A Toast to Provocations & Spirited Discourse: The Book Is Out!

4360243 – ender corks popping open a bottle of champagne

It’s official! Today’s the day Dynamic Teaching for Deeper Reading is released into the world. And I can’t think of a better way to celebrate that than by sharing some words from the fabulous foreword the great Ellin Keene wrote for the book!

I first ‘met’ Ellin when I read the original Mosaic of Thought, the seminal book on teaching comprehension that she wrote with Susan Zimmerman, and I was profoundly affected. Even now, in fact, I can clearly recall how she walked me and her other readers through her reading of Sandra Cisneros’s gorgeous but elliptical prose poem  “Salvador, Late or Early.” Not only did her insights about the piece inform my own understanding of it, but she did something remarkable that I’d never encountered before in a professional book: She not only shared what she made of the piece but what she didn’t make by bravely admitting to when, as she wrote, her “understanding diminished” because “the images were coming too fast for [her] to keep up with.”

To me, this was real writing about real reading, with all the real messiness of meaning making captured—and anyone who knows my work can only imagine how much she’s inspired and impacted that. So I was beyond thrilled when she agreed to write the foreword, where she brings the same level of authenticity, insight and honesty she brought to Mosaic of Thought.

Right up front, for instance, Ellin acknowledges that Dynamic Teaching for Deeper Reading is “a provocative book—in,” she adds, “the best way.” To me, that means seeing a provocation not as an act that threatens us but as something that inspires thinking, questions and ideas, which is how it’s viewed in Reggio Emilia schools—and closer to home, at the Opal School in Portland, Oregon. There teachers frequently design provocations by setting up an array of enticing materials or situations that beg to be explored and manipulated, like this:

I think, though, that texts can be provocations, too. Consider, for instance, the fifth graders I wrote about who wrestled with “Louisa’s Liberation.” Or take a look at all the thinking that was sparked when third graders encountered the cover of Cecil, the Pet Glacier and were simply invited to share what they noticed and what they were wondering about:

To see a larger imagine, click here

Tinkering, an off-shoot of the Maker Movement (and yet another X-Based Learning approach), also uses the idea of provocations, which you can see written side-ways on the far-left side of the chart—just before the learner’s nudged to take a risk and plunge in:

Of course, that stepping off a cliff of into the unknown can, indeed, feel threatening. But Ellin speaks to that aspect of provocations in her foreword, as well. She confesses that while the book affirmed many of the ideas she’d been toying with herself, she didn’t find herself wholly agreeing with every premise or claim I make. But, she writes:

This is exactly what I think we should experience in reading a professional text. It should challenge some of our long-held ideas about practice. It should cause us to think about our craft in new ways—and we should feel ourselves pushing back in others. When you sit down to discuss the ideas in this book, I wish nothing more than that those discussions are dynamic (see title of the book!!) and argumentative (in a civil way, of course!) and inspired provocative. I hope you and your colleagues are stirred and inspired and that you experience a great deal of cognitive dissonance. Are we really a profession if we don’t spar a bit? Are we engaging in spirited and informed discourse if we don’t?

Leave it up to Ellin Keene to say exactly what I’m wishing for, too: that the book will inspire lots of spirited discussion, questioning, ideas—and, yes, even push back—in a way that, as one of the “Louisa’s Liberation” students said, is “hard but fun.” To support those kinds of discussions, I’ll be setting up a Facebook page for Dynamic Teaching for Deeper Reading in the next few weeks. But for now I’d like to raise a toast that I hope you’ll join me in, to a rich, robust exchange of ideas and lots of dynamic thinking!

16524922 – two champagne glasses ready to bring in the new year

A Book Is Born (Well, Almost)

After umpteen drafts over nearly four years, I finally delivered the book I’ve been working on to Heinemann the other week. It won’t be out until early 2017, but it now officially has a title:

Dynamic Teaching for Deeper Reading:

Shifting to a Problem-Based Approach

Like Jan Burkins and Kim Yaris’s great new book Who’s Doing the Work?, Dynamic Teaching for Deeper Reading addresses the “What next” in reading instruction question that’s been posed by our rapidly changing times and the many pendulum swings that have hit the field of literacy over the years. And to give you a feel for how this book will answer that question, here’s some lines from the introduction:

I’ll show you how students can become the insightful and passionate readers and learners we all want them to be—and the critical and creative problem solvers and thinkers they’ll need to be in our increasingly complex world. The book builds on the process of meaning making that What Readers Really Do explored, though unlike that earlier book, this one looks at both fiction and nonfiction as well as explicitly connects the work to all the shifts, concepts and terms that have cropped up over the last four years, from close reading to mindsets and from grit to complex texts. It will also more explicitly help you build your own capacities as problem solvers and thinkers, as well as develop a repertoire of dynamic teaching moves. And it will deepen your understanding of what it means to read closely and deeply so that you can, in the words of Lucy Calkins, “outgrow yourself” as a reader in order to meet both the higher demands the Common Core has set—and enjoy what you read even more.

