The Great Books Foundation Blog

Selecting and Using Complex Texts in Great Books K–12 Programs

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 08 Apr 2014 21:44:00 +0000

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) call for students to “read widely and deeply from among a broad range of high-quality, increasingly challenging literary and informational texts.” Great Books programs, which include anthologies of high-quality literature, help teachers provide  a “staircase” of increasing text complexity so that students develop their reading skills for the more difficult texts they will encounter in college and careers. The ability to read increasingly complex text is the best predictor of achievement among college freshmen, better than critical thinking alone (ACT, 2006; Liben, 2010).

The Great Books Foundation’s K–12 programs are based on the belief that, with well-researched, inquiry-based support activities, all students can comprehend, discuss, and interpret complex texts. To select the literature for its anthologies, the Foundation uses criteria that not only mirror the Common Core criteria for determining complexity, but go beyond them.

This paper will explain the Common Core’s definition of text complexity, the Great Books Foundation’s criteria for selecting texts, the role of Lexile scores in the selection process, and the routine of collaborative activities that support students in comprehending and interpreting challenging texts.

How is text complexity defined by the Common Core State Standards?

Appendix A of the CCSS (CCSSO, 2010) uses qualitative, quantitative, and contextual criteria for determining the difficulty of a text, as represented in the graphic below.

The qualitative dimension of text complexity refers to characteristics of a text such as levels of meaning, structural complexity, and language conventionality and clarity. This dimension is determined by professional expertise and common sense. A story with multiple plot lines is more complex than one with a single plot line; a story with flashbacks is more complex than one with a sequential structure; and a story with unfamiliar dialects is often more complex than one with only standard English.

The quantitative dimension of text complexity refers to a numerical score determined by an analysis of text features such as word frequency and sentence length. While there are numerous text analyzer tools, the CCSS uses Lexile scores for establishing ranges, or “bands” of measures for various grade levels. Appendix A emphasizes, however, that quantitative measures are not the only indicators of text complexity. For example, texts with common words, shorter sentences, and more dialogue may have low scores but actually be very challenging due to their qualitative characteristics.

Reader and task refers to characteristics of individual students and the activities teachers choose to guide their learning. Background knowledge is very important to text comprehension, and each student has a different set of knowledge and experiences. Readers also bring their own set of interests to each reading experience. Teachers must consider the cognitive capabilities students need in order to read and carry out other activities with the text, the degree to which students will be motivated to engage with the text, and the vocabulary and content knowledge required to successfully navigate the text.

Evaluating text complexity involves an in-depth consideration of each of these three dimensions, with extra weight given to professional experience and the individual context (Hiebert, 2013). Great Books editors give each piece its due weight and often consider additional criteria, such as the inferences required by the text and how unfamiliar vocabulary is treated in the text. Careful attention is also paid to the placement of each selection in the anthology based on its qualitative aspects. Finally, each text is evaluated in light of the specific tasks and activities that we recommend in Shared Inquiry (see table below).

Table: Dimensions of Complex Text Selection

Qualitative characteristics*	Levels of meaning Knowledge demands Language conventionality and clarity Structure
Quantitative characteristics	Lexile measure
Reader characteristics*	Cognitive ability Background knowledge, vocabulary Motivation Experience
Task characteristics	Shared Inquiry Prereading (building knowledge, motivating questions) First Reading (noting reactions) Sharing Questions (asking questions) Second Reading (close reading activities) Vocabulary development Shared Inquiry discussion Post-discussion writing, creative response, and cross-curricular projects

*From CCSS: Appendix A (2010).

What qualitative criteria are used to select texts for Great Books Programs?

All Great Books texts meet a set of rigorous criteria that includes both quantitative and qualitative measures. The criteria must be rigorous because a primary goal of Great Books K–12 programs is not only to develop reading skills, but to develop critical thinking skills through reading and discussion.

The Foundation’s programs use a method of reading and discussion known as Shared Inquiry, in which students collaborate on a number of activities to closely read, analyze, and interpret a particular text. Because Great Books texts must sustain students’ interest over several sessions and also raise genuine questions of meaning, the qualitative criteria for selecting texts extend beyond those advocated by the CCSS.

Great Books Qualitative Criteria

Selections must support extended interpretive discussion. Because Shared Inquiry discussions call upon participants to develop ideas about the meaning of the text and support them with evidence, a story that has an explicit message or too little content to back up ideas is not suitable.
Selections must raise genuine questions for adults as well as students. Because teachers collaborate as participants in Shared Inquiry, the texts must be intriguing to them.
Selections must be limited in length. Because Shared Inquiry requires repeated work with a text and familiarity with its details, it is ideal if a text can be read in one class period.
Selections must be age appropriate. Because Shared Inquiry is about the discussion of ideas, texts chosen for a designated age group must be engaging, relatable, and appropriate for a particular age group’s level of maturity and life experience.
Selections must be well-written. Because students read a Great Books text several times, and much of a story’s meaning depends on how the words are interpreted, texts should use rich language and be examples of excellent writing.

A text can be of high quality and still not be selected depending on factors such as theme and diversity of genre, gender, and ethnicity. In fact, the average rejection rate for story selection at grades 2–5 is over 90%.

What quantitative measures are used to select texts for Great Books programs?

As stated in the CCSS, Appendix A (CCSSO, 2010) quantitative measures are a useful though sometimes unreliable dimension of text complexity. Great Books editors use Lexile analyzer tools because a majority of schools and libraries use Lexile scores to match individual students with texts of an appropriate level of challenge. The Foundation provides these quantitative scores for each selection to give teachers an idea of vocabulary and sentence structure.

In Great Books programs, the Lexile score of most texts falls within the stretch range of the grade for which it is designated. In cases where a text has a Lexile score outside the given range (lower or higher), the editors have carefully examined the text’s qualitative aspects, as well as its accessibility and relevance to its intended readers, and determined that it is appropriate for its designated grade level.

Reader and Task in Shared Inquiry: Supporting Classroom Use of Complex Texts

In addition to providing high-quality complex texts for students to read, Great Books programs address a major concern of teachers: How will I support my students in reading and understanding challenging texts?

All teacher’s materials for Great Books programs provide instructions for a routine, or “sequence,” of activities. These collaborative activities are designed to support students in comprehending and interpreting challenging texts and to teach them the habits of highly skilled readers. Carefully crafted for each particular text, the activities set a purpose for reading, build skills, and foster motivation. There are activities to help teachers provide their students with content knowledge, as well as activities that build vocabulary and strategy skills, provide motivation to exert effort, and increase comprehension and higher-order thinking. Taken together, these components of literacy instruction are the best ways to support students as they approach challenging texts (Shanahan, Fisher, and Frey, 2012).

Throughout each Teacher’s Edition, examples of teacher-student dialogue and suggestions for differentiation help teachers develop their students’ reading, discussion, and critical thinking skills.

Because Great Books texts raise intriguing and meaningful questions for them to grapple with through collaborative activities, students are motivated to stretch and work with more complex material than they might on their own.

References

ACT (2006). Retrieved February 18, 2014 from Reading Between the Lines: What the ACT Reveals About College Readiness in Reading

.
National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, Council of Chief State School Officers (2010). Retrieved November 14, 2013 from Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy: Appendix A.

Hiebert, E. H. (2013). Supporting Students’ Movement Up the Staircase of Text Complexity. The Reading Teacher, 66(6), 459–468.

Liben, D. (2010). Retrieved January 3, 2014, from Why Complex Text Matters. Aspects of Text Complexity Project.

Shanahan, Fisher, and Frey (2012). The Challenge of Challenging Text. Educational Leadership, 69(6), ASCD.

Mark Gillingham is a senior researcher at The Great Books Foundation.

10 Keys to Making Professional Learning Meaningful

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 20 Mar 2014 18:03:00 +0000

Chances are, as you look at your calendar of scheduled professional learning days, you aren’t overcome with excitement. Traditionally, teacher professional learning has ranged from the good (the workshop that’s actually hands-on), to the bad (the never-ending PowerPoint presentation), to the ugly (remember that one presenter . . . ).

But, as the Common Core State Standards become the norm, the new standards and the expectations around problem solving and critical thinking are prompting a new look at teacher development. In the process, more districts and schools are thinking of ways to make professional learning meaningful and engaging.

The biggest challenge in teacher development isn’t teaching teachers something new, but ensuring that knowledge and skills are applied in the classroom. A 2013 study by the Center for Public Education found that the majority of teacher development has been ineffective at changing instructional practice and improving student learning. Still, CPE argues that the Common Core demands effective professional development that directly links teacher learning with classroom instruction to help teachers meet the demands of the new standards.

Keys to Strong Professional Learning

Fred Hang, Great Books Foundation senior consultant, has a simple litmus test for professional development, “Don’t bore me, don’t waste my time, and don’t talk down to me.” Above all, professional development should be useful, engaging, and applicable. As you prepare for the Common Core, look for professional development opportunities that incorporate these best practices.

1. You Do the Heavy Lifting
Similar to an ideal classroom in which students are doing the heavy lifting, in an optimized training, you’ll be doing the work. In Great Books courses, for example, instead of sitting and listening to an expert speak for hours on end, teachers begin to plan and lead their own discussions right away. During the course, teaches are engaged with the methodology that they are learning, says Linda Barrett, another senior consultant for Great Books, which makes the work stick.

2. Identify Key Takeaways
There’s nothing worse than ending a professional development session with a head full of buzzwords—and not much else. Indeed, you should leave any course with clear next steps and takeaways that you’re excited to implement in your classroom. When reviewing the schedule for an upcoming professional learning day or course overview, don’t be afraid to ask the instructor or facilitator, “What practical strategies will I have available at the end of the session?”

3. Establish the Connection to the Common Core
Right now, there are a lot of people talking about the Common Core State Standards without the true background knowledge of what they entail. If a professional development opportunity advertises itself as “Common Core-aligned,” be sure to investigate what that really means.

For example, Barrett begins her courses by explaining how the materials she’ll cover align with the Common Core’s expectation for complex texts. Teachers, says Barrett, “immediately see that these texts meet the demands that we have in our classrooms.”

4. Build on Background Knowledge
Just like your students come to you with knowledge and skills, a professional learning session should meet you where you are. That means being honest with your instructor or facilitator about what’s going on in your classroom and where you need help. “A lot of the things [that we cover] parallel things that classrooms are doing,” says Hang, “and I try to help teachers find connections so they don’t think they have to reinvent the wheel.”

