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!

 

Engaging with Engagement: Building the Need to Know

© Dmitry Vereshchagin – Fotolia.com

A few months ago I had a chance to hear Mike Schmoker, author of the popular ASCD book Focus, speak at a summer institute. In his keynote, he shared ideas from his book, which was subtitled Elevating the Essentials to Radically Improve Student Learning, and some of these I wholeheartedly agreed with. He came down hard, for instance, on worksheets, which he described in his keynote as busywork and in Focus as “the archenemy of abundant purposeful reading, discussion and writing.” And as I’ve written about myself, he warned against reading instruction that sends students off on “treasure hunts” rather than actually reading. But when it came to engagement I paused.

Many of the practices he suggested were similar to those advised by Doug Lemov, the author of the widely read Teach Like a Champion. These include training students to keep their eyes on the teacher, cold calling on students whose hands aren’t raised to keep everyone on their toes, and launching lessons with some kind of teacher teaser intended to spark interest. For several of us listening, this sounded more like compliance and fear tactics than authentic engagement, and in this we weren’t alone. Charlotte Danielson, for instance, whose Framework for Teaching rubrics are being used, along with test scores, to evaluate teachers in New York City, describes engagement this way:

“Student engagement is not the same as ‘time on task’ . . . . Mere activity is inadequate for engagement. Nor is simple participation sufficient. The activity should represent new learning. What is required  for student engagement is intellectual involvement with the content or active construction of understanding.

This ‘intellectual involvement’, she goes on to say, requires designing activities and assignments that “emphasize problem-based learning,” “encourage depth rather than breadth” and “require student thinking”—none of which is necessarily happens when we stand in front of a class to share an interesting fact or anecdote that we hope will whet the students’ appetites.

I’m also not convinced anymore that ‘intellectual involvement’ is really kick-started by practices such as Anticipation Guides, which I used to use myself. Here, for instance, is one I designed for some 7th and 8th grade special students as the kick-off to a unit on relationship, in which they read several short stories by Gary Soto, Virginia Euwer Wolff, and Sharon Flake and watched West Side Story:

© Vicki Vinton, Literacy Consultant https://tomakeaprairie.wordpress.com

And here’s another one a group of science teachers and I created for a unit on genetics that would eventually involve the students exploring some of the complex ethical questions raised by advances in that field:

© Vicki Vinton, Literacy Consultant https://tomakeaprairie.wordpress.com

In both cases the students participated. They actively read the statements, circling A if they agreed or D if they disagreed in the Before Reading column, before they turned and talked with a partner. But in addition to the fact that only a few actually wrote any comments, the thinking they were doing involved little more than recalling what they already thought, not constructing some new understanding.

Better, I’ve found, are visual images, especially in the content areas. Here, for instance, is a set of images of Venice that a third grade class I worked with studied carefully, one at a time, before embarking on a social studies unit on Italy:

In the first image, students were intrigued by the place, in particular what many of them thought was a castle until one child noticed the cross on the dome and thought it might be a church. They also closely studied the tray of the family in the foreground, noticing the silver cups and spoons and the slices of lemon in glasses, all of which made them think that the place was not only beautiful but fancy. In the second, they were actually aghast at the transformation of the beautiful place they’d seen in the previous picture. And calculating the height of the water from the half-submerged tables and chairs, they worried about what might have been damaged in the castle-like church. And finally, the third image helped them develop hunches about what might have happened to create such as disaster—especially after some of the students began to think that the blue lines that criss-crossed the city weren’t roads as they first had thought, but water ways that might flood.

Compared to the students who were circling A or D in the Anticipation Guides above, these students were involved in much higher order thinking as they used what they’d noticed to infer and developed hypotheses that might explain what caused the difference in the two pictures. They were constructing new understanding, at least a provisional one. And feeling a burning need to know, especially about the fate of the buildings, they eagerly dove into an article about the problems Venice faced with the kind of intellectual involvement that Charlotte Danielson speaks about.

Those students’ engagement began with curiosity, which many scientists, such as John Medina, the Director of the Brain Center for Applied Learning and Research and the author of the best-selling book Brain Rules, think is intrinsically connected to our capacity to learn. And that initial curiosity led those students to think and to discover, which in turn fueled their engagement. That all happened because I think that thinking is actually exhilarating and discovery, as Medina writes, “brings joy,” which can become downright addictive—especially when the thinking and discoveries arise from our own noticings.

Unfortunately, though, curiosity and joy seems undervalued and underutilized in many schools settings, particularly in the upper grades where, as Medina also says, “Fascination can become secondary to ‘What do I need to know to get the grade?'” And this emphasis on grades instead of fascination—and performance instead of exploration—leaves too many students disengaged and at risk for checking out, as can be seen in a recent Gallup poll that showed that the percentage of disengaged students climb steadily as kids move up the grades, with eight-in-ten students engaged in lower school and only four-in-ten in high school.

