Humanizing the Teaching of Reading: Toward More Transformational and Humane Practices

Shortly after the last blog post I wrote, schools around the country began to shut down as the coronavirus upended both our country and our lives. But while the pandemic has been shockingly disruptive, it’s also exposed all sorts of inequities that need to be addressed. Fortunately, though, I’ve found a few silver linings, one of which is collaborating with the wonderful educator and author Maria Nichols on a handful or new projects. What you’ll see below is a repost of a guest post Maria and I were invited to write for the CCIRA blog, followed by some information on a new webinar we’re offering in March.

Like many of you, we began hearing rumors last March that schools might shut down because of a virus sweeping over the country. At that point we couldn’t begin to imagine the full scope of the disruption, devastation and death the pandemic would bring, but we each did begin to find emails in our inboxes postponing or cancelling work we had scheduled—and at some point, in an attempt to make sense of what was happening and to know that we weren’t alone, we reached out to each other and began a journey of thought that continues to this day.

In those first early days, huddled together on Zoom, we talked about supporting teachers and schools as they moved to virtual learning. But we’d scarcely settled on meeting dates and tentative questions to explore when our world erupted again with the murder of George Floyd, which shook us out of our “how do we support literacy as we know it,” focus and led us instead to listen to voices like Bettina Love, who talked about abolitionist teaching, and Sonja Cherry-Paul who challenged us with these words:

All of this convinced us that a return to normal could no longer be our goal. Instead, we wanted to be voices for transformative change, which, in words from David Kirkland’s powerful post “Making Black Lives Matter in Classrooms: The Power of Teachers to Change the World,” recognizes that “Teachers are human rights workers, and our classrooms are progressive vineyards thirsty for liberation’s laborers.”

This wasn’t a difficult shift for us to make, as we’d both been questioning many commonly accepted literacy practices for years. We’d also both been advocating for change, as we believed that the goal of literacy instruction should not just be ensuring students’ mastery of skills, as demonstrated through test scores, but should tap into the deeper, more meaningful aspects of reading and being a reader, which we found was best articulated by writers. 

Ursula LeGuin, for example, believed that “We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.” And, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley advocated for what he called a “moral imagination,” which we see as a capacity to occupy another mind and feel the emotional pulse of another heart, which reading can support. And that led us to think about whether we had experienced that, ourselves, as children.

I, Vicki, keenly remember reading The Phantom Tollbooth, a book that was given to me by friends of my parents, which I’ve kept all these years. I remember being put off by Milo and his chronic boredom at first. But as I kept reading about his adventures in the strange, confusing world he found himself in, I began to realize that he was changing – that indeed, people could change. They could become kinder, braver, and more helpful, as they started doing things they never thought they could, which I found enormously comforting. And it made me want to become a kinder, braver and more helpful person, as well.

As for me, Maria, the Betsy series by Carolyn Haywood was an early childhood favorite. Oddly, I had all but forgotten that little girl with the brown pigtails until a random day in the school library with my first graders. I was pursuing shelves, hunting for an unexpected literary gem, when a very worn red spine caught my attention: a copy of B is For Betsy!  As I thumbed through the musty, fragile pages, memories of Saturday trips to the library with my mom, long afternoons with nothing to do but read, and nights under the covers with books and a flashlight came flooding back. Through this favored series, I had bonded with Betsy, learning to face childhood fears through the comfort of family, true friends, contagious kindness, and the superpower of red ribbons and plaid bookbags. Truly, Betsy helped me construct ways of being as I went out into the world.

As we reflected on these memories, we found ourselves thinking about something else Bettina Love had said: “Why,” she asked, “had it taken a pandemic to see the humanity of all children?” This opened our eyes to the humanity in our own process.  We recognized that we had been privileged to have access to texts that helped us see ourselves and create a vision of the people we wanted to be. But we were also aware that we were able to do that without having been taught to “read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it,” or to “determine central ideas of themes of text.” Instead, we  did these things by connecting with and being moved by the humanity of a character in a book in a way that helped us become more humane, too. And believing that every child is capable of being moved and thinking deeply, just as we had been, we found ourselves thinking that the transformative change we longed for was a shift from a system based on standardization to one focused on humanization. But what would humanizing the teaching and learning of reading look like?

Before the pandemic, we’d already been asking educators to consider making some key shifts in their practice, which we realized, as we kept talking on Zoom, served the purpose of humanizing classrooms. For instance, 

• Shifting from what we saw as a pedagogy of right-answerism to inviting students to think, explore and develop their own ideas.
• Shifting from being a deliverer of content (like comprehension strategies, standards and skills) to becoming a facilitator of student thinking.
• Shifting from seeing confusion as something to be fixed to seeing it as the place where learning and thinking often starts.
• Shifting from seeing learning as something that can be achieved in a single period to seeing it as a much more complex and messy process.
• And, shifting from listening to students in order to assess them to listening in order to better understand their thinking.

These shifts all supported our shared belief that, given the gift of time for students to engage in that messy process, they not only have the ability to intellectually grapple with complexity—they crave it. And to see the effects of these humanizing shifts in action, here’s a conference Vicki had with a seventh grader named Yusef whose class was reading “The Lottery,” Shirley Jackson’s short story about village that, for reasons none of the villagers remember, holds a lottery every year and stones the winner to death.

Yusef had been labeled as a struggling reader, and while many of his classmates jumped into “The Lottery,” Yusef was having a hard time just getting to the third paragraph. When Vicki sat next to him, he pushed the text as far away on his desk as he could, and when she asked if he was wondering anything, he simply said, “This story’s too weird.”

Vicki could have responded in any number of ways, but committed to listening to understand, she leaned into his reaction and asked if he could give her an example of the story’s weirdness, and with that he pulled the story back and accusingly pointed to the second line of the story’s second paragraph:

“The children assembled first, of course. School was recently over for the summer, and the feeling of liberty sat uneasily on most of them; they tended to gather together quietly for a while before they broke into boisterous play, and their talk was still of the classroom and the teacher, of books and reprimands. Bobby Martin had already stuffed his pockets full of stones, and the other boys soon followed his example, selecting the smoothest and roundest stones [to make] a great pile of stones in one corner of the square and guarded it against the raids of the other boys.”