I’ll be sharing more from the book as we get closer to publication, but now that a new school year is about to start (or in some places is already underway), I want to spend the next few weeks posting a variation of my yearly tradition of kicking off the new year with teacher thinking. In the past (as you can see here, here and here), I’ve celebrated teacher thinking by sharing some of the amazingly thoughtful comments teachers have left on each year’s blog posts. But given that posts have been few and far between this year, I instead want to share some of the incredible thinking that teachers I’ve worked with have done in both classroom and institute settings.

Through the Teaching Learning Community Metamorphosis, for instance, I facilitated a content coaching institute this summer in Redding, California, for administrators and coaches who were embarking on a county-wide literacy initiative. For those of you unfamiliar with content coaching, it’s an incredibly effective approach to coaching that Metamorphosis founders Lucy West and Toni Cameron explore and define in their book Agents of Change as follows:

Recognizing the importance of developing a common vision of what the initiative might accomplish, I asked the coaches to consider this question from Agents of Change and, in groups, create a chart to share their thinking.

The groups immediately started talking as I passed out chart paper and markers. And here’s a taste of their thinking:

Having articulated such well-defined visions (with so many great variations) of what they want to see happening in classrooms, these coaches were ready to think more deeply about what might be the most impactful practices they could focus on with the teachers they’d be working with this year. And in that way, they were engaged in a process of planning for change that I wrote about in “Beliefs, Books & Being True to Yourself”: They articulated what they believed teaching and learning should look, feel and sound like before searching for resources and considering practices.

Next time, I’ll share some of the work teachers did with a practice I shared at this summer’s Paramus Institute on the Teaching of Writing, which engaged them in much happy grappling, in depth conversations and collaborative messiness. And in the meantime, here’s hoping that your new school year starts off with a sense of wonder, lots of energy and just the right amount of controlled chaos!

The Gift of Words

There’s been so many words of hate and fear unleashed in the world recently that this holiday season I’d like to share some that can bring us together, not tear us apart. They all come from an utterly wonderful book by Ella Frances Sanders called Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words from Around the World, which I discovered through Maria Popova’s equally wonderful website brainpickings.

As Sanders writes in her introduction: “The words in this book may be answers to questions you didn’t even know to ask, and perhaps some you did. They might pinpoint emotions and experiences that seemed elusive and indescribable,” but are, in fact, part of our common human experience. And as such, Sanders says, they are reminders, that [we] are fundamentally, intrinsically bound to every single person on the planet with language and with feelings.”

So while we’re surrounded by divisive words, here’s some that can remind us of what we all share—especially if we’re word and book lovers.

Dutch adjective

Italian verb

Japanese noun

Urdu noun

Now here’s hoping that this holiday season gives you lots of time to commouvere and is filled with much gezellig boketto and goya. And may next year bring more peace on earth and good will toward men.

Still Writing

Last month I read Dani Shapiro‘s book Still Writing, a memoir/writing advice hybrid that fellow educator and blogger Catherine Flynn had recommended after we discovered we both were fans of Shapiro’s novels. Of all the things I’ve been meaning to read—from the mountain of books stacked up on my nightstand to the dozens of titles on my amazon wish list—I wasn’t quite sure why I decided to pick that one at that time. But as I started reading, it became clear to me that this was a book my soul needed.

You see, I’m still writing the book I’ve been working on for two years—still wrestling, struggling, wildly swinging back and forth between exhilaration, frustration and despair, and often kicking myself for making the fact that I was writing another book so public. And so I needed to be reminded that what I was trying to do was, in fact, really hard, which Dani Shapiro did. As she writes:

When writers who are just starting out ask me when it gets easier, my answer is never. It never gets easier. I don’t want to scare them, so I rarely say more than that, but the truth is that, if anything, it gets harder. The writing life isn’t just filled with predictable uncertainties but with the awareness that we are always starting over again. That everything we ever write will be flawed . . . [and] all we can hope is that we will fail better.

I also needed to do what Shapiro does herself: “to remember that the job—as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy—of the [writer] is to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it.”

Of course, that’s easier said that done. And why I ever thought that writing a book I was hoping to call Embracing Complexity (alas, that title’s now been taken, which is yet another thing that derailed me) would be easy is beyond me. But I share this now to answer the “When will the book be coming out?” questions (the answer is simply not yet), and because working on it for as long as I have—and feeling like it’s still not quite there—has made me have to stare something in the face that’s been getting a lot of press lately: failure.

As you may have noticed, there’s been much touting of the benefits of failure lately, whether it’s in posts like “What Do Students Lose by Being Perfect? Valuable Failure” on the educational site Mind/Shift or in articles like “What If the Secret to Success is Failure?” in the New York Times. Posts and articles like these suggest that failure is good for us because because when we fail “we’re forced to adapt and change” and we learn important life lessons, like success rarely comes without lots of hard work and the importance of not giving up.

I’m not saying these aren’t true—nor that a fear of failing can’t destroy a love of learning, which it can. But I’m here to tell you, if you don’t already know, that feeling like you’ve failed really sucks. And the idea of creating scenarios in classrooms that actually set students up to fail (as some of these pieces suggest teachers should do) in order to teach them these lessons seems almost sadistic to me.

What looking at failure in the eye, however, has made me do is to think about how I cope with and manage it. And I have to say it’s not because I’ve embraced what Psychology Today says is the “magical properties of failure [to] rewire the brain and get the creative juices flowing.” Nor do I think it’s because I’ve got grit.