5. Be Willing to Try New Things
In order to improve your teaching, you’ll have to change your behaviors in the classroom. For example, Hang focuses on teaching teachers how to listen within the thinking process. “You can’t discuss if you’re not willing to listen,” he says. Even if a strategy seems off base to you or like it won’t work in your classroom, sometimes it’s worth it to give it a shot. If it ends up surprising you, wonderful—and if it doesn’t, the failure can often add to your understanding of what your students need and why.

6. No One-Day Wonders
The Center for Public Education found that the professional learning that was the most effective incorporated follow-up services, including coaching or mentoring. Change takes time, so professional development should continue throughout the school year.
For example, during a coaching day at Dana School in Hendersonville, NC, a consultant from the Great Books Foundation observed and co-led discussions across classrooms and then debriefed with teachers. The course, says principal Kelly Schofield, helped teachers focus, not just on where students were already working, but on the next steps. In the fifth grade classroom, for example, students were already good at using the text, but they weren’t using that information to support their responses during discussion. The course, says Schofield, “gave us a lot of things to think about, but mainly, how teachers select and address student questions will move them forward.”

7. Consider All of Your Learners
As you progress through professional learning, think about how the strategies will apply on a practical level with your higher-ability students, those in the middle and the ones on the lower end. What techniques will you need to tweak for each group and why? “Sometimes our poorest readers are the best thinkers,” says Hang, which is why he encourages teachers to incorporate opportunities for students to talk and think before and during reading. In any professional development, ask about how to address students with ELL or special education needs, or other populations in your classroom.

8. Maximize 21st Century Tools
Technology is a crucial component of the Common Core, your classroom and your students’ lives, which means it should be a part of your professional learning as well. When pursuing a professional development opportunity, in addition to understanding how technology can support students’ learning in the classroom, check to see what resources are available to support your growth as well.

Recently, Great Books has added online options for schools and teachers. There is now a blended version of their core course, which incorporate one–day of in-person training with 4 hours of online material that is designed to support teachers’ development in the application of Great Books strategies. In the online portion of the training, teachers learn more about Shared Inquiry, apply it in their classrooms, and then provide feed- back online before moving on to the next step. Quality online professional development can provide the ongoing learning and reflection that can help make a one- or two-day workshop leave a lasting impression.

9. Time to Reflect
Reflection allows us to make sense of our learning, and incorporate that learning into our understanding. Professional development should provide time for individual and group reflection that helps you solidify and crystallize what you learned.

10. There Should Be Surprises
After Hang teaches a course, he often hears how surprised teachers are at what their students can do. “Before a course, teachers might say ‘my kids aren’t there yet,’” says Hang. “But after they take a course and use our programs in the classroom, teachers find out what their kids are truly capable of, and there’s always a level of astonishment.” Professional development should continue to bring new realizations as you incorporate it into your practice.

Samantha Cleaver has worked as a special education teacher and instructional coach, as well as an education writer and middle grade author. She is passionate about reading and literacy instruction, using technology in education, and connecting educators who are doing great things. Visit her web site.

11 Tips to Turn Every Student Into a Close Reader

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 12 Feb 2014 18:08:00 +0000

Let’s face it, close reading isn’t often a skill that comes naturally. When our students get a new reading assignment, their first instinct is often to race to the finish line rather than engage deeply with a text.

Getting students to slow down, engage with the text in different ways, and reflect as they read are challenges for every teacher, and are the goals of close reading. They’re also at the heart of the Common Core English Language Arts standards. There’s no magic way to turn your class into top-notch readers overnight, but there are specific close reading skills you can teach that will help your students now and down the line.

In Harlem, NY, Mark Gillingham, senior researcher with the Great Books Foundation, watches a group of seventh-grade students reading aloud “The White Umbrella.” At one moment the narration becomes unclear and the students begin debating which character is actually speaking. Their genuine interest in figuring out who is speaking drives them to read, reread, and discuss the section. “This close reading of text that leads to authentic discussion is what the Great Books Foundation wants to cultivate in ALL readers,” says Gillingham.

The key is learning how to annotate effectively. “When students are drawing conclusions as they annotate their texts, they’re using high level reading comprehension skills,” says Linda Barrett, senior training consultant with the Great Books Foundation. “As their annotation improves, students may begin marking the points when a character makes a decision or when an author uses a specific literary tool.”

Nurturing these higher-level skills takes time and many different techniques. You can begin to strengthen close reading in your classroom with these eleven expert tips.

1. Be a Close Reader Yourself
As you teach close reading, it’s important that you know the text backwards and forwards. Every time you raise an issue or ask a question for discussion (e.g. “How do we know that Macbeth feels guilty?”), you’ll know how to help your students find the textual evidence and where it’s located in the text. Modeling close reading through your class discussion is as important as direct instruction in close reading.

2. Teach “Stretch Texts”
The purpose for having students learn close reading skills, says Gillingham, is to enable them to read increasingly complex texts over time. As you choose texts to use with your students, think about your purpose behind each text. Look for stories or articles that raise authentic questions and could be interpreted differently depending on each student’s background knowledge or prior reading. If you’re working with a novel, focus on a section that lends itself to ambiguity and interpretation. And be sure to occasionally assign “stretch texts” in class. These are texts that you wouldn’t expect students to read independently, such as a critical essay or short piece of philosophy. “It’s a text that’s meant to be difficult,” says Gillingham, “and may require up to a week of study.”

3. Teach Students to Look for the Evidence
If your students leave your class understanding how to provide evidence from the text, consider your year an unqualified success. It’s the most central skill of the Common Core standards, says Elfreida Hiebert, president and CEO of Text Project. “The Common Core,” says Hiebert, “focuses our attention on what content the text is helping us gain.” Push students to go beyond recounting facts and plot points. As you’re planning, think about what higher order questions you can ask in class discussion and written assignments.

4. Always Set a Purpose for Reading
After your students have read a text through once, help them dig deeper by setting a specific purpose for reading it again. That purpose could be to track a concept or theme, or to analyze how an author uses a literary element or creates tone. Giving students something specific to focus on requires that they return to the text and really focus.

5. Differentiate Your Instruction
Even if students aren’t able to close read a novel independently, they can still apply strategies to a passage. Students may listen to an oral reading of the text, work in a small group with teacher support, or work with a partner to reread a text and prepare for discussion. If the majority of your class is not ready for independent close reading, keep in mind that the overarching idea is to get students to think about different ways that people can interpret text and build their own arguments around text, which can be done with picture books or read alouds as well as novels and short stories.

6. Focus on Making Connections
Rather than asking students a myriad of comprehension questions, focus their reading experiences around connecting with and remembering the text. Plan and ask questions that help you understand if students understand the text, and where they need to dig deeper into the big ideas. Hiebert suggests focusing on how the text relates to what the student has previously read, and what else they might learn about the topic after reading this selection.

7. Model it First
If students are new to close reading, spend time modeling how to think about a prompt and how to annotate the text. You might want to use a document camera to project pages of the text and read through and annotate a passage around a central question, modeling your thinking. After you do a few pages, release the work to students and have them take the lead.

8. Let Them Make Mistakes
If some of your students have clearly misinterpreted the text, ask them to explain their thinking or help you see the connection they’ve made. This gives them a great opportunity to practice finding textual evidence. Students may also chime in with other interpretations. The important thing is that students clarify and refine their thinking strategies, not that everyone has the same “right” answer.

9. Close Read Across the Curriculum
Once students are familiar with close reading in one content area, expand the process to other texts and content areas. Close reading can happen in science, social studies, math, and other subjects. Students can spend time delving into charts and graphs in science, discussing a math concept, or working to truly understand the various interpretations of speech in social studies.

10. Use Student Questions to Drive Discussion
Here’s one technique to consider. During Great Books discussions, teachers start by compiling student and teacher questions that come from the text. Once the questions are compiled in a list, the teacher supports the students in reviewing all the questions, identifying ones that are similar and answering some of the factual questions that only require a short answer. Together, the class discusses the questions and decides which are the most interesting and worthy of further exploration. This is a great way to help your students learn to ask higher-order questions and to write good thesis statements.

11. Listen to Your Students
Along with close reading the text, you need to close read your students. When you begin to let students’ questions and ideas about the text take the lead, you’ll find your class will be much more invested in the reading. Your role will be to keep them grounded to the close reading process. If a student makes an assertion, can the class find the textual evidence for it? If not, why not? Is a new theory needed? As you probe into your students’ questions, you’ll learn more about where your students are and give them opportunities to engage deeper with the text. Ultimately, says Gillingham, “you are learning everything you can from your students.”

Celebrating Tove Jansson and Moomins

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 28 Jan 2014 16:42:00 +0000

January 2014 marks the centennial of the birth of Finnish writer and artist Tove Jansson. Her delightful story “The Hemulen Who Loved Silence” (Junior Great Books Series 4, Book Two) is a long-time favorite of Junior Great Books students. If you aren’t familiar with the story, I encourage you to read it—you’re unlikely to encounter a bored Hemulen pleasure-ground ticket puncher whose dream life isn’t what he envisioned elsewhere. I discovered the Moomin books and the world of Moominvalley when I was five, soon after my family transferred to Goose Bay, Labrador, and the strangeness of Jansson’s other-worldy characters and landscape made the strangeness of my new surroundings less intimidating.

Tove Jansson’s life was as rich as her imagination. Born in Helsinki, Finland, in 1914, into a family of the Swedish-speaking minority, her parents were both artists—her mother a designer, her father, a sculptor. Creativity was a given in Jansson’s family, to the extent that her father referred to her as an Artist with a capital A since birth. The family was close and supportive, and spent summers at a cottage on a small island in the Gulf of Finland. “Without a happy childhood,” she once observed, “I would never have started writing.”¹ Readers of her books will recognize Moominvalley life in her description of her youth:

"We lived in a large, dilapidated studio, and through the windows one could see the whole harbour and the roofs of Helsinki. I pitied other children who had to live in ordinary flats, who had living rooms without staircases and sleeping compartments up close to the ceiling, nothing like the mysterious jumble of turntables, sacks with plaster and cases with clay, pieces of wood and iron constructions where one could hide and build in peace. A home without sculptures seemed as naked to me as one without books . . . . " ²

As a young woman, Jansson studied book design in Stockholm and painting in Helsinki, Paris, and Florence. The first hippo-like Moomintroll appeared in public in 1938 when twenty-four-year-old Jansson worked as a cartoonist for a Finnish anti-fascist magazine—she published an anti-Hitler cartoon and signed it with a frowning Moomin. But Jansson drew the first frowning Moomintroll years earlier in an equally surprising location. When they were kids, Jansson and her brother Per used to share thoughts by writing on the outhouse wall at her family’s cottage. After Per wrote a complex quote from a philosopher, Tove wanted to contradict him but the quote "was so impossible to argue with that my only chance was to draw the ugliest figure I could." ³ Tove later said that the horrific war years motivated her to turn the frowning, ugly Moomin into a wide-eyed adventure seeker and observer that developed into the Moomin books.

