Amplifying the Light: Some Thoughts on NCTE & Beyond

From “Blind Light” by Antony Gormley, 2007, http://www.antonygormley.com

My hunch is that last December when NCTE announced this year’s convention theme, “Faces of Advocacy,” few of us imagined we’d wind up here, with ethical questions erupting almost daily and hatred running rampant—even here in my liberal corner of Brooklyn, where swastikas were painted on the playground equipment of a neighborhood park just a few weeks ago and a few grade school boys started a club that you could join if you pushed a girl and told her she was fired.

But here we are, and there was NCTE, offering sessions that not only shared powerful and practical ways to advocate for the children, but also attempted “to settle our souls,” just as Penny Kittle said poetry does. And for the days I was in Atlanta, I did feel more settled in my soul. I felt the power and purpose of the teaching profession and drew strength from being part of a community I deeply respect and admire. And I also felt affirmed as I noticed patterns and trends both within and across the sessions that echoed and pushed my own thinking.

The word light,or instance, cropped up in several sessions, with Margaret Simon sharing the phrase “Amplify the light,” which inspired this post’s title, in a session called “Writing for a Better World: Poetry as an Agent of Change.” In that same session, Amy Vanderwater urged us all to “look for places where there is light,” then showed us precisely what she meant by sharing a poem she’d written about a brother and sister who’d offered her light through a small act of kindness. Meanwhile. in another session, Ernest Morrell also spoke of light, when he insisted that “classrooms have to be spaces of light. That’s our revolution.” And the word revolution also kept popping up, most notably when Cornelius Minor took the stage at a breakfast honoring the legacy of Don Graves, and after sharing his own poignant story of growing up in war-torn Liberia, urged us to “teach for revolution” and “passionate disruption.”

Additionally there was much talk about the need for us, as teachers, to take risks and be vulnerable, with another “Writing for a Better World” presenter, Irene Latham challenging us to “risk vulnerability.” This was very visibly on display in a session I missed but caught up with online called “Risking Writing,” where Mary Lee Hahn, Heidi Mordhort, Shanetia Clark and Patricia Hruby Powell collaboratively brainstormed, drafted and revised a poem inspired by a photograph of vegetables in real time in front of a live audience:

Risk taking was also at the heart of a session on “Advocating for Essay: Students, Teachers, Coaches, and an Entire District Take a Journey to Discover the Complexity of Thinking,” which was inspired by Katherine Bomer‘s great book The Journey Is Everything. There teacher Allyson Smith shared how she modeled for her fourth graders how essayists take risks and explore ideas to ultimately arrive at some deeper truth by taking a risk herself. To ensure that her demo was authentic, she asked a student to volunteer an idea and was momentarily stymied when the student said, “Candy is Cool.” But with all eyes watching, she gamely dug in and showed the class how a riff on Swedish fish could lead to a memory of sharing some with a stranger on a plane, which in turn led her to consider the power of chance encounters in her life.

As Allyson said, taking these kinds of risks help “create safe spaces for students to take risks.” And creating spaces and opportunities for students was yet another pattern. Tom Newkirk spoke of “creating opportunities for students to try on and explore different identities”; Pernille Ripp talked of “creating opportunities for students to try on and explore different identities”; and Amy Vanderwater reminded us of the need to “give students opportunities to write about what’s happening in the world.”

Given that most of the chapters in my new book all start with the words Creating Opportunities, this was music to my ears. But risking my own vulnerability now, I have to say that while all these words inspired and nourished me those three days in Atlanta, the feeling was short lived. Yes, I believe in creating spaces of light so students can explore and forge identities, take risks and experience, in Ernest Morrell’s words “the power of language and the language of power.” Yes, I believe in small acts of kindness and of holding on tightly to hope. But I’ve found that the words that have  stayed with me most from NCTE came from teacher and Heinemann Teaching Fellow Kim Parker. She was one of the panelists at the Don Graves breakfast, and when asked to share her credo, she said, “I believe in rage.”

Those four words allowed me to fully own and embrace the rage I’ve been feeling since the election. I am outraged at the very thought of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education, Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, Steve Bannon as Chief Strategist; Tom Price as the Head of Health and Human Services; climate denier Myron Eball as the head of the EPA’s transition team; and, of course, Trump as President.