“Right there,” Yusef said. “That’s weird. They just got out of school and it’s like they don’t like it. Man, when I get out of school for the summer, the last thing I want to do is talk about it.”

Here again, listening to understand—and probing student’s thinking without judgment—can reveal surprises. Vicki learned that Yusef’s disengagement with the text wasn’t because it was too hard for him. He just didn’t know how to use his response to engage with the text. And so the first thing she did was validate his response by acknowledging that that was pretty weird. Then she asked if he’d noticed anything else that seemed weird, and he answered, “Yeah, what’s with the stones?”

If you know “The Lottery,” you may be thinking just what Vicki thought: that despite being labeled as struggling, Yusef actually was quite an astute reader who was unaware of that. But noticing and naming could help him begin to see that, so she told Yusef what he’d done: He’d noticed what seems to be a pattern of weirdness, with kids not doing what they usually do, and another pattern around the stones. Then she connected that to the larger work of reading and writing saying: Writers often use patterns to try to show us something they don’t want to come right out and say, and I think it’s possible that the writer actually wants you to pick up all this weirdness and is inviting you to figure out why she put it there. “Hmm. . .,” Yusef muttered, as Vicki gathered her things. But just before she left the classroom, she turned to look back and saw Yusef reading.

As we began sharing stories from our work with students in conferences, small groups and read alouds, we began to brainstorm what we started calling humanizing strategies. Unlike comprehension strategies, these weren’t meant to be explicitly taught to students. Rather they were strategies for helping teachers create more humane and equitable cultures in their classrooms. We broke them into categories, like these examples:

Strategies that can help students take risks with their thinking:

• Unless it’s clearly needed, model who to be vs. what to do, like being someone who’s curious and sometimes confused but who notices things and wonders about them.
• Trust and don’t rush the process of meaning-making—or, as Walt Whitman said, “Be curious, not judgmental.
• Use conditional language, like what might or could something mean vs. does.

Strategies that can help teachers facilitate the often messy process of meaning making through talk:

• Be invitational by asking questions like, “What are you thinking?” or “Is anyone wondering something?”
• Encourage multiple voices by asking questions like “Does anyone have a different idea?”
• Normalize confusion as something every reader experiences and invite students to share what’s confusing them.
• Help students develop a sense of agency by asking how they figured out something that had confused them or that the writer hadn’t explicitly stated.
• Honor students’ tentative thinking, even if you suspect that what they said won’t pan out.
• Help students see that readers revise, just as writers do, by asking if they noticed anything that gave them a new idea or changed their thinking
• Pay attention to students’ expressions and body language, as often there’s thinking behind smirks, grimacing or laughter.

Finally, as we reflect on the whole of this journey, we recognize that all the shifts and strategies we so strongly believe in had the same intention: They were meant to respect and honor students’ intellectual capacities, feelings, and humanity.  Perhaps a critical part of transformative change is recognizing that we all want to be seen, heard, and respected – as readers, as thinkers, as human beings.    

Finally, if these ideas intrigue you, please join me and Maria at 7pm on March 4 for Part 1 of our two-part Literacy Consultants’ Coalition webinar series “Humanizing the Teaching of Reading: Toward More Meaningful, Authentic and Joyful Practices,” where we’ll share several classroom examples that demonstrate both these humanizing shifts and the brilliance of children and talk about how to implement these in your own classrooms and schools. To register and pay the $25 fee, 10% of which will go to FirstBook, a non-profit organization committed to addressing the systemic causes of education inequity by putting books directly in children’s hands, click here: https://literacyconsultantscoalition.org/humanizing-the-teaching-of-reading/

Creating Opportunities for Students to Think

The other week I shared some of the wonderful thoughts and ideas of Aeriale Johnson‘s often-labeled-as-struggling second-graders as part of a case I hoped to make for not underestimating children’s intellect and for focusing less on teaching academic skills and more on nurturing students’ intellectual lives. But I’m aware that post may have raised the question of how, exactly, do we nurture and support our students’ intellectual lives?

The British writer and Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell had this to say about  about that very question. I love his ideas, but he doesn’t really delve into the instructional role that teachers can play—that is, how can we help students become “readers and thinkers of significant thoughts right from the beginning”?

My hunch is that many of you have discovered ways of doing just that. But for me, it almost always involves making a shift from teaching a lesson with an explicit teaching point and teacher modeling to creating some sort of opportunity for kids to start thinking right from the get-go.

In Dynamic Teaching for Deeper Reading, I decided not to use the word lesson when talking about instruction, but instead focused chapters around specific kinds of opportunities teachers could create for kids to think, such as:

• CREATING OPPORTUNITIES FOR READERS TO FIGURE OUT THE BASICS
• CREATING OPPORTUNITIES FOR READERS TO INTERPRET
• CREATING OPPORTUNITIES FOR READERS TO CONSIDER IDEAS AND OPINIONS IN NONFICTION
• CREATING OPPORTUNITIES FOR READERS TO SOLVE PROBLEMS IN THEIR INDEPENDENT READING BOOKS

Many of these opportunities involve kids using a Know/Wonder chart, which Dorothy Barnhouse and I first shared in What Readers Really Do. Not to be confused with a KWL (What I Know/What I Want to Know/What I Learned) chart, which asks students to access what’s already in their heads about a topic, consider what they’d like to know about that topic, then share what they learned about it from a text, a Know/Wonder chart invites kids to think about what they know or have figured out in a text and what they wonder about what that (which could be something that confused them or that made them curious).

You can see examples of kids’ thinking using Know/Wonder charts in Interpreting Interpretation: A Look at an Overlooked Word and When Is a Scaffold Not a Scaffold? But there are other kinds of opportunities I try to create for kids to think. I often invite them to compare and contrast in ways that support discovery and thinking, whether it’s looking at two different biographies of the same person to realize that biographers aren’t just sharing facts, they’re interpreting the life of their subject, or comparing different books by the same author to discover patterns, recurring themes and an author’s obsessions. And recently (with thanks & hopefully forgiveness from Georgia for the Poem A I drafted), I shared this chart with a class of third graders during their poetry unit to get them thinking about how they might revise their poems—and amazingly, without me saying a word, they started talking about nouns and verbs!