Her first Moomin book, The Moomins and the Great Flood, was published in 1945, and three more followed by 1950. The Moomin books were wildly popular in Finland and Sweden, and they reached an international audience after the London Evening News began publishing a Moomin comic strip drawn by Jansson in 1952. Eventually Mooomin comic strips ran in twelve countries and hundreds of newspapers, and by the end of her seven-year contract Jansson had drawn more than 10,000 comic strip frames. Moomins grew into a cultural phenomenon—including Russian and Japanese television shows, plays, operas, and a theme park—and the nine books in the Moomin series have been translated into forty-three languages.

The splendid visuals and fun of the Moomin books are enough to captivate young readers, and older readers (including adults) react to the strong narratives of characters responding to uncertainty and pondering the problems of friendship, solitude, and freedom. The books center around the Moomin family—good-natured, naive Moomintroll who loves fun and adventure; his mother, strong, loving Moominmamma who rarely says no; and his top-hat-wearing father, Moominpapa, who loves the sea and keeps track of his many adventures in a book called Memoirs. Like Jansson’s family, the Mommins are eccentric, tolerant of diversity, live close to nature, and value personal freedom. The Moomin household welcomes all needy souls and orphans, and the books introduce a large cast of intriguing, fantastical creatures. Nature and the seasons play a large role in Moomin life, and Jansson’s basic philosophy of acceptance and quest for solitude resonant throughout.

When asked how she perceived her Moomin reading audience, Jansson explained:

I write for myself first, not children. But if my stories are directed toward a certain type of reader, then it has to be a “skrutt.” By that, I mean those who have a hard time fitting in somewhere; those on the fringe, the lost ones. We all try to avoid being viewed as a “skrutt . . . . “ ⁴

Jansson also published novels and short-story collections for adults, and illustrated English and Swedish additions of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Hunting of the Snark, as well as J. R. R. Tolkein’s The Hobbit. She died in 2001, but never distanced herself too far from the Moomins in her lifetime. "You feel a cold wind on your legs when you step outside Moominvalley Valley, ⁵ she said.

Read more about the official centennial celebration Tove 100—Celebrating the art and life of Tove Jansson

1. Bo Carpelin, translation of “Tove Jansson,” Min väg till barnboken, B. Strömstedt, ed., Bonniers, 1964, as cited in Something About the Author, Volume 41, Anne Commire, ed. Gale, 1985. p.109.

2. Doris de Montreville and Donna Hill, eds., Third Book of Junior Authors. H. W. Wilson, 1972. pp. 147–8.

3. “Tove Jansson and the Moomin Story,” by Pekka Tarkka and Peter Marten, updated April 2010,thisisFINLAND, produced by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland and published by the Finland Promotion Board,

4. Carpelin, as cited in Commire, p. 113.

5. "Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words," by Boel Westin, Review by Sue Prideaux

Sharon Crowley works in K–12 marketing at the Great Books Foundation.

Another Best Books of 2013 List

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 18 Dec 2013 18:00:00 +0000

It’s list season again. Best songs. Best movies. Best vacation destinations. Best new restaurants. And of course, best books. Every year I’m thrilled to be reminded of the amazing creativity and focused discipline that results in more worthy books than I’ll ever be able to read.

These are my top 5 books of 2013. Each one captivated me from start to finish, and I couldn’t choose a favorite if someone forced me. I hope they inspire you to reflect on your best reads of 2013.

The Good Lord Bird by James McBride
(review from the National Book Award web site)

"Greedily" is the best way to describe how I read the historical novel The Good Lord Bird. I knew I should slow down and savor McBride’s phenomenal storytelling, but I couldn’t. The book starts with the sentence “I was born a colored man and don't you forget it. But I lived as a colored woman for seventeen years,” and only gets better. The narrator, Henry Shackleford, is a child slave rescued/kidnapped (there’s a fine line between the two in this story) by famed abolitionist John Brown after his father dies in a shootout. Dressed in an old sack that Brown assumes is a dress, Henry is too frightened to correct Brown when he thinks Henry is a girl. Thus begins Henry's—who is nicknamed Little Onion—new life as he accompanies the zealous, near lunatic Brown and his band of followers on Brown’s quest to end slavery. Funny, endearing, and often painful to read, The Good Lord Bird deserves all of the praise it has received.

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion
(review from the Guardian )

Characters who contentedly live outside of the norm appeal to me, and that’s probably why this book made my list. The Rosie Project won’t lead to meaty discussions or hours of reflection, but it’s funny and sweet and sometimes that is exactly what I want from a book. Don Tillman is a brilliant, logical genetics professor who lacks basic social skills and who is constantly perplexed by the behavior of others. Although he doesn’t acknowledge it, it’s obvious to all who know him that Don has a form of autism that limits his ability to engage in perceived normal ways. He’s never had much luck with the opposite sex, but when a neighbor casually comments that he’d make a good husband he embarks on what he calls the Wife Project to find a suitable spouse. In the midst of his searchwhich includes a questionnaire for prospective matesDon meets Rosie, his behavioral opposite, who is looking for her biological father. Shifting from the Wife Project to help with her Father Project, Don is surprised by how much Rosie brings to his life, and the results are delightful to witness.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
(review from the New York Times Sunday Book Review)

In this slim, fairy-tale-like novel, a nameless middle-aged artist returns to where he grew up in Sussex to attend a funeral. Driving to the end of a once familiar lane unleashes memories of frightening and fantastical events from his seventh year—a lonely time when no one came to his birthday party and a boarder in his family’s home accidentally kills his beloved kitten. When the boarder is found dead in the family car, he’s shuffled away to a nearby farmhouse where he meets a mysterious group of women, including Lettie, a girl just a few years older, who strangely knew about what happened and why. The Hempstock women are guardians against terrible forces that threaten all things and the young protagonist gets caught in the battle to stop these forces. My favorite character is Lettie, who tells the narrator: "I’m going to tell you something important. Grown-ups don’t look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside they’re big and thoughtless and they always know what they’re doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. The truth is, there aren’t any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.” Gaiman writes about the darkness of childhoodmerging imagination, memory, and magiclike no other contemporary writer.

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
(review from the Man Booker Prize site)

When I read about this bookan 800+ page complex murder mystery set in the gold mines of 19th-century New Zealandmy first thought was that it was probably 300 pages too long. But reading the book proved me wrong—Eleanor Catton didn’t need a better editor and she’s in full control of the book’s many tightly constructed plots. Walter Moody arrives in Hokitika, New Zealand from Edinburgh to make his fortune in gold. Not long off the ship he encounters twelve men (characters woven around signs of the Zodiac) convened in a hotel lobby discussing disturbing local events—their stories, secrets, and motivations unveil and intertwine in endlessly entertaining and unpredictable ways. The Victorian sensationalism, the astrological overlay, and the spiraling form would be too gimmicky with lesser writers, but with Catton’s skill it all works. A rich, atmospheric writer, Catton vividly depicts the locales and lives of gold seekers, prostitutes, power holders, and eccentric townspeople so engagingly that I missed them as soon as I closed the back cover.

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

(review from the New York Times Sunday Book Review)

I eagerly awaited Donna Tartt’s third novel and as trite as it sounds, it was worth the wait. Thirteen-year-old Theo survives a Metropolitan Musuem bombing that kills his beloved mother. In the rubble, a dying man insists that Theo take his signet ring and a small Dutch masterpiece that was blown out of its frameThe Goldfinch. His grief and the items connected to it form the trajectory of his life. Theo goes to live with the Barbours, the wealthy family of a school friend, where his alienation and loss of identity grow. Following the dying man’s instructions on what to do with his ring, Theo is drawn into the world of the pretty red-haired girl who drew him away from his mother’s side at the museum that fateful day. His unreliable father eventually shows up and takes him to an isolated Las Vegas subdivision where he meets another motherless teen, the wild and captivating Boris, who becomes Theo’s strongest ally. Tartt masterfully conveys the voice and perspective of youth and I cheered for sorrowful Theo throughout this heartbreaking book.

Sharon Crowley works in K–12 marketing at the Great Books Foundation. She has a well-worn library card, but still spends too much money on books.

Parkway Elementary School Principal Credits Junior Great Books for Vast Student Gains

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 02 Dec 2013 17:26:00 +0000

In spring 2012, ﬁfth-grade students at Parkway Elementary School in Virginia Beach achieved an unprecedented level of success on the reading portion of their Virginia Standards of Learning test: 100 percent received passing grades. To put this achievement into perspective, just under 80 percent passed the previous year.

What changed at Parkway to make such a leap possible? Principal Nanocie “Toni” Diggs gave credit to the school’s widespread implementation of Junior Great Books in 2011-2012.

“Absolutely,” she said. “I do give a lot of credit to Junior Great Books for our success last year.” Diggs noted that the use of Junior Great Books has changed the learning and teaching culture at Parkway. Where students once would have given “yes” or “no” answers, they now dig into texts to give reasons for the answers they provide. "The students can’t just give a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ response anymore . . . There has to be a ‘because,’ ” said Lisa Marler, a second-grade teacher at Parkway. Diggs also noted that this habit of probing more deeply for answers ﬁts well with general problem solving and critical thinking—twenty-ﬁrst century skills that students need to develop.

Junior Great Books has been used throughout the nation since it was ﬁrst developed in 1962. The program is no stranger to Virginia Beach School District, having been used as a gifted resource for many years. Junior Great Books is well known for its outstanding literature and its unique method of learning, Shared Inquiry™—a Socratic discussion method in which teachers ask students questions about a text that are central to the text’s meaning, and that have more than one defensible answer.

After years of its use in gifted classrooms, however, reading specialist Grier Crosby proved that Junior Great Books could be valuable to other students as well when she teamed with the teacher of a ﬁfth-grade inclusion class to bring the program to special-needs and regular-ability students. According to Diggs, “special-needs students who never passed a state assessment” passed in reading because of their involvement with Junior Great Books. “Their conﬁdence rose, and these students were able to perform better in other subject areas because of the ‘I can do it’ attitude they developed,” she said.