Those four words also made me realize that I didn’t really want to settle my soul as much as to spur it into action. So since NCTE, I’ve been signing petitions, supporting organizations like the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center, sending letters to my senators, and with Cathy Mere, adopting the hashtags #NotDeVos and #PublicEd4Kids. It’s my hope that those hashtags can create a space where we, as teachers, can constructively amplify the light of both our rage and our hope, take risks not just in our classrooms but the world, and share whatever inspires or outrages us. And I believe we need to do that because as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie so eloquently writes in her piece “Now Is the Time To Talk About What We Are Actually Talking About“:

“Now is the time to resist the slightest extension in the boundaries of what is right and just. . . Now is the time to confront the weak core at the heart of America’s addiction to optimism . . . Now is the time to call things what they actually are, because language can illuminate truth as much as it can obfuscate it . . . Now is the time to discard that carefulness that too closely resembles a lack of conviction. . . Now is the time to be precise about the meaning of words. . . Now is the time to counter lies with facts, repeatedly and unflaggingly, while also proclaiming the greater truths: of our equal humanity, of decency, of compassion.”

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!

On Conventions, Conferences & Other Great Adventures

I’m not quite sure how it got to be November, but for those of you who’ll be in Minneapolis for NCTE later this month, I wanted to offer a heads up that I’ll be presenting with the Kathy Collins in a session called “Becoming the Teachers of Reading Our Children Need Us to Be,” which will look at a variety of ways to help students become the curious, engaged and passionate readers and thinkers we all want them to be. The session will be chaired by Katie Wood Ray, who along with me and Kathy contributed to the new Heinemann book The Teacher You Want to Be, and it will take place on Sunday, November 22nd, at noon. My hunch is that some of you may be heading home by then, but if you’re still around and looking for one last hit of inspiration and some new ideas, please come and join us.

For all my international blog readers and friends, I also want to share that I’ll be presenting at two NESA (the Near East South Asia Council of Overseas Schools) events in the early part of next year. First, I’ll be in Muscat, Oman, on February 5 and 6 for NESA’s Winter Training Institute, where I’ll be exploring “The Power of Grammar” for two days with teachers and administrators. Then I’ll be in Bangkok from April 1 – 4 for NESA’s Spring Educator’s Conference, where I’ll be facilitating a three-day Foundations of Reading workshop for Grade 6-8 teachers. And while I’m already excited beyond belief about these two opportunities, it would truly make my heart sing to see and meet any blog readers out there who are in that part of the world.

Back in the States, I’ll also be presenting at the New England Reading Association’s yearly conference in Portland, Maine, on May 20 and 21. There, I’ll not only facilitate a session but I’ll participate on what promises to be a very special panel comprised of folks who contributed or worked on The Teacher You Want to Be. While plans for that are still being finalized, I have no doubt that it, too, will be both inspiring and thought provoking—and a great way to connect with other like-minded educators who believe that first and foremost we teach children, not curricula or standards.

Finally, for something completely different, I want to share an amazing non-teaching opportunity for any photography and wildlife enthusiasts out there. As some of you may already know, I was in France last summer with my partner David, who’s both a photographer and an Adobe Lightroom expert. Most of our time was spend cycling, but David also arranged a two-day photo shoot for us through a company called Create Away.

© D.A. Wagner 2015, http://lightroomguy.com

Create Away is based in the south of France, in an area called the Camargue. Situated in the delta where the Rhone River splits and spills into the Mediterranean, the Camargue is a regional park that’s home to an ancient breed of white horses, one of Europe’s few colonies of pink flamingos, the kinds of black bulls you’d find in bull rings, and an intriguing mix of French natives and gypsies. In fact, the musical group the Gypsy Kings are from the Camargue. And if you read The Da Vinci code, you’re already familiar with the Camargue town of Saintes Maries sur Mer, where as legend (and author Dan Brown) would have it, the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene and Mary, the sister of Lazarus, landed, along with the Holy Grain, after being cast our of Judea.