What I think is important about all these examples is that in each case I could have delivered an explicit teaching point and modeled my own thinking through a think aloud before releasing responsibility to the students. But instead I did what Eleanor Duckworth writes about in both her book The Having of Wonderful Ideas and her essay in The New Educator, “Helping Students Get to Where Ideas Can Find Them“: I “put the learners in direct contact with the subject matter”(which can be a text, a math problem, a primary source document, etc.), without the need for me, as the teacher, to be an intermediary.

When we do this, Duckworth says, we help “students get their minds, their awareness, and their feelings so active and thoughtful and informed that they are in a place where connections, understandings and new ideas can find them.” On the other hand, she writes, “Contributing our own ideas and thoughts about subject matter almost always short-circuits the students’ thoughts and decreases their interest.” So if we truly want students to think and are serious about nurturing their intellectual lives, perhaps we need to create opportunities that allows students to explore—and even struggle with—subject matter before we step in and teach.

P.S. Thursday was the day that, for better or worse, I really started feeling the impact of the coronavirus pandemic. I’m not sick, thank heaven, but between empty subway cars and bare shelves at supermarkets and drugstores, it’s clear that I have to change how I live, especially when it comes to public transportation and socializing. I’m imagining that many of you are wrestling with the impact of all this as well—along with the work and financial implications if you or your children’s schools are being closed. And that made me wonder if this is really what I should be writing about now, as the world goes strangely silent. But then I caught this Facebook post from Elllin Keene:

Thank you, Ellin for reminding me how lucky we are to spend time with children and what a privilege it is, even now, to spend our days thinking about how to engage and empower them.

Do We Underestimate the Students We Teach?

Last year I shared a story about a fourth grade class that was studying the Middle Ages. Based on formative reading assessments, many of the students had been labeled struggling readers. Yet despite that, they were able to insightfully consider a book about Galileo in a way that allowed them to understand the power and belief systems of that distant and very different time period.

In what seems to me a similar way, teacher and Heinemann Fellow Aeriale Johnson has been tweeting some of the incredibly insightful responses her second graders—many of whom have also been labeled as strugglers—have had to poems and books she’s shared with them.

Here, for instance, is a poem from Tupac Shakur that Aeriale shared with her class:

And here’s what one of her second graders had to say about it:

“I think 2Pac’s duo is his spirit & his body. I think sometimes his body doesn’t do the same thing as his spirit. He says, ‘This is my only regret.’ His regret is his body did something that his spirit didn’t want to do.”

Another poem Aeriale shared with her second graders is Mary Oliver‘s “Wild Geese” (which I didn’t read until my thirties):

Here’s one seven-year-old girl’s response to it:

That same poem also sparked the following exchange on the playground, where one child drew on Oliver’s words to help another deal with a painful interaction:

And finally here’s several of Aeriale’s students considering the meaning of this page of Kwame Alexander’s marvelous book How to Read a Book, with great illustrations by Melissa Sweet:

In all these examples, we see children who’ve been labeled as struggling readers being quite capable of deep thinking and insight. So how do we explain this? For me, it’s connected to something Lilian Katz, the early childhood educator and author of Engaging Children’s Minds, once said: “We overestimate children academically, while underestimating them intellectually.”

Katz was specifically speaking about young children, but I think this is true right up the grade ladder, from kindergarteners to high school. Some of the fourth graders I worked with, for instance, and the second graders Aeriale teaches, may indeed struggle with academic skills like identifying the main idea of a text or reading without making significant miscues. But intellectually, they are quite capable of thinking deeply and deriving significant meaning from texts. The problem is that too often schools place more value and emphasis on those academic skills than on students’ intellectual lives. And I think we do that to the detriment of students.

First, unlike speaking and understanding speech, human brains are not hard-wired for reading. As you can see below, reading is an extremely complex act that involves many areas of the brain, which is why learning to read can be challenging for many. Yet what better motivation can there be to take on that hard and sometimes frustrating work of learning to read than to feel that books have something important and vital to give you in a way that adds meaning to your life? Stickers? Pizza? A grade? I don’t think so.

And then there’s the question of those academic skills we spend so much time teaching and assessing. In a recent Position Statement, NCTE stated their belief that “Utilizing a model of reading instruction focused on basic skills devoid of meaning can lead to the mislabeling of some readers as “struggling readers” and “non-readers” because they lack extensive reading experience, depend on different prior knowledge, and/or comprehend differently or in more complex ways. . . . In addition, prescriptive, skills-based reading instruction misidentifies the problem as the students’ failure to learn, rather than the institution’s failure to teach reading as the complex mental and social activity it is.”

And in their wise and wonderful book, Disrupting Thinking, Kylene Beers and Bob Probst have this to say about skills:

“In too many places, we ask kids to read (and write) so we can give them a grade that shows they’ve learned some skills someone has decided they need to know. But if we aren’t reading and writing so that we can discover, so that we change—change our thinking, change ourselves, perhaps change the world—then those skills will be for naught.”

The fourth graders I worked with and the second graders Aeriale teaches were engaging with texts in ways that changed how they looked at themselves and the world they lived in. My hunch—and my experience—has led me to believe that if we carve out space for students to show us what they’re intellectually capable of, many who’ve been labeled as struggling have incredibly thoughtful and insightful things to say. So let’s not underestimate them by narrowly focusing on a diet of skills. Instead, let’s nurture, support and celebrate our students’ intellectual lives.

Jumping Back In (with thanks to Julieanne Harmatz)

The problem with not having written a blog post for months (or in my case, over a year) is that the longer you go without writing one, the harder it seems to do. Where to start? What to say? How to explain—or not?

For me, the silence stems from some usual suspects. Work certainly played a part, but on top of that there’s the outrage, despair and exhaustion I suspect that many of us have felt about the state of our poor country—and our poor, precious planet. And all of that was compounded by some health problems that threw me for a loop and made the simple act of sitting at my desk and concentrating quite a challenge.