The success in the inclusion class inspired Diggs to implement Junior Great Books for all students in grades 2–5. Students and teachers are excited that the program has become a permanent part of their curriculum. Diggs asked one fifth-grade girl if she likes Junior Great Books. “Oh yes,” the girl replied. “Why?” Diggs asked. “Because we all get to talk, and we get to talk to each other.” The student even volunteered, “We get to go back into the text and prove our answers.”

When students learn the habit of going back to texts to provide evidence for answers in Junior Great Books, they naturally transfer it to their studies in other subjects. “Students are proving their answers in social studies and science as well,” Diggs said. And teachers who have become accustomed to the deeper questioning used in Junior Great Books ﬁnd themselves asking further questions in other subjects. “They might be studying the Civil War or Virginia history,” Diggs said. “Teachers will ask an initial question, get an answer from a student, and then probe deeper, asking ‘What makes you think that?’ And students are ready to go back to their books and ﬁnd proof for their answers.”

Teachers at Parkway have discovered many beneﬁts of the Junior Great Books program. Fifth-grade teacher Kimberly Alvers lauded the program because it “gives the quiet ones a voice.” Teachers qualify to implement Junior Great Books by taking the Foundation's core professional learning course which gives them a solid grounding in the Shared Inquiry method of learning. One thing they learn is how to help children who are normally reserved feel safe venturing their own opinions about the story everyone in the class has read. Over time, as the ﬁfth-grade girl observed, students soon become involved in a conversation with each other, not just a question-and-answer session with the teacher.

Alvers also noted that Junior Great Books’ interpretive activities address the needs of different types of learners. “For example, the diverse writing prompts give students different approaches to express their opinions,” she said. Students are given the chance to practice expository and creative writing as they complete a Junior Great Books unit, and they are introduced to a variety of writing concepts and structures, including paragraphs, essays, letters, poems, and stories.

Junior Great Books can even “give teachers a bit of a help in coping with their busy schedules,” Marler said. Alvers added, “The lesson plans are already there . . . All the techniques that we need to address—main idea, problem solving, critical thinking—are techniques already covered in the program’s lesson plans.” Indeed, every Junior Great Books unit includes detailed instructions for carrying out prereading, note-taking, vocabulary, discussion, and writing activities, as well as curriculum connections to other subjects.

Teachers can also continue to hone their Great Books skills as they implement the program. Kriko Michaels, a staff trainer for the Great Books Foundation, has been helping Parkway teachers master Shared Inquiry discussion and the directed note activity since they began their implementation. As Diggs put it, teachers “need praises and polishing, just as students do.” Michaels has been on hand to meet with teachers, model exemplary Shared Inquiry skills, and team-teach with Parkway faculty. “Kriko has a passion for the program, and it is evident in how he trains our teachers,” said Mackenzie Robinson, another ﬁfth-grade teacher at Parkway.

The improvements in scores are a testament to the level of commitment from both the administration and the teachers,” Micheals said. “Like any skill, the facilitation of Shared Inquiry discussion must be honed by a committed practice. The test scores are proof that the teachers were able to impart the habits of mind of great critical thinkers. Students at Parkway are able to clearly articulate their thinking, cite evidence, and respond nimbly to counterarguments.”

It seems clear that Junior Great Books will be a ﬁxture at Parkway Elementary School. Principal Diggs noted that this year at “literacy night,” dedicated to literacy practices in the classroom, teachers were given a choice of what to present to parents who attended. “Fifth-, fourth-, and third-grade teachers all chose to discuss and model several components of Junior Great Books,” she said. Teachers were happy to tell parents about the program that has served them and their students so well.

National Book Release Event! Standing Down: From Warrior to Civilian

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 22 Nov 2013 18:11:00 +0000

If you’re in the Chicago area please join us December 4 for a free event celebrating the national book release of Standing Down: From Warrior to Civilian. Funded by generous grants from the NEH and the Chicago Mercantile exchange, Standing Down is an eloquent collection that speaks to the transition from military service to civilian life.

The event will take place at Chicago’s beautiful Pritzker Military Library and will include a panel discussion about war and literature. Several authors whose work appears in Standing Down—Benjamin Busch, Ed Hrivnak, and Edward Wood Jr.—will attend and talk about how their own military experiences shaped their writing. If you know or love a veteran, you should add Standing Down to your reading list and join us December 4!

Reserve your seat now or read more about Standing Down.

To Honor Our Veterans—Standing Down: From Warrior to Civilian

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 14 Nov 2013 17:30:00 +0000

“Home: it was less of a place than an act of imagination now, a realm fundamentally disconnected from what life had become. The time difference was part of it—dawn in America was dusk in Iraq—but after nine months it was more than that. Soldiers had a hard time explaining Iraq to one another; how could they explain it to someone whose life had nothing to do with the pucker factor of climbing yet again into a Humvee?”

—“The Good Soldiers,” by David Finkel, in Standing Down: From Warrior to Civilian

Since September 11, 2001, approximately 2.5 million American military personnel have been deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan, or both. More than a third of them were deployed more than once. Given these enormous numbers, many people are personally connected to a recently returned veteran. The connection may be close—a niece, a brother, a cousin, a spouse—or it may be more distant—a colleague’s daughter, a former student, a childhood friend. Even if you don’t personally know a veteran, they are important members of your community. And sadly, many of them struggle to reintegrate themselves into home environments that feel very different upon their return.

The challenges veterans face when transitioning to postwar civilian life are not unique to recent vets. Productively reintegrating into their communities, recovering from emotional and/or physical wounds, and relating to family and friends who haven’t experienced the reality of war have all been daunting "welcome home" tasks of soldiers for centuries. From the Civil War to both World Wars, from Korea to Vietnam—some things, it seems, never change.

It’s hard to know how to support our veterans. Is there a way to ease their transition? At the Great Books Foundation, we grappled with that question and wondered if reading and discussing literature could help. Could we provide an opportunity for vets to come together and reflect on their war experience? Could Shared Inquiry™ discussion help vets support each other and create a forum for friends and families to better understand the perspectives of their loved ones?

Our answer to these questions resulted in a powerful new anthology: Standing Down: From Warrior to Civilian. With 44 selections ranging from Homer’s Iliad to personal accounts by vets who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, the collection is ideal for veterans, friends, and families, as well as readers interested in the meaning of war and military service. Standing Down was created for Talking Service, our new initiative to develop reading and discussion programs for veterans.

Talking Service features discussions focused on the stories, essays, personal accounts, and poetry in Standing Down; skilled discussion leaders who help participants speak up about their service experiences and the challenge of returning to civilian life; and convenient discussion sites at veteran’s service centers and other local community centers.

Reactions to Talking Service and Standing Down have been incredibly positive at veterans centers in the Chicago area, and discussions are scheduled through the end of the year. Authors whose work appears in Standing Down (such as Ed Hrivnak) are also starting discussion groups in other parts of the country.

“The enthusiastic support of Talking Service by veterans themselves has been overwhelming and gratifying,” says Donald Whitfield, Director of Great Books Discussions and founder of the Talking Service program. “In many years of leading Shared Inquiry discussions, I have rarely had the privilege of being with such insightful and tough-minded individuals who engage with ideas as if their lives depended on it.”

Of all the outstanding anthologies the Foundation publishes, Standing Down is a personal favorite. When my father—an Air Force veteran— returned from Vietnam in 1973, vets were vilified and scorned on their return. I was too young to wonder about his distress, but now I can imagine how difficult it was for him. I thought about my dad’s experience when I read a 2011 Pew Research Center survey that found 44% of veterans surveyed who served in the ten years since the 2001 attacks acknowledged that reentry to civilian life was difficult for them. Standing Down and Talking Service are the Foundation’s efforts to acknowledge the struggles of all veterans and to hopefully lessen them.

The national book release for Standing Down will take place on December 4 at Chicago’s Pritzker Military Library. The event will include a panel of the book’s contributors, including Benjamin Busch, Ed Hrivnak, and Edward Wood Jr . The book release is open to the public, so we invite you to attend. You can register now or read more about the event.

There are numerous ways you can become involved with Talking Service, whether you are a veteran yourself, a veteran’s family member, or a concerned citizen who wants to support those who have served in the armed forces. For more information, visit talkingservice.greatbooks.org or call 312-646-7167.

Talking Service is supported by generous grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Wounded Warrior Project, and the Plante-Moran Company. Standing Down was funded by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Sharon Crowley works in marketing at the Great Books Foundation.

Teaching More Nonfiction and Informational Texts

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 17:51:00 +0000

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) make a lot of new demands on
teachers—requiring teachers to provide more nonfiction and informational texts at all grade levels and to shift to a more facilitative style of teaching, and requiring students to use text-based answers to demonstrate comprehension are just a few of them. With new demands come increased pressure, and we know transitioning to CCSS isn’t easy for already busy teachers. We want to make the transition easier. Our new one-day course, Using Shared Inquiry™ with Nonfiction, prepares teachers for the new reading requirements by demonstrating how to use complex texts and improving their questioning strategies so they can make sure their students get the most out of reading nonfiction.

The new standards' strong emphasis on nonfiction is a dramatic shift for teachers. CCSS calls for a 50/50 split between informational and literary texts in kindergarten, gradually increasing to a 70/30 split in high school. Reaction to the focus on nonfiction varies, but we at the Foundation agree that reading nonfiction is important for all students. Nonfiction helps students better understand a topic, issue, or problem by providing information—facts, terminology, and definitions—that make the subject real. While fiction helps students understand the universality of human emotion and experience, nonfiction exposes them to the broader context of real world issues. Reading more informational texts and nonfiction may engage reluctant readers and boost their interest in reading. Students who are quick to label fiction boring may be drawn to books about subjects that interest them—and after reading a book about snakes, music, or American Indians they’re likely to find fiction that refers to these subjects more fascinating and relevant. We don’t perceive the new nonfiction mandate as a challenge to the importance of reading fiction—we see it as affirmation of the importance of providing students with a variety of texts to improve reading comprehension, and Shared Inquiry has long provided students with the reading strategies and skills CCSS now demands.

Educators accustomed to using Shared Inquiry with fiction may wonder how an inquiry-based method of learning works with nonfiction. The answer is simple: questioning engages students more closely with what they read, including nonfiction and informational texts. Quality nonfiction is much more than a resource of facts: quality nonfiction is an exploration and discovery of a new subject. When teachers use questioning strategies, students explore and discover on a deeper level. Complex texts that raise questions requiring students to read closely to answer them are particularly well suited for Shared Inquiry—texts such as historical documents, speeches, and first person accounts. Consider these questions about the Declaration of Independence: “Why do the colonists feel a need to proclaim to the world their reasons for declaring independence?” and “Why are the inhabitants of the thirteen colonies able to think of themselves as ‘one people’?” (from The Will of the People: Readings in American Democracy). Asking students questions like these about nonfiction and informational texts takes them from simply learning and filing away new facts to examining and reflecting on issues behind the facts.

