Saturday Morning Coffee and Common Core

Motivation Matters

2014-08-30T08:50:00.000-07:00

Enjoy a Laugh

MOTIVATION Matters

“Motivation is fickle; it’s not as simple as making a connection

with students at the outset of the lesson. We have to maintain their interest.”

~ Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey

Click on 31 Signs You Have Been a Teacher Too Long from the International Reading Association. I know you can use this information in some way! It might take a minute to load—worth it!

Besides the above humorous link, I recommend the latest issue of Educational Leadership. September's issue is titled MOTIVATION MATTERS, and is literally filled with note-worthy articles. Find someone who has a copy and borrow.

DANCING WITH THE STARS

My FOUR favorites: (so far)

Four (Secret Keys to Student Engagement)

by Robyn Jackson and Allison Zmuda. FOUR STAR

Dimensions (or Keys)	Students Ask	Teachers Ask
Clarity	What’s my goal?	What do I want students to accomplish?
Context	What’s in it for me?	Why do they need this?
Culture	What have I learned from this classroom to help me persevere?	How can I support students?
Challenge	What's is my game plan and my on-going strategies?	How can I balance challenge and support?

Close Reading without Tears by Nancy Boyles FOUR STAR

Text sets are the perfect match for how texts work and critical thinking. Excellent questions for Standards 1-9 provided.

Reading Time with Goals in Mind by Jennifer Serravallo FOUR STAR

Students set goals to make independent reading time more purposeful. Teacher and student work together to set goals.

Designing Relevant Learning by Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey FOUR STAR Go beyond “because you need to know this next year."

For the past few weeks I have been working on a Close Reading project. Can't seem to finish, but it's looking good. Will share real soon.

Before beginning Season 2, I vowed I would only post when I had something to give you to make your job easier, or something I felt you couldn't live without. Most likely, I will not blog EVERY Saturday since that is a pretty tall order! I do appreciate you checking in on me. Have a wonderful 3-day holiday, and a very Happy Saturday.

WPS! Go Hogs!

2014-08-09T06:33:00.001-07:00

Teaching Urgency
Three Ways that WORK

Used through Creative Commons

The summer I turned 16, I landed my first job as a motel maid. Midway through the season, the owner popped into the room I was cleaning and told me he was going to have to let me go because I was too slow. I was devastated (and incredibly embarrassed)!!! Fortunately, I was able to talk him into giving me a second chance. Here’s the deal: I wasn't purposely trying to avoid work. I was simply day dreaming and got lost in time. Well, I learned a BIG life lesson that day.J

Getting the Year Going

More than anything else, establishing routines and procedures for managing independent learning is a must do for teachers. According to experts, it is imperative we do two things during the first two weeks:

· Help students think about themselves as learners

· Establish the context so our students will thrive

Lastweek, I provided a descending table of learning time and also strongly suggested that before student goal setting take place make sure the kids understand what they have control over. For today, my question is:

How can we get students to sustain a sense of urgency? Is it even possible?

In most cases, we can get students to work with a sense of urgency for a day, an hour, and/or an activity. Our goal for our soon-to-be students is for them to be good managers of time and self-starters. A genuine sense of urgency is a highly positive and powerful force. (Kotter, 2012). This behavior is part of growth mindset and can be taught.

Maintaining a Sense of Urgency

i.e., ENGAGEMENT

Here are THREE power-packed ways to make this happen:

Build solid relationships- kids won’t take us seriously if we don’t walk the talk. Share your own struggles with time. Don’t forget to share some of the strategies that have/ have NOT worked for you. DID YOU KNOW our brain remembers only the good and bad experiences that occur each day. Apparently, neutral experiences don’t make it into the memory bank. Make sure you have more positive than negative interactions with your students.

Provide Meaningful and Intentional Feedback-Do not praise the obvious. Praise learning attempts and students' struggle. Use phrases like “I can see you are working hard.” Praise specifically what you want to see repeated and spell it out for kids so they have a clear understanding. Make sure they know what they did that eventually brought them success or to that particular point (think process). We want to be teaching on a strategic level, i.e., by remembering what I did with this problem, it will will help me go through the same steps with a similar one.

Set and Use Time Limits-If students have a set time to complete a task they stand a better chance of getting it done. If Ernie had told me up front, “You need to spend 30 minutes in each room” I would not have had an opening anecdote!J

You probably already use at least one of these timers. Just in case, I've included three super cool suggestions that will help motivate and encourage students.

iPad Countdown timers are a must in every classroom

Red Light, Green Light

Best Sand Timer

iPad Lab Timer for Experiments

As always, thanks for stopping by. I really appreciate your time and I hope you found something you can use. Wishing you a very Happy Saturday.

TEACHING URGENCY--STEP ONE

2014-08-02T06:19:00.000-07:00

The Answer is 12,960 Hours

What is the Question?

Leveraging time has got to rank in the top three high-yield strategies—regardless of context. I remember watching a demonstration of a life clock on Oprah. On the grim reaper side it was a bit creepy to see how many remaining minutes of your life statistically are left. I suppose the non-techie version would be the Medicaid tables :) Seriously, we all know how fast time slips away, but unfortunately our students don’t (get how time slips by).

So here’s my question I would like to explore: What can teachers do to teach students to value their time and to build a sense of urgency within the students?

No pun intended, but this is going to take some time to figure out…since getting kids to value time and having (any kind of) a sense of urgency is the BIG goal of all teachers. We want students to use their time wisely in class. We’re not so much talking behavior management as much as having them authentically develop and hone a life skill. Why? To make their lives better.

FIRST, let's start by answering how much classroom learning time students have--give or take. The table came from my book, Unharnessing Student Power: Building Grit. The estimate of 6 hours was just that--an estimate.

How Much Time Do Our Students Really Have?

Days in one school year = 180 days

Hours in classroom for one school day = 6 hrs*

Hours in classroom for one school year = 1080 hrs

TOTAL HOURS spent in classroom = 12,960 hrs**

* I took off an hour for lunch and breaks

**Not counting preschool, kindergarten, lunch, or absences

Grade	At the end of year total hours spent	Total learning time left at the end of year
First Grade	1,080 hours	11,880 hours
Second Grade	2,160 hours	10,800 hours
Third Grade	3,240 hours	9,720 hours
Fourth Grade	4,320 hours	8,640 hours
Fifth Grade	5,400 hours	7,560 hours
Sixth Grade	6,480 hours	6,480 hours
Seventh Grade	7,560 hours	7,560 hours
Eighth Grade	8,640 hours	4,320 hours
Ninth Grade	9,720 hours	3,240 hours
Tenth Grade	10,800 hours	2,160 hours
Eleventh Grade	11,880 hours	1,080 hours
Twelfth Grade	12,960 hours	0

The funny thing about data is that it allows us a different perspective. When I was being ornery back in 8^th and 9^th grade, I could have used this reality check. Letting the students know how much time they have (or not) seems like a good place to start. For most grade levels all or parts of this table could be calculated by students. Hmmm... the questions are pretty straightforward.

How many hours have you been in school so far?

How many hours of classroom time before you

graduate?

As follow up to this particular lesson, students write and answer:

What did you gain from your 1,080 hours last year?

What do you expect gain from your 1,080 hours this year?

Once students see how quickly their opportunities diminish, in terms of school learning time, they need to realize that HOW they use their classroom time is completely within their area of control. Consider the following as a follow up activity:

What are the things in life you can, you partially can, and you cannot control?

This can be easily done by students using a double circle map, a tree-map, or a Venn. Answering these questions would make for a rich collaborative activity based on the discussion and debate generated. In addition, the activity naturally segues into a mini unit on goal setting.

I would like to add one more thing which I think is the most critical part of today's post. We must be REAL with our kids in these types of lessons. By that I mean, we need to disclose our own failed attempts and struggles with managing our time. Isn't this one of our life-long battles?

I could go on, but instead, watch for many more ideas on building a sense of urgency with our students in the weeks to come. Finally, I would love to know How you create a sense of urgency in your classroom? Please share in the comment section below.

As always, I want to thank you for stopping by. I really appreciate your time. I know many of you are gearing up. Beginnings are always so exciting. Wishing you a

Happy Saturday.

Which Common Core websites made the Best of the Best List?

2014-07-25T12:56:00.001-07:00

My FAB FOUR

Websites for Teaching CCSS

photo from Photogen

It’s good to be back. This officially marks the beginning of Season Two. Common Core has gotten a bad rap over this past year. It has been brutally bashed, politicized, and crucified in some regions…so much so, that my husband (who remains loyal and would defend most all of my actions) sat me down and sternly asked “Tell me more about this Common Core.”

As I told him, I taught Common Core my last year in education (the 2011-2012 school year). There were no assessments from PARCC or Smarter Balanced. We followed the Gates’ Maps and were “doing” C.G.I. (Cognitive Guided Instruction) math without much/any training. Our school district was already doing business with an Arkansas based company called The Learning Institute who steered us with pacing and frequent periodic formative assessments. Life was good!

I felt like we had stepped back into the thematic teaching of the 90's but were well armed with the knowledge from the past twenty years. To me, not only was it fun to plan and fun to teach, the kids enjoyed the curriculum as well. They made countless connections throughout the school day. In fact, they thrived. We still taught algorithms in Math, but did a lot with mental math, and according to their next year's math teacher, DID NOT do nearly enough with deconstructing numbers.

The biggest moment of truth for me was realizing how short-sighted my student expectations had been prior to CCSS. Ironically, if asked, I would argue and defend me always having very high expectations for my students. The Common Core curriculum proved me wrong. The rigor and the demands from CCSS are exactly what our students need. By the way, does any teacher ever claim to have low expectations for students? J

Here’s the deal for today. I have promised a few folks some of my favorite CC links, so I thought I would share them here in the blog. They are in no particular order.

1. http://www.pinterest.com/abchenhouse/

Many of you know I am a Pinterest junkie and I fell in love with The Hen House, Arkansas’ Common Core Pinterest Board, last summer. I have tried to keep up-to-date with their pins on my boards, but have fallen behind. There are 177 boards set up by grade level and each of the Gates’ modules. Some boards are more bountiful than others.

Serves Grades K-12

2. http://commoncorepcssd.wikispaces.com/PCSSD

I found this link last summer from Pulaski County Special School District in Central Arkansas, and almost cried when I thought I had lost the link. The organization makes it easy to navigate. Although some of the links are not available [to us], many are. In the middle of the page you will see the grade span to click on.

Serves Grades K-2, 3-5, 6-8

3. http://rogers.ss5.sharpschool.com/cms/One.aspx?portalId=3091742&pageId=3426721

The Rogers School District in Northwest Arkansas is pretty spectacular. I see they have recently revamped their website. Fortunately, it is still available to all.

Serves Grades K-5*

It may contain higher grade levels...just haven't found them.

4. http://oaklandk12-public.rubiconatlas.org/Atlas/Browse/View/Calendars?DoSubmit=1&SchoolFilter[]=19&Page=1&

I found this resource a few months back and still have notmade time to unlock its complete charms. As you click open the link listed above, you will see a menu on the left side: 1. Click on grade level. 2. Click on subject 3. Click on Browse. There are complete 5-week lesson plans on this website. For example, after clicking on second grade writing you will be brought to this page. Click on #4 OPINION: Using the Power of Reviews. Tell me this isn't an amazing score!

Serves Grades K-12

Screen shot of what you are looking for in order to get to lesson plan links

Well, there you have 'em...my FAB Four Common Core links. I hope you have time to play with these links and would love it if you would respond with your favorite Common Core links in the comment section. Help me build a list. If you respond with a link and it makes the list, I will send you a FUN treat J

Finally, what’s in a Name?

Something I did not do, in my very first blog last August was to mention anything about the blog’s name. At the time, it seemed indulgent, but in retrospect, perhaps, it was just plain rude. Obviously, the Common Core part is a no brainer. The Saturday Morning Coffee part was not so much referring to my publishing on Saturday mornings (although I do), but really to capture the essence of what Saturday mornings mean to me—and possibly to you, too. For me, Saturday mornings have always meant shedding the structure and confinement of week day work to become completely open to life’s possibilities. I wanted to capture that same freedom of thought for my blog.

As always, I want to thank you for stopping by. I really appreciate your time. I am hoping your summer has been restful, rejuvenating, and FUN. Here’s wishing you a Happy Saturday.

What Text Are You Using for Close Reading?

2014-04-05T07:37:00.000-07:00

UNDER THE MICROSCOPE

With Close Reading

Today's blog features a lesson taught this past Thursday by Kelly Villalobos, 2nd grade teacher at Wakefield School in Turlock, California. Despite the fact that I live in North Central Arkansas, Kelly and I regularly communicate back and forth on matters of teaching.

           Last night Kelly posted her latest teaching endeavor with close reading on her own blog. She made it so easy to visualize the lesson and her students' behavior from her descriptive reflection. You really need to click over and read her story. Going into the lesson she and I both felt the text might be too easy for her students.

          Kelly observed the students successfully completing each of the steps she asked them to do. She had taken the passage and opted to combine many of the tasks in one lesson versus spreading them out over a week as the unit had suggested.

         I typed the text into the readability analyzer. Here are the results on the story Rain from the gorgeous TPT unit Non-Fiction Passages by Jessica Tobin

Readability Formula
Flesch-Kincaid Grade level                    4.9 Grade Level
Automated Readability Index*                4.8 Grade Level
SMOG Index                                             5.3 Grade Level

Additional Interesting information
Word Count                                              101 words
Sentence Count                                            8 sentences
Words per Sentence                               12.6 words

Based on this information the text's readability level was not too easy for her 2nd graders.

*Automated Readability Index can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Readability_Index

Now What?

          My original thought that the students were successful with this text because it was written at an easier grade level was completely wrong. I was intrigued with trying to figure out why Kelly's students had been successful--certainly not to take away from her amazing teaching abilities :) I began by looking at the vocabulary since Kelly had said the students struggled with the word "frequent" that showed up in the first sentence. There may have only been 101 words in this passage but there was a huge opportunity to learn (or stumble over) eleven Tier 2 & Tier 3 words: frequent, occurrence, liquid, droplets precipitation, occurs, gauge, measure, excessive, amount, and inconvenient.

Next step.

I decided to redo the readability and rewrote the text to replace the more difficult eleven Tier 2 & Tier 3 words with easier words in order to see what kind of effect that would have on the readability. Here are the results:

Readability Formula
Flesch-Kincaid Grade level                    2.1 Grade Level
Automated Readability Index*                1.9 Grade Level
SMOG Index                                             2.7 Grade Level

So basically, if Kelly's 2nd Grade students knew most of these larger words they should have little problem reading the text. But I would certainly not classify this as an EASY read for them.

What else was going on that made this successful for the students? I went back and looked at Kelly's reading sequence:

1. Cold Read- students are prompted to annotate text
2. Teacher reads passage to students- students continued to annotate (presumably guided)
3. Teacher and students read the passage together - Teacher paused after each sentence to
     question class on annotations
4. In small teams of 4, students answered questions.
     They had to locate the answer within the text
     They had to write it in a complete sentence

     (Kelly's comments on Step 4)
      "This worked out FAR better than I expected. The kids all did their part and they held each other accountable. Phrases I heard were "but WHERE did you find that in the text?", "does that really answer the question?", "we have to add the telling part of the sentence, not just the doing part", and my personal favorite, "That is YOUR opinion. What did the text say? That is what Ms.V wants!" This simple little activity was a great team opportunity for discussion."

5. To prepare for the writing component Kelly gave students the prompt to help focus their thinking "If rain never fell from the sky..." Students had one minute to list ideas.
6. Students shared their ideas with their team. This was sort of a Give One, Get One activity as students could revise their list.
7. Students wrote to the prompt.

     (Kelly's comments on Step 7)
      "Then came the independent writing. No one groaned and they were all eager to respond. Why? I think it was because they had so much time to discuss and reflect as a class and with their groups. Everyone had the background information necessary for the assignment. As far as content goes, all the students did well with that part of the summary."

          As I began writing today's blog I thought Kelly had used an easy text for her close reading lesson and that was the reason her students were successful. From the readability scores, although not an exact science as evidenced by the variability in scores, the text was certainly not easy.

         According to Kelly, gauge, occurrence, and frequent were the three words that were new. Gauge was defined in the text. She helped the students with frequent and occurrence.

          So what were the factors that resulted in this being a strong learning experience? What can we take away to help us with our close reading lessons. In my opinion, I think the students did not struggle with the close reading assignment because the amount of text involved in the lesson could be easily managed.

            Students had background knowledge with the subject matter. Two months earlier they                had studied weather.

           The passage was a mini-bite portion of 101 words. Stamina was not an issue.

            Because the text was relatively short, there was time for three complete readings.

           The students were able to connect and to interact with the text in a small group.

   The students were able to process the information through writing.

   Kelly's 2nd grade students felt empowered to answer the questions using evidence from the text and to write to a prompt combining their own knowledge with what they learned from the text. Kelly realizes this was a perfect bite-size passage to use at the beginning of the year when laying the foundation for what is expected since the lesson allowed the rehearsal of annotation skills and close reading procedures.

          I started writing today's blog with a completely different idea of where I was headed. I was thrown a curve when the readability for the close reading text was much higher than we thought. What I really like about having been wrong is that I was forced to look more closely at Kelly's lesson and try to isolate the elements that came together and made this a successful learning experience for both Kelly and her students (and me, too). I was reminded how carefully we need to match the material we are using with our students and consider the lesson's purpose. Kelly did a great job in selecting the passage and supporting her students. Once again, Kelly, thank you, for always being so agreeable to share your classroom experiences. You are one of the most agreeable people I know :)

MORE ON CLOSE READING

My most successful blogs in terms of weekly visitors have been those on Close Reading. It seems like close reading has captured many teachers' hearts including my own. Link back to the three blogs that have appealed to readers the most this past year.

Back in the early fall, Kelly graciously and fearlessly stepped up to the plate to share details of her first close reading lesson (ever). Link here.

Ed Ewing, an elementary principal, stepped into one of his teacher's 5th grade classroom and taught a 2-day close reading lesson and then reflected on the learning process--for both himself and the students. Link here

Terri Rodgers, a 4th grade teacher, who taught and reflected on her close reading lesson and offered up many wonderful pictures documenting each step of the process. Link here

       Before closing I wanted to share another FREE resource that you may or may not know about. Or if you are like me, you have forgotten about the treasures this site holds. Lately, I have been using ReadWorks.Org for passages and other quality information. Check out the new K-5 Close Reading passages.

As always, I want to thank you for stopping by. I really appreciate you spending any time with me considering how little you have left after working all week. Hope its a great week and especially a very Happy Saturday.

Free Access. . .If You Don't Count Your Time

2014-03-28T22:02:00.000-07:00

Close Reading,
Common Core Writers Workshop,
and Free eBooks

My Life in Squares
(Photo: Mary Ann Olsen)

Still trying to shed the guilt from not having blogged last week. Wish I could say I had escaped to some place beachy and warm. Instead, I have been busy with my latest passion project which seems like it is taking forever. With each self-imposed deadline not achieved, I am reminded how difficult it is to cost base average between have-to's and want-to's. Isn't 21st century living all about cost base averaging our time? If we lose so much time with one activity we can leverage out another activity/activities in order to make up for the loss. Is time our most precious asset? How we use our time is becoming more and more like contemplating and strategizing the $22.47 stored away, safe, in the piggy bank back when you were eight years old. The rub of course is that now there is little time for contemplation.

            So, I will quickly get to the point. A lot of good stuff has passed over my computer screen in the last few weeks. If you are a follower of my Pinterest boards you will know I favor free -- and in fact probably have only two paid items pinned (not counting recommended books:) out of 14,000 pins. Today's post is based entirely on quality information you can get FREE.

     Within the last few months, Heinemann Publishing began their marketing campaign for Lucy Calkin's new writing Units of Study K-8 . These were written for grade level Common Core writing workshop curriculum. To promote these units, free grade level samplers were created. I passed the links on to several friends in California but decided maybe I could request FREE sampler units shipped to my home rather than having to print them all off--to save time, right. Done! Easy-Peasy! Since my current passion project has little to do with writing, I have been doing my best to ignore this enticing cardboard box consisting of 9 books of Lucy K-8 treasures. I couldn't help but peak and yes, they are amazing and all are averaging about a 100+ pages. The actual workshop units must be fabulous, and certainly worth the price of under $180.00 per grade level set. That being said, you can glean a lot by just using the sampler. Meanwhile, if you are in a coaching, professional development, or administrative role you need all grade levels of the FREE sampler units. FYI: Lucy is currently working on the high school curriculum. For additional free samplers from Heinemann authors click here.