From The Forest by Riccardo Bozzi, illustrated by Violeta Lopiz and Valerio Vidali

Fortunately, many months physical therapy and a handful of caring doctors have helped. But what I could do was walk and read, both of which offered much solace and joy. When it came to walking, I became obsessed with walking among trees, and almost every day for months on end, I’d head out for a walk in Prospect Park, Central Park, Riverside Park or the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, often with a book of poetry in my bag. And one day, I stumbled on this poem by Mary Oliver, which completely captured the kind of reverence and sustenance I’d feel as I looked up into the branches of a sycamore or a towering elm:

As for reading, while I read at least one poem a day, thanks to The Writer’s Almanac and The Slowdown, which each send a poem to my inbox every morning, I really gorged on novels. Some were mirrors, some were windows, but each one I stuck with and didn’t abandon (yes, it’s true, I’m a book abandoner) was marked by gorgeous language and amazing sentences. (FYI: I do love books with complex, nuanced characters, but when I took an online quiz to determine my reading personality, I was deemed an Aesthete: someone who “reveres writers whose words can exalt everyday experience into a shareable sublimeness.”)

I’m not sure if there are other Aesthetes out there, but here, in no particular order, are a few of the books that nourished and sustained me during those months of pain and discomfort. In addition to wonderful language, each has a powerful story to tell, with characters that might just break your heart:

 

 

Idaho by Emily Ruskovich: There’s a devastating event at the heart of this novel, but ultimately it’s about redemption, with characters who learn to bear the unbearable with compassion and grace.

 

 

 

Paris 7 A.M. by Liza Wieland, who imagines poet Elizabeth Bishop’s time in Paris in 1937, which was the only year in her entire life that Bishop didn’t keep a journal. Must read for any Elizabeth Bishop lovers out there.

 

 

 

Go, Went, Gone, by Jenny Erpenbeck, a German writer who tells the story of a retired academic whose life is fundamentally changed when he becomes involved with a group of African refugees seeking asylum in Berlin.

 

 

 

Prairie Fever by Michael Parker, a seriously quirky, but in my mind charming, historical fiction novel about two sister in love with the same man in Oklahoma in the early 1900s.

 

 

The Need by Helen Phillips, a novel about motherhood with a speculative twist that really unnerved me and got under my skin.

 

 

 

 

Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli about a family who embarks on a road trip from New York City to Arizona to try to find two lost migrant children and the ancestral homeland of the Apaches.

 

 

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, is another road trip book, but here the characters are a drug-addicted mom, a dad in prison, a 13-year-old boy desperate for a role model and the various ghosts that haunt them.

 

 

 

Now that my body is finally on the mend and sitting just involves sitting, I’m hoping to share some of the work I’ve done with teachers over the last year, along with some new thoughts and ideas—which, for better or worse, I never seem to be in short of. But for now, here’s a link to an oldie but goldie blog post from 2011, the year I started blogging. Interestingly enough, it speaks to what I believe is the real reason why we read—which is often quite different from what some of children perceive the goal to be. And hopefully it sparks some questions and reflections about what kind of messages are we sending students about the purpose of reading.

“I hope I get to read up to Level Z,” from What Messages Are We Sending Our Students About Reading?

Meeting Students Where They Are: Building Lessons Around Student Thinking

Last year, I had the privilege of working with a wonderful teacher named Keren who taught fourth grade at a small, progressive school in New York City. Every year, students engage in what the school calls a “Big Study”: an inquiry into a topic that was both engaging and broad enough for every child to find a focus of interest. And for several years, the fourth grade’s Big Study was the Middle Ages.

Keren had shown me the illustrated nonfiction books her students had created the year before—and they were absolutely stunning. Last year, though, she was a little worried, as this class was different than the one she’d had before. Reading level-wise, they almost spanned the alphabet. And they were a fidgety bunch who often interrupted each other. They had, though, seemed engaged with the handful of picture books she’d shared to launch the study. But she feared they wouldn’t grasp the big ideas around power, values and beliefs the way her last class had—and when she’d asked them to write about who they thought had power in the Middle Ages, many of the responses were like this one from a child who seems to have superimposed her own beliefs on a far different era:

“I think people had the power. They believed that wherever they went. This is what was going on with the power.”

My hunch is that many of us have experienced this before: What worked well with one group of students doesn’t really fly with another—or it works for some but not the rest. And when this happens we need to make some decisions. We can continue full-steam ahead and follow our lesson plans and pacing guides. Or we can keep scaffolding until the students get it (which, if all else fails, means telling them what we want them to get—then feeling relieved when they parrot that back.)

But if we truly believe it’s our job to teach students, not curriculum—and we take full responsibility for our students’ learning—we have to be willing to rethink what we’re doing and consider different ways of making big ideas and content accessible to students.

To do that, I asked Keren to gather all the work her students had done so far in the study and bring it to our next meeting. Our job would be to look at the work to see if we spotted any signs or glimmers of emerging understands that we could build on. And we hit the jackpot when we looked at the notes Keren’s colleague had taken during a read aloud of Bonnie Christensen’s I, Galileo, a picture book biography of the medieval astronomer who discovered that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the universe—and was condemned for that.

By that point in the year, the class was quite used to sharing their thoughts and questions in a read aloud. And as you’ll see below, after hearing the opening pages, they had lots of questions and lots of strong reactions to how Galileo was treated:

• Just because you don’t understand another person’s ideas, it’s not right to shut them down and dismiss them.
• Was he in prison in the beginning? Was it a “figurative” prison because he was blind? Or was it the kind of prison they put people in in those days?
• Why did they treat someone who has good ideas, who’s clever and a hard worker who can figure out the “mysteries of life” so badly?
• Does this still happen today? Do we treat people badly for ideas other may not understand?

Looking at these notes, Keren and I recognized that the children’s reactions were directly connected to their own beliefs and values, and we began to brainstorm how we might use these responses to first help them see how very different medieval values and beliefs were from their own and, from there, consider the role of power.

To begin with we decided to make a chart that captured some of the children’s thinking, which Keren would use to explain how hard it can be to understand people who lived in a very different time because they didn’t always see things the way we do. And we also decided to record the students’ thinking through a three-column chart that would help consider what they valued, what they thought Galileo valued, and what they thought people of the time valued.