Using Shared Inquiry with Nonfiction will benefit teachers familiar with Shared Inquiry and those new to the method. The course demonstrates how to adopt an inquiry stance with nonfiction and informational texts, how to use questions to explore the meaning of the content to which the text refers, and how to link related texts to differentiate for various students and foster cross-curricular connections.

For example, If You Lived at the Time of the American Revolution (a book in our Grade 4 Nonfiction Library), introduces rich content issues—such as freedom and equality—to students learning about the significance of the Declaration of Independence in their social studies class. This is an example of a book that can help address questions students raise during a sharing questions activity about the Declaration. Even fourth grade students can formulate and answer their own questions about complex issues such as freedom and equality. And developing those strategies early on can improve their reading comprehension and critical thinking skills across the curriculum. Using Shared Inquiry with Nonfiction will demonstrate how to make questioning a part of all instruction and will show how Shared Inquiry requires students to provide text-based answers.

We know the increased focus on nonfiction and informational texts may feel daunting, but we’re confident that Using Shared Inquiry with Nonfiction will make implementing CCSS easier. Educational trends come and go, but improving students’ essential literacy
skills—reading comprehension, writing, and critical thinking—remain a primary focus year after year. Shared Inquiry has been improving those essential skills since 1962 and CCSS provides a new opportunity for teachers and students to realize its benefits across the curriculum.

Contact a Great Books sales representative to host a Using Shared Inquiry with Nonfiction course in your district or to find a course near you.

Sharon Crowley works in K–12 marketing at the Great Books Foundation.

Does Writing Improve Reading?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 22 May 2013 16:55:00 +0000

Successful authors often encourage young writers to read more to develop their craft. When William Faulkner visited a University of Mississippi creative writing class a student asked him, “What is the best training for writing? Courses in writing? Or what?” Faulkner replied, “Read, read, read! Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad; and see how they do it. When a carpenter learns his trade, he does so by observing. Read! You’ll absorb it. Write. If it is good you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.”¹

Research supports Faulkner’s advice, and it doesn’t only apply to aspiring undergraduate writers. When children read extensively they become better writers. As creatures of imitation, it makes sense. Reading well-crafted sentences helps us learn to compose well-crafted sentences ourselves. So reading more improves writing, but is the opposite also true—can writing improve reading?

The answer is yes. Writing to Read: Evidence for How Writing Can Improve Reading, a Carnegie Corporation report released by the Alliance for Excellent Education, concludes, “The evidence is clear: writing can be a vehicle for improving reading. In particular, having students write about a text they are reading enhances how well they comprehend it. . . findings show that having students write about texts they read, explicitly teaching writing skills and processes, and having students write more do improve reading skills and comprehension.”

I know—there are endless reports about education and instructional practices. It’s hard to deduce which findings are useful to teachers. However, Writing to Read stands out because it summarizes high-quality research using the powerful statistical method of meta-analysis. The method allowed researchers to determine the consistency and the strength of an instructional practice, and to identify effective instructional writing practices that improve the reading abilities of students. By identifying which writing practices positively impact reading, the report helps teachers implement the best practices in their classrooms.

Writing to Read concludes that the most important practice is to have students write about texts they read. In fact, the report states, “Writing about a text proved to be better than just reading it, reading and rereading it, reading and studying it, reading and discussing it, and receiving reading instruction.”

The findings don’t surprise us—students write about what they read in all Great Books programs. Great Books writing instruction aligns with the report’s findings even more specifically—Writing to Read found that student comprehension improves when they respond to a text in writing (writing personal reactions, analyzing the text); when they answer questions about a text in writing; when they create and answer written questions about texts; and when they write notes about a text. Students do all of these things in Great Books writing activities.

In each Great Books unit (Junior Great Books Series 3–5 and Great Books Roundtable 6–8), student writing is connected with the stories they read. Students learn how to write well-organized expository, creative, and interpretative essays; they write notes, responses to, and questions about each story; they use modeling, guided practice, webs, and templates to organize their thoughts; they edit and revise their writing with the help of peer reviews and rubrics; they even respond to other students’ ideas in writing. All writing activities are linked to the story, repeatedly bringing students back to the text and engaging them with it in a variety of ways.

Confirmation of the interconnectedness of reading and writing is nothing new. But evidence that writing improves reading—specifically that writing about texts improves students’ comprehension—is relatively new and is certainly worth remembering when planning curriculum.

While Faulkner’s advice to “Read, read, read!” still holds, now we know students should also write, write, write about what they read.

1. Conversations with William Faulkner, edited by Thomas Inge

Sharon Crowley works in K–12 marketing at the Great Books Foundation.

Special Report - Finding Quality Nonfiction - WeAreTeachers

noreply@blogger.com (The Great Books Foundation) — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 17:40:00 +0000

Special Report - Finding Quality Nonfiction - WeAreTeachers

Symphony in the Classroom: A Newcomer's Guide to Peter and the Wolf

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 20:11:00 +0000

In 1936, Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev was presented with an unusual challenge. He was asked by the Children's Musical Theater in Moscow to produce a piece of music especially for children, something that could spark their interest and inspire a lasting love for music beginning in the very first years of school. He accepted the offer, and in a matter of weeks he created one of the most well known pieces of music for children, Peter and the Wolf. As teachers and musicians, we still face the same challenge today: How can we get students to engage with music? How can we get them to listen actively in a way that promotes constructive learning in addition to enjoyment? Prokofiev created an introductory lesson plan, and he embedded it directly into his composition. To answer these questions, we need only to follow his example.

Using only instrumental music and the voice of a narrator, Prokofiev retells a classic Russian folk tale. "Peter and the Wolf" is the story of a young boy who ventures out into the forest to capture a wolf, befriending many other animals along the way. The instruments "act out" each character in this twenty-five-minute symphony conveying all of the events of the story solely with the use of sound. Part of the fun for teachers is deciding which recording to use in the classroom, many of which are voiced by celebrities. Some noteworthy versions include the voices of Sting, David Bowie, David Attenborough, and, my personal favorite, Sir Patrick Stewart, among others. The narrator is one of the things that make this piece unique, because it shows that the composer laid out a welcoming foundation for students that he maintained throughout the symphony.

One of the central ideas of Peter and the Wolf is that a character's voice can be represented in myriad ways, following any whim of the imagination. The use of symbolism is woven into countless literary classics that kids will read as they grow up, and having exposure to these characters at a young age lays a wonderful foundation for learning about more abstract ideas like metaphors later on. Have the students talk about what various animals sound like, or have them create noises in the classroom and try to relate those sounds to nature. Wrinkling paper could be the sound of leaves, or falling pencils could be the sound of raindrops. If you have the resources, this is also the perfect time to bring in a few small instruments to let the students experiment and get acquainted with what the instruments look like. Even showing them pictures of the instruments will give them a much-needed mental image to hold on to while listening. They may be amused to know that a fully assembled bassoon is almost as tall as a grown woman, and certainly taller than the average elementary school student. These preparation activities allow the children to feel more comfortable with something they've never heard before and are a perfect complement to other activities that can be done while the music is playing.

During the story, each character appears several times, represented by its specific instrument. The students can be divided into small groups representing each character; each group should listen for their parts. Another option is to give each group a different scene from the story to draw. For example: "Suddenly, something caught Peter's attention. He noticed a cat crawling through the grass." The students can listen for this event in the music and add their pictures to a story board as the music is playing. The class can use what they hear in the music to create their own group illustration of the story. Or, it might be more fitting with older students to discuss the moral intention of the story instead. Is this a story about a boy who disobeyed his grandfather, or is it about a boy who acted bravely to save the forest animals?

Peter and the Wolf presents endless possibilities for children of all ages to discover and indulge in the fantasy of music. The instrumental backdrop provides a rich landscape of sounds to spark the imagination, while a friendly narrative voice welcomes the listener into a new world for the first time. This children's symphony is one of the great works of classical music, but it is not the only option for integrating music into the classroom. Students could choose songs that they feel represent the current reading assignment and present their reasoning to the class. They could also analyze song lyrics as if they were poetry. There are endless ways to get students involved with music on a more personal level, and I enthusiastically invite you to add them here. Have you taught Peter and the Wolf in your classroom? What are some other ways that we can use music to strengthen our lesson plans and spark the imaginations of our students?

Jamie Spagnola is a Customer Service Representative at the Great Books Foundation. She also holds a BA in music from the Bower School of Music at Florida Gulf Coast University.

Question from the Classroom

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 15:23:00 +0000

Is it ever okay to ask my students evaluative questions?

Shared Inquiry™ focuses on interpretive questions—questions that invite students to explore the meaning of a selection through close reading and thoughtful exchange of ideas about the text itself. Interpretation begins with the questions that we ask ourselves as we read. Why does a character act in a certain way? Why does the author include a particular detail? Why do things turn out as they do? What does a certain word mean in context? As we develop answers to such questions, we get a better sense of how the parts of the selection fit together and what the text means.

Evaluative questions, on the other hand, ask students to judge an author's creation in light of their own life experiences, values, and beliefs; to decide, for example, whether they agree with the author's ideas or approve of a character's actions. In Shared Inquiry discussion, students are encouraged to defer judgment about the selection until they have completed their work of interpretation. If evaluative questions are introduced prematurely, they are likely to invite digression and elicit only personal opinions having little to do with the selection itself.

However, asking students to think briefly about their own attitudes toward a character or situation in a story can sometimes be an effective way of involving them more deeply in the interpretive process. For example, if students participating in a Shared Inquiry discussion of Langston Hughes's "Thank You, M'am" (Series 4, Book One) have trouble responding to the question Why does Mrs. Jones give Roger money for the blue suede shoes?, a skilled leader might ask, Can you describe a situation where you might help someone who tried to steal from you? After collecting a number of different answers, the leader could then lead discussion back to the original question, Why does Mrs. Jones give Roger money?

Interpreting a work of literature draws on students' personal feelings and perspectives in many ways, and the interpretive activities in Junior Great Books® are designed to help students make the best possible use of these connections in exploring the selection at hand.