             Over the last few months, more and more FREE webinars are being held. It is completely dependent upon you gaining access to the right websites. This past week, P. David Pearson from Cal Berkeley did a webinar on Close Reading for the Developmental Studies Center. It is now posted on YouTube. Pearson spoke on 1) Where close reading came from and where it is headed, 2) What does text-based and text dependent really mean, and 3) Do we have to forget everything we have learned about prior knowledge? You might feel like you are back in the college classroom, but Professor Pearson makes some very good points and uses a great demo activity for modeling thinking. The PowerPoint presentation is available here.

                  "We can amplify each kid's natural inclination to dream,
                  we can inculcate passion in a new generation, and
                  we can give kids the tools to learn more, and faster,
                  in a way that's never been seen before." ~ Seth Godin

Translation: GIVE kids the tools to learn while we [teachers] motivate and cheer-lead them on.

I still order a fair amount of books each month. I know I am retired. . .I just can't seem to break the habit. All my favorite authors, just keep pumping out new great books. Earlier this week, I downloaded a FREE book I have had on my computer for a month or so: Stop Stealing Dreams: What is school for? by Seth Godin. Honestly, I don't know too much about Seth Godin, but as I read this book I kept having J Lo moments--lots of goosies. This is very, very powerful stuff concerning the technology implications of traditional schooling and where we are headed. This book had the same effect on me as Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat. I can't stop thinking about it and keep wondering where have I been? Of course I understand, its hard to see when you are standing right in the middle of something. This is why you need to read this book.

I had no idea we were so close to a complete paradigm change. Folks, this is so much bigger than the curriculum Common Core is suggesting and the political polarizing effect it is having around the country. The students are way ahead of the teachers in technology and will be for quite some time. How this all plays out is going to be very interesting. By the way, Godin provides a very great rationale for flipping your classroom.

Finally, here's a few more FREE eBooks:

Preparing Students for Work in the 21st Century by Rob Mancabelli and Will Richardson

Mobile Learning by Jackie Gerstein

Learning, Knowledge, and Meaning by Julian Stodd

Focus by Leo Babauta

How to Motivate Creative People (including yourself) by Marc McGuiness

Time Management for Writers by Thursday Bram

The Definitive Guide to Blogging by Diggy

The Writer’s Manifesto by Jeff Goins

Hopefully you are comfy and have grabbed yourself a cup of coffee with a bit of time to play around with some of these links. If not, stop back by when you can. Have yourself a great week and especially a very Happy Saturday.

Pinkston Middle School's Literacy Fair...Now that's a Celebration!

2014-03-15T07:00:00.000-07:00

Growing into Life Long Reading

"The man who does not read great books

is no better than the man who can’t."

Mark Twain

Allow me to introduce the super stars of today's blog

Jennifer Drewry and Karyn Jones

English Teachers

Pinkston Middle School ~ Mountain Home, Arkansas

               It's no coincidence that today's blog connects to my last one about motivating readers with the hope of ultimately creating life-long readers. Yesterday, I was one of several who judged student entries for Pinkston Middle School's annual Literacy Fair. Displays were created by all 7th grade Pre-AP students and any other 7th grade English student who wished to participate. The result: 80 dazzling entries.

               I interviewed Karyn Jones and Jennifer Drewry, the two teachers responsible for this magnificent literacy celebration. Karyn and Jen have also generously agreed to respond to any questions you might have--which I bet might include a request for a copy of judging forms, etc. (Isn't sharing what we teachers do so well!) You will find their emails at the end of this blog.

              This was my second time judging, so I felt like I had a better handle on what I was looking at and listening to when the students presented their books. In addition to creating a tri-fold display for their choice of book (and genre selection) students were required to design and present:

A Creative Display

· a creative display based upon salient aspects of the book

· a well written summary of the book

· an interactive, age-appropriate literary activity to create an interest in the text

· an interactive, age-appropriate content area activity to create an interest in the text

· a well-researched component to include bibliographic references

A Polished Oral Presentation

· a succinct summary of their book

· direct eye-contact and professionally appropriate body language

· demonstrations of their interactive activities

· answering of any clarifying questions from the judges

Because of our stretched thin time tables, the interview was short but I know you will enjoy hearing these ladies' thoughts on this assignment which improves from each year's tweaks and additions. Along with the interview there is a pictorial celebration of some of these remarkable achievements by their students. If you haven't already, please grab a cup of coffee, get comfy, and enjoy.

The Interview

Saturday Morning: Is this a cumulative, end-of-the-year project? If yes, what do you expect the students to have under control by the end of Feb? Would you list all the skills needed to complete this project.

Jennifer and Karyn: I would say it is a cumulative activity. The students are required to complete 6 creative book projects, with 2 projects being completed in each of the first 3 quarters of the school year. We provide 2 project options and students have the choice of which they prefer to tackle first. Along with the project each student is required to complete a book assessment form that focuses on language arts topics being taught in the classroom. By the end of February, students should have presentation skills, basic research skills, and a strong knowledge of identifying writer’s craft.

Saturday Morning: You had mentioned you had added a research piece this year. Can you talk a little bit about this?

Jennifer and Karyn: With each year, we have identified the need to challenge students at different levels in order to prepare them for 21^st Century. One of the areas that we identified for this year is the need to increase student ability to conduct effective research. Although this piece is challenging for students this age, it is a great introduction allowing them to grapple with the steps involving research. Adding the research piece strengthens the educational value and ties into Common Core.

Saturday Morning: What are the pro’s to this project? Cons?

Jennifer and Karyn: The benefits are that students gain knowledge on how to analyze literature for multiple curriculum connections. They get to the see the value of the book, not just for enjoyment and entertainment, but also for those teachable moments. Students are able to reach the highest levels of Bloom’s by evaluating, analyzing, and synthesizing information presented in their novel. Students' natural tendency to procrastinate is a deterring factor. Some students struggle with correctly creating quality activities and overall presentations due to their lack of experience. However each student shows pride in their accomplishments when they complete the project.

Saturday Morning: What do the students take with them in terms of learning?

Jennifer and Karyn: Participants of the Literacy Fair take away the ability to not only understand the content at hand but also the value of the social experience. Students must present themselves in a manner that is appropriate for the professional field; they are learning and practicing interviewing skills, speaking, listening, eye contact, composure, and the overall aspect of having an educational conversation with others.

Saturday Morning: What are you most proud of in terms of this assignment?

Jennifer and Karyn: The most fulfilling aspect for us, the teachers, is the pride that each student projects through the displaying and presenting of their projects. They begin to understand and experience the intrinsic reward of a job well done.

Saturday Morning: How do you equalize the opportunity for students who do not have family assistance and support?

Jennifer and Karyn: Our student body has a vast array of parent involvement, for those students that do not have access to technology or access to the materials needed to complete the project, we provide it for them. By the time this project comes around we have built that student/teacher relationship to a point where we know our students’ needs. We provide all students with access to computers at any time they need them, as well as attending computer lab once a week. Many of our lower income and/or struggling students are also in a study skills class where they can use that time for research or printing information. Each year we recycle project boards in order for students to have if needed, and every teacher keeps a set of art materials in the classroom for student use. Other faculty and staff are very helpful in meeting EVERY student's needs.

The Student Creations

The projects were amazing. Two things struck me even more than the technical artistry of the boards and the students' incredible creativity. Every student was articulate and able to present their project with ease and to demonstrate their interactive activities with such professionalism and pride. In most cases I left them with one final question: How would you rate your book on a scale of 1-10? Their faces brightened by at least three shades, eyes sparkled, and without hesitation most said "At least a 12!" Do I think Jennifer and Karyn have created life-long readers? It certainly looks promising. How did Jennifer and Karyn feel about this year's Literacy Fair? Once all the students had left the gym for lunch, they were huddled together, already plotting new ways to make this wonderful learning experience even stronger for next year's students. They came up with some really great ideas, but my lips are sealed. You'll have to wait til next year :)

As always, thanks for hanging out with me for a few minutes. Enjoy your week and especially, have a very happy Saturday.

P.S. If you have any questions for this assignment, don't hesitate. Please feel free to email me at cmccoyread2@yahoo.com or email Jennifer or Karen directly. Their emails are jdrewry@mtnhome.k12.ar.us or kjones@mtnhome.k12.ar.us

Building Lifelong Readers: 25 Ways to Motivate and Inspire Kids to Read

2014-02-22T07:09:00.000-08:00

How do you take your Common Core?

With or Without SSR*

used through Creative Commons

In our move to Common Core, let us not forget what brought us to the party. There has been research through the years on students independently reading self-selected texts during scheduled classroom time. The research results have been varied. Today I would like us to focus on the idea of a lifelong reader and to encourage you not to throw out this practice. Grab a cup of coffee and please hear me out as I share my story.

It wasn’t so much he had less than 10 pimples throughout his entire adolescence. It wasn’t so much that I was the one who grew into crooked front teeth. It wasn’t the stupid glasses either. What gnawed on my soul was that my brother was smarter. Someone, somewhere, had shared the secret his IQ was higher. I wasn’t jealous. Honest. I idolized him. Instead, I felt this hopeless inadequacy and wondered why some did and some didn’t.

I wonder is this why I became a reader. Solace in books. Hope. The escape and comfort of our small town library. Unconciously, I must have thought that maybe if I tried really, really, really, hard I could grow my IQ.

Books offered me an opportunity to become a better version of myself and as a result I transformed into a life long reader. The research would suggest that by my being surrounded by role models and having a public library within safe and independent walking distance those were contributing variables. On both counts, true. For the record, my being a life-long reader is not the result of any teacher’s effort and is not the result of being read to as a kid before going to sleep.

It is through books I decided to grow my IQ—more unconsciously, at first. Anyone remember Readers’ Digest vocabulary tests? Learning words in the 60’s was the cure for an ailing IQ. Despite this glimmer of hope, I still believed my intelligence was fixed and that I was cursed. Some were luckier than others in the exact same way that some escaped acne while others were bombarded. Honestly, I entered the self-help movement before it had a name. There was so much to know and I couldn’t funnel it in fast enough. How to be smarter eventually translated into how to be a better person which eventually morphed into how to be a better teacher and how to be a better wife. Books have always been there to provide me with the information I needed at the the very moment I needed it.

Now retired, many former students have become teachers. Some have shared the influence I had on them when they were my first or second graders. From 1986 to 1995 they were poster children for Whole Language. Of course, they loved books. I wonder has their passion with books remained and did they become lifelong readers as a result of their early love affair with great books and a passionate teacher.

I left teaching pre-service Teacher Ed classes a couple years back to teach second grade for my two final years in public education. My goal was to write a book during this time. Yeah, right! Instead of writing gems mined from each day’s anecdotes as I channeled inspiration from Debbie Miller, I struggled with all that being a new teacher brings. It had been over 15 years and in many ways was like starting over.

My classroom library

Allow me to share one thing about that first year’s class. During 2010-2011, there were no major initiatives and my school was still finding its way with levelized reading instruction. To support this effort, book rooms had been set up for both lower and upper elementary classrooms—a masterful effort and resource. Between my personal stash and both book rooms I was once again able to immerse 2^nd graders in wonderful books just like I had two decades before.

Well, I didn't write a book, but I did create a culture of readers and writers. I provided them with a bushel full of books, allowed them free choice, created long chunks of classroom time for them to read, had them bring reading blankets for their comfort, formed Oprah-like book clubs, and scaffolded their growing abilities through conferencing. The kids’ reading levels soared. I wonder: Will these kids grow up to be life-long readers?

The second year, we piloted Common Core and suddenly classroom SSR time shriveled to half its former size and became less of an instructional focus; coincidentally, so did the students’ enthusiasm for reading. Creating a culture for lifelong reading cannot be hurried. It takes time. We read as we had the year before but not in leisurely stretched out moments. It made a huge difference.

Last November I read Falling in Love with Close Reading by Chris Lehman and Kate Roberts. As always, I began with the forward. This one written by the Book Whisperer, Donalyn Miller. I stopped dead in my tracks. First, Miller quoted Alan Jacobs from his book The Pleasure of Reading in an Age of Distraction (2011). Jacobs claimed:

“The idea that many teachers hold today that one of the purposes of education is to teach students to love reading—or at least appreciate and enjoy whole books—is largely alien to the history of education. And perhaps alien to the history of reading as well.”

Donalyn then responded with the following:

“It’s vital that students graduate from high school with the reading skills they need for college and career success, but I want more for them. I hope our students find relevance in their lives, forge deep connections with others, create art, appreciate the world’s mysteries, and possess spiritual and emotional stores that sustain them in dark times. Reading shows us how to be better human beings, not just worker bees.”

These paired quotes have haunted me since, and at the time had a much greater effect on me than the information on close reading. This is MY story Donalyn is referring to. Through reading I found what I was looking for even when I had no clue what it was, and, yes, I found spiritual and an emotional strength I was not able to find else where. Reading has served as my anchor and has transformed me into a better me. Isn't this what teachers want for their students.

The Need to Read...on the radar this week

Edutopia came out with a piece on lifelong readers this week providing a zillion links to gather information on this subject. Larry Ferlazzo, one of my favorites, began the week with a 3-part series on lifelong readers and I have synthesized the info from the first two interviews. His format was based around well-known literacy people answering the following question:

What strategies can I use to make sure they will fully understand the books we read? How can I ensure that I will create life-long readers?

· Accessability to lots of books covering a wide range of genre and topics that interests the students

· Lots of time to examine, read, write and talk about books with the teacher and other students

· Choice

· Really get to know your students and their interests

· Teacher helps match students to books based on interest and ability

· Being able to navigate and visit the school library

· Listen to a fluent reader read aloud every single day

· Students not forced into finishing a book if it doesn’t appeal to them

· Provide in class time to read

· For early readers teachers need to have a clear understanding of how the reading levels progress and what behaviors need to be taught at each stage.

· Teacher modeling a love of reading—Talk the talk, and walk the walk.

· Create energy and excitement around reading books

· Students are allowed to take books home

· WIIFM(What’s in it for me): Share the bigger goal of reading as a means to bigger and better things

· If you can’t find a book to match a child’s interest, make one using clip art/Google images

· Create class-wide book clubs, conversations with parents about books, and opportunities for parents and children to share a love of book

· Teacher needs to choose books with kid appeal

· Intentionally model and provide opportunities to practice strategies for comprehension

In additon to this list, Miller suggested in a great article (written in 2010) some additional ways to create a classroom of readers.

“Lifelong readers possess certain habits that we can explicitly model and teach our students. By redesigning our classrooms to support young readers as they practice and internalize the behaviors of avid readers we can increase our students’ engagement in reading and reap the benefits that prolific reading engenders.”

· Set the expectation for students to read a minimum of 40 books during the year

· Set 30 min aside for SSR each day

· Always have kids carry books with them when they are going to have to wait: picture day, field trip, assemblies

· Students need to read when they have finished their assignment (No worries about what to do with fast finishers.)

· Instead of bell ringers in the morning have students read when they enter the classroom

Lastly, I am linking to an audio interview Ferlazzo did with Donalyn Miller earlier this month. Click on the link to listen to the nine minute interview on Ferlazzo’s BAM! Radio program.

I really enjoyed this interview because Miller affirms my thinking about our students. As teachers, we desperately want to think we have stepped in, performed our magic and created lifelong readers. In reality there are too many intervening variables in young people's lives as they make their way through the grades, through other teachers' classrooms, and through life. We want to think we have changed our students forever, and pray no one comes along to destroy all that we’ve built. Perhaps, we need to ask ourselves, how sturdy is the foundation we created for our readers and in what ways have we allowed for a gradual release of their independence once they have left our nest.

My deepest gratitude to Carol Dweck for giving me relief and hope regarding my IQ:) Her research surrounding Mindset has to be some of the most important findings this century.
Thanks to all of you for stopping by on a Saturday or at some convenient point during the week. I will be taking a couple weeks off from the blog. Have a wonderful week and especially enjoy your Saturdays.

*SSR- Silent Sustained Reading is a time during which the entire class reads quietly. There have been several names for it over the years: DEAR (Drop everything and read), DIRT (daily independent reading time), SQUIRT (Sustained quiet uninterrupted reading time), and many more.

Going for Gold: An Homage to Effort

2014-02-15T07:48:00.000-08:00

One School's Focus on

Grit and Resilience

photo courtesy of Hubspot

Before you begin reading, predict the numbers that complete this equation.
Intelligence =_____% effort vs. _____% ability*

Consider this quote from Michael Jordan: "I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I've been trusted to take the game-winning shot. . .and missed. I've failed over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."
Michael Jordan (1997 Nike commercial)

The growth mindset confirms that intelligence can be developed, and expertise can be built by means of deliberate practice.

What are mindsets and how do they affect our classrooms? What are ways we can build a growth mindset within our classroom? What are some ways to help students adopt a growth mindset? As I continue to research and read, these questions appear to urgently be in need of answers and more importantly transformed into daily classroom practice in every classroom beginning in preschool. As I write this week’s blog, the world watches an entire global celebration of grit and growth mindset in Sochi. Bring it on.

Back in August I wrote about teachers allowing their students to struggle to help them understand that learning often times involves struggle and failure; however, with continued effort and perseverance the likelihood of success increases. Around that time one of my former college students, Rebecca Finnegan, mentioned that her school, Forman K-5 Elementary School in Plano, Texas, had set grit as their school-wide focus for the school year. The idea of a school-wide campaign on grit appealed to my logic. If one teacher focuses on grit, the students will be influenced while in that particular teacher's classroom. For a genuine shift to occur, the students need consistency over time and within different contexts. Today we gain insight from first-year teacher, Rebecca, as to what a first year focus on grit looks like at Forman Elementary. I sent her a few interview questions, and Rebecca shared the following:

How was the staff in-serviced on the year-long focus of grit?

Tramy Tran, our principal, told us prior to school opening that our focus for the 2013-14 school year was going to be persistence and grit. We are an 80% ED school. The majority of our students are on free or reduced lunches. We have a huge ELL population. Plano is a fairly affluent city. We have 40+ elementary schools and of those less than 10 are similar to Forman (our school).

Our students have gaps to fill and have to work twice as hard to meet standards other schools in the district do not usually have trouble meeting, simply due to our student population. With this in mind, I think Ms. Tran felt grit (persistence and grit) was the perfect focus for our students to help them learn skills to be successful.

In August we were shown this TED talk video from Angela Duckworth about grit and her findings of how it was such a key factor in student success. As a staff we discussed what grit meant to us and how we could apply that in our classroom to help make our students more successful.

When the students began the year they learned about growth mindset vs. a fixed mindset

Videos were used for instruction and motivation in each classroom.

I know the answer,but what if I'm wrong

From failure you learn

Michal Jordan explains why failure has allowed him to succeed

Don't compare your inside to someone else's outside.

What does focusing on grit looks like at Forman

Bulletin Boards in the hallways at the continuing to display themes of grit.

Staff T-Shirts are themed as “The Key to Success is Persistence and Grit.”

Teachers' personal narratives about grit are displayed in the hallway.

Each Friday there are school wide morning assemblies, or during mid-morning assemblies on early release days, teachers share their personal stories of persistence and grit with the student population.

During morning announcements over the PA, we use the term “persistence and grit” in regards to just about everything. When talking about the science fair, focusing on our daily reading goals, showing growth with our intervention software (iStation and Think Through Math), our writers of the month, etc.

How have individual teacher’s classroom environment changed

I think teachers are using the term “grit” in their classrooms in a way that it never was before. It is now part of the vernacular of our students. Rewards are given for those students who exhibit hard work and growth due to using “grit”. Many teachers are bringing in real world examples of grit that have helped people succeed in life (sports figures, children with disabilities, other famous figures, etc.) and having classroom discussions focused around this idea.

How have you addressed grit in your classroom this year?