Based on their first discussion about the book, they could easily identify what they valued—and were pretty sure Galileo valued those things, too. But before we tackled the final column,  we read a few more pages from the book. And when we paused so the students could talk, the conversation took an interesting turn: they tried to wrap their minds around the perspective of a person in the Middle Ages:

• I wonder why at the time they thought the Earth was in the middle?
• It might have been hard for them to believe something else, because look at the sun, and the moon- it seems like they’re moving.
• Yeah, they didn’t feel themselves moving, so they had no evidence.
• And it probably seemed like a crazy idea to think that the sun was the middle of things.

Once that discussion ended, we asked the students to get into small groups to look at a packet of pages we’d printed from I, Galileo and Peter Sis’s book on Galileo, Starry Messenger, which we thought would push their thinking.

One of the things many of them noticed was a quote from the Bible beneath this illustration in Peter Sis’s book:

“God fixed the Earth upon its foundation, not to be moved forever.”

Many also noticed—and were struck by the fact—that the Church did not pardon Galileo for what they considered to be his crimes until 1992.

And when we came back together again, they had much to say about that:

• I don’t think they valued what can be seen with their own eyes- only the word of God.
• I think people valued other people who had the same ideas.
• Just who shared the same beliefs- they didn’t value those that didn’t share their beliefs.
• The Church wanted their beliefs be what everyone believed.
• It was only like 25 years ago when the Church finally pardoned Galileo and admitted his ideas were correct. I find that shocking.
• It seems what was valued was more the words of old history. They used the word “tradition” everywhere.
• It was traditions, because maybe they were scared of change.
• Change wasn’t something they valued- it was disbelief basically. I mean Galileo proved it, but they still didn’t believe him.
• Yeah, people weren’t believing Galileo-they held on and valued old traditions.
• Maybe it would embarrass the Church so they decided to burn people at the stake who had other ideas about the Earth not being the center of the universe.
• Maybe they thought it would disrespect God. So they couldn’t allow it.

With all these ideas, they were ready to add their thoughts to the final column of the chart:

From there it was an easy step to consider who had power in the Middle Ages. All it took was a little innovation to plan a learning opportunity that began with the children’s own thinking— and a classroom culture that valued students’ feelings, opinions, reactions and thoughts.

To read more about looking at student work to consider a child’s understanding and thinking, see https://tomakeaprairie.wordpress.com/2016/09/18/determining-next-instructional-steps-looking-at-student-work-through-an-improving-stance/

A New Year with an Old Friend: Some Thoughts on My One Little Word

I first learned of the tradition of choosing one little word to guide you across a year in 2015, when I started noticing blog posts by colleagues and friends who’d all picked a word for themselves. Being a word lover, I adored the concept and immediately started searching for a word to embrace that would support and inspire me.

There were many I was tempted by that year, like balance, simplicity and presence. But I wasn’t quite sure I was ready for those yet. I was coming off of a super busy year, which seemed to be barreling straight into another one, and I worried that those words might require too much of me. What I needed was a word that would help me feel less overwhelmed and stressed, but that also seemed realistic. And so I chose the word breathe. Surely I could breathe without a whole lot of effort.

Breathe turned out to be a good word for me. It kept me centered. It slowed me down. It calmed me when I felt frazzled. In fact, it was so effective and helpful, I felt ready to move on to a new word when 2016 rolled around.

So once again I started considering words, beginning by clicking on a link my friend Julieanne Harmatz shared on her blog. The link sent me to another great list of words, but as I quickly scrolled through the list to envision the possibilities, one word seemingly leapt out and grabbed me:

To be honest, at that point, I wasn’t quite sure what drew me to the word. In fact, it felt more as if the word had claimed me rather than me claiming it. I didn’t feel, for instance, that I needed to seek something—at least not the usual suspects, like  peace, love, God, fame, truth, or the meaning of life. But I definitely felt that this was it. I didn’t have to seek any further. And so seek became my one little word for 2016. And when I look at my life and work for that year, I see its influence everywhere.

Each time I write a blog post for instance, I seek images that somehow connect to what I’m writing about. And I’m always seeking texts that will serve a particular purpose I have in mind, whether it’s two biographies on the same subject that convey very different author messages, mentor texts that would help students see that writers do more work in the beginning of a narrative than write an engaging lead, or just the right quote to kick-off a new year (which I’ll share again here, just because it’s so wonderful):

That one little word was so useful for me in 2016 that I decided to hold onto it for 2017 and again in 2018, when, among many other things, it helped me discover:

• Sherman Alexie’s amazing poem Hymn, which he wrote in response to the events in Charlottesville
• An insane list of vocabulary words for first graders to learn during a unit on Early World Civilizations
• Herb Gardner’s wonderful play A Thousand Clowns, which has one of the most marvelous setting descriptions I’ve ever encountered.

In each of these cases, I was seeking something that would be good for something I was working on, be it a lesson, a unit, a blog post or a presentation. And the fact that I rarely came up empty-handed makes me believe what the great Persian poet Rumi said—which is exactly what I experienced when the word seek seemed to claim me.

But I also seek for other reasons. I seek to understand what’s going on in students’ heads as they read—and in the head’s of the teachers I coach. And I sometimes seek without a goal in mind. That is, I seek for the sheer fun of seeking.

As I thought about writing this post, for instance, I did a little seeking about the word seek, and not only did I discover the Rumi quote, I found this wonderful poem by Langston Hughes:

And just the other day, my eye caught the name Tove Jansson in an online journal I subscribe to. Jansson is the Finnish writer and illustrator of the Moomin books, which both my daughter and I loved as children. But when I clicked through the link I discovered that she was also a painter of some renown. Here, for instance, is a gorgeous mural she painted for a restaurant in Helsinki:

And here is a photograph of her and her assistant actually working on the mural:

Immediately I felt the sense of delight, which seeking often sparks in me. There was something delightful about the idea that the woman who created the Moomins was the same one in those Katharine Hepburn gaucho pants with a cigarette (or palette knife) dangling from her mouth—just as there was something delightful in stumbling on that poem, when it seemed, for a moment, as if Langston Hughes, Walt Whitman and I were connected across time.