As you can see, the shoot was spectacular—so much so that we’ll be returning at the end of August, when David is teaming up with Create Away to offer a special one-week photo tour of the Camargue with between-shoot (and great French food and wine) Lightroom classes. If this sounds like the kind of bucket trip you’ve always dreamed of taking, you can find out more at David’s—a.k.a. Lightroom Guy’s—website.

© D.A. Wagner 2015, http://lightroomguy.com

So here’s hoping that between Minneapolis, Oman, Bangkok, Portland, and France  some of our paths will cross. And now I really need to dig into my NCTE Convention Planner!

The Fourth Annual Celebration of Teacher Thinking

While the first day of school is still a week away for schools in my neck of the woods, I know many of you are already back in classrooms with a new bunch of learners — or if you’ve looped up, with familiar faces that have grown over the summer. And as I’ve done for the last four years (yikes!), I’d like to celebrate the start of a new school year, by once again sharing some of the inspiring and probing thoughts that educators have left on this blog over the last twelve months.

As happens each year, it was a challenge to choose a half-dozen comments from those left by members of what I’m convinced is one of the most thoughtful blog readerships out there. And as has also happened before, I think there’s a pattern that runs through many of the comments this year that reflects larger concerns in the field – this year, a renewed attention to process over product and to helping children develop what Mark Condon calls, in his must-read post, each student’s ‘UNcommon core’:

“An UNcommon, TRUE core for every child, is their own intrinsic engine that drives them to learn. If we teachers don’t help our youngsters to develop personal tastes and personal interests and personal goals and a reservoir of personally enriching experiences, then they will be ill equipped to handle the dizzying choices life offers them.”

Here, you’ll see that I’ve set each reader’s comments next to an image that links back to the post they were responding to (and if you click through to the post, you can read other comments by scrolling down to the bottom). And for those readers who also blog, I’ve embedded a link to their blogs in their name, which I urge you to click on as well for more wonderful food for thought. And now, without any more introduction, here are some words that reaffirm my belief in thinking teachers:

“This discussion about process versus product is huge. I love your point about the fear of reducing the art of writing into a flash draft. Like you, my process is slow and thoughtful. I do obsess word by word. On one hand, I can understand the need for assisting our students in getter over the fear of writing by offering them the opportunity to flash draft, but on the other, I am dually concerned about the message we may be sending, and I worry that we are not spending enough time developing the craft of writing.”  Laurie Pandorf

“There are so many things worth knowing and ways of knowing that cannot be verbalized (and perhaps should not be reduced to words)…a painting, a jazz riff, an equation, an “elegant” line of computer code. But we don’t allow much for this type of knowing. And when we do, we feel the need to verbalize/analyze rather than “know” through the language of color, form, line, rhythm, number or whatever language the creator has used. . . Naturally, the written and verbal word are paramount — that’s our common way of communicating (and the way we expect kids to learn). But there are other ways and levels of understanding perhaps more natural especially for our youngest learners – I’d argue that’s true for all learners but we squelch it earlier and earlier . . . To focus on the child — to focus on multiple ways for students to make meaning and to make their understandings visible would be such a welcome change of pace.” Lisa

“Such a timely post as we’ve had this discussion lately that includes, “How many final published pieces of writing should a student have?” I’m leaning towards the answer from the ‘cheap seats’ – ‘It depends!’ I think there is a definite need for balance when we think of confident, competent writers. Writers themselves need to be aware of their metacognition and how writing plays out for them. Environment? Quiet or Noisy? Handwrite or Keyboard? Think or Draft? But more importantly are the issues about WHAT to do when stuck . . . keep writing, go for a walk, try a different approach. Writing is so complicated. Good writing even more so. It really is not as simple as just putting words on paper!” Fran McVeigh

“’…an essay in which the writer inquires into and explores a problem, a question or one or more texts, with the goal of adding his or her own unique perspective and ideas to the ongoing conversation about that problem, question or text.’ I’m trying to remember a time when I either asked a student to engage in an ongoing conversation or was asked to participate in one. Yikes! I love the idea of being part of a grand, ongoing conversation! That really knocks me, as teacher, off center stage and suggests a community of thinkers. Yikes! I am reminded of a student essay I read recently that compares the onset and growth of ideas to drops of water coming together, from creek to stream to ocean, to make something more powerful than their individual selves. A grand conversation! Delicious!” Faynessa Armand