In my classroom I have the words persistence and grit displayed, and refer to them almost daily. My students define grit as "never giving up," that is in their own words. They often make connections to grit and see it in stories and other situations.

My focus for grit in the classroom is on building their stamina and confidence in their own abilities, as well as building cognition. We focus on applying that to our reading and reading comprehension especially. Honestly, most of my students read below grade level, but will be expected to take and pass a grade level standardized test that has questions they will have a very hard time understanding. My job is to give them tools and skill sets to do the very best they can and to not feel overwhelmed/ready to quit before they even begin.

I model grit as often as possible for my students, and have found myself on many, many occasions using it myself. Often times, not only as a first year teacher in a public school but in a school like Forman especially, I find myself overwhelmed with all of the things I have to do that have nothing to do with planning quality lessons that take up most my time. This leads to 10-12 hour days and often interferes with time with my family. I also am overwhelmed with the task of trying to get 21 sweet babies who struggle daily to pass not only the STAAR test, but third grade! How do I meet all of their individual needs when they are so great?

I feel like giving up every day due to the fear that I will fail the monumental task entrusted to me, but know that I need to push on and push through (use grit) because the job I have is so very important, and these kids have been given up on by too many in their lives already.

Rebecca. Thank you so much for sharing what your school is doing to foster grit and growth mindset at your school. We can all empathize with the weight you carry on your shoulders as a first year teacher. Believe me no teacher wishes they could relive that year again.

Teaching reeks stress and havoc as a result of juggling so many priorities, and yes, they ALL are priorities that ALL need our time and attention. Right now. And faster is better. The sad reality is that our accelerated pace truly does not serve anyone--teachers and/or students. For a new teacher, the pace and the expectations can be toxic in the same way it is for our struggling students. It is not how fast students master learning but rather their persistence, grit, and effort they put forth along with the right menu of teaching strategies. The growth mindset of a teacher contributes greatly to his or her responsiveness to the needs of students.

Let us all step back, take a deep breath, be reminded that teaching is the most noble of all professions. We are truly the fortunate who can call themselves teachers. Thanks for stopping by and strengthening some neurons. Best wishes for a Happy Saturday.

* Depending on your mindset:

Fixed mindset = 35% effort vs. 65% ability

Growth mindset = 65% effort vs. 35% ability

Team U.S.A.-- Lucy Calkins and Charlotte Danielson

2014-02-08T06:59:00.003-08:00

Need Help with Your Teacher Evaluation?

Michael Fullan has cautioned that the greatest problem in education is not resistance to change, but the adoption of too many innovations, implemented in a superficial way,

uncoordinated with each other and needing ongoing work.

photo taken by Barbara Taylor

I can remember months ago receiving an emailed invitation to a one-day conference presented by Lucy Calkins, author and educator extraordinaire, featuring Charlotte Danielson's Framework for Teaching currently being used for high stakes teacher evaluation. Why was Lucy, Reading and Writing Guru, intersecting with Charlotte Danielson? Calkins' reasoning rested in Fullan's opening quote. We (teachers, administrators, education in general) have been innovated to death with little attention paid to integrity of the original design since we've already devised a shortcut or need to shortchange the process before we even get started because we are juggling so many other programs and initiatives. Hmmm! For the 2013-14 school year many, many schools have faced Year One implementation of Common Core in addition to adopting a formal high-stakes teacher evaluation model. Could it be any more stressful?

It is the Teacher's College Reading and Writing Project's (TCRWP) goal for schools using the Danielson Framework for Teaching to coordinate their teacher effectiveness work with their literacy instruction. Thus, the one-day conference was born. Brilliant and logical. It took me less than a nan-nu second to know I had to go. Lucy has to be my Numero Uno educator who I worship and have faithfully followed since the Whole Language days when the spotlight beamed brightly on student writing. Unfortunately, Lucy was in New York for this event and I was here in the Ozarks in North Central Arkansas. It wasn't going to happen for me.

Well life moves on, I forgot about the event. About two hours ago I received an email from Lucy. Actually it was from the secretary at Teacher's College announcing videos of literacy lessons using the Charlotte Danielson Framework had been posted on Vimeo. I joined (it's free) and started watching a couple of these. Suddenly, I realized I had to switch out my already written blog to bring you up close and personal with these videos. My reasoning is simple. These have just come out and you can watch them this weekend and start implementing on Monday. I know there are many of you scheduled for evaluations later in February and in March.

Each of the 15 videos is focused on one of the three teachers being observed and within each of the series, you will find an introduction to that teacher's observation (by Lucy), the teacher's pre conference, observation, and post conference. You should know that these teachers opened their doors--to their first-ever observations and to a film crew--all within the first few weeks of the school year. A detailed menu and individual links for each of the videos are in the resource section at the end. Enjoy!

There will be additional materials to accompany these videos. I will pass anything good your way. Rebecca, I know you will be fine with me moving your interview to next week because you are you. A big thank you for always being so flexible. I will be pinning the videos to both my Growing Readers and Growing Writers Pinterest boards. For more on Charlotte Danielson's Framework see an earlier blog. Also, you might want to visit my Pinterest Board on Teacher Evaluations/Charlotte Danielson.

I know how busy everyone is. Teachers simply are the best people on the planet. Thank you so much for stopping by. Best wishes for a very Happy Saturday.

Additional Resources

If you are on the website the videos should be in two columns (or at least they are on my screen) I am going from Left to Right with a return sweep to the next row. The lessons are being taught in grades, 1, 2, and 4.

Video 1- A Danielson observation of a TCRWP First Grade Shared Reading Experience and Reading Workshop--Introduction by Lucy Calkins.

Video 2- A Danielson observation of a TCRWP First Grade Shared Reading Experience and Reading Workshop--Pre Conference

Video 3- A Danielson observation of a TCRWP First Grade--Observation of a Shared Reading Experience

Video 4- A Danielson observation of a TCRWP First Grade-- An Observation of the subsequent Reading Workshop

Video 5- A Danielson observation of a TCRWP First Grade Shared Reading Experience and Reading Workshop-- Post Conference

Video 6- A Danielson Observation of a TCRWP Second Grade Reading Workshop and Interactive Read Aloud--Introduction by Lucy Calkins

Video 7- A Danielson Observation of a TCRWP Second Grade Reading Workshop and Interactive Read Aloud--Pre Conference

Video 8- A Danielson Observation of a TCRWP Second Grade --An Observation of a reading mini Lesson

Video 9- A Danielson Observation of a TCRWP Second Grade-- Reading Workshop and the Interactive Read Aloud

Video 10- Danielson Observation of a TCRWP Second Grade-- Reading Workshop and the Interactive Read Aloud-- Post Conference

Video 11- A Danielson Observation of a TCRWP Fourth Grade Reading-- Intro by Lucy Calkins

Video 12- A Danielson Observation of a TCRWP Fourth Grade Reading Writing Workshop in an Integrated Co-teaching class- Pre Conference

Video 13- A Danielson Observation of a TCRWP Fourth Grade -- An Observation of a Writing Mini Lesson.

Video 14- A Danielson Observation of a TCRWP Fourth Grade Reading Writing Workshop in an Integrated Co-teaching class- Post-Conference

Video 15- A Danielson Observation of a TCRWP Fourth Grade--An observation of the rest of Writing Workshop

21st Century Classrooms: Engage, Empower, and Teach

2014-01-31T14:59:00.001-08:00

“Sticks and stones may break my bones
    But words could never hurt me.”
    And this I knew was surely true
    And truth could not desert me.
    But now I know it is not so.
    I’ve changed the latter part;
    For sticks and stones may break the bones
    But words can break the heart.
    Sticks and stones may break the bones
    But leave the spirit whole,
    But simple words can break the heart
    Or silence crush the soul.

Choice Words: How Our Language Affects Children's Learning
by Peter H. Johnston. Stenhouse, 2004

The Power of Words
Changing Minds and Changing Worlds

Today’s guest post by high school Math teacher Daniel O’Neill challenges us to deepen our students’ experience of learning by infusing a simple engagement technique into our lessons and by considering the phrasing of language we use with our students. In making this leap, we can transform students’ negative statements to positive statements to create a more memorable and rich learning culture for them — something that could hopefully shape their future. Please read on to see how Daniel incorporates these ideas into his teaching! Daniel can be reached at daniel.oneill@sisters.k12.or.us

Student Engagement—

Do not accept “I don’t know…”

Image used under Creative Commons

Part of being engaged is being willing to be engaged. Some students use coping mechanisms to avoid the stressful situations that often accompany being engaged. I empathize with them, but I also know that allowing those avoiding coping mechanisms to work is allowing students not to learn, which reinforces and perpetuates an unfortunate cycle.

I have been reflecting on and trying to notice some of my habits and tendencies I have created over my career with regard to those students. I noticed that I have developed a way of being that causes students who are not engaged to be very uncomfortable by taking away their negative coping mechanisms. I do not allow my students to say “I don’t know” during class discussions.

In my classroom, students don’t have to have the correct answer, but they do have to offer up something rather than “I don’t know.” Here are their choices: They can tell the class something they do know that is in some way related to the original question. They can ask a meaningful question. They can reference their notes to gain clarity. The only way a student can escape these stressful situations is to think and engage. Those situations while awaiting a student’s response and the awkward silence that accompanies the wait are painfully uncomfortable until the class culture is developed to the point where this is totally natural.

This strategy works for most students because they realize that they can think and that they do know more. They usually quickly abandon the negative avoiding mechanism of saying “I don’t know,” and realize that the only way to feel comfortable is to engage. Sadly, there are some students though who persist in focusing more on their stress and fear rather than making the shift.

My very direct approach does not work with a small percentage of students. So, what I am working on now is trying to imagine a way of being that both challenges every student to be fully engaged, holds them accountable for their engagement, yet still is supportive enough to help even the most math afraid students grow “more comfortable being uncomfortable” without pushing them away. I have not figured it out yet, but I have gotten past placing the blame on students. I am taking my share of the responsibility. I want to be right about why students can learn rather than be right about why they can’t.

In my experience, many students are quick to identify what they are not good at and what they cannot do. Many students choose negative language to describe their academic situations. After they state, as fact, what they cannot do, they seem to stop thinking. Oftentimes, after a student has stated that they cannot do something they look at me with an-almost challenging look, “What are you going to do about it?”

We want our students to be honest with themselves. We want our students to respond even to their admissions of weaknesses as evidence of their desire for strengths. In others words, its okay to be wrong or to make a mistake since it is vital to the process of learning. Here are some examples of how to reshape the language students’ use with honest and positive rephrasing in order to stop their fixed negative self-talk.

Negative Student Statement	Positive Honest Rephrase
“I am lazy”	“I want to feel motivated to improve”
“I’m not good at reading”	“I need to practice to become a better reader”
“I don’t know the quadratic formula”	I know that the quadratic formula is used to solve quadratic equations, but I need to spend more time working with it before I know it by heart”
“I’m not good at math”	“I would like to be better at math. I want to be smart”
“I’m going to fail the test”	“I need to spend more time learning and mastering concepts before I can perform well on the test”
“I don’t try hard”	“I would benefit from asking questions, practicing skills, and self-assessing my own level of mastery”
“I hate school”	“I want the experiences I have in school to help me feel stronger. I know that I’ll have to experience struggle. I am ok with the struggle as long as I am struggling toward success”

I realize that when you first read this, you might think, “Yeah, right. Students don’t talk like that.” Students do talk like this once they’ve learned how. Ask them to rephrase every single negative statement you hear them say. In the beginning, some of them may say the positive statements with a mocking tone. Just embrace the fact that they are practicing the rephrasing. They’ll soon lose the mocking tone. Also, recognize that some students will genuinely struggle with rephrasing positively. Respect their struggle and help them. Do not accuse them of being unwilling to rephrase when they say they can’t. Encourage them and let them know that you believe they can. I have been working on this for years. It is effective.

Listen closely to your teacher talk

Do not say “Class, I want you to…”

Observe any classroom and you will most likely hear, “I want you to…” over and over again. Stop for a moment and recognize where the focus is. School is supposed to be about students’ learning and self-empowerment, so our language should reflect that. Rephrase “I want….” with positive and empowering words:

· ”You will benefit from…”

· “If you…, then you’ll learn…”

· “You’ll learn most from…”

· “Now you have the opportunity to…”

· “You can show that you learned… by ...”

Use any other phrase that is focused on student learning rather than complying with the teacher. Trust me! A teacher can live out an entire career without ever uttering, “I want”. This might seem like a small change, but the impact on the culture of learning is enormous. Again, be ready for this to be an extremely difficult change to make. As began making this change in my classroom language, I would experience horrible embarrassment when I “slipped”. It just sounds so selfish once you become aware of it, but I kept habitually doing it.

I decided to enlist the help of my students. I got a Nerf ball and told my students if they ever caught me saying, “I want”, then I’d give them the Nerf ball, close my eyes, and give them a free shot. It was funny the few times they caught me, but the sad part is that they rarely catch me even when I notice it myself. Students are so used to hearing, “I want” that they don’t even realize it. Please make this change, give up the “I want”.

Keys to a Successful Rephrase

Our goal is for students to feel more powerful, so it is extremely important that they feel their original idea was not lost in translation. The rephrase cannot negate the validity of the original statement. We are not making them think altogether different thoughts. I am trying to help my students without covert manipulation. This is important because students can tell, consciously or subconsciously, when we try to manipulate them. Keep in mind; we want them to feel empowered.

Another reason to recognize the fundamental change that occurs in the rephrasing is that while most students will immediately flourish in this new environment of positive phrasing, like someone moving from a smog congested city to the fresh air of a mountain town, a few people will feel an initial increase in stress. By using language and positive directed statements, we are creating an atmosphere that inherently contains the expectation to constantly get better. The expectation for growth and endurance of struggle toward growth will cause a significant increase of stress for some people. Be aware of that and be compassionate and empathetic to their discomfort. Maintain your expectation that they engage and grow no matter how uncomfortable it might make both of you. They want to be smart. Be patient, most of them will come around eventually.

Respect the Challenge of Changing Fundamental Habits

In order to stay determined to make this most important change, we need to respect and be aware of how difficult the change may be to make. Here is the key to helping your students learn to phrase positively: lead by example. You will see how difficult it is. Always direct your students by telling them what to do and how to do it correctly. Always follow telling students to do something in a particular way by explaining the learning benefit, short term or long term, they will experience. The answer to why a student must do something is always what the student receives from the experience. If a student asks, “Do I have to…?” answer, “NO, you don’t have to, but if you do you’ll benefit from…”

Embrace the opportunities that arise when you catch yourself phrasing something negatively when talking to students. Stop yourself mid-sentence, genuinely apologize for phrasing negatively, and rephrase positively. I can’t emphasize enough how important these moments are. When you begin your original negative phrasing, an emotion will be cast over your students. They probably won’t even notice it because they are so used to hearing such statements.

When you stop yourself and apologize, you will grab their attention. When you rephrase the original negative statement to a positive one, a different emotion will be cast. It is the contrast of cast emotions that is important. If the contrast seems to be significant and you think that a large portion of the students also recognize it, bring conscious attention to the contrast by talking about it briefly to your students. Not only will your students notice the difference in how they feel, they will actually have respect for you rather than just having to show respect to you because you are a teacher.

Once again, many thanks to Daniel O'Neill for sharing and caring. I have been interested in teacher talk for two decades, but my perspective has been linked solely to an explicitness and thoughtfulness surrounding the teaching for comprehension. I really had not thought about talk through a social-emotional lens. Daniel will be back again soon to share his thinking on teaching struggling math students. Next week, one of my former college students and now friend shares how her school is currently implementing a year-long campaign on grit. Can't wait.

As always, thank you for stopping by. Hopefully, today's blog has inspired you to think about the language you use with your students and the fixed-mindset, their beliefs and perceptions, your students have about themselves as learners. We have so much influence. Granted, never as much as we would like. Hope it's a great day and Happy Saturday.

If you would like your story, or a colleague's story to be featured on Saturday Morning Coffee please send an inquiry to cathemccoy@gmail.com

Additional Resources

Choice Words by Peter H. Johnston first chapter available online here
Opening Minds: Using Language to Change Lives by Peter H. Johnston available for complete online previewing here
Peter Johnston's handout from his Iowa Keynote this last fall

Pictures used today:
http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/search.php?search=student+asking+questions&cat=&gid_search=&photogid=0&page=3

A Teacher's Quest for Mastery of Close Reading: A 4th Grade Lesson

2014-01-24T14:29:00.000-08:00

Close Reading

Moving Forward with Our Teaching

If our teaching is to be an art, we must draw from all we know, feel, and
believe in order to create something beautiful...It is not the number
of good ideas that turns our work into art but the
selection, balance and design of those ideas.
Lucy Calkins (1994)

Terri Rodger's students displaying the heart of close reading.

               Limited training and misconceptions surrounding CCSS have resulted in many teachers having had (or having) an incomplete or incorrect understanding of what close reading is and how to teach it. If you presently teach literacy you most certainly are either working on developing and teaching close reading lessons, or at the very least, you are thinking about it. Hopefully you have taken that first step.

               By and large we remain a closed-door profession. If there are no administrative mandates for teaching close reading, it remains too easy to push close reading to the back burner and assure ourselves that next year we'll take it on. That simply is not going to cut it. Our oath as educators is rooted in the idea of preparing students to become contributing adults. As teachers, our role is to prepare our students for surviving and thriving in the future--most certainly, a highly complex and changing world. Truthfully, no one has a clue what their world will look like. However, what is crystal-ball-clear is that the future of our students (and our future) depends upon citizens who are able to effectively think and reason. Close reading provides the opportunity and venue to do just that-- teach students how to think critically. This is truth and undeniably a "21st Century Must Do." Since we already are in the 21st Century there is not a moment to lose. This is a matter of urgency. The skills associated with close reading are:

read closely citing specific textual evidence (R.1)
analyze how ideas develop and interact with one another (R.3)
analyze words and phrases for specific word choices and how they shape meaning (R.4)
analyze the structure of texts (R.5)
analyze how point of view shapes a text (R.6)
analyze two or more texts to build knowledge (R.9)

Meet Terri Rodger, 4th Grade Teacher
Dennis Earl School in Turlock, CA

It is such a pleasure to feature a dear friend and colleague sharing her most recent close reading lesson with us. I have had the pleasure of knowing and teaching with Terri for more than a decade. Her passion for the profession and her steadfast love and support of ALL her students comes through each and every day as she walks into the classroom. Her name precedes former students conversations about their most favorite teacher EVER. Terri, don't ever doubt your influence and the imprint you have made. You have literally changed lives.

Terri Rodger has been in education for 29 years. She has taught kindergarten, second, third, fourth and fifth grade. Terri has been active in professional development as an instructor and site coordinator for Reading First Institutes. She has also been an Instructional Coach, BTSA mentor, and teacher leader. She holds a Master of Arts degree in Administration and Supervision from California State University Stanislaus. In 2012, she returned to her “true passion” the classroom. Terri has been married to the “man of her dreams”, her husband Terry, for 36 years. She enjoys reading and traveling.

Terri was so generous with her time and camera. Here is our interview:

Will you describe how you planned?

At the end of Christmas break a 4^th grade colleague and I met to discuss where we were headed next as far as Common Core was concerned. I had introduced close reading to my class, we had annotated informational text in social studies and science and various pieces of text I had brought in. My colleague and I looked at the CCS and decided to focus on the following standards:

Literacy CCRA.R.1 - Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.
Literacy CCRA.R.3 - Analyze how and why individuals, events, or ideas develop and interact over the course of a text.
Literacy RL.4.1- Refer to details and examples in a text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text.
Literacy RL.4.3- Describe in depth a character, setting, or event in a story or drama, drawing on specific details in the text (e.g., a character’s thoughts, words, or actions).

We then began to look at each standard and think about the objectives for each standard. We needed to review what students need in order to master the standard and what it looks like when they do. Our questions were simple:

How am I going to accomplish this?
How will I assess?

How did you choose the text?

We decided to look in our Houghton Mifflin California Edition anthology to see which selections had a character that changed throughout the story. We were fortunate to find two that we felt would “fit the bill.” We also liked the fact that the first story “Happy Birthday, Dr. King!” coincided with Dr. King’s birthday and the selection,“The Last Dragon” coincided with Chinese New Year! We selected two stories because we wanted to compare and contrast the characters from each story.