The Janssen piece was a reminder that people are complex and multi-layered, with lives that often take surprising twists and turns, which I found comforting and hopeful. And that somehow triggered a synapse in my brain that made me remember that way before Dr. Seuss wrote The Cat in the Hat and Horton Hears a Who, he drew political cartoons, like the one I subsequently discovered, which, well, I’ll leave the reaction to you!

And so I’ve decided to hold on to seek again. You see, when I seek, many other things happen. I notice more. I’m open more. I appreciate more. I’m present more. I trust myself more to solve the many problems responsive teaching poses. And I feel the joy and thrill that comes with serendipitous discovery, the act of stumbling onto something delightful that you didn’t know your heart or mind needed until suddenly it appeared.

The word seek also helps me stay in a life-long learning stance, which is just what we want our students to take. What other word could do all that? If you’ve got one, let me know! And in the meantime . . .

The Sixth Annual Celebration of Teacher Thinking

The summers of my childhood seemed long and slow and languorous to me, with nothing more important to do than round up some of the neighborhood kids for a game of Kick the Can or find a mom to take us to the pool.

Now, though, summers seem to zoom by—and this one was no exception. For better or worse I spent more time at my desk this summer than I did at the pool. And while there were definitely some highlights—some great cycling and hiking, lovely time with my daughter and a personal writing project that’s been challenging but fun—there was also the daily assault of the news, which often left me anxious and drained, along with enough sweltering 90+ degree days to make me long for September.

Of course, it’s September now and the news horrors continue. But my spirits picked up over Labor Day as I reread all the comments blog readers had left from last September in order to share a handful here for my annual celebration of teacher thinking. So many were asking big important questions and fearlessly reflecting on their practice to arrive at new understandings and insights, which I found inspiring. And so, as I’ve done before (see here, here, here, here and here), I’ve set each reader’s comment next to an image that links back to the the post they were responding to, so you can have some context for their thoughts as well as see what others think. And if the author of the comment is a blogger or on twitter, I’ve embedded a link in their name to their blog or twitter account, so you can learn more about their work and connect.

“How do teachers find that balance between offering true, authentic choice, alongside the responsibility for the ‘teaching’ of reading? I don’t know the answer, but I do believe that building a community of readers and writers begins with a teacher who is passionate and who supports a learning environment where empathy is honored, so that risk taking can occur. I always wanted to structure my 7th grade classroom like Atwell’s, where kids can read or write whatever they want, and community is built through poetry. Maybe that’s why her students win so many writing awards… Less structure + More choice = Abundant Learning!”  Laurie Pandorf

“My students and I were considering endings of short stories and interpreting what the writer might want us to understand about the ending and beyond that, the larger story. When I asked them to pose some theories about why Roald Dahl might have ended “Lambs to the Slaughter” as he did, some of their early responses were ‘because he ran out of things to say’ or ‘because he wanted to wrap it up.’

I wanted students to go further, and they did. With some prompting, they got to saying things like ‘there may be moments that are so devastating, that you can’t hold back your anger’ (yes!) and ‘maybe we are all capable of the kind of crime Mary commits’ (beautiful!). I love where their interpretations ended up, but I wondered about those early responses. Were students thinking about their own reasons for ending a piece of writing? How often have they been asked to write a story, and ended it because they ran out of steam and/or ideas and/or interest? Are students aware that writers make choices in attempt to say something to the reader, not because they’ve run out of things to say? I know where I need to go next.”    Brian Weishar

“I always go back to Donald Graves when I find myself getting mired in nearby talk that reveres units of study packaged programs, rubrics and numbers as a way of determining learning. Our students are not any of those things, which is what makes teaching so challenging and exciting. You never know what’s going to happen in the classroom. What a student will say and do will just make you stop in your tracks to consider something you hadn’t thought about before. It’s what I love about teaching and what I see as important to keep front and center so I don’t lose my way.” Elisa Waingort

“In so many ways, we need to see the interactions with our students and our interactions with text as part of a bigger whole–ways we can live together in our world today. I think we and our students can see the world as a part, not apart, from the wonders and the issues and the insights we have together. Honoring these moments, supporting the ideas of the students, and stretching the ideas beyond the beginnings, to see connections, to value the ways we can get smarter by listening to each other–in our words and deeds.” Kathy Doyle

I used to lament that “kids these days just don’t know how to think! Now I realize, of course, that “I” was the problem: I wasn’t providing a space or opportunities for them to do that. I think I was also not so subtly sending the message that their thinking wasn’t valued. I’m working hard to change all of that now, and am trying to learn to shut my mouth and let them open theirs more, and then to sit back and wonder at all they have to say.”  Allison Jackson

As a classroom teacher who feels surrounded by TPT and Pinterest projects galore, I wonder…where has our respect for ourselves as professionals gone? By blindly following one curriculum, program, cute project after another, we have lost the voices of children. I frequently ponder, what have we “done” to reading? As Beers and Probst offer in Disrupting Thinking, “Skills are important. But if we aren’t reading and writing so that we can grow, so that we can discover, so that we can change—change our thinking, change ourselves, perhaps change the world—then those skills will be for naught.”  Lisa Osterman

“Getting our students to habituate to the idea that interpretation requires opportunities to “revisit, revise and refine” is a deliberate and yet messy process, because there will be many theories as to meaning, many with equal validity. As teachers, we often want some neat “one answer” that can then become the anchor of a thesis statement or PARCC answer, for that is what teachers have come to think of as teaching. In actuality, as you and Dorothy so brilliantly posit in your books, the “answer” to the meaning of any particular book is less important than the intellectual journey there – the habits of thinking that allow us to pause, re-read, wonder, and reframe idea,” Tara Smith

So here’s to a new school year. May yours be filled with big questions, insightful reflection, messiness and the joy of thinking with your students!

Are We Opening the Door Wide Enough for Our Readers?