I’m aware, of course, that it may seem much easier to tap into students’ curiosity with a compelling image than with a complex text (which Chris Lehman’s latest Close Reading Blog-a-Thon post painfully illustrates). But I’ll tell you when those 7th and 8th grade special ed students really got engaged: not when they filled out the Anticipation Guide but when they read the first short story, “Dozens of Roses,” by Virginia Euwer Wolff, which I looked at last month. I invited them then to simply wonder, which I said could consist of something that confused them or something they were curious about. And with that and time to talk, they were filled with questions: Who sent Lucy the roses? Why didn’t she want them? Why doesn’t she have any pep now? And those questions built the need to know that naturally led them to read closely with their full mental engagement.

So what are you doing to build your students’ intellectually involving engagement—which, as Chris, also rightly points out “isn’t a thing, it’s the only thing” that counts?

By R. Kikuo Johnson for The New York TImes. Used with permission of the artist. http://www.rkikuojohnson.com

‘Tis the Season

 Earlier this month I received what seemed like a gift from a Secret Santa. Somehow, some way, through facebook posts and tweets, my post, “What Messages Are We Sending Students About Reading,” went viral, bringing over 1,000 readers to this blog in less than three full days.

Clearly it struck a chord in readers who treasure books and want to give children authentic and meaningful experiences as readers. And it struck a chord in those of us who sometimes fear that in our data-obsessed and -driven age, where logic and analysis seem to be valued over wonder and imagination, we risk losing what we most cherish.

I was both humbled and heartened to know how many of us are out there. And so in the spirit of gift-giving, I’d like to give something back to all of you who hold on to the dream of not only helping the students we work with be college- and career-ready, but become passionate readers and writers. Here are three texts that speak to those higher purposes and callings by three wise writers whose words seem more precious to me than frankincense, gold and myrrh. In each case I share an excerpt and a link, which will take you to the full piece where you may also want to poke around for more inspiration and solace.

The first piece is called “The Place of Books in Our Lives,” by the great children’s and young adult book author Julius Lester. In this essay, he looks at the origins of the words book, read, and knowledge, and he makes a powerful, persuasive case for letting children choose what to read without interference or judgment, while exploring what the written word gives us:

Books invite us into realms of the soul by asking us to imagine that we are someone other than who we are. Books require that we temporarily put our egos in a box by the door and take on the spirit of others. Books are the place where the possibility of blacks and whites and men and women experiencing each other is created. I am convinced that if I can bring you into my being through words, I create the possibility that you and I will see that we are more alike than we may have thought. When we can imagine the hurt and anger of another person, we have an understanding in the heart. When we understand in the heart, each of us is less alone.

The second is the preface to The 9 Rights of Every Writer by Vicki Spandel, one of the key developers of the 6-Trait model for writing instruction and assessment. Here she looks squarely at what assessments can and cannot give us, while urging us, as teachers, to hold on to and embrace what is most meaningful and significant about writing, not just what can be easily measured:

In this book, I touch on what I believe to be the most worthwhile goals of writing: writing to think, to move another person, to create something that will be remembered, to find the most salient personal topics that will weave a common thread through virtually all the writing text in one’s life, to develop a unique personal voice with which one feels at home, to develop and maintain a spirit of unrelenting curiosity that drives the writing forward, to be whole comfortable with the act and process of writing. These are all hard things to measure. Moreover, they take time. Significant time. Heavy emphasis on assessment can rob us of that precious time. It can also make us afraid.

The third is a poem called “Revolution for the Tested” by former teacher and award-winning author Kate Messner, which has been making its way around my corner of the cybersphere. It’s an impassioned call-to-arms for both students and teachers to resist the forces of standardization that threaten to rob us of the vital lifeblood of real reading and writing that I’ve been carrying with me every day I walk into a school. Here are two sample stanzas:

Read.

But don’t read what they tell you to.

Don’t read excerpts, half-poems,

Carefully selected for lexile content,

Or articles written for the sole purpose

Of testing your comprehension . . . .

Read for the world.

Read to solve its problems.

Read to separate reality from ranting

Possibility from false promise,

And leaders from snake oil peddlers.

Read so you can tell the difference,

Because an educated person is so much harder

To enslave.

Finally, whether you’re lighting candles on a menorah, reconnecting with the Seven Principles of Kwanzaa, trading presents beside a tree, or just curling up with a good book, I wish you well this holiday season and hope that these offerings fill your heart and spirit with good tidings of comfort and joy.

Till next year . . . .