"Happy Birthday, Dr. King" is about a young boy, Jamal, who is given an assignment to come up with an idea for the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. school assembly. In addition, he is given a “pink” slip reprimand for fighting on the bus. His grandfather, having endured segregation, provides him with lots of first-hand information. Jamal’s father also recounts his personal experience of hearing Dr. King preach in his church. Jamal learns a lesson and comes up with a great idea for a skit.

Have you taught close reading lessons from your basal before?

Absolutely, we started with predictions and added slowly. A couple of students asked today if they could throw out the old post-it notes from previous stories. My answer was "No!" I want them to see what they have done at the end of the year. We have not read every story in the anthology. I move around a lot through the text. The biggest issue of course is my supply of Post-its. In addition to the ones I receive from the school, I buy large quantities at the $1 store and ask parents to donate. Although my students prefer to use text that they can highlight, etc. They are fine with post-its.

What kinds of decisions were you making while teaching?

I was always thinking "Where do I go next?" After looking at their predictions I noticed that I needed a mini-lesson/reteach before our next story. I needed to make decisions on whether “low babies” needed more scaffolding. At one point I realized I needed a sentence frame or two to help with partner discussion. I had assumed that they did not need one because we are 6 months into the school year. Some of my students were not fully engaged. I was so disappointed because they said things like "I think the family will have dinner together" when they saw a picture of the family around the table. Our sentence frame has always been:

I think ___________ might happen because _______________.

As I monitored partner and class discussions, I also realized that some were getting stuck on unimportant details and not looking at the Big Idea. I included that in our next discussion.

Terri's Teaching Sequence was 8 days

Day 1: Vocabulary, picture walk/predicting

Day 2: First read, annotating for new words, interesting facts, questions, comments, etc.

Day 3: Discussion and Charting of important parts of story, problems, etc.

Second read, annotating character traits of main character and evidence.

Day 4: Partner and class discussions, charting, more annotating, etc. Students then completed a graphic organizer reflecting character at beginning, middle and end of the story

Day 5: Reading and Journaling. Third read. Students were given questions to guide them if needed. We then had discussion and sharing time.

Day 6: Review of Author’s purpose and introduction to Author’s message. Partner and whole class discussion on what message (lesson, point or idea) was the author trying to convey in the story.

Day 7 and 8: Introduction to Response to Literature.

We could have gone longer (more days) but I decided to eliminate one graphic organizer and not have them do a final draft of the Response to Literature. I felt we had met our objectives and goals and if I assigned those two items it was like “beating a dead horse.”

What really worked with this lesson?

I taught my students about metacognition in the beginning of the year. They really did not have a clear understanding. With annotating they are really starting to “think”. Several of them have commented that by reading several times and annotating, they really think they are becoming better readers. Charting everything (discussions, thoughts, etc.) really helps discussion and also serves as scaffolding for students.

What would you change?

I realized that some of my guiding questions during journaling were not at a higher level. I need to study Webb's Depths of Knowledge (DOK) when planning. DOK questions stems can be linked here.

Did you have a formative assessment?

Formative assessment happened throughout the 8 days. A lot of it was looking at what they were annotating on their post-it notes. This showed me what they understood. Class discussions and calling on non-volunteers also helped me to see if they “got-it.” Spot checking their journal writing was important.

What was the students’ take away in terms of learning?

Students felt that they were looking closely at the character and realized how important they are to the story. Many of them commented that they understand the stories so much better (see above)

What was your take away?


Each of Terri's students were given an "Annotating Text" folder when school started. It serves as their organizer, scaffold, and catch-all for C.R. materials being currently worked on.

Although, I love Close Reading, there are some areas that I need to work on to strengthen students' learning.

Time is a big issue. I noticed that I need to streamline my lessons.
I need to reassess how I teach Close reading. First of all, in the beginning I gave them a chart with all kinds of symbols to use for annotating (see picture above). There are too many symbols and I have learned that they only need a few common ones. They need to learn what works best for them.
I need to continue to “unpack the standards” to see what I need to keep and what I can let go of.
Our goal was Literacy. RL.4.3 (describe depth of character). We tweaked Literacy.CCRA.R.9 (Analyze two or more texts for themes and topics) in that we chose character analysis. This is a good example about letting things go. Although we felt it was a good lesson, it is not the 4th grade CC standard.

Thank you so much for sharing Terri. I know there is insight to be gained by everyone who reads this week's blog. You were so very generous with your information and pictures. As a result, many teachers will be planning their close reading lessons by thinking closely about selection of text, balance of standards, design of learning activities that tap into those higher levels of cognition, and the actual teaching. For me, our collaboration this week made for a rich and exciting week as we communicated back and forth. It was such a pleasure.

Parts of Terri's reflection reminded me of the close reading lesson I taught in the fall using Scholastic News where my knock-me-on-the-head insight was KIS. If we want our teaching to be an art as Calkins describes, and we want our students to be able to independently use what we have so carefully orchestrated, we must simplify and streamline the learning sequence. This does not mean removing the rigor. I think a guiding question is How do we maintain rigor within our close reading lessons, yet insure that what we are asking of our students is doable? More on this later in February. For next week we will be discussing how to give effective feedback to our students. Daniel O'Neill returns to share some of his ideas and examples.

As always, thank you for stopping by and staying for the inspiration. I think we all need to consider comparing the rigor we are providing along side the rigor CCSS is promoting. Without deep understanding, a text cannot truly come to life. I have provided you with a few tools in the resource section. Very best wishes for a Happy Saturday.

Additional Resources

Depth of Knowledge:

Video defining and applying Depth of Knowledge (extremely good examples in the application)
Levels of Thinking in Blooms Taxonomy compared to Webb's Depth of Knowledge link here
Descriptors of Levels of Depth of Knowledge for Social Studies link here
Cognitive Rigor Matrix for reading and writing link here

Texts for Close Reading Lessons:
free

Annotations Made Simple:
For consideration of a less cumbersome annotation system link here

Building Our Future...One Student Blogger at a Time

2014-01-17T22:04:00.000-08:00

Blogging in the Classroom
A Fresh Approach

Are you ever surprised by the small crumble of information you remember and yet in the same moment of brilliance can't recall why you are at the grocery store? Almost a year ago I read a short piece on a math teacher in Oregon who was committed to supporting and transforming his students into independent learners who self-monitor and reflect for the value of learning opposed to a grade. We're talking High School students! Obviously, a personal connection had been sparked because I vividly remembered the article and tracked Daniel down this past December.

               Today's blog features Daniel O'Neill, a passionate, dedicated, and innovative high school math teacher currently teaching Pre-Algebra through Algebra II at Sisters High School in Central Oregon. Daniel has been teaching for eight years, and has discovered/ is creating some of the trade secrets for motivated and self-regulated learners. Daniel generously shared his thinking with me. I am certain you will be just as inspired by his story as I am. Since Daniel's teaching IQ is so strong, I will only share a portion of our interview today--students' blogging to articulate their learning and their growing understanding of themselves as learners. Enjoy Part 1.

Here is Daniel's standing assignment as you click and enter one of the classes' blog:
"Welcome to the reflections blog! Please reflect after each section of learning has taken place. In your reflections you will explain what you have learned and how it makes sense, or doesn't make sense, to you. You will also describe what you are learning about yourself as a learner. What strengths and weaknesses do you have? What strategies work well for you? What will you need to do in order to learn best? I encourage you to read other students reflections. Comment on great reflections. Help each other out if you see that someone is misunderstanding something."

"Nerd Party"

TOM EMO RIZ EME ANS NOT HIN GWI THO UTU NDE RST AND ING

In Daniel's words, "It is fun to start out the year on the first day of school by telling the students there will be a quiz the next day and they need to memorize the 14 sets of 3 letters."
(If you need help decoding the info is at the end of the blog :)

Our Interview

Your student blog is great. How did you get the idea? How long have you been doing it? Do all students willingly participate?

I used to ask my students to write reflections. They reflected about content, learning style, and their emotional response. If our class was having a tough time or a great time with regard to class culture, they would reflect about that too. I want it to be a genuine experience, for them to reflect for what they get out of it not for points. I used to randomly call on students to read their latest reflection to the class and we’d have a class discussion about what we heard. That caused rich discussion and provided a little bit of social accountability. If a student said that they did not write a reflection, I’d say “Okay, then reflect now”. After reading an individual reflection and thinking, “Wow, I wish everyone could read this” for the fiftieth time, I realized that everyone can read and learn from one another's reflections!!! The reflection blog was born. I created a Google site that night.

How long have you been doing it?

The blog was created early last year. Reflecting can be powerful and can be done from a variety of perspectives. I do not want to tell the students exactly how to reflect. I do not want them to think about what I want while reflecting. I certainly don’t want them to fall in to the all too common perspective of doing it for points. So, I do not award points for reflecting on the blog. They get learning out of it. I ask them to reflect on content, process, learning style, emotional experience, class culture, and anything else. If a student is struggling with something in particular, I might ask them to reflect on something related. For example, I had a student who was struggling to find motivation. I asked him to reflect about what the “perfect student” was in his mind. He posted his reflection in the algebra 2B. In his reflection, he was basically describing the student he wanted to be. He found motivation. There was a fairly drastic change in his approach to the class after that.

Another way I motivate the students to reflect is to ask them to consider how many times they have “learned” things in past math classes only to totally forget them soon after. How many times have they earned a B or an A in a class, then a month after the class was over they couldn’t even describe what they had learned. In my experience, all students can relate. So why are they doing their work? Who are they doing it for if they are not retaining it for themselves? The answer is that they are doing their work to please their teachers, parents, and admissions officers. This is a very sad situation.

In the years when students are transitioning from children to adults, they are developing the habit of spending their energy thinking about appeasing other people. No wonder we have so many adults who have a hard time finding happiness, they have fallen out of the habit of thinking about what they want for themselves. So, I ask the students if they think that being able to clearly articulate the concepts in a way that another person can understand would increase the likelihood of retention. Their answer is yes. I ask them if their retention would increase if they relate what they are learning to their own past experiences. Yes. Would focusing on awareness of their emotional response to struggle and success increase the likelihood of attaining more effective emotional responses to struggle and success? Yes. So, I motivate the students to reflect by sharing with them what they have to gain from reflecting.

Do they all do it? NO. I believe that the culture of education we have has deeply engrained many students into the perspective of only doing things for points. I’ll admit that I do get tempted to threaten and manipulate the students into reflecting by holding points over their heads. I was raised in that system too. When I catch myself having those thoughts, I quickly remind myself that by doing that I would be abandoning my original goal.

Danielle Rudinsky writing her blog at SHS

An interesting story happened last year when a student, Danielle Rudinsky, went to Europe for three weeks. She was one of the top students and was determined to stay that way. I let her know what content she would be missing, let her know what the assignments would be, and informed her of some additional online resources as well as pointed out the sections from the book. When she came back, I handed her the unit test she missed on rational and radical functions. I was nervous for her. She aced the test. Soon after I found out that she did not open her book the whole time she was in Europe. She read the reflections that her peers wrote and learned the content to a deep level. I was amazed. That says a lot about Dani, her classmates, and the power of the reflection blog.

How much time do you spend reading and responding to your students?

               It does take time and I do have to make it a priority. I probably spend about 30 minutes to 45 minutes reading and responding to reflections after a day when many students reflect. With all of the tasks teachers have to do, we often feel overwhelmed. I believe we feel overwhelmed when we have to do tasks that don’t really impact student learning but we have to do them anyway. We just want to put our focus, time, and energy into activities that impact student learning. So, when I engage in activities that impact student learning, I become more calm even though it takes energy.

               Responding to reflections is awesome because my energy and time are LEVERAGED. I respond to an individual student, which is good for the student, but other students read the response as well. A student might read one of my responses two weeks later. It also creates a culture in some classes where students begin responding to each others' reflections regularly. When that happens, I feel like I invested a little bit of money into just the right stock.

               So, it does take time and energy but it is also one of the things I really look forward to each day. I used to start up my computer in the morning with a slight feeling of apprehension about what emails I might open and the tasks that will follow. Now I start up my computer each morning excited to engage in my student’s reflections.

So...What Does this Look Like?
Samples of Students' Reflections

"Today's lesson was ok. I have been feeling a little lost lately though. I know that I know how to factor using grouping, distributing, sum of squares, and now sum of cubes. I know that I know how to solve using ZPP. But for some reason on the examples today I read the problem and didnt know how to start. After mr. Oneill took us through the reasoning and the first step I could easily finish it out on my own. I guess that I'm thinking more about what I don't know that what I do when it comes to these types of problems. I need to start breaking it down because I know it should be easy stuff by now. Sometimes I fell like as a learner I think too much about the details or over think them. Which are extremely important, but sometimes that takes away from me being able to get a problem right. I definitely have a few areas to improve on throughout this unit."

Here is Daniel's reply:

"Yes. Nice insight. I think your struggle is coming from trying to remember how to solve equations that look like the equation you happen to be looking at in the moment. Instead of focusing so much on the equation you are looking at, first think about what solving techniques you know (you could do this without looking at any equation). After thinking about the process you know, then look at the specific equation and see if one of your techniques applies. After each step, look at the equation as a new problem. You, along with a bunch of other great students, are struggling for the first time. It is great! This is an opportunity to learn how to struggle in a positive way. The stronger you are, the more you'll allow yourself to struggle. I can't wait to see how much you develop as a thinker over the next two months."

Another student's blog entry:

"I have tried to reflect as much as possible and use the reflection blog to its fullest. Algebra 2a was the point where I first started to reflect and realize how much it was helping me. It was a better way to review the concepts and have nothing there to help you out except your understanding. It was cool to pin point exactly what you knew, and what you didn’t. And when we moved the reflecting to the blog, it was even easier to use. Before writing everything out was always kind of a pain. It was annoying to write your hand off and only look down to see a paragraph or two. The average reflection wasn’t very long and it took awhile to write all our ideas on paper so I don’t know about everyone else but I was shortchanging myself. After that changed, I changed. I got really into typing out how I feel and not only reflecting on concepts but also learning styles, quizzes, test and stress levels. It was nice to just take a moment to take a step back and relax. I got really panicked at time with my grade and I used the blog also as a coping mechanism. Many of the lessons were challenging and I also used the blog to ask questions to my piers and Mr. O’Neill. That also helped my learning and I got great feedback from everyone and got to hear different ways to think about something at the same time. It has been awesome to use the blog, to understand, review and help each other.
I have come to rely on the blog quite a bit and it kept on becoming a larger priority in my schedule. I am so glad Oneill has helped set this up because it works! I plan to continue to blog and reflect in future classes and I have learned so much from this class in itself."

Something we all know about exemplary teaching practices (like many art forms)
"The show" or final product looks effortless, so incredibly easy. Has Daniel mastered the art of teaching? With his continual questioning, natural ability to problem solve, and his determination to create a "learning for learning's sake" mindset in adolescents he is transforming how students see themselves. Daniel's class blog is successful because of the emotional and social foundation he has meticulously built with his students. Behind these student blogs is a culture and climate for thinking, the building of genuine relationships, and the establishing of mutual trust.

Learn more about this extraordinary teacher and how he created his classroom culture in early February. Thank you for sharing and thank you for caring, Daniel O'Neill. We need teachers like you. If you have questions or seek additional information, Daniel can be reached at daniel.oneill@sisters.k12.or.us

As always, thank you for stopping by and staying for the inspiration. If I were still in the classroom, I would start a class blog without missing a beat. I have provided you with the tools in the resource section. Very best wishes for a Happy Saturday.

Additional Resources

How to Set Up a Classroom Blog--click here

10 Reasons Why Students Should Blog--click here

20 Reasons Why Should Students Should Blog--click here

*To Memorize Means Nothing Without Understanding --This is the message. Look again and you will easily see it:)

An Inquiry Process to Improve Teaching: Instructional Rounds

2014-01-11T06:54:00.002-08:00

Instructional Rounds

Targeting Improvement

Today's guest blog features my dear friend and colleague, Dr. Connie Tate, an Instructional Rounds Consultant from the Central Valley in California. Connie's background is stellar and richly diverse. During 36 years in education Connie has been a successful reading specialist, literacy resource teacher, an adjunct professor, classroom teacher and a guest lecturer at various universities. She completed her doctoral degree in 2012 as part of the inaugural doctoral cohort at California State University, Stanislaus. She and her husband Mick have three adult daughters and nine grandchildren. She brings much information to share with us today.

For more information on Instructional Rounds, to include a step-by-step guide she has prepared, feel free to contact Dr. Tate either through Saturday Morning Coffee (leave a comment or request) or email her directly at ctateread@att.net.

“I have learned more about myself as a teacher and quality instruction in one day of instructional rounds than in five years of professional development.”

A teacher's comment after participating in Instructional Rounds

Walk into any school in America and you will see teachers who care deeply about their students and are doing the best they can every day to help students learn. Yet, you will also see a high degree of variability from classroom to classroom. Instructional Rounds asks educators to collaboratively define and establish a common understanding of what good teaching and learning looks like.

Amazon

What actions might lead to a more equitable education for all?

A promising practice developed by the authors of Instructional Rounds in Education: A Network Approach to Improving Teaching and Learning is a must read for 2014. This book is intended to help education leaders and practitioners develop a shared understanding of what high-quality instruction looks like and what schools and districts need to do to support it.

I personally became interested in Instructional Rounds in 2010, and my intent is to pique your interest in a model that creates a culture of continuous learning and questioning through shared responsibility and commitment.

Rounds is modeled after the medical training model, where medical students gather in a hospital room with an experienced doctor visiting a patient. Afterwards they discuss what they observed. Medical students base their comments on evidence and keep their comments factual such as the patient did this or I noticed this. They ask questions and eventually, a diagnosis is offered with possible treatments.

City, Elmore, Friarman and Teitel applied this same medical training model—one that includes a shared language and a common sense of what is effective to education to provide a disciplined way for educators to work together. The result is a learning process focusing on classroom practice, not about a teacher's personality and/or style. The practice combines three elements: a network, an improvement strategy and classroom observations.

Rounds is an Inquiry-Based Process

It is designed to help network members understand what is happening in their classroom, NOT to evaluate or "fix" individual teachers. This is not about teacher evaluation.

Instructional Rounds versus Supervision and Evaluation
What rounds is Not	What rounds is. . .
A program	A practice designed to support an existing improvement strategy at the school level or system level.
A teacher evaluation tool	No assessment of individual teachers. Separate the person from the practice; focus on the practice Learn about effective learning and teaching.
An implementation check	Rounds focuses on patterns of practice, predicted results, not compliance directives.
Training for supervision	Rounds focuses on collective learning, rather than individual supervisory practice.
Passive	A community of practice where we expect to push each other and learn from each other.

How Do Rounds Work?

STEP 1: Convene a network*. You assemble a group of colleagues who will meet together over time to solve a problem of practice connected to an improvement strategy.

*No steadfast rule to networks; while some are composed of peers such as a principal network, others may include multiple roles such as superintendents, specialists, teachers, and principals. A facilitator is helpful, but this model is not dependent upon outside consultants. The first network I worked with was comprised of district superintendents, county office personnel and representation from California Department of Education. Another network was comprised of only three rural superintendents and two county office consultants. Each of those networks maintained a leadership team within their own districts.

Examples of Problems of Practice

Student engagement strategies are in place, but all students are NOT actively participating.
Are students provided powerful learning opportunities in reading and responding to expository text?
Is the students’ understanding in mathematics conceptual or only procedural?
Do teachers do most of the talking and thinking in the classroom?
How are teachers challenging students with questions that require high levels of thinking and reflection and how are students responding to questions posed in class?

The school identifies a problem of practice. A problem of practice focuses on instruction that is observable, actionable, connects to a broader strategy of improvement, and is high leverage. It should also be something the school cares passionately about, feels stuck on, and wants to genuinely understand. Schools vary in their process, but clearly if the problem is something teachers feel stuck on they need to have an opportunity for their input.

Observe Practice in Classrooms

STEP 2: The network will visit classrooms in groups of 4-6. Each group visits four classrooms, staying 20-25 minutes in each. There are no checklists, rubrics or boxes for tally marks. Observation teams collect data that is: descriptive, not evaluative; specific; about the instructional core; and related to the problem of practice. Trained beforehand, observers take note of the actual tasks students are doing. The network is collecting evidence and not passing judgment on teachers.