Low-stakes writing has such high value in our classrooms, and in reading your piece, I couldn’t help thinking of equating this type of writing to the idea we talk about in reading of “imaginative rehearsals.” When we read material that explores areas of emotion or psychology that we have not fully explored in our lives, it better prepares us for when we have to deal with those events. Writing in low-stakes forms, allows us to explore similar things; we get to practice new ideas in a space that is non-threatening. Essentially, we get to play with thoughts, ideas, and words that may or may not become part of our thinking later on, when it may matter much more. Patrick Higgins

“Your discussion of writing as an unfolding event is resonant. Writers need to trust the process, the struggles, the to-ing, fro-ing, ebbs and flows which lead to breakdowns and breakthroughs. Sometimes the biggest challenges produce the most rewarding products (as I am discovering with my PhD). . .  I think the struggle is what results in good writing and robust ideas. Deb (a.k.a. The Edu Flaneuse)

Of course now that I (Vicki) have typed this up, I see another pattern: I seem to have unconsciously chosen quotes that I, as a writer who’s had her fair share of breakdowns and breakthroughs over the last year, need to hold on to and remember. I’ll share more about that journey in an upcoming post, but for now here’s hoping that whether you’ve already started or are still gearing up, the new school year will be filled with lots of joyful learning, fascinating questions, delicious thinking and regular celebrations of all of our UNcommon cores!

 

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.

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.

In a Time of Standardization, an Invitation to Authentically Read

“Reclining Reader” by Milton Avery

Last week third through eighth grade students across New York State took the three-day marathon known as the Common Core English Language Arts Test. And if the feedback left on testingtalk.org, the website set up by some of the best literacy minds in the country, is any indication, it was not a pretty sight. Words like travesty and debacle—and even sadistic—appear with some regularity as do many stories from both teachers and parents about student acting out in various ways to deal with the pressure and stress, such as the parent who came home to find her son beating a bush with a stick.

Many questions were also raised about what these test were actually testing, since careful close reading simply wasn’t possible given the time constraints and few, if any, questions required critical thinking, if for no other reason than that they were incredibly narrow and myopic. Additionally, as I wrote in an early post, many of the teachers leaving feedback spoke about the convoluted and confusing nature of the questions themselves and the fact that many of those questions asked students to discern insignificant or minor differences between several possible ‘right’ answers. And all that reminded me of this  quote by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche:

“All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.”

Applied to our current situation, I interpret this as meaning that the whole one-right-answer approach to testing is a function of the vise-grip that powerful corporate interests have over education these days, not on some unequivocal truth. And in addition to adding my voice to testingtalk.org, I decided to push back this week by reviving an idea I tried out in my first year as a blogger: inviting readers to read a short text, this time 20/20 by author Linda Brewer, and share what they made of it, knowing that it’s the diversity—not the conformity—of our interpretations and the particular way we express them that enriches our understanding of ourselves, the text and the world.

Your task, should you choose to accept it, is not to focus on, say, how paragraph four develops the main character’s point of view or why the author used the word ‘choked’ in line six. Instead I ask you to do what the test-makers seem to consider Mission Impossible: to think about the meaning of the whole story, which will almost inevitably entail looking at the story through the eyes of the characters, the eyes of the author and ultimately your own eyes, as you consider what you think and feel about what you think the author might be trying to show us about people, the world, or life through the particulars of this story. And I invite you to do that by simply paying attention to what you notice in the text and what you make of that.

Then in the spirit of collaborative learning, real reading and community, I invite you to share your thoughts about the story, how you arrived at them and what the experience felt like by either clicking on the speech bubble at the right of the post’s title or on the word ‘reply’ at the bottom of the post, right after the list of tag words. (Email subscribers can used the comment link at the end of the email.) And if anyone wants to try it out on some students, please go right ahead!