Certainly there are things I persevere with, whether it’s cycling up a hill to reach a stunning vista or plugging away at trying to learn French and Italian. But I’m also someone who regularly abandons books rather than forging on to the end of something I’ve heard is great but doesn’t quite strike my fancy. And I’ve been known to give up on those hills and just walk my bike to the top, despite the fact that my partner David always tells me that I’m capable of making it but I psyched myself out.

No, what I’ve come to realize is that I only persevere in things I feel passionate about. I’m passionate about moving through a landscape on two wheels propelled by my own two legs. I’m passionate about French and Italian and the soul-stirring places where those languages are spoken. I’m passionate about words and the power of language to change hearts and minds and actions. And I’m passionate about supporting teachers to help their students experience the beauty and power of language, too, whether it’s in the texts they read or the ones they write.

What’s interesting, however, is that passion rarely comes up in discussions about grit—though even Angela Duckworth, whose work inspired the whole grit obsession, concedes the importance of it. In an NPR piece, for instance, called “Does Teaching Kids to Get ‘Gritty’ Help Them Get Ahead,” she says:

I don’t think people can become truly gritty and great at things they don’t love. So when we try to develop grit in kids, we also need to find and help them cultivate their passions. That’s as much a part of the equation here as the hard work and the persistence.”

Why we focus so much on grit and so little on passions speaks, I think, to a belief system that’s much more comfortable with the old puritan nose-to-the-grindstone work ethic than anything as extravagant and potentially unruly as passion. But passion, not grit, is definitely what keeps me going—as well as the intrinsic rewards that Trevor Bryan shared recently on his wonderful blog (and you can see below):

And so I keep writing, believing in what Dani Shapiro says: that writing

has been a privilege. It has whipped my ass. It has burned into me a valuable clarity. It has made me think about suffering, randomness, good will, luck, memory, responsibility, and kindness, on a daily basis—whether I feel like it or not.

Here, for instance, if nothing else, struggling with writing this book has made me remember the power of passion, without which I simply wouldn’t keep going. And writing this blog has renewed that passion, which is getting those creative juices flowing in ways that just grit never has.

And so, as I turn from the blog to the book that is still there waiting for me, I ask you this: What are you doing to cultivate passion in the readers and writers in your rooms? And what passions are you cultivating and nurturing in yourself, knowing that they will fuel and sustain you far more than failure and grit?

News from the Writing Front: Some Thoughts on Process

I shared this image and quote from Hemingway at a session I chaired at NCTE in November, and between now and then I’ve done a lot of blood-letting as I’ve plugged away at my book. I’ve also experienced jolts of joy, because as Neil Gaiman writes, “The process of writing can be magical.” From nothing but words you can create whole worlds that can move and affect other people. I also learned a thing or two about myself as a writer that have raised some questions about how we teach writing in classrooms, which I’m feeling an itch to share, along with a handful of great writing quotes that could use a good home.

The big thing I learned (or had to re-learn) is to trust my process. I’m not a fast writer in any way. In fact, the whole idea of writing a flash draft is about as unappealing to me as speed dating or dining at Burger King. That’s not to say that I never do it. I can, if I absolutely have to. And I do try to keep my pen or keyboard fingers moving if I’m writing something exploratory, which I do if I’m stuck or want to play around with an idea or image in my notebook or a new document. But that’s writing for me, not writing for a reader. The minute I’m intentionally writing for a reader (versus an assessment or test scorer), I slow down in order to, as Rachel Carson says, “be still and listen to what [my] subject has to tell [me].” And I’m aware that flies right in the face of both many writers’ advice and current classroom trends.

Many writers, for instance, say it’s important to just get a draft down on paper because, as Anne Lamott says in Bird by Bird “you need to start  somewhere,” and giving yourself permission to write what she calls a”shitty first draft,” can help. Likewise, John Steinbeck advised would-be writers to “Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on.”

Advice like this is part of what drives the flash draft trend in schools, but there’s another writing camp of thought that doesn’t get as much press, which does things differently. Here, for instance, is Annie Dillard making a case for writing carefully and slowly right from the start:

“The reason to perfect a piece of prose as it progresses—to secure each sentence before building on it—is that original writing fashions a form. It unrolls out into nothingness. It grows cell to cell, bole to bough to twig to leaf; any careful word may suggest a root, may begin a strand of metaphor or even out of which much, or all, will develop.”

This camp believes in letting the words guide you, which for writer Jayne Anne Phillips means that she writes “line by line, by the sound and the weight and the music of the words,” without too much revision.

Of course, for better or worse, I revise a lot, too (which is why this book is taking so long). But while much of my revising has to do with clarifying my focus and meaning, which inevitably involves moving parts around, I also follow Tom Romano‘s advice for revision from his fabulous essay “How to Write”:

 “Read aloud. Feel the words in your mouth. Listen. Your sense of how language should sound is a great ally. You’ll hear when words make music; you’ll hear when they’re discordant. Make adjustments if you need to . . . honing language, tinkering and tuning.”

I just do that in my first draft, too.