Debrief Observation

STEP 3: Observation teams discuss and analyze the data for trends. Observation teams also predict what students are learning by asking: "If you were a student in the class/school and you did everything the teacher told you to do, what would you know and be able to do?"

The debrief is steeped in protocol. The debriefing process moves in steps from description to analysis to prediction and leads participants into identifying the next level of work.


Two Hungarian consultants and two teachers from Pleasant View.

Identify the Next Level of Work

STEP 4: Network members think collaboratively about what resources and support are needed to provide teachers with what will result in an improved instructional core. Some networks brainstorm action steps for this week, next month, and by the end of the year.

Rather than handing teachers a “fix-it” list on how to improve, members think together about what kinds of resources and supports teachers and administrators would need in order to move instruction to the next level. The more detailed and precise the suggestions the more helpful they are.

In my opinion, the next level of work is where the complex relationships among teachers, students and content are addressed. At this juncture the rounds process requires members to look within the school and district to suggest new and powerful ways educators can work together to achieve the student-learning they desire. They do NOT blame teachers, students, parents or other factors outside their sphere of influence.

If we believe in the educability of all students, then we must also ensure that we provide the supports and resources necessary for educators to do so. In closing, I would like to share a Superintendent’s comment after implementing rounds in his district.

" I found teachers were doing exactly what we asked them to do, the problem was that what we asked them to do was not improving learning. We are all responsible for the learning in our classrooms. If you are sitting in your office, then you do not know what is happening in your classrooms."

Additional Resources to Learn More

Targeting Improvement: Instructional Rounds by Colleen Gillard

feature article in current January, 2014 issue of AASA

Learning From Instructional Rounds by Elizabeth A. City
ASCD 2011/ Volume 69/ Number 2

Thank you Connie for graciously sharing your expertise on instructional rounds with us. Having been involved in district-wide improvement, I can see easily see the strength for a district's stake-holders (from superintendent to include all teachers), in learning how to hold one another accountable, individually and collectively. Can't wait to hear about the results. Please come back and share with us.

For next week I will be featuring an interview with Daniel O'Neill, a passionate high school math teacher from Central Oregon. He has pushed the idea of student reflection and accountability wide open. His story has completely captured my attention and admiration. Please join us. You will be inspired. As always, I hope you have gained something of special interest and send you best wishes for a very Happy Saturday.

Gettin' Gritty

2014-01-04T06:11:00.001-08:00

A Very Happy New Year Wish

People often say that motivation doesn't last
Well neither does bathing.
That's why we recommend it daily.
Zig Ziglar

Used under Creative Commons

               2014! Double yikes! I had planned for a very different blog this week, but stuff happens. At the moment I am in the process of finishing up my research guide I will be selling on TPT. I referred to it before Christmas. The research unit (book--120+ pages) will be awesome!! At this moment I am really only a week or so behind schedule (Not too bad considering my history with pitifully poor under-estimated time frames). It will be finished sometime this next week.

               Sandwiched between mid-December and now, my husband and I couldn't have celebrated the holidays any better: We decorated, shopped, visited family and friends, and of course ate (and ate)! I hope your holiday experience was festive, fun, and brought you a reconnection to what matters most--family and faith. I also hope as you think about switching your life back into teaching you feel renewed and ready.

                Over break, I read two great books (technically 1 1/2) . . .still reading this one:)

http://www.amazon.com/Focus-The-Hidden-Driver-Excellence/dp/0062114867/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1388693478&sr=8-1&keywords=focus+the+hidden+driver+of+excellence

Finished Outliers in two sittings...in fact, it continues to haunt my thinking. It's been out for quite some time and on my reading list for a couple of years. Both books are inspiring and perfect for thinking about building grit and perseverance in our students. We have no alternative. We must.

http://www.amazon.com/Outliers-Story-Success-Malcolm-Gladwell/dp/0316017930/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1388696814&sr=8-1&keywords=outliers

So back in August I wrote about grit and created a Grit/Perseverance Pinterest board.
I have pondered how to foster grit in the classroom while working on this research unit. I couldn't help but reflect back on students who had or would have difficulties with such an extended unit of study. We all know that Common Core places heavy emphasis on the 3 Informational R's: Reading, writing, and research. Many have suggested teaching a quantity of short research units rather than the traditional "big one in the spring." While I agree with this 100%, I believe students need to experience one extended project each year--if for no other reason than to build stamina and perseverance. Building stamina and grit is a thread I have woven throughout my research unit. It excites the heck out of me because the time has come to translate this theory into our classrooms. Now.

Next week Saturday Morning features a guest blogger who is an expert on Instructional Rounds. I know the information will be interesting. In the following weeks, expect blogs on text complexity, always more on Close Reading, how the teaching of the Arts support Common Core, math, and so much more.

Resources to get you excited

An Interview from Educational World featuring Carol Dweck. "How to Get Your Students Motivated" Although the article dates back a ways, the message is for RIGHT NOW. (I have some of her more current work on my grit Pinterest board.

Chris Lehman's video addresses the "Two Roads Taken" approach to Common Core, the value of CCSS "aligned" materials (to include favorite exemplars currently found on the Internet), and the plea for teachers to place their students' needs above current initiatives. While an hour in length, you can listen to it while doing something menial...like laundry or cleaning. The info is important.

Back to work on my unit. If you are teaching grit and perseverance in your classroom, please share your stories with us. If you don't want to leave your idea in the comments section, email me at cathemccoy@gmail.com. Enjoy your weekend and have a great Saturday.

Part 2: Project-Based Reseach in a Fourth Grade Classroom

2013-12-14T06:52:00.000-08:00

Budding Biologists Raise Trout

Meet Ashton Barnett
4th Grade Science/Writing Teacher
Amanda Gist Elementary School

Cotter, Arkansas

Continuing with the research theme from last week, this week's blog features a friend, colleague, and former student. Ashton is half way through her trout project and shares how her 4th graders began raising trout. It sounds like a memorable project. It is Project-Based Learning (PBL) in nature and will create lasting memories for all involved. In her own words here is her story. I know you will enjoy.

During the first week of school while on recess duty, I spotted a student of mine crouched down on his hands and knees completely absorbed and intently peering through his tiny magnifying glass. I asked what he had discovered. At this point, he led me around the entire playground, showing me microscopic objects that normally go by unnoticed. The science teacher in me was cheering and I couldn't have asked for a better segue into our Trout in the Classroom Project.

Last year I happened on the Trout in the Classroom website and immediately knew it was something I had to do. It was perfect since fishing is what our local region is all about. Cotter proudly claims to be the Trout Capital of the U.S.A. Trout in the Classroom is sponsored by the organization of Trout Unlimited and is considered "place-based education." The learning is focused within the local community of students, providing students with opportunities to become active citizens and stewards of their environment. This approach emphasizes hands-on, real world learning that challenges students to learn and solve problems. The Trout in the Classroom website offers huge support to teachers with lesson plans, resources, etc. They sent a representative to my classroom to set up a 55 gallon fish tank and chiller and provided us with 100 trout eggs. It was the students' job to observe changes and release the fry into our local fishing streams.

                I knew from the beginning it would be easy to grab my kids’ enthusiasm for the project. When school started in August, I teased them a little by leaving a corner of my room void of anything except the word “Trout.” They were hooked--riddled with curiosity.

                I had begun the year by teaching the students what REAL scientists do: They observe, predict, question, investigate, collaborate, communicate, and they interpret information. Finally, the students were ready to take on the roles of biologists. I explained Trout in the Classroom and their faces were glowing with excitement. All at once I had two problems on my hands. First, it was all of their questions. So many questions, I couldn't write fast enough. Second of all, I had one student who voiced an indifference to learning more about “dumb trout.” Fortunately, he quickly changed his mind.

               The enthusiasm for the project was infectious. Even the parents were getting involved. My students were showing up to class with treasures: long-forgotten trout species posters, pictures of fry and fingerlings torn from fishing magazines, and one student brought in a shell for the tank. Another student decorated a spiral notebook for notes reserved just for trout. As a class, we quickly put together binders to hold all the information we were finding, and boy were they finding it fast!

Remember my first problem- all the questions. Well I recorded all of them, which led to pages and pages of notes. More notes than I thought we could manage. I modeled good research skills while we found informative articles to answer the questions, which then led to more questions. Their personal trout binders allowed them all to become responsible for managing the accumulated information.

When we began the research phase, I assigned them a partner so they were in groups of 2-3. I have three student computers and seven iPads, so everyone was able to begin researching using the skills I had modeled. Each group chose a question to answer. I gave them a note taking page where they recorded their question, the website URL, and their notes. At the end of the week, partners took turns sharing their information in which ever way they had selected-- a poster, a report, etc.

               It is hard to find a speaker who has the knowledge, is able to communicate that knowledge in a way that excites kids, and also who cares about the students’ questions in a way that makes them feel valued. Gary Flippin, a local fishing guide, was just that person. He taught the students so much.



               We also took a field trip to the White River where two biologists from the Norfolk Fish Hatchery came to share some information with my budding biologists. They brought real fish models to explain the differences in types of trout and the parts of the fish. We also went to the river and took samples to test the Ph and dissolved oxygen levels. Our notebooks burst with information.

There have been times I have had to step away from our trout curriculum. There are other standards to teach that are just as important. The great thing about this project is that at the end of each unit we would find our way back to the trout project and tie it to our new learning. As a result the students have begun making big and broad connections to the different areas of science.

We are nearing the end of the first phase of our project. Soon we will release the trout. One of my final goals is for my students to take all the bits and pieces of information they have recorded and learned and to have them create something that authentically captures their learning. Without this critical last step, I feel like I can’t technically call this Project Based Learning.

I’m considering what real biologists do when they learn new information. Most of them write about their discoveries in articles and reports. Since I also teach writing, we will dive into informational writing beginning in January. It is during this informational writing unit the students will synthesize their learning from the Trout in the Classroom Project. In addition, they will create formal presentations using a biologist's perspective.It promises to be an exciting January and February.

As I reflect about what I’ve learned so far on my first attempt at PBL, I would say I’m very pleased with how easily this project progressed since it is so relevant to our community. Speakers, field trip locations, and resources have been abundant and easily obtained. Because of so much information coming in so quickly, I struggled keeping track of it all. Through this project I was able to hit so many of the standards that I formally teach without even trying! I hope that by the end of the writing and presentations phase, I can look back on all that the students have learned and see their learning went much deeper than I expected.

Thank you so much Ashton for your fascinating and inspiring story of your students' experience with Trout in the Classroom. Maybe I can coax you into sharing the final phase later this spring once your students have finished their biologist's reports and have given their presentations.

As I was working with 2nd graders last spring teaching beginning research skills I did a great deal of reading about PBL. I think it has a prominent place in our 21st Century classrooms. Some of the best resources I found were from the Buck Institute For Education. You might want to check them out. Also, I have a Project Based Learning board on Pinterest. It's loaded with great ideas and links.

Although, I am closing the blog down until January 4th, I will post when the Animal Experts Research Unit is completed and for sale on TPT. Hopefully, very soon! :)

Happy Holidays to all of you. There is a wealth of great info beginning in January. Please stay with us. In the meantime, may all your days be Best Days and especially those precious
Saturdays. Merry Christmas and God Bless!

p.s. If you have questions for Ashton, you can contact her through Saturday Morning Coffee.

LINKS
More information on PBL:
Larry Ferlazzo is a wealth of information. His best information sites information is THE BEST.
PBL Do's and Dont's Part I and Part 2

Are You Ready for Some Research?

2013-12-05T18:42:00.003-08:00

The Expert Files

Moving from Plagiarized to Synthesized

Planning and staging the research campaign.

               From studying the CCSS, it’s more than obvious to see why teachers need to be teaching and engaging students in research as early as Kindergarten. My reasoning for today’s blog is two-fold: 1) I am in the process of creating my Animal Experts’ unit to be sold on Teachers Pay Teachers so student research is on my mind, and 2) I know that at some point during winter break—after presents have been purchased, wrapped, unwrapped, and put away—teachers will earnestly begin thinking about the months ahead.

               For many, you will carve out sacred pockets of time during winter break--finding long awaited and much deserved moments to devote yourself to some quality planning. There is something mysteriously powerful about stepping away (even if just for a few days) to then return and plunge yourself back into a teacher life. From even the most brief mental and physical getaways, we rebound quickly. Refreshed. With revitalized energy we have the ability to create dazzling lessons to brighten those dreary lack luster winter months ahead.

               As you begin to nurture and rekindle your teaching spirit later this month, I am betting and hoping you contemplate having your students engage in some classroom research. Perhaps, today's blog will help focus your thoughts in that direction. First, let's take a peek at those Reading and Writing Common Core standards (and portions of standards) which both support student research and make it a curricular non-negotiable at all grade levels.

Reading Anchor Standards

Key Ideas and Details

Common Core Standard 1: Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.
Common Core Standard 2: Determine central ideas of a text and summarize the key supporting details and ideas.

Craft and Structure

Common Core Standard 4: Interpret words and phrases as they are used in a text, including determining technical meaning.

Integration of Knowledge and Ideas

Common Core 7: Integrate and evaluate content presented in diverse media and formats, including visually and quantitatively, as well as in words.

Range of Reading and Level of Text Complexity

Common Core Standard 10: Read and comprehend complex literary and informational texts independently and proficiently.

Writing Anchor Standards

Texts Types and Purposes

Common Core Standard 2: Write informative/explanatory texts to examine and convey complex ideas and information clearly and accurately through the effective selection, organization, and analysis of content.

Production and Distribution of Writing

Common Core Standard 4: Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.
Common Core Standard 5: Develop and strengthen writing as needed by planning, revising, editing, rewriting, or trying a new approach.
Common Core Standard 6: Use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing and to interact and collaborate with others.

Research to Build and Present Knowledge

Common Core Standard 7: Conduct short as well as more sustained research projects based on focused questions, demonstrating understanding of the subject under investigation.
Common Core Standard 8: Gather relevant information from multiple print and digital sources, assess the credibility and accuracy of each source, and integrate the information while avoiding plagiarism.
Common Core Standard 9: Draw evidence from informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research.

Range of Writing

Common Core Standard 10: Write routinely over extended time frames (time for research, reflection, and revision) and shorter time frames (a single sitting or a day or two) for a range of tasks, purposes, and audiences.

Our Animal Experts’ Project

Knowing there was a strong, recurrent research thread within the Common Core my teaching buddy, Dinah, and I embarked on a research project with her second graders during spring, 2013. We sketched out a 3-4 week research unit, planning backwards from a culminating event of collaborative oral presentations. With no prior experience, we were excited and nervous to step outside our comfort zone. Step 1--fasten seat belts!

Much more important than a final written product, an oral presentation, or a grand moment was our goal to create an engaging, authentic setting for students to think analytically about a topic of their own choosing. In order for them to write an informational report and begin to grow their expertise, students needed direct instruction on the how-to. They needed to know how to capture, sort through, categorize, and organize their information. Our bigger, much more idealistic goal was for the students to sprout and begin to grow their self efficacy, a legitimate empowerment earned from being labeled an “Expert.”

This was an excellent and wonderfully successful project. Was it perfect? Heck no! Through reflection and additional reading I now see shades of gray areas that could easily be finessed to improve and maximize the students’ learning experience. Some components were completely revamped. Student research projects are tricky. It's another one of those prickly basics such as analytic reading or writing a summary that many of us were regularly assigned to do but not necessarily instructed. Armed with CCSS and all of our current collective wisdom we now know the buck stops with us. Right here. Right now. If we teach it they will learn.

Here is just a small taste, a sampling, of our research project to ignite your thinking and inspire you to consider a research project/report with your students.

OUR DAY #1 - Defining Terms

Used Under Creative Commons

Research

Students need to have a basic understanding of research. What it is and how important those questions really are? How you do it? Why you do it?

Used under Creative Commons

Plagiarism

Students need to know what plagiarism is. How important it is NOT to do. How to avoid it AND what the consequences are if you do it.

Expert

Students need to have a conceptual understanding of being an expert. How does one become an expert-- in any field? It helps if you are very, very interested in the topic, but to be called an expert is no easy feat. It takes perseverance and lots of hard work.

Students Make Tough Decisions

Not Fair! I Only Get to Choose One?

With so many resources available I was lucky to find the Defenders.Org website (thank you for the link, Kelly Villalobos). On this website viewers are able to scroll through an entire catalog of 80 animals. We went through the entire catalog in less than15 minutes. During this time, the students were able to see a picture of each animal, perhaps, learn a quick fact or two, and were also able to create an on-going list of those animals they might want to know more about. This was the beginning of 20 lessons that brought the students closer to becoming experts.

I thought I would share some pictures of our project along with some helpful tips to jumpstart your thinking. The Animal Experts' Unit will be available through Teachers Pay Teachers within the next couple weeks--barring illness, power outages, or technology hiccups. In addition, my research projects and inquiry boards on Pinterest hold many treasures.

Researchers do lots and lots of reading.

SUCCESS TIP: The students need many books and other sources of information at their independent reading level. This is going to take some planning and time on your part. Don't forget to use your librarian's expertise. Give the librarian as much advance notice as possible.

Researchers search for details to answer their questions and take notes.

SUCCESS TIP: There are so many steps involved in research. As teachers, we must stay the course and remain vigilant of our students' progress. Note-taking needs to be modeled more than once. No drive-by instruction. Identify and stay focused on your ultimate goal which is insuring their success and students seeing themselves as experts.


Researchers use their notes to summarize the information learned.

SUCCESS TIP: The writing of the research can be laborious for some students. Don't let them continue too far without having read their work and providing feedback. Make it a personal goal to read every student's writing each day during this phase. After reading, pre-plan your teaching points. This is vital to expanding their writing skills and deepening students' understanding of how to transform notes into well written summaries.

Researchers organize their information in a way that makes sense.

SUCCESS TIP: Each student organizes in different ways. For this project the students created their Table of Contents after their writing. This seemed to help all of the students. A 2-pocket folder for each student saved the day. The students' work was kept safe and wrinkle free.

Researchers need to share their research and teach others.

SUCCESS TIP: Having the students create collaborative murals within their research group was a perfect learning activity after they had completed their individual written reports. It served as the dessert after eating all of your vegetables. Not enough attention was paid to art. If the students had begun their investigation/research with a labeled drawing of their topic it might front-load and better support their learning and note-taking with them paying closer attention to details. Perhaps, it would have helped them when it came time to formulate genuine and meaty research questions.


Researchers make sure they can articulate their knowledge so others will understand.

SUCCESS TIP: The students had limited experience with oral presentations. However, it was by far their favorite phase of the research project. When they learned they would be presenting to someone other than their classmates the bar was raised. Make sure you have a working video camera. The research presentations were absolutely precious.

I hope to have whetted your appetite for tackling an extended research project with your students. If I were still in the classroom I would strive for at least one if not two extended research projects combined with many mini research-based inquiries during the school year. Beginning on the very first day of school I would launch a campaign for students to persevere, hang tough and to focus. These are the bricks and mortar for becoming an expert.

Once again, I express my thanks to Ed Ewing for his interview in my last blog. I knew you would find his story inspirational. Over 800 people visited Saturday Morning Coffee! Thank you so very much for paying us a visit. Please stay with us since there is so much more coming in the new year. I will post on Facebook when the research unit is for sale on TPT. Hopefully, very soon. For those of you facing severe weather I literally feel your pain here in Northern Arkansas. I am posting early this week thinking we might not have electricity much longer.
What ever weather comes our way, I wish you a very Happy Saturday.

An Administrator Steps In to Teach A Close Reading Lesson

2013-11-20T14:35:00.001-08:00

Meet Ed Ewing

Who Doesn't Just Talk the Talk


Ed Ewing, Administrator of the Osborn Two-Way Immersion Academy in Turlock, California

Ed Ewing, an elementary administrator for the past 8+ years, had been toying with the idea of teaching a lesson after attending a Common Core training with a group of his teachers earlier this school year. He also is currently involved in Saturday Morning Coffee's online book study of Falling in Love With Close Reading by Chris Lehman and Kate Roberts. When Ed emailed to say he was going to teach a close reading lesson and that he would share his experience with all of us I was grateful beyond words. I am devoting today's blog to Ed's lesson in which he taught an introductory close reading lesson to 5th graders at his school in Turlock, California located in the state's Central Valley. He shares his reflection of the lesson and his experience.
1. Can you tell us why as a school administrator you decided to teach a lesson?