Just remember, though, there is no right answer! There is only interpretation and what happens between the mind of the reader and the words on the page. And now here is 20/20 by Linda Brewer:

Now follow these simple instructions from the poet Mary Oliver:

 

The Power of the Word ‘Huh’

I was inspired this week by another series of blog posts I stumbled on recently, which (if I’ve gotten the chain of inspiration right) Stacey Shubitz and Ruth Ayres of the original Two Writing Teachers adapted several years ago from the wonderful scrapbooking blogger Ali E. The posts were all in response to a challenge called One Little Word, which asks teachers to think about a single word they want to hold on to in the new year to help them stay focused and grounded. And whether it’s Dana Murphy sharing how the word float found her or Tara Smith recounting the journey that led her to embrace the word pause, these posts once again demonstrate the richness and depth of teachers’ thinking. They also reminded me of a word I’d been meaning to write about for a while: huh. It’s a word that’s often accompanied by a scrunched up face or a quizzical look indicating disbelief or confusion. And like the word yet, which I wrote about before, I think it’s an under-rated but powerful word.

It came up, for instance, in a demonstration lesson I was doing with a class of third graders in Staten Island reading the book 14 Cows for America by Carmen Agra Deedy. The book, which is listed as an exemplar text for grades 2-3 in the Common Core’s Appendix B, is about a Maasai village in Kenya which gives fourteen cows to America as a gift of friendship and compassion after hearing about 9/11. And I’d chosen it specifically to see how much students could get of out of a text deemed complex without the kind of prompting and scaffolding that’s offered in many a teacher’s guide and online lesson plans.

The teacher’s guide the book’s publisher puts out, for example, tells teachers to ask a series of before-reading questions to ascertain how much students already know about 9/11 and Kenya, and then to transition to the book by saying, “Today we’re going to learn about a small village in Africa and how they were affected by the events of 9/11.” Setting a context for reading this way by helping students access their background knowledge then giving them a quick introduction to the book is a common practice. And the teachers observing me were a bit worried about what the class might not know. As it was, Staten Island had borne many losses on September 11, but it happened before these third graders were born. And while the class would be studying Kenya later that year, the teachers all thought the students’ geographic knowledge might be limited at best.

But wanting the students to learn not only about the content of the book, but how readers make meaning, I skipped the pre-reading activities and just held up the book and read the title, at which point I heard a huh. It came from a boy sitting in the front whose face was, indeed, all scrunched up, and seeing him it seemed to me that huh was actually an appropriate response for a book with that title and cover. I said so to the boy and then asked if others felt the same, at which point hands went up in the air. I then I asked them to say more about the huh, and they spoke to the fact the title mentioned America but the cover illustration didn’t look like that to them. Plus there were no cows anywhere to be seen.

Unpacking the huh led the class to form their first two questions, Why is the book called 14 Cows for America? and Where does the book take place? They thought they’d found the answer to the second question when we got to the title page where two giraffes had been added to the cover’s scene, and that made them think the book took place in Africa. And when, having already noticed a reference to New York and September, we came to the following page, several children found themselves wondering whether the story the main character tells his tribesmen had to to do with 9/11.

In each case, the students drew on their background knowledge not because we’d explicitly asked them to but because they’d been trying to sort through their confusion. Put another way, they’d drawn on the strategy strategically in order to understand what had puzzled them. And the huh was the engine that drove them to both notice those details and reach for the strategy, confirming what the writer and thinker Tom Peters said: “If you’re not confused, you’re not paying attention.”

With the connection between Africa and America now established, the students turned their attention to the cows. By the end of the book they felt they finally understood the title, but they continued to wrestle with why the tribesmen gave the cows and especially what purpose the cows were meant to serve. And that confusion drove them deeper into the heart and the message of book.

Their path there, however, was not straight and easy. The first student who attempted to answer those questions drew on his background knowledge again to wonder if the tribesman thought that the cows could be used in the war on terror. When I asked if there was anything in the text that made him think that, he cited the line from the page below about the Maasai having once been fierce warriors, and many other students agreed, pointing out that in some of the illustrations the cows were shown with horns, which they thought could be used as weapons.