So why do we teach students that writers always write their first drafts quickly when actually that’s not true? It may have to do with the fact that some students can feel inhibited or downright scared at the sight of a blank page or screen, and in that they’re not alone. Writer Margaret Atwood, for instance, has said, “The fact is that blank pages inspire me with terror. What will I put on them? Will it be good enough?” And writing a flash or a shitty first draft can be a way of tricking our minds into leaving those fears behind. It’s also easier to teach kids to write flash drafts than it is to invite, if not teach, them to love language. But as often happens when we take an easy route, we run the risk of simplifying something complex—and, in the case of writing, really hard.

I also suspect we ask students to write flash drafts as a way of preparing them for on-demand assessments, though the two are different. When it comes to high-stakes performing, for instance, science writer Elizabeth Svoboda, author of “How to Avoid Choking under Pressure,” writes that “If you are well-practiced, just let the learning you have done unfold under the force of unconscious rather than conscious thinking.” That is, you’re not supposed to think. But what if all that you’re well-practiced in is writing on-demand? What learning is unfolding then?

I’m not suggesting that everyone follow my process, only that process is as important as products—though in our current product-driven age, it doesn’t get the attention it deserves. It’s during the process, after all, that we get to practice and try out things as writers, whether that’s leads, structure, craft moves or even a process itself. We could, for instance, give students more than one strategy for getting words down on the page and then invite them to consider which worked best for for them, using this advice from Tom Romano as a guide.”Whatever helps you come to language, tap, exploit, ride. Whatever hinders you coming to language, avoid, shun, spurn.”

Of course, this means we’d need to value engaging with language as much as getting a job done. But I believe there are students out there who might actually find more joy in the blood-letting by listening to and following their words. And by finding more joy in the process, they’d learn more, which means that they’d come to those high-stakes moments with more that could unconsciously unfold.

Some Thoughts on a Thought-Provoking Trip

From http://www.marcandangel.com/2010/03/29/25-beautifully-illustrated-thought-provoking-questions/ with photo by Rolands Lakis http://www.flickr.com/photos/rolandslakis/116382077/in/photostream/

Between Thanksgiving, Buffalo, Portland and a book that still needs to get done, I haven’t had much time to post, but I did want to share a link to the blog of the Opal School in Portland, where I was last week, and invite you to join a discussion about reading that we started there. For those of you unfamiliar with Opal, it’s a Reggio-inspired pre-K though grade 5 school (the preschool is private while the elementary school is a public, lottery-based charter) housed in Portland’s Children Museum. And it’s mission is “to strengthen education by provoking fresh ideas concerning environments where creativity, imagination and the wonder of learning thrive.”

I’ve know about Opal since I had the great fortune to meet Susan Mackay, the Director of the Museum Center for Learning, and Mary Gage Davis, the school’s Curriculum Director, two years ago in Reggio-Emilia where we were fellow participants in a study group exploring the implications of the Reggio approach on literacy instruction across the grade. (To read more about that experience, click here, here and here.) And I’d come to know Matt Karlson, the Center for Learning Administrator who also writes many of the Opal School blog posts, through the perceptive and thoughtful comments he’s left here on this blog. But I’d never been to Opal before. So when Matt invited me to join them for a workshop on “New Possibilities for Readers,” I jumped at the opportunity. And what an opportunity it was! Inspiring, energizing and incredibly thought-provoking, as the staff and I shared ideas and questions about the role and place of reading.

You can learn more about the workshop itself and the ideas and questions we’re still puzzling over in Matt’s recent blog post. But in a nutshell, we realized that while we share many of the same visions, beliefs and hopes for children and schools, we saw the role of books and the purpose of reading slightly differently.

My belief in the power of books and reading are perhaps best captured by author Julius Lester in his wonderful piece “The Place of Books in Our Lives,” where he looks at the origins of the words book, read, imagine, and knowledge and explores the implications of each word’s root. The word read, for instance,

“comes from an Old Teutonic root and means ‘to fit together, to consider, to deliberate, to take thought, to attend to, to take care or charge of a thing.’ To read is to fit together, to attend to. It is to take care of something, to take charge of something. So, what is being attended to? What is being fit together?”

Lester believes that ultimately it’s the reader who is being fit together. And he thinks this because

“. . . books are the royal road that enable us to enter the realm of the imaginative. Books enable us to experience what it is like to be someone else. Through books we experience other modes of being. Through books we recognize who we are and who we might become.”

For this magic to happen, however, he says, “Books require that we temporarily put our egos in a box by the door and take on the spirit of others.” And I wonder if it’s this idea of putting ourselves in a box by the door to take on the spirit of another—whether that’s a character, an author, or the subjects of facts—that raised the questions we posed.

At the risk of trying to speak for Opal, I think the conversation for them always begins, not with the word book, read, or even imagine (as it often does with me), but with the word child. They believe strongly in the power of children to make sense of the world around them in ways that can also illuminate for us, the adults who are privileged to spend time with them, the wonder, beauty and heartache of our world. It’s certain something I believe in, too. In fact, here’s a sentence from the same piece by Lester:

“When we read we discover and rediscover the power of words, the power to express thoughts and feelings, the power to touch another, the power to express love, the power to take care,”

If I recast it with children at the center, I see an equally powerful truth: When we listen to children we discover and rediscover the power of their words to express thoughts and feelings, to care for and touch one another. And given that our current educational climate tends to value data points over children’s words, I understand and applaud Opal’s commitment to seeing literacy education as first and foremost concerned with offering “experiences that lead [children] to understand that they have something worth saying before caring about what others have to say.” In fact, seeing the amazing work the children and teachers were doing at Opal made me wonder if my work with reading was really big enough—and if perhaps I’m too pious and staunch in my reverence for books. But then the book lover in me kicks in again, wanting to say it’s enough, especially when students have other opportunities in other kinds of settings to recognize who they are and who they might become, as they do at Opal.

