are the sole guiding principles which make daughters of the common people the equals of ladies in high society.  The author seems to have a high opinion of women if he's going to say that their beauty and intelligence make them able to go beyond any kind of social rank. So he thinks her unhappiness and worry should be all for nothing. We'll see how that turns out. . .

                                    ("The Necklace" by Guy de Maupassant)

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Obviously, this is a little overkill, but it helps the students understand that reading is an active process. We're not necessarily "reading" when we let the words flow past our eyeballs; reading involves predicting, summarizing, connecting, and questioning. By showing the students overtly what we do when we read, they can begin to internalize these processes that will make them better students and better readers in the years ahead.  

If you want to read more about this idea, take a look at Kylene Beers's book When Kids Can't Read: What Teachers Can Do. Many schools have copies in their professional library. It's the most practical book I've ever read for any teacher who wants to know the various troubles facing our kids when we assign things for them to read.

Everyone's Jobs

“I’m sorry. I can’t help you. That’s not my job.”

That’s what the A/V guy said to me before he left me in the room with a computer that wouldn’t play the audio on a video I was supposed to show. I was working as a presenter at a conference in downtown Chicago, and this was my first experience with labor unions.

What I didn’t know is that audio and visual belong to two different unions. The organizers at the conference had to hire two sets of workers to support its presenters in technology. The so-called A/V guy was in actuality just a V guy. He belonged to the video union. He could help me with anything involving the video aspect of my presentation, but he wasn’t allowed to touch the audio stuff, which was the realm of the A guy, who happened to be elsewhere when I needed his technical support. Meanwhile, the trash collectors’ union was on strike, so stinky bags of garbage piled up on streets in front of shops and in alleyways. No one was allowed to do anyone else’s work. That was the rule. “It’s not my job” was something we heard a lot that week.

I wonder how often we adopt that not-my-job mentality in education. In Texas public schools, we don’t have unions, but it seems like we are quick to disavow any teaching task that doesn’t fall neatly into our subject or specialization area.  

Here are five areas which, as I see it, are the jobs of every adult in a school to teach, no matter what:

1.  It’s everyone’s job to teach reading.  I hope I’m not the first person to tell you that reading needs to happen frequently in every classroom.  If we are preparing students for their futures, which will likely include at least some post-secondary education and a career, we must make them competent, confident readers who are able to comprehend and think about texts. That means not pre-digesting material for them and spitting it into their mouths like a momma bird. That means providing students with rich, high-interest content-area texts and giving them the tools to comprehend them in authentic ways—not study questions, packets, and worksheets. That means having discussions with students about what to do when they struggle with a word’s meaning (hint: the answer isn’t always “look it up in the dictionary,” but that’s an okay option if you’ve exhausted other possibilities), what to do when they realize that their comprehension has broken down, and how to adjust their approach for various reading purposes. You don’t have to have a degree in reading to do this; if you know how to read (which I assume you do if you’ve made it this far into this article), you have the skills to help kids get better at reading. They’re not going to get better at reading unless they read, and if reading only happens in their language arts class, that’s probably not enough practice to lead to growth. Make it part of your job to help your students improve as readers.

2.  It’s everyone’s job to teach writing.  For some reason, writing scares teachers, even English teachers.  Can we all just agree that the ability to write with clarity is an essential academic skill as well as an essential skill for most careers?  If so, we need to get over our collective fear and start implementing writing in our classes on a routine basis. This doesn’t mean we have to start writing research papers in math class. Teachers can easily incorporate writing as a learning tool in any content area. Start with something simple like a quick write or an exit ticket. Give students something engaging to think about to introduce a lesson and have them write about it before discussing it with the class. Ask students to explain a concept or a process in writing. I can hear what you’re thinking now: “I am not a writing expert. I wouldn’t know how to grade writing. I have forgotten all about grammar. What if I teach them the wrong things?” Put those doubts and fears aside. Here’s the only question you need to ask yourself to be a competent writing teacher: “Does it make sense?”  More important than any feedback you can give is the opportunity for students to write in every class multiple times a week. Show them real-world examples of what writing looks like in your subject area and ask them to identify the traits and qualities they notice. Help them come up with rubrics and indicators of excellence.  Most importantly, give them opportunities to write. I can tell you from experience that the more frequently we write, the easier it gets. Make it part of your job to give your students plenty of practice writing.

3.  It’s everyone’s job to teach critical thinking. The world requires us to solve problems every day. Math class shouldn’t be the only place where students solve problems at school. Providing students with coaching on how to analyze situations, break complex tasks into parts, generate and test solutions, and evaluate the outcomes will help build independent critical thinkers. Breaking everything down for students and reducing everything to a set of pre-thought-out steps may help students learn to follow directions, but it won’t do much to assist them when they encounter difficulties that can’t be solved using the previously learned recipe. That’s why we all need to make sure teaching critical thinking is part of our job.