As this idea took hold of the room, I found myself in the uncomfortable position of scrambling to think of what move I could make that would avoid everyone getting stuck on that idea without me suggesting it was wrong. I wound up asking a variation on one of the questions Jeff Wilhelm offers in his great book Engaging Readers & Writers with Inquiry: “Did anyone notice any other details that might suggest another reason for the Maasai to give the cows to America?” The students turned and talked about this, and when we came back together to share out, one girl said she still wasn’t sure what the reason could be, but she didn’t think they’d send the cows to war, because, as she put it, “They love their cows. Why would they want them to get hurt or killed?” And at this point another powerful word could be heard in the room as the class mulled over this student’s words and added her thoughts to the group’s thinking: hmm.

Like the seventh graders I wrote about earlier who wrestled with what really happened in Virginia Euwer Wolff’s story “Dozens of Roses,” I think these students initially latched on to an explanation that was in their reach, and the huh’s and hmm’s opened the door to a possibility they’d never envisioned before—that the Masaai gave America the cows as a symbollic gift of compassion. Of course, to fully get that, they had to read the text again. But they did that not because of some pre-determined close reading protocol, but once again because they wanted to answer the questions their huh’s and hmm’s raised. And while that second read also wasn’t neat and easy, neat and easy doesn’t always get us where we need to be—or as high school teacher Joshua Block writes in an edutopia post on “Embracing Messy Learning,” “If [we] don’t allow learning to be messy, [we] eliminate authentic experience for students as thinkers and creators.” And why would we ever want to do that?

For the New Year: Some Signs of Hope

It was seven degrees outside when I started writing this, which, with the wind chill, feels like minus six. And while this kind of cold usually sends me into a state of despair, I’m finding myself handling it better than I might because I think I’m feeling heartened by signs that seem to point to a thaw or a shift in the discussion about so-called school reform that has for too long left real educators frozen out in the cold.

The new year, for instance, started out with a bang here in New York City as Bill de Blasio, our new mayor, appointed Carmen Farina as the city’s next School Chancellor. Two of former mayor Bloomberg’s appointees, Joel Klein and Cathy Black, had no experience in public education (beyond that the fact that Klein had attended New York City public schools as a child). But Carmen Farina is one of us. For four decades, she’s worked for the city’s public schools, spending 22 years as a classroom teacher in Brooklyn before moving on to become a principal, then a district superintendent, and the deputy chancellor for the DOE’s now defunct division of teaching and learning.

According to Chalkbeat New York, a great site for all city school news, she’s promised “to pursue a ‘progressive agenda’ that would reduce standardized test preparation in classrooms,” and in her own words she’s already talking about the “need to bring joy back” instead of more accountability and data. I know she may have her hands tied a bit by the State’s Education Commissioner John King (whose comments about parents expressing frustration with the State’s Common Core rollout at an Town Hall event rival Arne Duncan’s beyond belief remarks about white suburban soccer moms). But with a vision that she describes as “five Cs and an E“—collaboration, communication, capacity building, curriculum enhancement, celebration and efficiency— it’s my dearest hope that she’ll be able to shift the focus here from assessment and data to instruction and students, which is where it needs to be.

I was also excited to hear the news that Kate DiCamillo will become our next national ambassador for young people’s literature. Of course, the previous ambassadors—Jon Scieszka, Katherine Paterson and Walter Dean Myers—have all been great, but I feel a personal tie to DiCamillo. When my daughter was in fourth grade, the librarian at her school chose to read an unknown book by an unknown author to my daughter’s class based on nothing more than the first page. DiCamillo was the author and the book was Because of Winn Dixie, which my daughter and her friends fell in love with, as so many others after them have. In fact, they loved the book so much, they wrote a letter to DiCamillo and received a long and lovely hand-written reply saying that their letter was the very first piece of fan mail she had ever received.