And that in turn reminds me of words Susan Mackay shared from Toni Morrison: “The words on the page are only half the story. The rest is what you bring to the party.” My visit to Opal raised all sorts of questions for me and the teachers there about why, how and when to balance—or not—the words on the page with the words of the child, and what agendas might be served by the choices we make. It’s not an either/or proposition, rather, as Matt said, a question of emphasis. But if we believe, as Jerome Bruner does, that “pedagogy is never innocent,” these questions are worth considering.

So if you have your own thoughts, ideas or questions, Matt and I both hope you’ll consider leaving a comment here or on the Opal School’s blog to keep the conversation going. And I promise that I’ll be back soon with Writing Meaningfully about Meaningful Reading Part 2!

Giving Thanks in a Time of Sorrow

For years, Thanksgiving has been connected in my mind with NCTE, which holds its annual convention the weekend before turkey day. And for the third year in a row, I’ve sat at my desk after Thanksgiving to give thanks to all the people I heard at NCTE who inspired and energized me. This year, however, feels different because between NCTE and Thanksgiving something else happened: Ferguson. It’s become a word that stirs up a whole battery of feelings for me—from sadness to outrage to shame. Shame that we live in a country where people seem more expendable than guns. Shame that we can’t seem to bring ourselves to have the kind of hard conversations we desperately need to have about guns, race, poverty, inequality and what’s going on in our schools.

These feelings hovered over my Thanksgiving, but I still want to share some of the voices I heard last weekend because, as writer Roxane Gay writes in her heart-wrenching essay about Ferguson: “Only Words”:

“I have to believe we are going to be better and do better by one another even if I cannot yet see how. If I don’t believe that, I, we, have nothing.”

NCTE helps me believe this in many ways. I might not have read Roxane Gay’s essay, for instance, were it not for my friend and fellow presenter Katherine Bomer, who shared some of Gay’s writing in her presentation last week. Then in one of those synergetic NCTE moments that Burkins & Yaris write about, I spotted Gay’s name in a tweet from another NCTE presenter Paul Thomas, who writes the thought-provoking blog The Becoming Radical. I checked out Gay’s essay, as I urge you to do, and was moved by her powerful words. And I was moved as well to make a donation to the Ferguson Library, which you can do by following the link at the end of the essay.

Then there was the Convention itself. This year’s theme was “Story as the Landscape of Knowing,” but as happened before, I noticed a pattern in the sessions I attended, which suggested another related theme: the need for us, as teachers, to focus our work first and foremost on helping students build strong identities as readers, writers and thinkers who are able to raise their voices with confidence, conviction and compassion.

The first session I attended addressed this directly, as educators Justin Stygles, Kara DiBartolo and Melissa Guerrette joined authors Lynda Mullaly Hunt and Liesl Shurtliff to talk about “Revising the Story: Reluctant Readers Overcoming Shame.” In different ways each speaker looked at what Justin called ‘contra-literacy’ practices—those things we do in classrooms which, while often well-intentioned, not only can kill a love of reading but breed a sense of shame. Each also shared personal and classroom stories of students who’ve shed the stigma of shame through teachers and books that helped them develop a sense of agency. And I left with two new must-reads:  Lynda’s new book Fish in a Tree and Liesl’s re-imagining of Rumpelstiltskin, Rump, both of which have main characters who overcome a sense inadequacy to triumph.

Next up was for me was Sheridan Blau, author of the great book The Literature Workshop. He, too, looked at practices that turn kids off of reading, including ones that promote what he called “inattentional blindness”—tasks that, by narrowing students focus to hunt for a particular thing in a text, blinds them to other things that might be more meaningful. He demonstrated this by showing us a video we later learned was called “The Invisible Gorilla,” and asking us to count how many times a ball was being passed—and intent on counting the passes, I completely missed the gorilla! And he proposed an alternative to those tightly focused tasks: giving students opportunities to bring their whole self to a text so that they can experience and feel a text before they’re asked asked to analyze it.

I noticed the theme, too, in Matt Glover, Kathy Collins and Dan Feigleson‘s session on engaging and inspiring readers. Matt began by showing us how easy it is to help our youngest readers develop identities as readers. All we need to do is honor their approximations, give them some choice and listen. But he cautioned that it was just as easy to destroy those identities if we evaluate students’ choices and attempts. Next Kathy shared the idea of turning readers notebooks into scrapbooks that record students’ personal journey as readers—which, as a scrapbook lover, I adored. And Dan ended the session by sharing some of the ideas he explores in his new book Reading Projects Reimagined: Student-Driven Conferences to Deepen Critical Thinking, and showing us the thinking that emerges if, in a conference, we simply keep asking students to say more.