For example, the Prereading activity for "Thank You, M'am" asks students to share their thoughts about being taught right from wrong. To help students think about how people learn good behavior, the leader asks them to recall someone who taught them right from wrong, or a time when they taught someone right from wrong. After engaging in this personal reflection, students will be in a much better position to interpret the dynamic between Mrs. Jones and Roger and discuss why she gives him money for the shoes.

After Shared Inquiry discussion, the expository and creative writing activities give students further opportunities to express their thinking about a story. Students are called upon to use their own knowledge and experience to extend their thinking about a text, to relate it more concretely to their own lives, and to take full advantage of shared inquiry's potential for helping them improve their language arts skills.

The creative writing activity for "Thank You M'am" asks students to write a letter from one character to the other. The activity teaches them how to write an informal letter using a graphic organizer for ideas, and enables them to further develop their interpretation of the characters' actions.

Consider this question, Does a person need to be caught doing something wrong—like Roger— before he/she can learn right from wrong? Students will be prepared to address the issues in this evaluative question only after coming to an understanding of what Roger learns in "Thank You, M'am." In Shared Inquiry discussion, concentrate on interpretive questions, referring to the facts of the work for evidence and reserving evaluation for a time when interpretation is complete.

Michael Elsey is the Vice President of New Media at the Great Books Foundation. He has a long history as a Senior Trainer for the Foundation and in his new role is eager to explore the wonders of technology to enhance and expand the experience of Shared Inquiry discussion.

Remembering Diane Wolkstein (1942–2013)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 22:11:00 +0000

One of the highlights of my eight years of working for the Great Books Foundation was this past June, when I arranged for author and storyteller Diane Wolkstein to visit our office.

Diane's work is a perennial favorite at the Foundation, with three of her stories appearing in Junior Great Books anthologies: "Mother of the Waters" (Junior Great Books Read-Aloud, Pegasus Series), "The Banza" (Junior Great Books Series 3, Book One), and "White Wave" (Junior Great Books Series 3, Book Two).

Her visit came about as a result of a phone call some months earlier, in which I was requesting permission from Diane to reprint a story of hers yet again in one of our upcoming projects. As we spoke about the terms of the agreement, we got to talking about storytelling, about how wonderful it can be for children to hear a story told well, how it will stay with them all their lives. Diane sent me a link to her website, where I learned that I was speaking with the woman who had at one time been given the title of New York City's Official Storyteller! I called her back and asked her how it was that we'd never had her record her stories for the audio CD that accompanies our anthologies. I could almost picture her smile as she told me that she didn't know why, but that she'd be delighted to visit us sometime and record them.

It was an absolute privilege to have Diane visit us. Over lunch, we had a wonderful time listening to her anecdotes, stories, and adventures from around the world. She gave an amazing rendition of both "The Banza" and "Mother of the Waters" in our recording studio, as well as a fascinating interview on the nature of storytelling for our website.

We at the Great Books Foundation were deeply saddened to hear of her death last week and are honored to have had the chance to collaborate with her.

Patrick Hurley is Production and Permissions Coordinator for the Great Books Foundation. He also writes speculative fiction, and his work can be found in the magazine Big Pulp as well as in various e-zines and podcasts. When not training for marathons, he is at work on his first novel.

Book to Movie: The Life of Pi

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 21:44:00 +0000

I'm usually disappointed when I learn that a favorite book or story is being made into a movie. Even though I often enjoy film versions of great tales, I assume that what I love about a book will be lost in adaptation. When I heard that Yann Martel's Man Booker Prize–winning Life of Pi was being adapted into a film, I didn't think anyone could bring such a beautiful book to the screen without abandoning what made it beautiful. What a shame, I thought, not every good book makes an equally good movie.

Reading is a private experience. A stranger's words combine with our imagination to create images and perceptions that exist solely in our heads. Sure, we talk about the books we read with friends, and our reactions to them are often similar—but the way a story looks and sounds in our mind is individual. Each of us hears the cadence of a character's voice, sees the shifts of emotion on characters' faces, and senses the atmosphere of a described location in different ways. When a book is brought to the screen, not only is there the chance that what we see will be far different than what we envisioned and felt reading the book, there's also the risk that the movie will provide so much less of everything compared to our reading that we will lose some of what the text gave us. It's similar to reconnecting with a friend from childhood as an adult. If we like the person, it's wonderful, and we're delighted to see them again. But if the grown-up version of our friend disappoints us, our fond childhood memories are now tainted by the reality of an adult we can't wait to escape.

With this risk in mind I saw Life of Pi. If you're unfamiliar with the book here's a simple synopsis: It's about an inquisitive Indian boy, Piscine (Pi) Patel, whose father decides to sell the family's small zoo and move the family and animals to Canada. After a storm sinks their ship, Pi is left sharing a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. There's much more to it, as Life of Pi is a story of stories within stories, but I won't go into the layers of the book. In the end the reader is left wondering which stories to believe and why he or she might want to believe them. Given that most of the book chronicles the 227 days that Pi has no one to talk to but a tiger, and that it contains more reflection than action, I assumed the work was unfilmable. But thanks to the incredible talents of director Ang Lee and screenwriter David Magee, I was wrong.

The movie is gorgeous, epic, and as captivating as the novel. Lee's a sensuous storyteller (he also directed the lush Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Brokeback Mountain, and Sense and Sensibility) and the vast setting of a seemingly endless ocean and sky allows him to adopt a wide range of sweeping, magnificent views. In all of them sit Pi and Richard Parker, two small, powerful forces of nature at the mercy of larger forces. Both boy and animal must adapt quickly to their confining circumstances to survive. Using CGI and a rotation of real tigers, Lee brings Richard Parker to glorious, believable life without Hollywood overkill. Life of Pi is not a Disney-like story and, thankfully, the film isn't Disney-like either. Animals aren't portrayed with human qualities, and the human connection to animals and nature isn't sentimentalized or depicted as if humans can control either. Lee also uses 3D to extraordinary effect; he doesn't employ it to surprise the audience, but only to enhance the depth and color of the glorious natural world. Screenwriter David Magee is equally responsible for the film's success. Magee and Lee worked on the script for over three and a half years, writing 170 drafts. Each received an Oscar nomination for his work on the film, a confirmation that their dedication to the material was worth it.

Life of Pi is the type of film adaptation all readers hope for—it enhances the experience of reading the book and creates an even greater appreciation of the author's work. I couldn't stop talking about and reflecting on the book when I read it in 2001, and seeing the movie years later brought me back to the same place with equal intensity. While I marveled at Martel's stunning, descriptive writing and his creativity in weaving stories together as I read the book, seeing Lee's eloquent interpretation onscreen somehow magnified my impression of Martel's talent. And last week I experienced the best possible outcome of a book-to-film adaptation—a young friend who saw the movie, but hadn't read the book, asked to borrow my copy of Life of Pi. I look forward to talking about the book, yet again, with her soon.

Sharon Crowley works in K–12 marketing at the Great Books Foundation.

Online Learning

noreply@blogger.com (The Great Books Foundation) — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 18:09:00 +0000

Webinars

Great Books webinars give you what you need to know now. From learning new instructional strategies to improving your skills leading Shared Inquiry™ discussions, our 90-minute interactive webinars make it easy to gain insights and collaborate with colleagues across the country.

Currently Scheduled Webinars

Date	Topic	Time
February 5, 2013	Close Reading for Informational Texts	3:00 PM to 4:00 PM (Central Time)
February 20, 2013	The Power of Student Questions	3:00 PM to 4:00 PM (Central Time)
February, 21 2013	Shared Inquiry Review	3:00 PM to 4:00 PM (Central Time)
March, 11 2013	Shared Inquiry Review	3:00 PM to 4:00 PM (Central Time)
March 14, 2013	The Power of Student Questions	3:00 PM to 4:00 PM (Central Time)
April, 18 2013	The Power of Student Questions	3:00 PM to 4:00 PM (Central Time)
April 19, 2013	Shared Inquiry Review	3:00 PM to 4:00 PM (Central Time)

Need another date? Click here.

Home by Toni Morrison

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 17:21:00 +0000

Knopf, 160 pages

Reviewed by Sharon Crowley

Most readers have authors' names, not just book titles, on their reading lists. Anticipating a new work by a favorite writer is one of the finest pleasures a reader enjoys, and when that writer is prolific and rarely disappointing, anticipation of the next book is that much greater. Toni Morrison has yet to prove undeserving of my high hopes, and while her tenth novel, Home, isn’t as linguistically grand or meaty as her master works, it reaffirms my resolve to read whatever she writes.

Home starts with Frank Money, a drifting, emotionally wounded 24-year-old Korean War veteran restrained in a psych ward for an offense he can’t remember. He’s been back in the United States for a year and he’s plagued by who he has become after surviving a war that killed his two closest friends. He’s lost his girlfriend, apartment, job, and in spite of his surname, the little money he possessed, and he's often overcome by uncontrollable rage. His skin color may not have mattered much in Korea, but Frank is quickly reminded that it’s what matters most in segregated America and he finds no societal welcome-home mat for black soldiers. Since his return Frank has avoided his hometown of Lotus, Georgia, but a letter from an unknown woman implores him to come home to save his adored sister Cee from an unidentified danger. He’s told to come fast, that she’ll be dead if he doesn’t. The request pulls Frank out of his detached daze and he heads south with the help of kind strangers and the weight of memories he can barely carry.

No one will envy Frank’s experience of home. His family fled their Texas home when he was four after hooded men told them and other African American families they had 24 hours to go or die. They settled in Lotus, a place Frank despised, and there’s no knowing if he could have ever grown fond of the town given how he arrived. His parents worked nonstop and then died young, leaving Frank and Cee in the care of grandparents who responded to their own hard lives by embracing cruelty. Cee sought solace in a boy who used her for a car and Frank escaped to the Army with his best friends. Now, twenty years after the first time he was forced from his home, Frank is running again, this time from himself and what he’s done.

Home addresses Morrison’s familiar themes—loss, redemption, memory, identity, and coming home. More brutal than beautiful, Home is abrupt and unembellished. Readers accustomed to Morrison’s gorgeous indulgence and slow build-up to emotional plateaus may not like Home’s brevity and the matter-of-fact delivery of shattering character revelations, but her storytelling reflects Frank’s predicament. It’s now or never for Frank. His sister’s life depends on him and he needs her crisis to force him to claw his way out of his own. By begrudgingly going home Frank takes the first tentative step toward moving beyond mere physical survival, and Home reminds us that what and how we survive are as unique as our experiences of home.