As ambassador, DiCamillo has said that her mission will be “to get as many kids and as many adults together reading as [she] can” because she believes that “stories connect us.” I have to believe than anyone reading this passionately believes that, too, and several new studies have come out recently that demonstrate the quantifiable benefits in reading stories.  A New York Times article, for instance, called “For Better Social Skills, Scientists Recommend a Little Chekhov” reports on a neurological study that found that people who read literary fiction “performed better on tests measuring empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence,” than those who did not. And teacher Collette Bennett’s blog post on the National Assessment of Education Progress Report for 2012 shows that, across demographics, students who read for pleasure outperform those who don’t on standardized tests. Unfortunately, these studies haven’t managed to change certain Common Core-inspired practices, which include all but abandoning fiction for nonfiction, eliminating or cutting back on in-class independent reading, and giving students a steady diet of excerpts and short texts because that’s what’s on the test. My hope here is that, in her new position, Kate DiCamillo will become the perfect spokesperson for the lasting power of stories and real reading.

Finally, I spent much too much time over the break reading blog posts by fellow educators, many by the nominators and nominees of this years Sunshine Awards, which celebrate educational bloggers. That meant I didn’t get any drawing done, but I did find another reason to hope that this year might bring some real change. The richness, diversity and depth of thought I encountered on those blogs is mind-boggling. And I believe that the fact that these educators are connecting with each other through blogs, twitter and websites not only qualifies them to teach 21st century literacy, but it makes them a force to be reckoned with. Additionally, virtually every post I read reflected the very same habits of mind, such as curiosity, openness, creativity and persistence, that the National Council of Teachers of English, the Council of Writing Program Administrators and the National Writing Project have identified as being needed for college. 

Like instruction and stories, these habits of mind have a taken a backseat in much of the current conversation about both readiness and schools—probably because no one has figured out yet how to quantify and test them. But these seem as important to me as the ability to analyze a text or write an argument. And given that we, as teachers, need to be who we want our students to be, these blogs also made me incredibly hopeful—despite the freezing cold!

Sharing Some Blogging Love: The Sunshine Awards

I’d been looking forward to the days between Christmas and New Years to catch up on blog posts I’ve missed. And in addition to reading several great posts, I was surprised to discover that I’d been nominated for the Sunshine Awards by four fantastic bloggers: Dana Murphy at Murphy’s Law: Musings from a Literacy Coach; Tammy Mulligan who, along with Clare Landrigan, writes Assessment in Perspective; Pat Johnston who, with Katie Keier, is behind Catching Readers Before They Fall; and Heather Rader at Coach to Coach.

To be honest, I knew nothing about the Sunshine Awards until now—and despite a fair amount of surfing, I’m still not sure how they got started. But I’ve learned that they were created to give bloggers a chance to recognize other bloggers, as well as to share a bit more about themselves.  I’m incredibly honored to be acknowledged by such admired and respected colleagues, and I so like the idea of nominating other bloggers that I’ve decided to break my blogging break and follow the award rules, which are as follows:

Acknowledge the nominating blogger.
 Share 11 random facts about yourself.
 Answer the 11 questions the nominating blogger has created for you.
 List 11 bloggers.  They should be bloggers you believe deserve some recognition and a little blogging love!
 Post 11 questions for the bloggers you nominate to answer and let all the bloggers know they have been nominated. (You cannot nominate the blogger who nominated you.)

So first the random facts:

1. I share a birthday (same day, different year) with Charles Manson & Grace Kelly.
2. I’m a book abandoner (finishing only about a third of what I start).
3. My daughter, who’s an illustration major at Pratt, and I have been working on a picture book together.
4. In every personal narrative or memoir I’ve ever written, I’ve made something up.
5. My grandfather was a stone carver and mason who helped create the lions in front of the New York Public Library.
6. I love toe socks (i.e., gloves for your feet).
7. When my daughter was younger, we had a pet pygmy hedgehog who we buried in our garden in a shoebox covered with hieroglyphics (she was studying Ancient Egypt when the poor hedgehog died).
8. I met David, my partner of the last nine years, on an online dating site.
9. My desire to do road trips by bike comes from reading a color-coded SRA reading passage on the American Youth Hostels in 6th grade.
10. I know how to say the equivalent of ‘eenie, meenie, miney, moe’ in Swedish.
11. And like Heather Rader, I, too, am a mindless hummer.