Dorothy Barnhouse and Charlotte Butler also addressed this theme in their session, “Story as Identity: How Reading Conferences ‘Write’ the Stories Students Tell Themselves,” as each shared ways of turning what could be seen as a student’s deficits into a positive strength. Dorothy, for instance, shared one of the conferences she writes about in Readers Front and Center, where a student’s apparent inability to infer becomes an opportunity to show him—and us—that it’s less important to ‘get’ something right away than to read forward with an open mind and a willingness to revise his thinking, which the student was able to do. Charlotte, on the other hand, shared work she’d done with Ken and Yetta Goodman on Retrospective Miscue Analysis, which also helped students recast what could be seen as mistakes into something more positive—in this case, minds striving to make meaning.

Coincidentally or not, these themes were also present in the two sessions I participated in. As chair of “It’s Not Just for the Kids: Stories of What Can Happen When Teachers Embrace Curiosity, Openness, Creativity & Wonder,” I had the honor of introducing my session presenters, Fran McVeigh, Julieanne Harmatz, Steve Peterson and Mary Lee Hahn, all of whom met each other through this blog and only came to together in person last week. (They also each wrote about the session in their respective blogs, which you can read by clicking on their names). I’d asked them each to think of a question they were curious about and invited them to pursue that question and present what they discovered. And in each case they found that children can do far much more than we sometimes think they can, if only we open the door wide enough.

Finally in “Embracing Complexity,” I presented alongside Mary Ehrenworth and Katherine Bomer who also focused on empowering students. Mary, for instance, shared the work she’s been doing to help students see multiple layers of ideas in nonfiction texts, which they can talk back to. And Katherine made a passionate plea for us to leave behind formulaic structures and cutesy metaphors like hamburgers when we teach writing essays and instead return the the root of the word—’to try’ or ‘attempt’ not ‘to claim’ and ‘prove’—in order to create something that’s more exploratory than declarative and raises more questions than answers.

And that brings me back to Roxane Gay, who asks this critical question: “How do we see one another as human, as having lives that matter, as people deserving of inalienable rights?” I believe the answer lies in part in classrooms and in people like the ones I heard at NCTE who are trying to help children revise, rewrite, recast and reimagine the stories of their lives so that we can all be and do better. And that makes me both hopeful and thankful in a time of sorrow.

On the Road Again: Upcoming Events

Last week I got to hangout on Google with Fran McVeigh, Julieanne Harmatz Steve Peterson and Mary Lee Hahn to talk through the session we’ll be presenting together at this year’s NCTE conventional at National Harbor, just south of D.C. The talk was deep and rich and energizing, and it made me want to share a few details about that and other places I’ll be presenting over the next several months, where, as always, I’d relish the chance to meet blog readers in person.

Before jumping on the Bolt Bus to D.C., however, I’ll be heading half-way around the world to the city of Doha in Qatar. In addition to working for several days with teachers (and my Reggio-Emilia comrade, Katrina Theilmann) at the American School in Doha, I’ll be facilitating a two-day workshop on “Teaching the Process of Meaning Making in Reading,” as part of the NESA (Near East South Asia Council of Overseas Schools) Fall Training Institute, which will be held on November 7 and 8. I know it’s highly unlikely that I’ll run into any stateside blog readers there, but I’m hoping to touch base with a few overseas ones as well as reconnect to some of my other Reggio-Emilia trip colleagues as well.

Next up will be NCTE where I’ll be chairing the session that was mapped out in that Google Hangout last week on Friday November 21 at 4:15. Titled “It’s Not Just for the Kids: Stories of What Can Happen When Teachers Embrace Curiosity, Openness, Creativity and Wonder in the Teaching of Reading,” each presenter will share work they’ve done—some with students, some with teachers—that grew out of questions they wondered about and pursued with passion and curiosity. And I’ll be there to connect the pieces together and share the story of how we all discovered each other, from New York to Ohio to Iowa to California, through the blogosphere.

I’ll also be presenting the following day, November 22, again at 4:15 with two of my favorite people in the world, Mary Ehrenworth and Katherine Bomer, in a session called “Embracing Complexity: Helping Students (and Ourselves) Become More Complex Readers, Writers and Learners.” While we’re still ironing out the final details of that session, we’ll each share classroom stories and student work that show what can happen when we move away from more teacher-directed procedural ways of teaching to something more messy and complex.

After that I’ll be in Portland, Oregon, December 9 and 10, presenting a workshop for educators sponsored by the Portland Children’s Museum Center for Learning and the Opal School. Called “Extending Our Image of Children: New Possibilities for Readers,” Opal School teachers and I will share stories and ways in which we’ve invited children to enter texts as authentic readers. And I’ll also have the amazing opportunity to model some of the approaches I’ve developed in an Opal School classroom—though I imagine the kids will steal the show (as well they should).

And finally, after what I hope will be two balmy days in Los Angeles in January working with LAUSD’s wonderful Education Service Center South coaches and teachers, I’ll be heading north to wintery Toronto for the Reading for the Love of It Language Arts Conference on February 9 and 10, 2015. Along with other amazing presenters, such as Ruth Culham, Pat Johnson, Tanny McGregor and Linda Rief, I’ll be doing two sessions, one on “Helping Students and Ourselves Become Critical Thinkers and Insightful Readers,” which will focus on fiction and “What’s the Main Idea of the Main Idea: From Scavenger Hunting to Synthesizing in Nonfiction Texts.”