As a featured speaker at this year’s upcoming Literacy for All Conference in Providence, I was invited to write a guest post for the Lesley University Literacy blog. Some of you may have caught this there, but if not, here’s a repost:

Recently I’ve been starting PD sessions by asking teachers to engage in what Harvard’s Project Zero calls a “chalk talk.” A chalk talk asks participants to consider a question then silently write down their ideas about it, without talking to each other. Then once they’ve gotten their own ideas down, they’re invited to respond to others—again, without any talking.

As you can see, the question I ask is “What do you think are the ‘right reasons’ to teach reading?” And to spark their thinking, I share this passage from Vicki Spandel’s preface to The 9 Rights of Every Writer, where she lays out what she believes are the “right reasons” to write:

“Our reason is not—or at least it should not be—to help students meet the standards we set…[Instead] I believe the most worthwhile goals of writing are: writing to think, to move another person, to create something that will be remembered, to find the most salient personal topics that will weave a common thread through virtually all the writing text in one’s life, to develop a unique personal voice with which one feels at home, to develop and maintain a spirit of unrelenting curiosity that drives the writing forward.”

Every time I ask teachers to do this, they come up with many worthwhile and meaningful reasons to teach reading:

• To become a more empathetic human being
• To acknowledge the complexity of human experience
• To help us understand how we fit into our world
• To feel more understood and accepted
• To not be satisfied with the status quo

Yet often, in their classrooms, these same teachers spend much of their time teaching discrete skills, standards and strategies that, in and of themselves, may never touch on these deeper reasons for reading. To be clear, this isn’t always the fault of teachers. Many schools use packaged or scripted programs, which they require teachers to implement “with fidelity,” and the lessons in those programs are mostly framed around discrete strategies, standards and skills. And in schools that aren’t using packaged material, teachers are often expected to write a specific outcome in the classroom each day—often presented as an “I can” or “Students will be able to” (SWBAT) statement—and then assess who’s met the outcome, or not, by the end of the period.

Inevitably, what this does is narrow the door for readers in a way that can give them a warped view of reading—and it prevents us from seeing all they might be capable of. To see what I mean, let’s imagine two groups of students both reading the following passage from Patricia Reilly Giff’s Fish Face, which is a Fountas & Pinnell level M book. One group is being asked to identifying character traits, a commonly taught skill, while the other is reading the passage more holistically to consider what it might mean in a broader way.

When asked to identify each character’s trait, many students will read this passage and conclude that Emily is nice, friendly or kind and that Dawn is shy. In each case, they’d be able to support these conclusions with evidence from the text: Emily is nice because she wants the new girl to sit next to her and says friendly things, like “You have a pretty name,” while Dawn is shy because she’s a new girl and doesn’t always respond to Emily. They might meet the outcome on the board by doing this, but they’d be missing a lot. I’ve seen many, for instance, who miss the fact that Emily has lied to Dawn because, having already identified a trait, they think their work is finished. And by missing that, they also miss the chance to engage in meaningful reasons to read: to realize how complex people are.

Now, let’s see what can happen if we opened the door wider and set the task, not on practicing a skill, but on exploring what the writer might be trying to show her readers. And let’s say we do this in a way that encourages students, not to rush to make claims, but to consider multiple possibilities. Those students might think that Emily could be nice, kind and friendly and also envious, while Dawn might be shy but also mean or snooty. Many might also consider that envy could lead to lying, which would help them understand that people are complex—and might make feel understood and empathetic.

So how do we open the door wider to give students more room to engage in deeper thinking and reap the real benefits of reading?

Shift from Answers to Thinking

While standardized tests are all about answers, reading is an act of meaning making, and the first thing we need to do is shift our focus from looking for answers to thinking. To do that, we need to be, as Walt Whitman once said, “curious, not judgmental.” That means not hopscotching from student to student until we get the answer we’re seeking, but accepting a wide a range of thinking—not to debate, but to consider. It also means honoring provisional thinking, which uses words like might, could and maybe. After all, the only way to really know what’s going on with the characters in Fish Face is to suspend judgment and keep on reading with these possibilities in mind, revising your ideas as you go.

Use Kid-Friendly Language

I’m often in schools that want teachers and students to use academic language because, after all, they’re in school and that language will be on the tests. Much of that language, though, consists of abstract words connected to abstract concepts, like theme, and while we can teach students to use this language, it doesn’t mean they really understand it.

Take, for instance, the small group of fourth graders I used the Fish Face passage with. Like our second group, they inferred up a storm, though they hadn’t explicitly been asked to. After they’d shared their thinking, though, I asked them—in front of all the fourth grade teachers—if they knew what the word inferring meant. To their teachers’ dismay, some said they’d never heard it before, while others said they’d heard it, but couldn’t remember what it meant. But finally, a boy said he knew what it meant: reading between the lines.

Of course, that definition is abstract as well. So to help them see what inferring meant, I named for them what they’d done: they’d added up small details in the story to figure something out the writer hadn’t said directly. And to make that even more concrete, I took one of the inferences they’d made and wrote it out as an equation:

Dawn had curly hair and ladybug earrings
+ Emily had straight hair and no earrings
+ Emily wanted earrings (“She flicked at her ears” and has begged her mother)
Emily is envious of Dawn

“Ah,” they all said, now they got it. What they needed was an experience and a concrete example drawn from their own thinking to attach the abstract word to.

Trust the Process

In our current climate of teacher evaluations, accountability measures and mandates, trust is often in short supply. And I’m aware that some teachers are afraid that, if they open the reading door wider, they’ll be seen as not doing their job.

I’m reminded, though, again of something else Vicki Spandel says about writing:

“The problem with standards is not that they aim to high but that often they do not lift us up nearly enough. The great irony is that when we teach writing for the right reasons. . . the little things tend to fall into place anyway. . . What’s more, the writer learns to care about such things, not because we said we said she should, but because they took her to a place where her writing became powerful.”

When we open the door wide enough for students to engage in real meaning making—which involves continually revising your thinking and considering multiple possibilities—the strategies and skills we can belabor often seem to magically appear. Like the fourth graders, students reading for meaning often infer at higher level than students who are charged with practicing a skill. Also, the claims students reading for meaning make tend to be more nuanced and complex than those of students reading to identify a trait. And when it comes to standardized tests, they’ll be ahead of the game. Instead of starting to think once they’ve read the passage and get to the questions, they’ll be thinking from the very first sentence.