4.  It’s everyone’s job to teach persistence and perseverance.  When life gets rough, it’s important to keep going. Shouting “Don’t give up!” and “Push through it” at kids doesn’t do the trick for most. Teaching students to have grit requires two things. First, you have to provide them with worthwhile challenges, ones that are meaningful to work toward but are not easy. In most instances, what challenges one person doesn’t challenge another, so it’s advisable to plan several tiers of difficulty to provide appropriate rigor for each student. Second, you have to be upfront about normalizing difficulty and openly discussing with students ways of dealing with struggle. Provide exemplars of others coping with challenges. Offer second and third chances. Stop mid-problem and strategize with your students. Make your class a safe space to take risks. Point out your students’ resilient moves as you witness them. Celebrate successes when they come. Like reading, writing, and critical thinking, teaching persistence and perseverance should also be part of your job.  

5.  It’s everyone’s job to teach kids to be decent human beings. They’re not learning it from the media. They may or may not be learning it at home. And, some aren’t learning it from their friends. The list of life lessons in the “decent human being” curriculum is long and multifaceted. Get along with others. Share your toys. Learn to win and lose with grace. Take an interest in others. Take responsibility for the world around you and for the public good. Communicate. Be honest, trustworthy, and upstanding. Listen more than you speak. Do the right thing, even when no one is going to know about it. Be kind, patient, and polite. Treat one another with respect. Don’t let the world tread on you. Speak out when you see injustice. Earn the admiration of others for being a person of integrity. The list could go on for pages. If every educator modeled these traits, reinforced them in norms and class expectations, and took advantage of teachable moments to guide students to grow as humans, not just as learners, we’d be making unimaginable impacts on the future. Indeed, teaching kids to be decent human beings should be everyone’s job, too.

It looks like I’ve dumped a lot on your plate. The good news about these is that none of these is an extra prep; all of them can be easily worked into your existing curriculum. In many cases, I suspect you’ll find that the additions actually enhance what you are already teaching. Reading, writing, and thinking critically about your content will all deepen students’ understanding, and teaching students to be good people who don’t give up easily will pay off in greater success for students who are more delightful to spend time with. If we make these everyone’s jobs, together we can achieve incredible results.

20 Questions: A Note-taking Self-Quiz

20 Questions  
A Note-taking Self-Quiz

Answer the following questions about your reading and note-taking from a textbook. The “best practice” answer for each question is “yes.” If you’re struggling with note-taking and studying, consider ways you might change some of your “no” answers to “yes.”.  

While reading:   

1. Do you preview the chapter before reading to get an overview of how the author has organized it?

2.  Do you read in an environment that is free of distractions (no television, music, text messages, computer interruptions, etc.)?

3.  Do you think while you read? (You should be actively working to construct meaning and understand as you read.)

4.  Do you leave white space in your notes so you can add more information or make connections later?

5.  Do you abbreviate whenever possible?

6.  Do you avoid writing complete sentences in your notes, focusing instead on phrases, words, or pictures?

7.  Do your notes reflect the organization of the chapter?  Do you write the names of sections?  

8.  Can a person looking at your notes distinguish main ideas from supporting details?

9.  Do you try to see the big ideas in the reading?  Are you thinking about how the author organized the chapter, why the author included specific information, how ideas compare and contrast, etc.?

10.  Are you categorizing the information or grouping the information by theme (ie. social, political, economic; causes, effects) as you read?

11.  Are you avoiding minutia (tiny details or trivia like dates and statistics)?

12.  Do you look for cues in the text (“the most important reason…”, “another cause…”, “three goals…”)?

13.  Do you put info in a chart, picture, or diagram when useful to do so?

14.  Are you thinking about your notes as a reminder of what you learned in your reading rather than as a storage place for information you didn’t take the time to put in your brain?

15.  Do you think about why people, events, examples, etc. are important?

16.  Are your notes legible?   

After reading (steps that lead to long-term learning):   

17.  Do you review and revise your notes after taking them (preferably before class)?  Are you underlining or highlighting key terms? Putting stars by important ideas? Color-coding your notes?

18.  Do you write higher-level questions about your notes after reviewing and revising them?

19.  Do you summarize the notes as a whole after writing questions?   

20.  Can you use your notes to retell the story of the chapter?

Problems Waiting for Solutions

Some problems don’t have answers...yet. But I’m a firm believer that in education, much of the innovative progress we make comes from first identifying a problem that results in a shift of our philosophical stance on the issue.

Here’s an example to illustrate what I mean.