So much to see, so much to plan for! Here’s hoping I get to see some of you, too!

 

Making Room for Thinking in the New Reading Wars

Watching the news these days is depressing as, whether it’s Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, Gaza, Ferguson or our dysfunctional Congress, the whole world seems enmeshed with conflicts. And here, on the literacy home front, we seem to be in the midst of a new round of reading wars, with Balanced Literacy and ‘just right’ books being pitted again Achieve-the-Core-style close reading methods and complex texts the same way that phonics was set in opposition to Whole Language way back in the 1970’s.

© 2013 Alejandro Giraldo, illustrator of The Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments (New York: Jasper Collins Publishers). Reprinted with the illustrator’s permission. http://www.alejogiraldo.com

Just as then, this either-or mentality isn’t terribly helpful, nor is it always accurate. In fact, all of these this-versus-that positions seem like examples of a particular kind a reasoning flaw called the false dichotomy or dilemma or the black-and-white fallacy. This flaw in logic appears in arguments when an author presents a reader with only two opposing alternatives without any acknowledgement, let alone consideration, of other options or shades of gray. And, in fact, there are all sorts of other options. In many a classroom, for instance, phonics instruction co-exists with various whole language approaches—and no teacher or child has yet died. Balanced Literacy can meet the objectives of the both the Common Core Standards and close reading as the two lessons I compared in “Weighing in on Balanced Literacy” demonstrated. And in both their recent blog post and their fabulous article in this month’s Reading Today, “Break Through the Frustration: Balance vs. All-or-Nothing Thinking,” Jan Burkins and Kim Yaris push back on what many have framed as a choice between complex texts and ‘just right’ level books with this sound advice:

“To avoid the educational equivalent of scurvy and the whiplash that comes from the constant pendulum shift, we suggest moving from ‘either/or’ conversations about instructional- and frustration level reading to ‘both’ conversations.'”

There’s also something key that’s left out of all these this-text-or-this-approach-versus-that talk: Thinking. What kind of thinking are we asking or setting up students to do regardless of the texts or approach? Is it identifying text structures or using more clues to figure out unknown vocabulary as the two lessons I shared in that earlier post did? Or are we really asking students to consider a text’s meaning at both the literal and thematic level, whether it’s a quantitatively measured complex text or a ‘just right’ book? And what kind of thinking are we engaged in ourselves when we create those lessons? Are we filling in the boxes of lesson planning templates with Standard numbers and objectives or searching google for a lesson on, say, the main idea (which yielded 1,770,000 results in .53 seconds)? Or are we thinking deeply about the texts we’re putting in front of our students to better understand how a reader actually determines the themes of that text through its specific details?

Personally, I can’t help but wonder whether we’d be in this whole Common Core/complex text pickle if we always set students up for deeper thinking instead of practicing skills or strategies that don’t necessarily lead to closer reading and more insightful meaning making. But that means that rather than investing in supposedly Common Core-aligned curriculum and training sessions on creating text-dependent questions, we would have needed to give teachers more time and space to be readers—deep, close and thoughtful readers who authentically think about how specific texts are put together and the kind of demands they place on a reader. And of course, we didn’t.

For a long time now I’ve believed that building our own capacity as readers is the key to helping our students become deeper thinking readers, too. And that belief informs much that I do, from offering occasional read alongs on the blog to starting workshops by asking teachers to read a text not as teachers, but as readers, as I did last week when I had the great privilege of working with coaches and teachers from the Los Angeles Unified School District’s South schools. And so I was utterly thrilled to learn about a keynote speech Lucy Calkins gave at the opening of one of this summer’s Teachers College Reading and Writing Project Institutes, where in her inimitable stirring and raise-the-bar way she said this: “To lift the level of your teaching, you must work on your own reading . . . [you must] try to outgrow yourself as a reader.”

What’s fascinating, though, is that Timothy Shanahan, one of the key proponents of the Standards and the author of another ‘just right’ book bashing article that also can be found in this month’s Reading Today, says more or less the same thing. In his clearly frustrated post, “Why Discussions of Close Reading Sound Like Nails Scratching on a Chalkboard,” he suggests that rather than “signing up for a workshop in ‘How to Teach the Close Reading Lesson,'” teachers would “be better off signing up for a Great Books discussion group,” which he likens to the a “reading version of the Writer’s Workshop approach to professional development” where teachers write to become better teachers of writing.

And that makes me wonder about what could happen if we focused on what we have in common rather than on how we differ: the need to carve out time and space for teachers to deeply read together and then apply what they learned from those experiences to design instruction that helps students grow into close and thoughtful readers. Perhaps then we wouldn’t need to create these false choices between this or that text or approach because we’d all share a more developed vision of what deep reading really looks and feels like. And who knows, perhaps that would even help us solve some of those other conflicts.

P.S. If you’re looking for more food for thought, here’s three links worth checking out that  are related to this week’s post:

1. To hear more incredibly sane and wise thoughts from Jan Burkins and Kim Yaris, check out their new book Reading Wellness.