Finally, when we open the door wider, we create enough space for students to feel the power of reading to help them better understand themselves, other people and the world around them. And if those chalk talks are any indication, that’s just what we want to happen.

 

 

With Appreciation

Things have been quiet on the blog for a while, mostly because I’ve been working on several challenging projects, one of which involves writing copy for a new website that will house the blog and a variety of other resources (and hopefully be up next month)> But aware that this has been Teacher Appreciation Week, I’ve been thinking about how much both past and present teachers have impacted and contributed to my life and feeling a need to share that.

From my own days in grade school, for instance, there was the English teacher I wrote about in “My Daughter Reminds Me Why I Write (and Why She Doesn’t)”. She chose a story I’d written to submit to Scholastic’s Writing Contest—despite the fact that she was surprised that the quiet, meek girl who hardly ever spoke in class had actually written it. And last year for Teachers Appreciation Week, Heinemann shared a video of me sharing the story of how another high school teacher made me realize that, despite failing to get into AP English, I could, indeed, write insightfully about books if it’d connected to them deeply.

And then there’s the art teacher who instilled in me a love for visual images, the legacy of which you can see here on the blog. I took after-school art classes from her for years, first in her attic (which had sloping ceilings just like an artist’s atelier in Paris) and then in the incredible studio that extended from the back of her house. Frequently she’d create a still life for us to paint—a bowl or plate filled with apples and grapes, a jug overflowing with poppies—and in spring she’d have us take our easels outside to her garden to paint the flowers, “en plein air,” just as the Impressionists had done.

From her, I learned that looking and seeing are actually two different things, and that as poet Mary Oliver put it, in words I only discovered years later, “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.” But perhaps, most importantly, she made me feel that I had the sensibility of an artist, with a unique way of seeing the world—which, I think, is exactly what those English teachers did, too. They noticed something in me despite all those despites. And even though my medium turned out to be words, not markers or watercolors, each of these teachers empowered me in ways that have shaped my life.

More recently, though, I find myself inspired and impacted by teachers in a different way. Whether it’s the teachers I work with in schools, the many colleagues I have who’ve become dear friends, or those I’ve never (yet) met in person but feel like I know through twitter, it’s teachers that keep me thinking and learning—and reflecting on the question I often feel compelled to write down in my notebook:

Sometimes, this happens when a teacher says or tweets something that pushes me to reflect (in ways that aren’t always comfortable, but needed):

Sometimes it’s when an educator writes something that makes me realize that I hadn’t fully understood something that I thought I had. Recently, for instance, in his blog post, “Confronting the Disimagination Machine,” the Opal School’s Matt Karlson made me realize that worksheets are even more insidious than I’d previously thought: Not only are they not meaningful to kids, but they standardize children’s experiences and thinking in ways I hadn’t, until then, considered.

Sometimes, too, a teacher will share a project online that helps me see possibilities I’d never imagined before, which makes me incredibly happy). For example, just recently I stumbled on the work kindergarten teacher Faige Meller‘s kids’ did when she invited them to go outside and, inspired by the installation artist Andy Goldsworthy, create art from nature (which seems like the perfect antidote to the disimagination machine):

And then there’s Amy Ludwig Vanderwater, who always gets me thinking (as do Rebecca O’Dell, Alison Marchetti and the other teachers who share ideas at movingwriters.org). This year for National Poetry Month, Amy challenged herself to write 30 poems, one for each day of April, about a single subject (#1Subject30Ways), using a different poetry technique from her book Poems Are Teachers for each poem. And she invited teachers and students to join her. Amy’s subject was the constellation Orion, which inspired three of teacher Emily Callahan‘s students to write poems about Greek Mythology, like this one:

And here’s a gorgeous poem from teacher Kate Rodger, whose subject was poems about home:

Finally, there’s the teachers who invite me into their classrooms and schools to help them puzzle through problems that perplex them. Recently, for instance, I got an email from a school I’ll be starting to work with in June on embedding more meaningful grammar instruction into their middle and upper schools. And the email included the following questions, which were on their mind:

• What might a grammar curriculum across the grades look like? How do we build in inquiry/apprenticeship work from one grade to the next – should we cover the same concepts/techniques but with different (increasingly sophisticated?) mentor texts?
• How do we address student errors in addition to focusing on teaching grammar in terms of craft? How best to address grammatical errors when giving feedback on student writing?
• How do we find time to integrate inquiry grammar lessons into our curricula?
• Is there a place for direct instruction? Does it matter whether students can distinguish between a helping verb and a linking verb or a clause and a phrase? Should students learn grammar definitions, and if so, when in the process should terms be introduced? Is there ever a place for testing or quizzing students on grammar?
• How can a teacher tell if inquiry/apprenticeship instruction is effective? How do teachers encourage students to try new grammatical/stylistic techniques in their writing without having it feel forced?

I have some answers up my sleeve already, but I actually relish the opportunity to wrap my mind around these questions again and see if anything new pop up. It fact, it’s partly what keeps me going—along with remembering that paying attention is our endless and proper work.

Thinking Routines for Authentic Discussion

This week, as I recover from jet lag, I’m sharing a blog post by one of the amazing students I had at UNH’s Summer Literacy Institute last year, Megan Dincher. Here Megan beautifully captures what can happen when we shift our teaching focus from seeking answers to thinking and hand over the role of “question master” to students.

Taking the Time

I used to provide discussion questions for my students.  I would spend time thinking about book-specific questions that I could ask, questions that I thought would prompt complex discussion and make them really think about the text at hand.  Sometimes, they did have really complex discussions, and I’m sure they spent time thinking about said text.  But the discussion wasn’t as authentic as I wanted it to be, because I was telling them what to talk about.

Now, there are always going to be things that we want students to talk about, and there’s a time and place for helping them understand things about a book that they might not have discovered for themselves.  When I want my students to discuss a book–not necessarily analyze the book, but discuss it, I now have a different approach.

Last summer, I took a class with Vicki Vinton at the New Hampshire Literacy…

View original post 884 more words