And now the answer to 12 of the questions the nominators posed (I added an extra just to keep things even):

Answers to Dana Murphy’s questions:

1. What is your favorite blog post you’ve ever written? My current favorite is “What Messages Are We Sending Our Students about Reading Revisited” because I figured out a way of combining a tribute to one of my favorite authors, Alice Munro, with a critique of one of the packaged programs that are taking the heart and soul out of reading.
2. What advice would you give future teachers? Hold on tightly to whatever made you want to be a teacher in the first place and try not to teach out of fear.
3. PC or Mac? With the guy I live with, it’s Mac all the way.

Answers to Pat Johnson’s questions:

1. Tell me something about the grandparent who meant a lot to you. I adored my grandfather who, at Sunday dinners, would always say “Chicken ain’t nothin’ but a bird” before sharpening the knives and carving up my grandmother’s beloved roast chicken.
2. Name a teacher from your past who impressed you and why? My 5th grade teacher Mr. Holt comes to mind here because he made me aware of what I was unaware of. One day, for instance, after saying the pledge, he asked us to write out the words, which clearly proved that I had no idea what I was saying each morning. (I wrote something like, I plejalleegents to the flag.) And in what seems unimaginable these days, he arranged for another teacher to burst into the room one day holding a banana like a gun and then asked us to write about what we saw. Many were convinced he did have a gun and many swore that he was masked, which led us all to understand that sometimes our eyes are unreliable.
3. If you could invent a holiday, what would it be for? I second the suggestion of Lena Dunham, the star of the HBO show Girls:

Answers to Tammy Mulligan’s questions:

1. What are you reading right now? The Christmas present I gave to myself: Archangel by another of my favorite writers, Andrea Barrett. It’s a gorgeous collection of historical fiction short stories that all involve characters who are scientists.
2. Why did you decide to settle in the town you are living in now? Having grown up in the suburbs of New York City, I moved to Colorado when I was twenty positive I’d never come back. Ten years later, graduate school and a sick parent brought me back to the city, and falling in love with Brooklyn made me stay.
3. Why blogging? Because I don’t really know who I am if I’m not writing—and blog posts are much more forgiving than a book.

Answers to Heather Rader’s questions:

1. What is a great read aloud book? I read The Doll Bones by Holly Black over the summer and think it would make a marvelous read aloud for a fifth or sixth grade class.
2. What are titles of compelling documentaries or foreign films you’ve enjoyed? A few weeks ago I saw the Italian film “The Great Beauty,” which I thought was magnificent. It was the next best thing to being in Rome (which, in my book, is just about the best thing there is).
3. What color is on your living room walls? Do you love it or hate it? Having lived with colored walls for some time, I went back to basic white a few years ago—but I did do an accent wall in the living room I love that’s like the Sherman Williams Goldfinch.

And now for the fun part: I’d like to share some blogging love with some of the wonderful education bloggers I’ve had the privilege to meet through this blog, who in post after post share their thinking, their questions, their minds and their hearts:

Jan Burkins & Kim Yaris at Burkins & Yaris

Tomasen Carey at ConversationEducation

Mary Lee Hahn at A Year of Reading (which she writes with Franki Sibberson)

Steve Peterson at Inside the Dog

Julieanne Harmatz at To Read To Write To Be

Fran McVeigh at Resource-Full

Matt Karlson at the Opal School Blog

Colette Bennett at Used Books in Class

Catherine Flynn at Reading to the Core

Carrie Gelson at There’s a Book for That

Tara Smith at A Teaching Life

And here are 11 questions, which, if you’re tempted to bend the rules, feel free to pick & choose from:

1. What book would you want with you if you were stranded on a deserted island?
2. What did you learn from your mother?
3. Where do you write?
4. Where do you find joy in your classroom or work?
5. What do you do to recharge?
6. What was your favorite book as a child and why did you love it?
7. If you could have dinner (or coffee or drinks) with anyone living or dead, who would it be and what would you want to ask him or her?
8. Do you have a quote that you keep (in your mind, a notebook, a pocket, your desk, etc.) that captures something that seems important to you? If so, what is it?
9. What are you afraid of?
10. How do you feel about being the age you currently are?
11. If you could go back to one moment in time, when & where would that be & why?

And now, it’s back to my my blogging break . . .