2. To see more fun illustrations and explanations of other logical fallacies, check out The Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments by Ali Almossawi and Alejandro Giraldo.

3. And to get a taste for some of the work I did last week in Los Angeles, check out this podcast interview I gave with the Instructional Superintendent of LAUSD South schools, Robert Bravo.

When Is a Scaffold Not a Scaffold?

© D. A. Wagner 2012, dawagner.com

Over the last few weeks I’ve found myself reflecting a lot on how much has changed in the educational landscape and my own thinking since What Readers Really Do came out two and a half years ago. And having also spent some time last month working with Lucy West, Toni Cameron and the amazing team of math coaches that form the Metamorphosis Teaching Learning Communities, I want to share some new thoughts I’ve been having about the whole idea of scaffolding.

From what I could gather from a quick look at (yes, I admit it) Wikipedia, the idea of scaffolding goes back to the late 1950’s when the cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner used it to describe young children’s language acquisition. And by the 1970’s Bruner’s idea of scaffolding became connected with Vygotsky’s concept of a child’s zone of proximal development and the idea that “what the child is able to do in collaboration today he will be able to do independently tomorrow.”

Even before the Common Core Standards, teachers have been encouraged to scaffold by using scaffolding moves like those listed below (which were culled from several websites):

• Activating students’ prior knowledge
• Introducing a text through a short summary or synopsis
• Previewing a text through a picture walk
• Teaching key vocabulary terms before reading
• Creating a context for a text by filling in the gaps in students’ background knowledge
• Offering a motivational context (such as visuals) to pique students interest or curiosity in the subject at hand
• Breaking a complex task into easier, more “doable” steps to facilitate students achievement
• Modeling the thought process of students through a think aloud
• Offering hints or partial solutions to problems
• Asking questions while reading to encourage deeper investigation of concepts
• Modeling an activity for the students before they’re asked to complete the same or similar one

© D. A. Wagner 2012, dawagner.com

As I looked at in last year’s post on Common Core-aligned packaged programs, scaffolding these days has been ratcheted up even more, with teachers more or less being asked to do almost anything (including doing a think-aloud that virtually hands over the desired answer) to, in the words of one program, “guide students to recognize” and “be sure students understand” something specific in the text. And, for me, that raises the question: What is all that scaffolding really helping to erect or construct? Is it a strong, flexible and confident reader who’s able to independently understand all sorts of texts? Or is it a particular understanding of a particular text as demonstrated by some kind of written performance-based task product?

If we think about what’s left standing when the scaffolding is removed, it seems like we’re erecting the latter, not the former—though in What Readers Really Do, Dorothy Barnhouse and I attempted to change that by making a distinction between what we saw as a prompt and a scaffold, which can be seen in this chart from the book:

Most of the scaffolding moves listed above don’t, however, follow this distinction. Many solve the problems for the students and are also intended to lead students to the same conclusion—a.k.a. answer—as the teacher or the program has determined is right. I’m all for reclaiming or rehabilitating words, but given that the Common Core’s Six Shifts in Literacy clearly states that teachers should “provide appropriate and necessary scaffolding” (italics mine) so that students reading below grade level can close read complex texts, redefining the word scaffold may be a bit like Sisyphus trying to push that boulder uphill. So I’ve been thinking (and here’s where the math folks come in) about recasting the kinds of scaffolds Dorothy and I shared in our book as what my math colleagues call models.

Models in math are used not only as a way of solving a problem but of understanding the concepts beneath the math (which Grant Wiggins has just explored in a great “Granted, and. . . ” blog post). Here, for instance, are two models for multiplication: The first is a number line which shows how multiplication can be thought of as particular quantity of another quantity (in this case, three groups of five each), and the second the Box Method, or an open array,  shows how large numbers can broken down into more familiar and manageable components and their products then added up. Each model is being used here to solve a particular problem, but each can be immediately transferred and applied to similar problems:

And here’s a text-based Know/Wonder chart that records the thinking of a class of 5th graders as they read the first chapter of Kate DiCamillo’s wonderful The Tiger Rising (and—sneak peak—will be appearing in my next book):

© Vicki Vinton 2013, adapted from What Readers Really Do by Vicki Vinton and Dorothy Barnhouse (Heinemann, 2012)

Like the math models, it references the specifics of a particular text, but it’s also a model for solving certain kinds of problems—in this case, how readers figure out what’s going on at the beginning of a complex texts and develop questions they can use as lines of inquiry as they keep reading. In effect, the chart makes visible what those students were “able to do in collaboration” that day that they’ll “be able to do independently tomorrow,” because, whether we call it a scaffold or a model, it’s directly and immediately transferrable to other texts that pose the same problem.

In the end I don’t think it really matters what we call this kind of support, but I do think we have to ask ourselves what, exactly, we’re scaffolding or modeling. Are we helping students get a particular answer to a particular problem or text in order to produce a particular assignment? Or are we, instead, really offering a replicable process of thinking that’s tied to the concepts of a discipline, which can start being transferred tomorrow not an at indeterminate point in the future? Of course, that raises the question of what the underlying concepts in reading are, which we don’t talk about as much as my math colleagues do for math. But that I’ll need to save for another day . . . .