I recently attended a Common Core training on text complexity with some of my teachers. As we discussed our learning I became very excited about the shifts we are undergoing in language arts and decided that I wanted to give it a shot! My most important role as a principal is to be an instructional leader. As we move to Common Core, I need to make sure that I have deep knowledge in the whys and hows so I can support my teachers.

I’m very excited about the close reading strategy! In the past, the goal of reading has been to demonstrate the ability to find the correct answer to the question. We’re moving away from the world of finding THE right multiple choice answer to a wider world of choosing a lens, looking for patterns, thinking, and justifying with text. Exciting…but tricky!

Close Reading (and Common Core) is about reading, thinking, reading, analyzing, discussing, and reading again and perhaps again. In my personal and professional life I love thinking and talking about ideas. That’s exactly what we are going to need to teach our students to be able to do in the college and career ready vision of Common Core.

2. Will you describe your planning process?

I read some sample lessons at achievethecore.org and used them as a guide to write my lesson. I then met with our instructional coach. As we discussed the lesson and the reading passage I’d chosen, it dawned on us that the text better fit another standard and so I rewrote the lesson. The lesson was a two-day lesson (2 one hour sessions). Day One did not go as well as I’d hoped, so, after reflecting with our instructional coach, I revised Day 2. The entire planning process took well over several hours (I know, I know, for just a 2 hour lesson!).

http://www.biography.com/people/sacagawea-9468731

3. How did you choose the text?

I chose the passage because it tied into U.S. History which is taught in 5th grade, and because I personally found the passage about Sacagawea interesting. I think we can draw some interesting conclusions about her character and her relationship to Lewis and Clark based on the scant information we have about her. I felt the vocabulary and sentence structure was of sufficient rigor that students would struggle a bit, but not too much.

Day 1 Lesson Plan and Reflection

4. What really worked for Day 1?

I taught the students how to annotate the text and this seemed to work real well. Some students were more confident annotators than others.

5. What would you change?

Way too much teacher talk!! I needed to structure more opportunities for student interaction. Also, my pacing was too slow. Instruction needed to be snappier with more student engagement.

6. Did you have a formative assessment?

As I walked around I noticed some of the same words being circled, and several students surprised me by circling a part of the selection that also struck me (Sacagawea was captured from a neighboring tribe and sold to a trapper who took her as one of his wives). Several students also made note of the information hinting to a sincere respect Clark seemed to have for Sacagawea.

7. What did you walk away with after teaching this first lesson?

The knowledge that I was working way too hard and the students weren’t working hard enough! I was reminded teachers need to consciously work at limiting teacher talk, keeping the lesson moving, and structuring student interaction. This is crucial to keeping students engaged with a difficult task.

Day 2 Lesson Plan and Reflection

1. What really worked with this 2nd part of the lesson?

The student interaction with the text and with each other was great.

2. What would you change?

I would have broken the text up into smaller bits as I guided them through the process of discussing their annotations and their analysis of relationships between individuals in the text. This would be an easy way to scaffold their learning.

3. What did the students' learn?

As their formative assessment the students were instructed to write 2-3 sentences describing the relationship between two individuals in the reading and citing text evidence to justify their description. The big learning for them I believe is that reading isn't merely a 'one and done.' Reading is a process of searching for clues, thinking, conversing, and reflecting. The lesson objectives were not discreet as has so often been the case with our previous standards and assessment system. I really want students to understand in close reading we aren't finding single correct answers, but rather readers are actively searching and thinking about ideas.

Student sample of content objective (RI.5.3)

5. Overall, what is your reflection of the entire experience?

I struggled with the amount of scaffolding to provide. After I had the students cold read the first section, I modeled reading and annotating the first section. For the second section I had them cold read (to get the flow), then had them reread a second time to annotate, and then had them reread the entire selection paying attention to details that hinted at relationships. I desperately wanted to share my own 'awesome ideas' about the relationships of some of the individuals but forced myself to stay quiet to give them opportunities to read, think, talk, and write with as little influence from me as possible. If I had had more time or for the next lesson, I would probably go over the passage again to model some more sophisticated responses than most of them were able to generate, in order to move them further along for their future close readings.

With the introduction of Common Core there is a lot of talk of increasing how much students grapple with academic concepts and teachers working to build students' perseverance (or grit) to stick with difficult tasks. In the past, teachers have worked to scaffold student learning every step of the way, robbing them of opportunities to grapple and experience moderate amounts of confusion. After teaching this lesson I was struck by how much we scaffold--not just to help our kids learn, but also because it makes our job as teachers much easier! It was difficult to simply trust that students would be able to read and draw conclusions without a lot of frontloading and modeling.

Finally and most importantly, I want my teachers to know that I stand behind them in this journey. The nature of teaching and the expectations of learning are shifting in a way that will require more thinking on the part of teachers and students! It is really a far more respectful view of the teaching profession than the days of giving teachers a program and a day-to-day pacing guide. I want my teachers to realize that no matter how talented and dedicated they individually are, we will always be more powerful and effective as a TEAM of teachers working together. Our work is cut out for us!

Thank you, Ed. I hope this inspires the readers of Saturday Morning Coffee to tackle that first close reading lesson if you haven't done so already. Intentional selection of text, methodical planning, and reflection after each lesson are the cornerstones for teaching powerful close reading lessons.

Still can't believe Thanksgiving is less than a week away. There will be no blog next week. I look forward to catching up with you on December 7th. Have a Happy Thanksgiving holiday and always Happy Saturday.

Close Reading With Informational Text - Part 1

2013-11-15T17:20:00.000-08:00

Close Reading With Informational Text

Learn From My Mistakes


Some folks would call this my office but I call it heaven! Wall to wall professional books.

I am an addict. A certifiable out-of-control nonfiction junkie. I don't completely understand my lifelong love affair with nonfiction but I vividly remember the exact moment I named it. I was in high school and was unsuccessfully explaining this near religious epiphany to my Mom while she was tending pork chops on the stove. She didn't understand what all the fuss was about since after all I was a lock-myself-in-the-bedroom and don't-bother-me kind of reader. I am sharing this with you for two reasons: 1) I want you to understand my head-over-heels passion for the topic of Informational Text, and 2) You might appreciate my restraint in not having written about it sooner. My goal for today's blog is for you to learn from some of my dumb mistakes in the teaching/non-teaching of nonfiction and particularly those lessons where I was trying to scaffold students' close reading.

Before we launch today's topic I would like to share that last week I made a huge shift in my understanding of Close Reading using narrative texts thanks to Chris Lehman and Kate Roberts, Falling in Love With Close Reading. Always self-propelled forward, I feel pressure to get a handle on teaching students the how to of close reading using information text. The challenges are overwhelming.

What Makes Teaching Informational Text So Doggone Challenging?

               Let's take a quick peek and I promise to talk at greater length about these challenges next week. First of all, with informational text readers can't ride the wave of story structure and meaning as we are able to do with narratives. With narratives, at an early age we intuitively understand the story mountain: the beginning, the build-up, the problem or dilemma, the resolution, and the ending. With informational text structures changes not only from book to book but within the same book and perhaps even within the same paragraph.

               The vocabulary is formidable and tricky. The more background knowledge and prior knowledge we have the more we are able to understand the text and those Tier 2 & 3 words. The information is dense and then of course there are the multitude of text features--side bars, text boxes, charts, figures, etc., etc.

               Most of us could be video-taped during read alouds using narrative texts. We have transformed our read aloud to an art form. Our experience with informational text for read alouds/think alouds in most cases is limited and lacks the same effortless expertise. Most teachers do not have the amount of informational books they need and many of the informational books published prior to 2005 are impossible to use as mentor texts. Good News: Nonfiction books are stepping out and truly coming into their own. Bad News: There are so many nonfiction duds out there. Be sure to look closely at the publication dates. Buyer Beware!!

My classroom's cozy reading area....in every corner of the room there were bookcases.

Mistake #1 Teacher Hijacks Teachable Moments

               One afternoon during January 2011, my first year back as a classroom teacher transplanted from Higher Ed, I suddenly realized the disproportionate amount of fiction compared to non-fiction in my library. It was an impressive classroom library with literally thousands of titles: Frank Asch, Leo Lionni, Gerald McDermott, Barbara Cooney, Marc Brown, William Steig, Patricia Polacco, Judy Blume, and the names go on for miles. There weren't many information books...a few Seymour Simon and Gail Gibbons...not a whole lot going on in this area. It was during this time I was thinking about providing students with a well balanced diet of genre and I realized information books (my favorite genre!!) were non-existent in my library. The irony was not lost on both counts.

               With a little comparative shopping off Ebay and the used books from Amazon I equalized the balance of fiction and nonfiction within a month's time. I wanted to create a complete information/research area for the students...which I immediately set to work on. Meanwhile, I promoted the heck out of this coming-to-your-classroom-library-soon addition. The students were prepped as I teased and tantalized. They were totally hyped. Finally, the unveiling. On a dreary Monday morning in February I brought the kids back to the carpet for a team meeting and as I shared the different categories of books and pulled out titles their eyes just kept getting wider and wider with anticipation. The excitement brought sunshine to otherwise a very gray day. Long and short... the students loved those new informational books. Everyone had cute, covered plastic ice bins as their personal book box and these boxes were literally stuffed with books. There were books hanging out every which way like arms and legs dangling from car windows. How the students loved those information books!

               I know what you are thinking. You are wondering how on earth could this be a mistake because it sounds pretty good, right. Here's the rub. Although I certainly now had the books and I completely captured and captivated the students' genuine attention and interest, I did a lousy, horrible, very bad job of getting my kids to understand the intricacies of nonfiction. I failed to unlock the uniqueness of this genre for the kids. The students enjoyed and read the books eagerly...particularly the boys...I taught no formal lessons on how to access the text.

                That was 3 years ago. My knowledge (and our collective knowledge) has grown by leaps and bounds. Naturally, I long for a do over. The learning stage had been set. I had the book-bins labeled and piled high with gorgeous books on every fascinating subject you could imagine and nonfiction charts were hanging on the wall. I had even done a pre-sale like they do for Lancome. I failed to teach them how to read this distinctively unique genre in which colorful text features such as diagrams, graphs, cut-aways, and captions all are vying for and commanding the reader's attention. It never even occurred to me to teach them access points to the genre of informational text. A completely wasted opportunity on my part. Please, learn from my mistake.

Authors: Elaine M. Weber, Barbara A. Nelson, and Cynthia Lynn Schofield (2012) Maupin House

Mistake #2 Sit and Git Will NEVER Grow Dendrites

During the Christmas holidays last year, 2012, I read Guided Highlighted Reading. This was the first professional book I read on close reading. It was very easy to follow with lots of examples. In the authors' words:

If students are prompted to find the salient points of a text, they will be able to write a summary. If the prompts lead them to find examples of author's craft in a text, they will be able to write an analysis of the choices that an author makes during writing. (pg 1)

As a result, I was super psyched to get into classrooms and try this strategy out. I used this strategy twice. Once with third graders and once with second graders. The book suggests using it for grades 4-12. Let me share my 3rd grade lesson. At the time I was wondering about young students' enthusiasm with textbooks so I decided to use the adopted Silver Burdett 3rd grade science text. I retyped and numbered a small section to enable the students to have two pages of easy-to-follow text. After an introduction to the lesson, and in my most animated style I began with the prompting to have them perform perfectly to my commands. Here is a sampling from my lesson plan.

In the Introduction find and highlight three words that explain why tobacco smoke is harmful to people.

4,000 harmful chemicals or contain harmful chemicals

Also in the introduction, find and highlight three words that explain how public buildings, like churches, schools, restaurants, keep the environment healthy. “No smoking” signs

In line #4 in the first paragraph, find and highlight the one word that explains what tobacco is. Plant

               To help keep the kids active, alert, and on task I kept the pace fairly swift. I incorporated drama, active participation techniques, think-pair-share, choral answering, and choral reading. The kids were engaged and reasonably kept up with the pace. They actually loved the lesson.

               Okay, here's the funny part. Near the end of the lesson, the students were given a comprehension worksheet comprised of 95% literal questions that their teacher had prepared. They struggled with transferring their "learning."

               As I reflected back on the lesson I realized the students were attentive because I had successfully used engagement tricks plus the class was stacked heavily in my favor with many former students from the year before. I entertained them and they gleefully complied. I would classify this Guided Highlighted Reading as an activity rather than a strategy. There was nothing strategic about this lesson.

                This lesson consisted of a solitary 50 minute time slot that I shared with a group of students. I did not have an opportunity to debrief with the students. Perhaps, I could have pulled it together. Who's to say. Fast forward almost a year later, as I think about it now, I did not understand the purpose of close reading and I was too focused on teaching the content. I did not see close reading as a way to teach students navigation of informational text for their ultimate independence and for them to walk away with a skill they could use on other texts. I did not move forward their understanding of informational texts as a result of this lesson. With my current understanding of close reading I want to provide students with tools that enable their success and independence on the next science or social studies section they are asked to read. Please, learn from my mistake.

Mistake #3 K.I.S. Dummy

As a kid I absolutely hated Weekly Reader. During my recent two years of teaching second grade all classrooms had subscriptions to a weekly news magazine published through Scholastic. Like clockwork they arrived bundled every month. If lucky, a parent volunteer sorted them out for me, but sorted or unsorted, they stacked nicely in some dark corner to be long forgotten, safe, and to gather dust. Only when stressing and writing sub plans would I remember their existence and pull a stack out to avoid the hassle of writing detailed guided reading sub plans. I have changed my mind.

Early this past September I was itching to get in to meet my former teaching buddy's new second graders and to try out another close reading lesson using Scholastic News. We had decided this is a perfect text for close reading....a short, manageable amount of informational text with lots of text features and everyone has a colorful copy they can annotate the heck out of. As I planned for this Scholastic News lesson I studied the website and was blown away by the bells and whistles. If you have not seen Scholastic's new "Common Core designed lessons" for all their grade level weekly newspapers you seriously need to check it out. With so much fun, techie stuff to choose from I planned my close reading lesson carefully by first identifying the student learning targets:

· I can identify the different nonfiction text features in Scholastic News (SN) and be able to use them to help me predict what I am going to read

· I can identify the author’s purpose for the SN

· I can define the word “Information Text”

· I can define the word “feature” and provide examples

The brief lesson plan outline was:

1. ~~Think-Pair-Share experiences with Weekly Reader (opt~~)

2. State student learning targets for the lesson

3. Teacher model using text features to gain information

4. Students list text features that the author used to help the reader understand the information (formative assessment)

5. ~~Teacher uses all the titles, headings, captions to write a prediction of what the magazine is going to say.~~

6. ~~Quickwrite (formative assessment)~~

Note: I crossed out what I had to delete from the lesson

One of the benefits I liked best about projecting the online version is being able to display the inside two pages together as a single spread sheet. They are usually linked together in some way. For this edition, I had wanted to show the students how the four boxes spanning both pages were time-order text boxes starting with King George III of England and ending with our celebrating Constitution Day, 2013 here in the United States. Mysteriously, one of the boxes was blocked out on Dinah's computer when I clicked on the 2-page spread. Stuff happens, right.

This lesson was really not a flop but judging from the many learning targets it is evident I had gone overboard and had to monitor and adjust frequently during the 45 min lesson. We need to allow and plan for our students' wading time during close reading. If we truly want to create opportunities for our students to grapple with text and to work both independently and collaboratively we need to embed safe pockets of time in order for our students to do this. My learning targets were ambitious and the lesson was over planned. Less is more. Please, learn from my mistakes.

For the next few weeks I will share some of the insights and access points I have recently learned for using and teaching Informational texts. In addition, we will have to include a piece on text complexity. So much to learn...thankfully coffee is not just available on Saturday mornings.

RESOURCE ROUNDUP

The Teaching Channel has a wonderful selection of current great teaching videos:

Selective Highlighting: Reading with a Purpose
Teaching About Textual Evidence Grades 6-8
Examining Elements of Persuasive Speeches Grade 8
T hinking Notes--annotating to make highlighting more focused Grades 9-10 (2 min video)

Here in the Ozarks our mornings have been in the teens. I call that cold. Make sure you see below they appear to be quality resources and links. As always I will hope you have found something of interest to spark your thinking and planning for using informational texts. Happy Saturday.

H.O.P.S. (Hot off the Press- literally)

1. From Achieving the Core for ELA (There is also info on Math, Science, and Social Studies)
Fixing Classroom Observations: How Common Core Will Change the Way We Look at Teaching.

This report proposes an approach to classroom observations built around two factors: 1) Assessing what’s being taught in addition to how it’s being taught, and 2) putting observation rubrics on a diet. The reports suggests that schools put a greater emphasis on choices about lesson content and making it easy for observers to determine whether a lesson is helping students master grade-appropriate Common Core Standards are both critical for making the shift to Common Core.

Classroom Observations K-2
Classroom Observations 3-5
Classroom Observations 6-12

2. Edutopia has compiled free supports for Common Core
The team at Edutopia has compiled their most popular resources to include:
Common Core Blogs by grade level
Common Core Resources
Info on how the Common Core assessments will function
Plus lesson plans and more

Close Reading to Gather Evidence and Understand Literary Characters

2013-11-09T06:02:00.000-08:00

Taking the Character
Out of the Story

The faster one goes, the more strain there is on the

senses, the more they fail to take in, the more confusion

they must tolerate or gloss over--and the longer it takes

to bring the mind to a stop in the presence of anything.

Wendell Berry, "An Entrance to the Woods"

http://www.heinemann.com/products/E05084.aspx caption

It's been such a strange mix-of-extremes-week. Saying goodbye to friends, saying hello to friends I've not seen in over a decade, and meeting new friends. I have temporarily placed student inquiry thinking on the shelf to begin Falling in Love with Close Reading by Chris Lehman and Kate Roberts. I am moderating an online book discussion with colleagues1500 miles away. We have just started and I am excited to wade in the deep discussion of the how all of this translates into our classrooms. I am slow reading this text afraid of missing an important insight while doing lots of thinking along the way.

Before you begin to read, I beg you to watch this wonderful video on Text Complexity. As I think more and more about close reading I can't imagine selecting books to teach my students the how-to of close reading without a basic understanding of text complexity. Selection of text needs to be spot on to insure a successful lesson. I think you will find this video fun and informative.

              As I began to read Falling in Love with Close Reading I stopped at page 12 with a strong urge to create my own chart. The one they provide is very clear. I just needed to grab a pencil and apply my thinking. The authors have clarified what close reading is and have formulated a manageable three step "ritual".
Step 1:      Figure out your focus, or what you are specifically going to look for as you read.
Step 2:    Once you have collected details for the text find patterns. Look for similarities
or echoes.
Step 3:    Study patterns in order to unlock big idea(s) or understanding of text.

So far, this is very doable, wouldn't you agree. For determining purpose for close reading there is a wide assortment to choose adapted from Lehman's and Roberts' book.

STEP 1

What’s your Purpose for Close Reading?

Select a Category & Select Focus
What Types of Details Will You Be Collecting?

CHARACTERS
Who Are We Talking About?

What is the character saying?
What is the character doing?

What are the character's inner thoughts?

What does the character look like?

How does the character interact with other characters in the story

What is the setting like?
Is the story placed in the present? past? future?

Are there any objects that keep showing up in the story?

Answers to the questions: WHO? WHAT? WHERE? WHEN? WHY? HOW?

VOCABULARY
All Words are NOT Created Equally

Are their strong emotion words?
What kinds of verbs are being used?
What kinds of adjectives are being used?

AUTHOR'S TOOLKIT
A Close Examination

What is the genre?

Does the plot follow the typical pattern?

How does the story begin?
How does the story end?
Does the author use any literary devices?

POINT OF VIEW
Who's Really Telling the Story?

Who is telling the story?
Are there different points of view in the story?