Sharon Crowley works in K-12 marketing at the Great Books Foundation.

Shared Inquiry™: An Opening Note for New Leaders

noreply@blogger.com (The Great Books Foundation) — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 20:17:00 +0000

Many of us start with a degree of self-consciousness when we first lead discussion. We wonder whether participants will understand and respond to our focus question and whether we will understand their responses; we worry about whether we will easily think of follow-up questions and whether we will be able to keep discussion focused on the problem of meaning we have raised. Leading is not an easy task and it requires practice. But while there is no substitute for experience, there are things you can do to establish good conditions for thoughtful discussion.

The first thing you can do is to educate your students about shared inquiry. In advance, they must read the selection twice and think carefully about it. Trying to understand what is not immediately evident in writing requires effort, patience, and the exercise of imagination; a student's quick "It's boring" is often simply an excuse for not wanting to work at the interpretive process.

Faced with bad reading habits, you have to use discussion time to engage your participants in the selection by reading it aloud and providing good note taking strategies, for example. If students are not helped to go through the looking glass to discover that what is at first hard can become manageable through persistence they are unlikely to ever learn to read in a meaningful way.

Stress that your participants have to observe the five guidelines of shared inquiry. The guidelines are there to make discussion a learning opportunity for you and for your group, to help you make the best possible use of your discussion time. They act as a fence, confining discussion to what everyone has read and, for a brief period, keeping out all distractions.

Your participants must also learn to approach discussion in a spirit of open-mindedness. Discussion should be an opportunity to broaden one's own perceptions of a story by sharing thoughts and listening to new ides. It is not a time for participants to hoard insights, either because they are trying to compete with other members of the group or because they are afraid to offer a tentative opinion. In shared inquiry, we can build solid interpretations even from views that are half thought through or inadequately expressed.

Finally, your students must learn to weigh their opinions, and those of their fellow classmates, against the evidence in the selection. When they begin to express in their own words what they think the author was trying to say, and can point to evidence to support their views, you will know that real interpretation, the act of thinking through and individualizing an author's meaning, is taking place.

What about your responsibilities as the leader? Of course, there is equal need on your part for strong preparation, the avoidance of quick judgments, an open-mindedness towards disparate ideas, and the insistence on evidence in support of opinions. But, in addition, there must be the desire to push towards resolution because you care about your basic question. By asking questions about what you want to know and by demonstrating your interest in pursuing answers, you will provide your participants with a model of reflective thinking and of what it requires, genuine curiosity about a problem, the flexibility of mind to consider the problem from many different angles, and the willingness to question, probe, reevaluate, and sometimes change the way one looks at things.

Getting Students to Talk to Each Other

noreply@blogger.com (The Great Books Foundation) — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 19:05:00 +0000

Question from the Classroom

My students always direct their answers to me during discussion. How can I get them to talk more to each other and get a real discussion going?

When first starting your Junior Great Books program, it's natural that students will respond to your questions just as they do in the regular classroom setting. That is, you ask a question and they direct their answers to you. They don't know what a good Shared Inquiry™ discussion looks or feels like. Just as you might have to change gears from your usual teaching habits when acting as a discussion leader, your students have to change gears too. You can help them become good participants by explaining to them what makes a good discussion, by modeling good follow-up skills for them, and by encouraging them to interact more.

Before each discussion, remind your students that they are free to add to each other's ideas, to agree and disagree, and even to ask questions of each other. Preface the discussion activity with comments like: "Joe, if you agree or disagree with one of Whitney's ideas, you can just say so. Sarah, if Hector says something and you want him to explain further or show you where he got the idea, just turn to him and ask him your question."

Besides telling your students that they are free to interact, you can show them that you want more interaction through your follow-up questions. For example, once a student has give you an answer, ask other participants whether they agree or disagree with that answer. Ask them if they understand the answer or if they see evidence for it: "Does Jason's answer make sense to you, Madison? Jason, can you explain to Madison what you were trying to say? Ray, can you help Jason find evidence for his answer?" Asking these kind of questions helps make an individual's answer the property of the group, the answer out on the floor for the whole group to consider.

After your discussion, praise the group for the times they did interact and let them know that you hope they do more of it the next time. Once students do interact and see that it is something you encourage in discussion, they will start working together as a group. Remember that the other Junior Great Books program activities, especially Prereading, Directed Notes, and Vocabulary, also provide opportunities for students to practice the same skills they use in Shared Inquiry discussion. These activities give students specific interpretive issues to talk about and help them become more comfortable with examining ideas as a group.

Sharing their opinions with their peers, considering others' viewpoints, debating issues, and asking lots of their own follow-up questions is what makes Junior Great Books so much fun for students. With that kind of interaction, you can be sure that they have really improved their listening and critical-thinking skills. Teaching students to become good Shared Inquiry participants is a process that might take some time, but soon you'll be commenting on how difficult it is to get them to stop talking to each other about the stories and the issues they raise.

New Webinar Announced: Modeling Close Reading with Students for Social Studies

noreply@blogger.com (The Great Books Foundation) — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 17:03:00 +0000

Learn how to help students get the most out of reading primary documents by taking this timely and convenient webinar:

Modeling Close Reading with Students for Social Studies
Date: Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Time: 3–4:30 p.m., Central Time
Course fee: $50

Modeling Close Reading with Students for Social Studies is a webinar that middle and high school teachers can attend to help students read for comprehension of primary documents. In the webinar, teachers will learn how to:

Improve students’ reading and thinking
Identify students’ needs and learn strategies to meet them
Work through concrete steps that help students manage difficult texts
Learn questioning methods to improve students’ comprehension and critical thinking.

System requirements
PC-based attendees: Windows 7, Vista, XP, or 2003 Server
Macintosh-based attendees: Mac OSX 10.5 or newer

Space is limited, so reserve your webinar seat now! After registering, you will receive an invoice. You will find your unique webinar URL and passcode on this invoice. On the date and time of your webinar this information will be required to join the webinar.

Shared Inquiry™ is a trademark of the Great Books Foundation.

Upcoming Webinars: Helping students think about what they read.

noreply@blogger.com (The Great Books Foundation) — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 16:59:00 +0000

Please join us for an interactive webinar experience.

Review the essential elements of a Shared Inquiry™ discussion or take your knowledge of the Shared Inquiry method a step further! Choose from three great options below.

Shared Inquiry Review
Date: Thursday, October 18, 2012
Time: 3–4:30 p.m., Central Time
Course fee: $50

This course provides participants with a review of the essential elements of a Shared Inquiry™ discussion and the Great Books interpretive reading activities, that enable students at all levels to participate successfully. Teachers will solidify their understanding of their role as leader and how Shared Inquiry connects to state and district standards.

Reading Comprehension Strategies
Date: Wednesday, October 17, 2012
Time: 3–4:30 p.m., Central Time
Course fee: $50

This intermediate-level course will help you increase the impact of Shared Inquiry on students’ reading comprehension by integrating reading strategies such as rereading, making inferences, and asking questions. The instructor’s modeling will open up ways for you to use these strategies with your students.

The Power of Student Questions
Date: Wednesday, October 24, 2012
Time: 3–4:30 p.m., Central Time
Course fee: $50

This intermediate-level course will help you teach students how to pose better questions, identify different kinds of questions, and focus on the questions that will best help them build their understanding of the selection. You will learn how to stimulate students’ initial curiosity about a specific text and guide them to become active partners in inquiry.

We hope you can join us!

Shared Inquiry™ is a trademark of the Great Books Foundation.

More than Literature: Informational and Nonfiction Texts in Primary Grades

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 21:14:00 +0000

by Sharon Crowley

Implementing the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) brings many shifts to elementary classrooms, and one of them is the increased emphasis on informational and nonfiction texts. I’m sure it isn’t news to educators that the language arts standards call for elementary curricular materials with a mix of 50 percent literary and 50 percent informational texts. Predictably, there are mixed reactions to the CCSS mandate. I’ve read articles and educational blog posts indicating that some people perceive the shift as a disregard for the importance of stories and poetry on children’s development. While others have responded with a sigh of relief, citing the reasons why it’s important to provide expository and nonfiction texts in early grades. No matter where your personal opinion falls, I’m certain we agree that being able to critically read informational texts is an essential skill.

The National Forum on Information Literacy defines information literacy “as the ability to know when there is a need for information, to be able to identify, locate, evaluate, and effectively use that information for the issue or problem at hand.” Sadly, some 44 million Americans can’t extract information from text in many circumstances. That estimate, from a 2004 presentation by University of Michigan professor Nell K. Duke, is likely higher today. Like all illiteracy statistics, the figure is disturbing. While there’s never one reason for such a statistic, mandating access to nonfiction and informational texts in elementary grades is a step toward lowering it. Although Great Books K–12 programs emphasize developing reading and critical thinking skills by working with high-quality literature, we don’t perceive the new 50/50 requirement as a challenge to the importance of fiction. We recognize that students need to read a large variety of texts to learn strategies for content reading in the upper grades—this will help them grow into more literate adults—and any mandate increasing time spent reading in the classroom is a positive.

But it isn't enough to provide access to nonfiction and informational texts; quality is equally important. Students need texts that have descriptive details, an enthusiastic voice, clear organization, and an appealing design. How do teachers decide which books to provide their students? How can they quickly discern which are high-quality texts? We created our new Junior Great Books^® Nonfiction Libraries for grades 3–5 to make the choices easier. Each library contains 30 titles selected by Foundation editors, including science and social studies books, as well as Common Core informational exemplar texts. Using the same high standards for choosing selections for Great Books programs, Foundation editors selected texts that are engaging, age-appropriate, and substantial. Our nonfiction libraries will help teachers dig deeply into topics like science, social studies, and history. Titles such as “Boy, Were We Wrong About Dinosaurs!,” The Cloud Book,” and “Quest for the Tree Kangaroo: An Expedition to the Cloud Forests of New Guinea,” are ideal for independent science reading. Each library comes with a teacher’s guide with optional activities for student response and sharing, its own bin, and stickers for each book to keep the library organized.

Quality materials are an essential component to meeting the demands of CCSS. Teachers have enough work to do without the additional burden of searching for suitable texts. Let us help you implement CCSS in your classroom with nonfiction libraries that meet the high standards Great Books teachers have come to expect. Our new Junior Great Books Nonfiction Libraries will be available in late October.

Sharon Crowley works in K-12 marketing at the Great Books Foundation. She's celebrating Banned Book Week by rereading her favorite often challenged book "To Kill a Mockingbird."