I have a problem teaching literature.  I have decided that I am opposed to most quizzes and tests used to measure students’ reading comprehension. The way we have traditionally attempted to check student reading is problematic, and I am not okay with it. I’ve been pondering my stance on this for a while and made up my mind last week after a conversation with a few 10th grade students.

In a Spanish classroom I happened to visit, I met a young woman; let’s call her Fred for the sake of anonymity. I noticed that Fred had a copy of Charles Dickens’s often-reviled-by-high-school-students novel A Tale of Two Cities among her possessions and that this particular copy had a bookmark situated about two-thirds of the way through the book. Endeavoring to offer some hope and encouragement to this sophomore, I remarked, “I see that you’re on the home stretch of the book. Impressive!”

Fred looked a bit confused and then examined her book more closely. “I guess I am,” she replied, with a bit of pleased surprise in her voice.

“How are you enjoying it?” I queried.

“You know,” she said, “it’s not so bad. It’s actually getting a little easier and more interesting. I kind of like it.”

I commended her on her hard work and made some chitchat about the book. Our conversation was overheard by another female student sitting at a nearby table. Let’s call her Buddy. Buddy interrupted us to boast loudly, “I haven’t read any of that book.”

We looked at her in surprise that she was so delighted by her admission. “And,” Buddy continued, “I made 100 on both of the quizzes over the book just by reading Sparknotes!”

Fred frowned, looked down at her book, and said quietly, “I made an 80 on my quizzes.”

I tried to buoy her spirits by reminding her of how much she has grown as a reader who can handle challenging texts, but I could see that Fred was a little disappointed at the amount of effort she had expended for a payoff less impressive than that of Buddy, her corner-cutting classmate.

That, I decided, is what is wrong with reading quizzes. If some students are not rewarded for reading while others achieve success without doing the very thing the quizzes are intended to measure, something is not right. The students’ teachers have  reinforced the idea that having the right answer--however you come by it--is more important than developing reading skills.

The obvious solution (we’ve all done it) is for teachers to read Sparknotes themselves and construct a quiz or test that is Sparknote-proof. That way, students who take shortcuts won’t be rewarded. The problem with that, though, is that students like Fred who are conscientiously reading (and struggling because Dickens is hard) may still have difficulty answering the new, super-specific questions. This solution reinforces the belief that the important thing about reading a book is to pay attention to and memorize trivial details--the color of the beggar’s scarf, the speaker of a fairly unmemorable quotation, the name of the footman who brings in the letter.

We want to reward the readers and trap those who don’t, but our efforts still punish and reward the wrong things. We seek accountability, but we can’t always be certain that our results measure what we think we are measuring.

So I have decided that I am officially opposed to such quizzes.

The problem is that I don’t have other options readily available to me. Although I know what I don’t believe in, I don’t exactly know what to do instead. What I do have is a list of criteria for the solution I seek:

• I want to be able to reward Fred for her hard work, perseverance, and growth.
• I want Buddy to want to be more like Fred by actually reading the book so she, too, can grow in her reading abilities.
• I want my assessments and grades to align with the goals of the unit and the lessons I am teaching to help students reach those goals.
• I want to motivate all my students to read, to challenge themselves, to gain confidence, and to take risks academically.
• I want it to be okay to struggle in my classroom and not always be punished for it.
• I do not want to be the teacher who is constantly in “gotcha” mode.
• I want students to see the worth of reading rather than dread it.

My list of criteria will help me figure out a solution that works. Perhaps I will decide that I just need to get over the whole “hold their feet to the fire” mentality and quit giving comprehension checks altogether. Maybe I will change the nature of my comprehension checks to a format that allows students to explain what they do understand instead of asking them to recall facts I think they ought to remember. I could also direct my efforts to creating a classroom environment which encourages students to engage with the content in such an exciting, authentic way that they want to read so they can be a part of what’s going on.

Ideally, I can find some colleagues who are wrestling with the same problem and start some meaningful, solution-oriented dialogue to come up with innovative solutions. In a world that is changing as swiftly as ours, it’s a shame to hold on so tightly to the traditions of the past and continually think inside the box.

I suspect that you can identify some significant problems of your own, problems without easy solutions that warrant further exploration. What is going on that you are not okay with? Maybe these problems are at a campus level: engaging certain populations of students; keeping kids in class and out of the halls; rampant absenteeism; student apathy; ineffective homework practices, inequity in enrollment in advanced classes, cell phone use spiraling out of control. They may also be problems particular to an academic team or unique to you as a teacher.

I encourage you to take some time to identify a problem, explore its scope, identify criteria for an acceptable solution, and then find some people who will engage with you in some extreme visioning. Maybe you could even bring students into the decision-making process; after all, they’re the consumers here.

And if you want to help me brainstorm ways to solve my anti-reading-quiz dilemma, let me know. I welcome the opportunity to dream big with you.