DIFFERENTIATION
One Size Doesn't Fit All

Once these elements have been taught you can easily differentiate by assigning students to focus on more than one element.

With my newly created menu I can easily see that I want to focus on character traits specifically looking at their thinking, conversations, and actions . Deciding on a just-right text is crucial. It needed to be fairly complex (hopefully you watched the video), contain strong characterization, and provide some obvious stopping points. Seedfolks by Paul Fleischman came to mind since there are many short vignettes on 13 different characters allowing me to easily manage a close read. I started out with a two column note-taking device. These are open-ended and easy for the students to use. What has been crossed out on the wonder side are the wonders that have been answered as I read.

Kim
What I Know	What I Wonder
Girl Lives in apartment in Cleveland 9 yrs old Father has died Lives with mother and older sister Vietnamese She seems brave to go outside Father died when she was 8 mos old Determined	~~How old is she?~~ Is she lonely? ~~Why are her tears different than everyone elses'?~~ ~~Why is she planting seeds?~~ ~~Why is she afraid?~~

When I started my close reading of the text, I realized that I needed another column for evidence. I decided it needed to be first since close reading is about working your way through text and charting your thinking as you're reading. In the past, we have come up with ideas first and then gone back into the text to support those ideas. In other words, we would think "WOW!

Kim is really brave." Once we made that determination we might return to the text and find supportive evidence if necessary. Lehman and Roberts are very clear. Gather your evidence or details FIRST. Next, read over your evidence and search out patterns. Once you have discovered a pattern(s) you will be able to find the big idea(s).

Kim
Text Evidence	What I Know	What I Wonder
“still hoped that perhaps his eyes might move. Might notice me." "rice and meat offered him were gone." “I stood tall and scouted” " Worse, he had no memories of me. When his spirit hovered over our altar, did it even know who I was?" “In this vacant lot he would see my patience and hard work." "I would show him that I was his daughter." "And I vowed to myself that these beans would thrive.”	Girl · 9 yrs old · Father has died poor · Lives with mother and older sister · Vietnamese · She seems brave to go outside · Father died when she was 8 mos old · Patient and works hard · Determined father was a farmer	~~How old is she?~~ ~~Are they poor?~~ Is she lonely? ~~Why are her tears different than everyone elses’?~~ ~~Why is she planting seeds?~~ ~~Why is she afraid?~~

As I look at the details I gathered from reading the first vignette I see a young girl thinking about her father. She is questioning whether her father's spirit will know her? Through her determination, patience, and hard work she plants and nurtures her seeds in the same way her father would have. What is exciting about close reading is that the process of thinking is honored. There isn't necessarily one right answer.

http://www.heinemann.com/products/E03073.aspx

Last night I was rereading sections of an amazing book, What Readers Really Do: Teaching the Process of Meaning Making (2012) by Dorothy Barnhouse and Vicki Vinton. This is one of the most important books out there right now. I would like to close today's blog by sharing a few of the points I gleaned from their book.

Seven Ways to Make Close Reading

More Successful

1. Uncertainty or confusion is to be expected in reading. If authors wanted you to know everything at once, the book would be boring and short. Allow students to grapple.

2. The text is the teacher's tool--no different than a hammer and nails are for the carpenter. We want to teach the students the process of thinking their way through a book rather than teaching them the story. Choose the book wisely.

3. We need to look at ourselves as facilitators of students' thinking. We are not trying to teach them the "right" answer. It is all about processing and their learning how to think strategically.

4. Read Aloud time serves as the perfect venue for us to model the foundations for thinking through a text.

5. Narrative beginnings are very confusing. The reader needs to become acclimated and trust that the author will slowly help us find our way. Authors usually throw out breadcrumbs to help us along the path.

6. If the teachers are asking the questions, the students will become dependent upon us. Let them pose their own questions while they are reading.

7. While reading forward, we need to think backward in order to recognize the patterns the author has created for us. The patterns that will help us to discover the big ideas locked away in the text.

RESOURCE ROUNDUP

I know you understand how crazy it is when hunting down information on the computer. If you were not already ADD, you grow into it. This week I thought I would use a new strategy for keeping track of my online adventures. I just kept adding links as I went. Perhaps, you can see the patterns. Unfortunately, there were many wonderful pictures embedded within the information that I cannot directly include. I hope you have time for some exploration.

Using Thinking Notes for Shared Reading
Passing Notes to Share Quotes
***Scholastic's Introduction on Character Traits
Using Music to Improve Close Reading
How to take 2 Column Notes From ASCD Express (using nonfiction)
Guiding questions to help you understand you understand your character better
EXTENSIVE list of questions to help you understand your character better
***BEST resource I found online for Character Analysis
Projects for Seedfolks
Novelinks for Seedfolks
We Already Know Your Protagonists Journey. Do You?

For more information and ideas on character traits and analyzing characters in narrative texts check out my new board on Pinterest that I created especially for today's blog. Meanwhile, we are all shaking our heads trying to ground ourselves in the reality that it's almost Thanksgiving and wondering where in the heck did 2013 go? Thank you for stopping by and I sincerely hope you found something useful today. Best wishes for a Happy Saturday.

Does Charlotte Danielson's Framework Represent the Lexus Version of Teaching?

2013-11-01T21:48:00.000-07:00

How To Start Earning Frequent Flyer Miles

Used under Creative Commons

Seriously, how much attention are we giving the Charlotte Danielson Framework for Teaching? More than once I have heard Level 4, or the "Distinguished" category, is a place you visit but no teacher lives there all the time. Okay, I get that. As I immersed my thinking in student-driven learning, authentic questioning by students, I puddle jumped over to student motivation and instructional models (effective teaching practices). Whew! Busy week for me.
My second question and the topic for this week, If Charlotte Danielson's framework represents the Lexus version of classroom teaching what can we do to move our teaching into Level 4--even part of the time?

Almost randomly I selected components from each of the teaching domains so I might better understand the instructional goals. Let me share:

DOMAIN 1 - Planning and Preparation

Activities permit student choice
Learning experiences connect to other disciplines
A variety of appropriately challenging resources that are differentiated for the class
Lesson plans differentiate for individual student needs

DOMAIN 2 - The Classroom Environment

Students indicate through their questions and comments a desire to understand the content
Students assist their classmates in understanding the content
Students take initiative in improving the quality of their work
With minimal teacher prompting, students ensure that their time is used productively

DOMAIN 3 - Instruction

If asked, students are able to explain what they are learning and where it fits into the bigger context
Students suggest other strategies they might use in approaching a challenge
Lesson activities require high-level student thinking and metacognitive explanantions
Students have an opportunity for reflection and closure on the lesson to consolidate their understanding
Students initiate higher-order questions

DOMAIN 4 - Professional Responsibilities

Students contribute to and maintain records indicating completed and outstanding assignments
Students contribute to and maintain data files indicating their own progress in learning

Wow! This really helped. Immediately the shade on my thinking was lifted and I realized the importance of creating student-centered learning environments (even as vacation get aways or time shares).

Used under Creative Commons

If we were to consider a more student-centered philosophy in our classrooms are we armed and ready for student-centered learning? Do we have models to follow? Do we have all the tools? In many cases, this was not how we were taught and we have no/limited role models.
I DO-WE DO-YOU DO has been referred to as the optimal learning theory. I certainly did when I taught Effective Teaching for my education classes. It makes so much sense. When our lessons bite the dust we can place blame on a lack of scaffolding and think I should have modeled more, or maybe I put them into group independent situations way too early. All very legitimate reasoning and so neat and tidy. Pretty much our lessons march to this sequence:

Review --- Teach --- Model --- Practice

If we are dreaming of vacations in "Distinguished" based upon Charlotte Danielson's Framework this model is simply not going to cut it. Orderly and manageable but lacking in passion and curiosity. Teachers are so busy frontloading and scaffolding we are not allowing our students to grapple with any ideas and concepts. In fact, grappling seems to be the antithesis of this teaching model. Let's switch models for a minute and take a peek at another ...the Inquiry model.

Inquiry is defined as “a seeking for truth, information, or knowledge—seeking information by questioning. The process of inquiring begins with gathering information and data through applying the human senses—seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling.” Quoted from Thirteen Ed Online If time, check this website out for a crash course. Very good.

Used under Creative Commons

I just finished reading Succeeding with Inquiry in Science and Math Classrooms (ASCD, 2013) by Jeff Marshall and also participated in a lesson he taught via a webinar this past Tuesday. His instructional model was guided inquiry. It was not open inquiry because the beginning question(s) came from the teacher rather than the students. I will try to capture his lesson with as much detail and integrity as possible. Here is his instructional sequence:

Engage --- Explore --- Explain --- Extend

Engage- The goal for this phase is to spark students’ thinking and begins with a question. Students reflect and answer the question(s). In his webinar, Marshall displayed 20 photographs for students to classify and sort into one of three categories: as living, non-living, or not able to determine. His book is filled with many math and science lessons. I noticed that many of these lessons used an anticipation guide instead of pictures. For the anticipation guide, students would read a short series of questions about a particular concept or topic. Using their current understanding students would determine which questions were true and which were false.

Explore- In this phase students "muck around" and grapple with their thinking. They explain and must be able to justify their thinking within small groups. During this time the teacher is closely monitoring the students measuring their background knowledge and misconceptions. In his book Marshall warns, “The goal is not for the students to come up with a complete or perfect list. Rather students need to use critical thinking to come up with a solid list that they can defend.”

Explain- During this next phase the small groups share out information to the whole group. Teacher guides and moderates. The teacher can then provide additional examples to check for understanding. As a further check for understanding, students would then provide a written explanation in their learning notebook to a particular prompt the teacher provides. In this case, the prompt was for students to explain why each characteristic is critical for an object to be considered "living". Notice this is not the blanket summary we often use, "Students, write down and explain what you learned." The teacher is asking for much deeper processing and a more precise and detailed answer.

Extend- The final phase appears to be a check for understanding to see if students can take the information they have learned to apply and transfer it to something different. For this particular lesson, the students classified additional pictures using the criteria they developed. NOTE: The correctness of the actual answer was not as valued as the secret sauce: How were students able to defend their selections.

As a result of watching Jeff Marshall's lesson, I have been pondering all the different ways we might apply this sequence to our teaching, particularly Language Arts. This is where I will be spending my thinking time. I have new books to read and "who knows the places we'll go."

In addition, I plan on plunging head first into Falling in Love with Close Reading by Chris Lehman and Kate Roberts. The books are arriving in the mail. Saturday Morning Coffee is facilitating an online book study and I know many of us can hardly wait to begin this next week. In the meantime, check out my Pinterest boards: Anchor Charts, Close Reading, Teaching Inferences, Main Ideas and Details, Inquiry Learning, Project-Based Learning, Text Complexity, Research Projects Charlotte Danielson, and Interactive Journals to name a few :)

Microsoft Images

Thinking just a little bit more about the Danielson Framework, I've adapted a quick guide to help keep your eyes focused on the target as you aim closer to that coveted "Distinguished" vacation spot. The perfect spot where learning is optimal and you create more powerful learning for your students. The chart was adapted from CoreStand.

A QUICK "VACATION" GUIDE

             Be intentional with your lessons and student groupings—base on
             students' interests, strengths, and needs.

             Ask yourself who is the driving force in the classroom? You or your
             students—seek the latter.

             Use formative assessment as your GPS for instructional decision
             making.

             Create B-D-A time for students to reflect on their learning
             (Before-During-After) the lesson.

   Get those interactive journals out. Students' reasoning needs to be
   supported and cited with evidence from texts.

   Carpe Diem! Also, seize teachable moments and remain flexible.

             Reflect on your students' learning AND your daily teaching. Daily.

RESOURCE ROUNDUP

5 Keys To Student Engagement Article
How Far Should Student Centered Learning go? Article
Looking at the differences between project-based learning and inquiry
Edutopia's Project Based Learning Guide--everything you would want to know
Why Inquiry Learning is Worth the Trouble
Video clips of Inquiry lessons going on in the classroom

“The future depends on what you do today.”

Mahatma Gandhi

As always I hope you have found something to use or ponder. The fall colors are brilliant and the Razorbacks are playing in Fayetteville. Life is good. Happy Saturday.

I would love to hear from you. Simply choose Name/URL. You can leave the URL space empty.

Fostering an Eye for Details- Part 2

2013-10-26T07:00:00.001-07:00

Teaching our Younger Students to be Better Observers and to Notice Details

“Golfing is more than keeping the left arm straight. Every good golfer is a complex engine that runs on ability, ego, determination, discipline, patience, confidence, and other qualities that are self taught…if their values are solid their work is likely to be solid.”
http://anniemurphypaul.com/2013/10/wednesday-writes-46-the-tyranny-of-tips/

In last week’s blog I wrote of details and spoke of professions where lives are dependent upon a person's attention to detail. The above quote clarified for me all that lies behind the concept “detail-oriented” and certainly helps to answer the question of detail-oriented as NOT being a fixed trait. Wouldn’t you agree? Here are the questions I left you with:

How do we teach our students to be better observers and to notice details?

How do we apply this to their daily reading and writing?

My husband asks me, “How long will it take you”? I pause for a minute, consider, and respond with what seems like the reasonably calculated amount of time needed to get a particular task or job done. Invariably, I shortchange my time estimate. Usually, by hours, and in some cases by days and/or weeks. It's not that I get off track and mess around (although I sometimes do). It's not that I don't have a list of what I need to accomplish and a plan (although I sometimes don't).

The problem lies in the fact that I lack a peculiar perception when it comes to quantifying time. Perfect example: As I review the two questions from last week, I suddenly realize their enormity. Entire books and reading programs have been written in order to answer just one of these questions, let alone two. Today’s topic deals only with the first question “How do we teach our students to be better observers and to notice details?” I will only focus on our younger elementary students this week.

"I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.” ~ Einstein

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/10/17/ok-plateau/ption

Besides being time-challenged, I am a “why” girl. Tell me something. Anything, really. Automatically, by reflex, my first utterance is “Why?” It annoys the bejeebies out of my husband. I try to explain that not asking a question translates into disinterest and apathy. In other words, the “why” should be viewed as a compliment. He doesn’t buy it. Regardless, I choose to think asking questions reflects genuine curiosity and a passion for learning. I think it's a good thing!

            Isn't a large part of our role as teachers to stimulate students’ curiosity and imagination? If we desire our students to be better observers and to develop an eye for detail and to ask questions we must create the environment and teach the values that supports this type of learning. It's not just the ability to attend to details, more importantly, it's the values behind being successful and reaching a goal: the ego, determination, discipline, patience, confidence, and other qualities that are largely self taught but can be strongly encouraged and prompted for within the classroom.

               Innovators, people who learn through inquiry and observation, people who ask questions and recognize and solve problems through careful observation with an eye to detail, and people who share and discuss these and other questions with like-minded others most certainly will have an enormous impact on our nation's future pathway to success. Curiosity paired with imagination is both our legacy and our future!

www.stenhouse.com

This past week I read A Place for Wonder written by Georgia Heard and Jen McDonough. Truly a remarkable and inspirational book. It is easy-to-read, there are many examples, and they address how to foster and strengthen children’s curiosity. Let me share a few of their ideas for primary classrooms.

One Small Square- This idea is based on the One Small

Square series written by Donald Silver and illustrated by Patricia J.

Wynne and Dianne Ettl. The One Small Square series uses the space of a three-dimensional square to explore the details of different habitats. There are at least 12 different titles in the series. Georgia Heard and Jen McDonough created and cut out square viewing frames for students to take outside so they could frame and focus on a small area. At first students noticed just grass, but with a closer gaze they began to observe the more discrete details. They were given student observation guides to record their observations. By explicitly teaching students the how to of getting up close and observing the details, students will have a first hand and concrete understanding of details and can transfer this knowledge to their writing.

"Put on your socks and shoes -- and don't forget your ears!

We're going on a listening walk. Shhhhh. Do not talk. Do not hurry.

Get ready to fill your ears with a world of wonderful and surprising sounds”.

HarperCollins. ISBN 10: 0064433226

The Listening Walk- Inspired by the book of the same name by

Paul Shower and Aliki (1993) The Listening Walk is an attempt to have students “sharpen their ears.” Georgia Heard and Jen McDonough had their students go on a listening to walk to focus on the ears rather than the eyes. Afterwards, students recorded all the sounds they heard in their “listening walk diary.” Although I have done this with students, the idea of recording in a diary makes so much sense. Being able to take these written recorded sounds and apply it to their writing would be the logical next step.

Other ideas from this wonderful book include a Wonder Center, easily incorporated into a center rotation, but also available to students throughout the day. Here students write their "I Wonder" questions on sticky notes. A set time is given for answering questions...perhaps, as a culminating thread on a Friday afternoon. Along this same idea is Wonder of the Week. One of the students’ "I wonder" questions is selected as the wonder to be focused on throughout the week. Students research, hypothesize. discuss, and write their explanations under the posted question(s). This can be easily turned into a center. Pondering Time and Whole-Class Shared Research is another idea that follows and supports students forming their own questions. They need to know how to research. With the help of an anchor chart on how to find answers to questions, independent or small group research is a perfect segue. Almost magically if the word "club" is added to an activity a new excitement ensues. The Wonder Club is a place where students voluntarily enter and exit to join in discussions of important topics like “How Does God Make Toenails?”

           Another idea to strengthen observation is critter observations paired with wonder journals. Most, if not all of us, have experienced having classroom pets. By leaving observation journals near the pets, students will be encouraged to record their questions, observations, and to share ideas. I have found that teaching them how to draw the basic shape of the animal courtesy of an Ed Emberley type drawing helps them to discover and appreciate the more subtle details. In addition, researching a particular critter goes hand-in-hand with observation.

               Finally, Discovery Tables periodically set up by the teacher (or a group of students) in order for the class to look closely at objects through a microscope and to experience them through touch and smell is exciting for students. They can then record their observations and in so doing have something stimulating to write about, building their vocabulary, and their observational skills.

These are just a few ideas to get you started. I know you can think of many more. Next week I will explore what would foster a sense of wonder and curiosity in our older students. Sounds kind of like an oxymoron, doesn't it. In the meantime, I will hope there is something here that sparks an idea, a connection, or a wonder for you all. Have a great week, allow yourself an opportunity to look at something closely in order to see life's beauty that surrounds us. Happy Saturday!

How Detailed Oriented Are You?

2013-10-19T00:30:00.000-07:00

The Power of Details

Casey, our Labrador, obviously agitated began his loud, continual barking. As I checked from the window, the rear lights of the postman's truck fading into the woods confirmed a box had been left by the door. Yep! Amazon had once again come through. In looking more closely the return mailing label was mysteriously unknown. Piqued, I tore into the box only to clamp on the breaks when I saw the sleek, shiny silver Nordstrom's box. Okay, you have to realize for a transplanted California girl living in Arkansas this would be the high point of any week so I indulged in one solitary moment of reverie. Inside I found all the exquisite accouterments of my cousin's son's wedding held this past summer. Everything was so perfect and precise in its packaging right down to the creasing of the otherwise pristine tissue paper. Even the tape was perfect. Not too much. Not too little. Ashamed, for a tiny second at the thought of how I send off gifts, I then dove into the treasures. Cards adorned with doilies, ribbons, sachet, tiny silk flowers...all the details of a carefully planned wedding with much attention given to even the smallest of details. I was completely awed by the perfection of details.

Within the same hour, not nearly as dramatic or fun, was a request from LinkedIn for me to write a friend's recommendation. LinkedIn provided this example: "____ is detailed-oriented." I couldn't help but reflect on the concept. Obviously, if I were hiring I would think "detailed oriented" is a good thing. In last week's post I talked about us (collectively speaking) waking up and paying attention to life's details for the sake of both quality and our safety. This week I wonder...

Is "detailed-oriented" a fixed trait like blue eyes?

We either have it or we don't?

I have always referred to my husband as being anal which admittedly sounds gross, but Jerry is so precise about EVERYTHING. Heck yes, he is detailed-oriented. Mine is more situation specific. Teaching-yes. Being a wife-almost always. Housework-No. Cooking-sometimes. Baking- yes. It seems our priorities in life is one of the factors that determines the quality of our attention to detail. Maybe another factor is stimulus input. Perhaps, we have only so much cognitive energy to take in information to then sift and sort out details. If we are on overload we won't notice the more discreet details.