Great Books Roundhouse

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 17:25:00 +0000



	Great Books Roundhouse™ Great Books Roundhouse combines great literature and the Shared Inquiry™ method of learning in the virtual world of Whyville. Treat your computer-savvy middle school students to a one-of-a-kind virtual learning experience. Try some activities as a class or invite students to explore Roundhouse on their own. In Whyville students can: Read and post questions and comments about outstanding literature Participate in online discussions Engage in other fun and creative activities In Whyville teachers can: Supplement students’ work in reading and language arts Coordinate live discussions with other classrooms Use Whyville tools to set up and monitor their students’ Whyville activities Connect and share with like-minded colleagues Visit Great Books Roundhouse now! Log in and bring your students the benefits of Great Books in a virtual world. Visit our Whyville page to learn more!
		Great Books Roundhouse™ and Shared Inquiry™ are trademarks of the Great Books Foundation. `

Great Books Webinars

noreply@blogger.com (The Great Books Foundation) — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 22:04:00 +0000

Take your knowledge of the Shared Inquiry™ method a step further! Choose from three great options below.

Reading Comprehension Strategies
Date: Thursday, September 13, 2012
Time: 3–4:30 p.m., CDT
Course fee: $50

This webinar will help you increase the impact of Shared Inquiry™ on students’ reading comprehension by integrating reading strategies such as rereading, making inferences, and asking questions.

The Power of Student Questions
Date: Thursday, September 20, 2012
Time: 3–4:30 p.m., CDT
Course fee: $50

This webinar will help you teach students how to pose better questions, identify different kinds of questions, and focus on the questions that will best help them build their understanding of the selection.

Review: Shared Inquiry Discussion
Date: Saturday, September 29, 2012
Time: 10–11:30 a.m., CDT
Course fee: $50

This webinar provides participants with a review of the essential elements of a Shared Inquiry™ discussion and the Great Books interpretive reading activities that enable

students at all levels to participate successfully.

System requirements
PC-based attendees: Windows 7, Vista, XP, or 2003 Server
Macintosh-based attendees: Mac OSX 10.5 or newer

Shared Inquiry™ is a trademark of the Great Books Foundation.

The Great Books for What? Continuities and Challenges to the Canon

noreply@blogger.com (The Great Books Foundation) — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 15:35:00 +0000

Ronne Hartfield

Shimer College Commencement Address
May 6, 2007

My warmest greetings and congratulations to you, the Shimer graduating class of 2007,
and to those parents, friends, and teachers who have supported and sustained youthrough the years with books, computers, IPods, endless cups of coffee, and advicesought and unsought, useful and less so, though mostly worth pondering at least.

My thanks to you, dear colleagues, for such a generous introduction. When I considerthe professional journey that you just summarized, I am sometimes left to ponder its many surprising and unanticipated digressions. Since that culminating moment over a half century ago (can it really have been that long?) when I, like you students before me this afternoon, was completing arguably the most significant chapter of my education, myyears in the College of the University of Chicago, I have never ceased to value andrespect that time of deep immersion in the great ideas of western civilization. To paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s wonderful phrase, the arc of my education has been long, but it bends toward rightness.

It is of that rightness that I want to speak this afternoon--not the rightness of my ownpath, but of the one which lies before you, in a time that seems infinitely more complex thanthe one I approached with such eagerness in 1955, in a world that seems more fraught with terror than with optimism, in an America that holds at once more possibility and more vulnerability than my classmates and I could ever have imagined.
With all of our nation's acknowledged and unacknowledged shortcomings and failures,our mid-twentieth century America still defined itself as the world's greatest nation and much of the world agreed. Our generation had an agenda, a set of plans to address what wasn't working, and at the threshold of unprecedented scientific and technological advances, we were perhaps insufferably confident about our ability to solve whatever challenges lay ahead.Our social scientists were developing new understandings of culture, and we were rewriting earlier histories to create newer, truer and more inclusive ones. Our artists,writers, and musicians, were creating radically new images, abstract expressionism replacing impressionism and realism, disjunct harmonies replacing the smooth sureties of the past.

By the time we matured in 1976, two hundred years after the founding of this country, after Vietnam, after terrifying and tragic political assassinations, our confidence was shakier, but we were still assured by visible successes. Though still woefullyinadequate, we saw gradual advances in Civil Rights, impelled by Black demands that America hold true to its earliest principles; we saw movements for women's rights that while some may only recall them humorously as the bra burning years, they were serious and committed protests leading to the radically increasing presence of women in graduate education and in the workplace. Withal, we still held, albeit tenuously, to the early assurance that America's Great Idea, this Grand Experiment for freedom and Democracy, could be a beacon for a more promising future for the rest of the world.

And then, one year into the new millennium, the world we knew came to an end, and an unanticipated era was harshly ushered in on September 11. 2001, by those life-changing events that we refer to with awe and in appropriately harsh and truncated language, as 9/11. And, students, the ineradicably horrifying images of the twin towers of the World Trade Center under attack, disintegrating before the eyes of the whole world, remain the most powerful symbols available to us that our America, indeed the world that we had thought futilely that we knew, would not, could not ever be the same again. Thetragedy of 9/11 and its timing as a defining event coincided oddly, even eerily, with the new millennium. At the very onset of the twentieth-first century, America as a nation has been faced with realities that, although simmering for decades before, have now come forcibly to the very front of our consciousness, demanding profound redefining, reshaping, reevaluating, replanning. And you, Shimer graduates, have the humbling task of taking your place among those whose minds and skills will be called upon to assume these awesome responsibilities.

The good news is that none of this is unimaginable. We need to remember that American history, in all of its bloodiness and arrogance, is nonetheless characterized by resilience and triumph over obstacles. Your histories and mine are honored in the title of Stephen Ambrose's great document of the famed Lewis and Clark expedition that openedAmerica's path to the northwest, limned in his accurate term "Undaunted Courage."Now let me talk for a moment about why Shimer College has provided you marvelouslywith the fundaments you will need in order take your places, if not as grandscale moversand shakers, if not as "deciders," certainly as definers and shapers, of what willinevitably be this new millennial world. My confidence in you is rooted in the fact that your Shimer education has given you at least three tools for the work you are poised to engage:

FIRST: In exploring the Great Ideas that reside in the great texts of the western world, you have learned the importance of serious inquiry. In studying the archive of what might be the most significant body of classical knowledge available to us, that collective of thought and experience that has withstood the test of time; you have lived closely with the minds of writers and thinkers who were about transformation as well as formation. You have also learned that all texts must be open to reexamination in new circumstances and reinterpretation with new and wider lens, that all canons are amenable to augmentation. It is gratifying to note that your curriculum here at Shimer now comprises works by Hannah Arendt and W.E.B. DuBois, among others whose ideashave contributed measurably to present dialogues.

SECOND: Through serious struggle with serious thought, you have learned the value ofauthentic attention. Your knowledge and insights into a past which you did not inhabitenable a thoughtful informed set of responses to issues in the world where you will now reside. If you are familiar with the classical debates between Hamilton and Jefferson, between Woodrow Wilson and Robert LaFollette, you cannot approach complex predicaments superficially, nor can you be glibly contemptuous of alternative views. Within the complexities inherent in decisions for or against a war, or when or when notto call an end to military occupation, the insights of Thucydides or Euripides should notbe overlooked.

THIRD: With a Shimer education, you have learned to approach current ethical and moral problems from a rich context of reflection, with a permanent resource for approaching timeless questions inherent in all human experience: How does a moral person make wise choices in the midst of a society that has no consensus on such issues? How and on what basis can anyone decide when human life begins and when it should end? How and with what information does one accept scientific advances that challenge former sureties, the artificial fertilization of embryos, the use of embryonic tissue forpharmacological purposes, or at the far end of contemporary challenges, whether or not to consider human cloning, for any purposes conceivable. The spiritual struggles of St. Augustine, or those to be found in philosophical inquiries from other traditions, such as the Tao te Ching, enrich the conversation with scientific questions posed by Galileo or Linnaeus.

So. Finally. As F. Champion Ward, then Dean of the Hutchins College, once confirmed, citizens are liberated not from but through a knowledge of history, noting that those whowould move the world must first be given a place to stand. What I want to leave youwith here is an abiding respect for the learnings provided in what you will come to look upon and speak of as your Shimer years, with a commitment to take your places as leaders in any disciplines or professional fields where you choose to invest your energies.You have been given a place to stand.

The Great Books must not be misunderstood as the keepers and protectors of any outmoded status quo. Rather, they are the raw materials for reconsiderations of everything. They are a resource for leadership that is deeper and more useful than Forbes Magazine or the Wall Street Journal. Adam Smith may provide more understanding of the positive potentials of a humanistic capitalism than does the Director of the Federal Reserve. Shakespeare may provide military insight and moral direction not readily available in the televised reports from Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib. Nineteenth century novels may illuminate the nearly invisible but intractable structures of social class and caste that impede affirmative action in education and the workplace. Plato can elucidate society's vague but persistent distrust of artistic freedom, and the demands torearrange our thinking made by quantum physics are less onerous if one has read Newton and Einstein first. You will be grateful - and so will the world - that you have actually read Darwin and can respond intelligently to concepts of intelligent design that exclude his seminal research. Popular books or videos that purport to expose The SECRET, with their too-simple recipes for living, should be open to informed questioning, and you need to be able to respond seriously to hackneyed questions about What Might Jesus Say.

Of course, God willing, you will be living well into this bare-begun century. And as you are livingon a sadly ailing planet, you will need all of your creativity and will to changewhat has constituted pretty comfortable ways of life. You will need to read many Great Books that have been heretofore omitted from the canon---books by Toni Morrison and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Wole Soyinka, and books by writers from all over what used to be called the Third World. And you will read Great Books as yet unwritten, perhaps even one written by a Shimer graduate. You will need to open your minds and hearts toideas and experiences from what has been called the "Runaway World." And you will becalled upon to engage all of this with moral urgency and commitment---with not onlythe right stuff but with your best stuff, with grace and grit and gravitas. As one of my favorite poets, Gwendolyn Brooks, demands, know all of this, and go down the street anyway. Go down the streets of the world as it is given, respect histories already lived, and change them; make the old worlds better, make them new. My faith is in the Great Books, and in you.

Ronne Hartfield is an author, essayist, international museum consultant, and former executive director at the Art Institute of Chicago and Urban Gateways: The Center for Arts in Education. In 2004, Ms. Hartfield published Another Way Home: The Tangled Roots of Race in One Chicago Family to critical acclaim.