                Artists, photographers, scientists spot details in nature elusive to most of us. They have an eye for detail. Does this eye-for-detail exist in all professions? The pilot is detail-oriented in his pre-flight checkoff just as the quarterback is detailed-oriented in his pass patterns. IS the ability to see and attend to the most subtle of details a mixture of natural ability combined with experience and training and repetitive practice? Artists, photographers, pilots, football players, and doctors are able to experience nuances through their senses that are invisible or non-existent to many of us. Why?

               What is also important to note is that these details add up to a qualitatively better end product. Atul Gawande, a surgeon from Harvard wrote at great length about hiring a coach to closely observe him so he could be more detailed-oriented, more precise (and more successful) in his surgeries. You can read more about it here. Long but fascinating.

               Our classroom universe is filled with millions and millions of tiny details stitched together. Years ago one of my tricks for creating a second set of eyes in the classroom was hosting student teachers. Details I see often were not the same details someone else sees. I know we all get the importance of classroom details. Behind these details lie rich life stories that often are the critical puzzle piece we have been searching for. Bobby wore the same clothes three days in a row while his sister Rachel hasn't combed her hair all week. Gone are her colorful hair ribbons. What's up with this? Usually, Michael has been reprimanded five times within the first 30 minutes of class. Today he hasn't uttered a sound. Is it already noon?
               All the details compete for our attention. Sorry. I don't have any brilliant solutions to offer. This certainly has captivated my attention though. Classroom teaching is a mirror of the world outside. Fluid and fast paced, moving, changing so quickly it's impossible to take it all in to include the more subtle details. Funny. I used to think of the classroom back in the old days (late 80s -early 90s) as a student's refuge, or a haven. I suppose it still is for many students, it's just become so much more stressful. Teachers, we do the best we can given the day of the week, the time of year, the weather outside, and how much sleep we had last night. For me, what was the hardest to deal with coming back to the classroom after more than a 15 year absence was the lack of time to reflect and plan. Reflection and planning is where the details give birth to new details... details that support the success of our students and details that could possibly change their lives. What and how can we take these insights and apply them to our practice? Next week I will offer suggestions on the how.

How do we teach our students to be better observers and to notice details?
How do we apply this to their daily reading and writing?

RESOURCE ROUNDUP...Just for You.

               We created a new Freebie ABC's of Teaching Academic Vocabulary. Clicking on the icon will get you to my TPT store. If by chance you are in need of more information, please check out the 570 academic words organized into 10 lists developed by Averil Coxhead. These are not the usual high frequency words we think of in terms of sight or spelling words, but instead are words found in textbooks and academic discussions. The lists are grouped and listed in their frequency of showing up in textbooks. Also, check out my Pinterest Academic Vocabulary board.

                 In last week's post Kelly provided the Tulare County Office of Education link. I printed out the reading, writing, and speaking/listening sheets for the grade levels I was interested in and have referred back to them all week. The layout is friendly and comprehensive. For each standard there are essential skills, academic vocabulary, questions stems, and the standard's expectation for both the immediate grade below and above to help with differentiation. Thank you once again, Kelly. After you link to their website scroll all the way down to ELA CCSS templates and you will be able to choose from K- 12th grade. These truly are awesome.

               About a month ago the Achieve the Core website published the long awaited writing information. All 600+ pages are devoted to where the standards meet the students in their writing. It serves as a collection of K-12 annotated student writing samples for the three types of writing stressed by CCSS: 1) argument/opinion 2) informative/explanatory, and 3) narrative. What makes this manageable is that you can download whatever you need rather than killing off another National forest. Just use the table of contents as your guide. I think I might use these in tandem with rubrics so the students would have a concrete understanding of what each score looked like.

I hope I have offered something that you can use today. In the meantime, Happy Saturday.

P.S. I wish leaving a message on this website was more direct. I would love to hear your thoughts on the details of teaching, and/or teaching our students to be more detailed oriented. To leave a message you just have to type in your name. You can leave URL space blank.

A Teacher's First Close Reading Lesson and What She Learned

2013-10-12T01:00:00.000-07:00

"Saying a textbook will meet #ccss is like saying holding a Weight Watchers box
will make you thin."

quoted from a tweet found on Christopher Lehman's website

               Thanks to the source from where I found the above quote I now have my first legitimate reason why I must tweet: Another reading world lies out there. Who knew. During the last six weeks I have blogged about Close Reading. I switched the blog's focus to other topics, but somehow got pulled back in by readers and friends...not that I minded :) The close reading blog-a-thon with Chris Lehman and Kate Roberts continues but the end is in sight. Like a great book, I dread saying goodbye. Fortunately, their book will be propped up against my front door courtesy of UPS next week. The blog-a-thon contributor's postings are equally as insightful. I urge you to check them out here. There is a growing critical mass of very intelligent, tech savvy, take-charge teachers out there.

               In almost a eulogizing effort last night I reread some of Kate's blogs. I still have a couple I haven't read so what I am about to say may already have been expressed. As I was reading last night, two big ideas bounced around in my brain. First, through our efforts with close reading we now have the power, i.e. skills and knowledge, to take our students' writing to higher levels than we've seen. Ever...or at least in my lifetime. Perhaps, from teaching and coaching our students to read closely and helping them transfer that same depth and detail to their writing they will go where no student has gone before.

               Second, in Kate's post yesterday she linked close reading to close living. In other words, wake up and truly notice the details in life. We are oblivious to the details and are missing opportunities to create special moments from those visible yet invisible details. Perhaps all the multitasking, the hurrying to get more done, faster, quicker, perhaps the evolving loss of a sixth sense, that of being aware of your surroundings for basic survival, has resulted in a deadened ability to observe what is right before our eyes. We have lost the ability to look closely at life. Have you noticed people don't even look--and we're not even talking both ways--when they cross the street?

              The glass I am drinking from is more than half full when it comes to close reading. I fret about the publishers that are coming out with programs to teach close reading. Their promises for easy to deliver lessons that produce successful learning outcomes are as compelling as losing weight easily and successfully and without giving up the dessert food group. Where's the disconnect? Back in my former Reading Recovery days, three lifetimes ago, we were adamant, outspoken, and clear that programs do not teach students. Teachers teach students. We can't let this opportunity pass. We can't mess it up this time with mass marketed materials coming from publishers that don't know our kids. Instead, we must put on our big-boy or big-girl pants and use our close reading lessons as opportunities to explore the possibilities of how deeply we can take our students whether it be in reading, writing, or in their ability to look at life with fresh, open and awakened eyes. Our first steps are the hardest.

Meet Kelly Villalobos, 2nd Grade Teacher Turlock, CA

Kelly's district has just begun CCSS. Many of us have been through the initiation and understand the daily confusion and stress. I am guessing they are in week 7. Kelly agreed to share her very first attempt at teaching close reading. I know many of you will be interested, inspired, and willing to take that first step after Kelly's reflection. Please watch the video. It served as the catalyst for Kelly's lesson. The teacher's language is so precise and clear. My interview with Kelly was done through Facebook. Thank you, Kelly. I am so proud of your sharing and also to call you a longtime friend.

How much prep time?

The actual prep time for the lesson wasn’t all that long. The biggest challenge I faced was really understanding what close reading is and trying to figure out how I would implement it in the classroom with my second graders. I didn’t know where to start. Finding the text and CCSS based questions and activities were pretty easy. http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/2nd-Grade-Informational-Text-Passages-Close-Reading-CCSS-Assessment-Homework-884414

My principal sent me several videos to watch and gather ideas from. http://www.cleanvideosearch.com/media/action/yt/watch?v=WgQYvj2U4Kw Once I saw this video, I decided to focus primarily on annotations in text. I found a great sheet with annotations: http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Close-Reading-Toolbox-CCSS-Aligned-713442 I printed out a full sized page poster for me to use whole group. I then copied, pasted, and shrunk the poster so I could fit 4 on a page. These I printed out for each student to use. The last bit of prep was to mark up my own text to prepare for the lesson. I wanted to have a guide to use to make sure that I hit on important concepts with the kids.

One more thing…I referenced my WONDERFUL standards sheets from Tulare County Office of Education. http://www.tcoe.org/ERS/CCSS/ELA/Templates_02.pdf (INCREDIBLY AWESOME) I focused on RI 2.1 and RI 2.2 to guide my lesson and my content and language objectives for the lesson.

Lesson Sequence

Pass out text, we numbered the paragraphs, and I read to students the first time.

Second reading was a shared reading with students. Pass out annotation marks sheet and discussed what each meant.

Third read: The first paragraph I read and modeled making annotations. I “thought out loud” to show them what my thought process was as I made the annotations. The second paragraph they read with me and helped me with annotations. The third paragraph I asked them to do it alone. This was a mistake. They needed more guidance. I roped them back in and we did the 3rd and 4th paragraph together. Somewhere in the third paragraph, a low reader (EL) timidly raised his hand and asked "What does government mean?" That was the turning point in the lesson. I was amazed that he spoke up. I was so gratefu
Discuss what a president is. What are the jobs of a president? Who is our current president?( the kids couldn’t answer this).
l too. He prompted the others to come out of their shells and discuss and ask questions. It was great. I had to d
Introduce and define close reading as well as the terms expository, annotations, and text.
I gave some side bar definitions of Congress and the SupremeCourt but the kids got it.

I concluded that portion of the lesson with the students using post its to write two facts that they learned about the president. No one had a hard time coming up with ideas.

What worked with the lesson?

I had a very narrow focus for the first lesson. I only focused on teaching the annotation marks and applying those to the text. Because of the fact that I didn’t introduce too much at one time, the students were able to interact with the text. The other thing that surprised me was that all of the students could access the text this way. I read the text many times, as did their peers. The low readers were able to participate in the class discussions regarding vocabulary and commentary on each paragraph because they had access to the content. I was afraid of using the text because I thought it was too complex. It ended up working very well.

What would you change?

The next time around, I want to use text where the content is of high interest to the students. I will probably pick text about an animal. While the students were able to do great things with this text, I think the process could have been easier for them, especially for the first time, had it been on a subject they were familiar with.

How was student engagement?

Super! Second graders are naturally squirrelly. To make it even more challenging, I have 9 students reading below grade level. Four of those are significantly below grade level, reading at a level 2. That being said, all students were engaged. The fact that I read the text to them helped. The annotation sheet was also a gem. It was an easy to use tool that kept the students busy but also brought meaning to the text.

There was so much information I wanted to share this week. Somehow it all seemed insignificant compared to celebrating a teacher's first attempt at close reading. As teachers we are always trying something new. It keeps us fresh and moving toward becoming better at our craft. I strongly encourage you, beg you, to click and listen to the poem on close reading: When the Key Clicks by Kevin Hodgson. It is beautiful and would serve as the most poignant conclusion to any PD on close reading.

Until next time keep your eyes wide open, be sure and look both ways, and look closely at the world. Happy Saturday.

Becoming an Expert Teacher is a Lesson in GRIT

2013-10-05T00:30:00.000-07:00

TESSing Looks a Whole Lot Like PMSing

Becoming an expert teacher is not a gift bestowed on a chosen few but

a journey through a challenging, thorny pathway
that requires constant pruning.
P. Mielke and T. Frontier, ASCD, Nov 2012

Charlotte Danielson is on everyone’s radar here in the beautiful state of Arkansas. Nationally, over 20 states have adopted her Framework of Teaching for the formal evaluations of teachers. Ironically and it needs to be noted, Danielson never meant for the framework to be used as an evaluative tool. Her intent was to create
“a common language” resulting in “a shared understanding” of what effective teaching looks like. Much needed and completely in sync with Common Core standards.

Implementation is going to be a lesson in Grit. In many schools TESS (Teacher Evaluation Support System) has teachers checking calendars and counting years, bursting into tears at unexpected moments, inventing new vocabulary (non academic), and feeling completely and utterly overwhelmed. Not just teachers, principals are feeling it too since the burden has been dumped onto their laps. One administrator in a training, slipped out the door, re-entered the room later to announce she was retiring.

Teacher evaluation is just one more thing—but it is a mountain-size one more thing to deal with and to manage. I know this to be true. I was well trained (over time and with annual recalibration sessions) to serve as a Praxis III Assessor for the state of Arkansas. I know first hand the careful documentation and hours, make that lots of hours, going into one teacher's observation and the detailed written evaluation. Administrators don't have the time. I switched college preservice juniors and seniors for 2nd graders my last two years in teaching. As a result of re-entering public schools I know firsthand what it feels like to have too many changes thrown at you at one time without the proper training. It's no one's fault...we can't point fingers. I believe it's based upon our well-intentioned efforts to keep pace. We're moving so fast and taking on so much so quickly in our efforts to keep up with the information and momentum of the 21st century.

Managing the Beast...

My offerings to you

First things first. The 2013 Danielson's framework can be downloaded here—Load your ink jets for 113 pages. This newest edition is aligned to CCSS; however, Danielson has made very few revisions from her early edition.

Kate Glass, co-founder of CoreStand (see more below) writes in reference to Charlotte Danielson's framework, and being evaluated:

"...you can’t fake it with one spectacular lesson. Pulling a rabbit out of your hat or tap dancing in front of your class will simply not cut it....you’ll have to have habits of learning set in place long before an administrator walks in your door. You’ll have to know your students well and your instruction will have to reflect this knowledge. In short, the pedagogical integrity you bring to the class day in and day out should be obvious to anyone who drops in on any given day."

The big idea here is for our students to be tooled with both critical thinking skills demanded by the CCSS along with the student-centered instruction required by the Charlotte Danielson teaching framework. If these two pieces are firmly in place our students will succeed no matter what subject we are teaching.

Teaching strategies are not equal. More than 20 years ago Classroom Instruction that Works was published. High yield strategies that could positively affect student achievement were identified and quantified.

In Visible Learning for Teachers (2012) John Hattie ranks 150 influences on student learning from most powerful to least powerful.
I know you are dying to find out what made the top ten? Check out the list here.

Arkansas's goal for teachers is to translate Hattie's research directly into all K-12 classroom teaching aided by TESS, the work of Jane Pollack (AMAZING), and the professional development options that are earnestly and currently being developed. The ultimate goal of TESS is not meant to be punitive in any way, but rather to support teachers in their quest for self improvement centered on research proven best practices.

You know you're a teacher if. . . you get tingly and goose-bumpy when you discover an amazing classroom resource online. With so much new being thrown at you what's a teacher supposed to do? With lightening speed all of us grab lesson plans from websites and TPT to adapt them for our students. There's no time for extensive planning.

1+1=3 Yesterday, I stumbled across the infographic to your right from CoreStand. Five Degrees to Becoming a Common Core Ninja represents this company's philosophy built around powerful collaborative lesson planning. Since most of us are doing CCSS in the US why don't we pool our efforts, collaborate to grow ideas and build high interest lessons that everyone can use. CoreStand provides a full range of services both free and paid to accomplish this. Check it out. I landed on their website for my Danielson search and got side-tracked with close reading. Big surprise. Right :)

Last night I downloaded and read their ebook The Ninja's Guide to the Common Core Standards. FREE Super good, short, and easy to read. You will love it. You can also link to it on my Pinterest Common Core board.

So much information available. I hope you have time to click on some of the links. A shout out to all who gave me feedback on the Close Reading ABC's. There is another ABC's list in the making. Hope today's info helps and Happy Saturday.

Nerdy News

I believe collaborative lesson planning is going to take center stage in our professional development. A couple weeks ago I read Common Core Unit By Unit by Cheryl Becker Dobbertin in one sitting. It made a huge impression and continues to haunt my thinking. This book would make a perfect book talk for PLC's.

Saturday Morning Coffee and Common Core

Motivation Matters

DANCING WITH THE STARS

Used through Creative Commons

TEACHING URGENCY--STEP ONE

Which Common Core websites made the Best of the Best List?

My FAB FOUR

Websites for Teaching CCSS

What Text Are You Using for Close Reading?

Free Access. . .If You Don't Count Your Time

Close Reading, Common Core Writers Workshop, and Free eBooks

Pinkston Middle School's Literacy Fair...Now that's a Celebration!

Building Lifelong Readers: 25 Ways to Motivate and Inspire Kids to Read

The Need to Read...on the radar this week

Going for Gold: An Homage to Effort

Team U.S.A.-- Lucy Calkins and Charlotte Danielson

Need Help with Your Teacher Evaluation?

Additional Resources

21st Century Classrooms: Engage, Empower, and Teach

The Power of WordsChanging Minds and Changing Worlds

A Teacher's Quest for Mastery of Close Reading: A 4th Grade Lesson

Meet Terri Rodger, 4th Grade Teacher Dennis Earl School in Turlock, CA

Building Our Future...One Student Blogger at a Time

Our Interview

So...What Does this Look Like? Samples of Students' Reflections

An Inquiry Process to Improve Teaching: Instructional Rounds

Additional Resources to Learn More

Gettin' Gritty

A Very Happy New Year Wish

People often say that motivation doesn't lastWell neither does bathing.That's why we recommend it daily.Zig Ziglar Used under Creative Commons

Part 2: Project-Based Reseach in a Fourth Grade Classroom

Budding Biologists Raise Trout

Are You Ready for Some Research?

An Administrator Steps In to Teach A Close Reading Lesson

Meet Ed Ewing

Who Doesn't Just Talk the Talk

Day 1 Lesson Plan and Reflection

5. What would you change?

Way too much teacher talk!! I needed to structure more opportunities for student interaction. Also, my pacing was too slow. Instruction needed to be snappier with more student engagement. 6. Did you have a formative assessment?

The knowledge that I was working way too hard and the students weren’t working hard enough! I was reminded teachers need to consciously work at limiting teacher talk, keeping the lesson moving, and structuring student interaction. This is crucial to keeping students engaged with a difficult task.

Day 2 Lesson Plan and Reflection

1. What really worked with this 2nd part of the lesson?

2. What would you change?

I would have broken the text up into smaller bits as I guided them through the process of discussing their annotations and their analysis of relationships between individuals in the text. This would be an easy way to scaffold their learning.

3. What did the students' learn?

5. Overall, what is your reflection of the entire experience?

Thank you, Ed. I hope this inspires the readers of Saturday Morning Coffee to tackle that first close reading lesson if you haven't done so already. Intentional selection of text, methodical planning, and reflection after each lesson are the cornerstones for teaching powerful close reading lessons.

Still can't believe Thanksgiving is less than a week away. There will be no blog next week. I look forward to catching up with you on December 7th. Have a Happy Thanksgiving holiday and always Happy Saturday.

Close Reading With Informational Text - Part 1

Close Reading With Informational Text

Learn From My Mistakes

What Makes Teaching Informational Text So Doggone Challenging?

Mistake #1 Teacher Hijacks Teachable Moments

Mistake #2 Sit and Git Will NEVER Grow Dendrites

Mistake #3 K.I.S. Dummy

RESOURCE ROUNDUP

Close Reading to Gather Evidence and Understand Literary Characters

Taking the CharacterOut of the Story

Seven Ways to Make Close Reading

More Successful

RESOURCE ROUNDUP

Does Charlotte Danielson's Framework Represent the Lexus Version of Teaching?

How To Start Earning Frequent Flyer Miles

A QUICK "VACATION" GUIDE

RESOURCE ROUNDUP

Fostering an Eye for Details- Part 2

"I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.” ~ Einstein

How Detailed Oriented Are You?

The Power of Details

RESOURCE ROUNDUP...Just for You.

A Teacher's First Close Reading Lesson and What She Learned

Becoming an Expert Teacher is a Lesson in GRIT

Managing the Beast...

My offerings to you

Close Reading,
Common Core Writers Workshop,
and Free eBooks

The Power of Words
Changing Minds and Changing Worlds

Meet Terri Rodger, 4th Grade Teacher
Dennis Earl School in Turlock, CA

So...What Does this Look Like?
Samples of Students' Reflections

People often say that motivation doesn't last
Well neither does bathing.
That's why we recommend it daily.
Zig Ziglar

Used under Creative Commons

Way too much teacher talk!! I needed to structure more opportunities for student interaction. Also, my pacing was too slow. Instruction needed to be snappier with more student engagement.

6. Did you have a formative assessment?

Taking the Character
Out of the Story