White-Knuckling It Until Break--"Last Week" Inspiration

Winter Break is five class days away, and we are providing every possible distraction for students--from hockey games to holiday pony rides to holiday concerts to the dining hall's holiday dinner, and we've got athletes leaving early for competitions. I've got students crawling the walls ready to get on planes and head off for their three-week breaks. Three weeks. (I might as well let you in on a little secret here, too. There's a bit of wall-crawling happening for me, too...)

What to do? What to do? 

I've never been satisfied with wrapping a pre-vacation week with a film. There's something about saying farewell to my kids by not really speaking with them that bothers me. Films should be taught. But I haven't found the right film for the last week before holiday break. Or the right balance of viewing and dissecting. Last year, we were just wrapping a unit on The Merchant of Venice, so we spent the two days before break dissecting Pacino's performance in the role. Somehow, it didn't feel like the right tone for the festive holiday season coming up (and we spend plenty of time in the depths of humanities studies--Humanities 10 isn't afraid to go heavy). 

For a brief time, I thought I might be able to start them on the personal projects I ask them to choose post-break. But I wondered how effective that might be with a three-week break in the middle of it. 

So here's where I've landed. I wanted something that will not be too heavy, will manage the multiple "non-assignment nights" we have this week, will not put students who are leaving early too far in the hole, will give me time to interact with my students, and will allow for individual student choice. What I've landed on isn't revolutionary, but I am excited about it. We're reading. 

Monday night of this week, I've asked students to post one or more book recommendations for their classmates and me. I've got an example I wrote for them posted to a Schoology discussion board:

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Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

Jon Krakauer was on Mount Everest during one of the most disastrous climbing seasons in the mountain's recorded history. In May of 1996, he went on a climbing expedition as a writer for Outside Magazine, and he got caught in a storm no one saw coming. Five people died. Countless others' lives were impacted. This is his take on the event. 

Yet another non-fiction text (I do read fiction, too...). I'm into endurance athletics, and I've always been fascinated by what makes people test themselves in what most people consider to be outrageous ways. I've never really been drawn to the idea of climbing in the way the people do in this book, but I recommend the read because it is an absolutely gripping tale of man versus nature, man versus man, and man versus himself. It's written in such a way that even though you know disaster is coming, you still want to jump onto the pages of the book and make all those people long gone change their minds or turn back. (Incidentally, Krakauer has written a number of other books, and I can just give a blanket recommendation for him as an author here.)  

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Between Tuesday and Thursday's class, they need to find a book to bring to class. And Thursday and Friday we'll do some "pleasure" reading or "leisure" reading in class. 

I've got a couple of other reflective moments built into the plan. There's a moment this week when I'll give them some time to do a mid-year reflection that I keep until May. It's nice for them to think about how far they've come since August, imagine how far they'll go before the end of the year, and then see it at the end of the year as I'm asking them to write to their seven-years-from-now selves. 

On Thursday and Friday we'll have some time to read and then some Bowmanville cafe time when they'll have some time to talk about their reading with each other. There'll be snacks and hot chocolate. And I hope that we'll wrap the week with them engrossed in something to read on their plane rides, having reflected on the start of their sophomore year, and excited to see each other again in January. 

I'll let you know how it goes. Wrestle on, friends. Holiday style. 

The post-experience update
So on Thursday, they took their test, read their books, and I did a quick check-in at the end of class to ask what they were reading. A number of students didn't come to class with books, but I had a stack of some of my favorites in the room, or I sent them next door to the library to get something so that everyone would have something for Friday. Students brought their own mugs to class, and we went through a pot of coffee and a  bunch of hot chocolate and some tea.

But I also got sick. Like swimming head cold sick. So by the time I got to class on Friday, I lacked the endurance to get through classes with kids who were VERY ready for break. I showed up with snacks, and we did some reading, but I was just sick. And students were really resistant to reading in books (which broke my heart into a 1000 pieces). I had a few who wanted to read books, but I think I had more who were wanting to read on their phones. And I didn't have the energy to try to rally their enthusiasm around books (more than providing them the time, the snacks, and caffeine, and the comfy chairs). The forces of Holiday vacation were also working against me.

I'll try again. 

Leadership: Discussion Facilitation (or Facilitation 102)

Facilitating discussions is difficult. Facilitating difficult conversations is even more difficult. But the skill of facilitation is important. And we often put our students in a position to lead workshops for other students, and those workshops usually include students leading some form of discussion. In order to teach and to give an opportunity for some students to practice this particular skill this week, I developed a workshop that I thought might be worth sharing here.

Discussion Facilitation 101
When I met with this same group of students in August, our workshop centered on holding meetings, in general. So we started off with some conversation about what their term one experience had been. I was most interested in the comments about how some groups had a lot of enthusiasm, but they didn't have agendas (so the enthusiasm wore off). And others on how they had agendas but limited engagement, and that frustrated them. I've witnessed both as I've wandered through some meetings during term 1--one meeting had great people in the room ready to dig into a topic, but no clear path laid out for them to do so; another meeting had a clear agenda and a facilitator bent on getting through that agenda, but no clear sense of the people in the room and what they might need (or how the items on the agenda connected to one another). Both meetings ended up feeling just painful.

So for the purposes of helping students become successful facilitators (or "ones who makes the way easy"), I put out these three ideas to the room:
1. In order to facilitate a good discussion, it's helpful for the facilitator to believe that the topic of conversation is worth having. If a facilitator isn't "into" the discussion, the participants will have a hard time getting into it, as well.
2. In order to facilitate a good discussion, the facilitator needs to invest in the people in the room. Facilitators need to be invested in making the way easy for those people in that moment. And that means tuning into their needs and contributions.
3. In order to facilitate a good discussion, the facilitator needs to make it easy for the people in the room to invest in the topic and invest in each other. It can't just be about the facilitator building a relationship with the people in the room--it has to be about helping the participants build a relationship with one another. Getting this balance right is a complicated balancing act.

In very simple terms, I told my workshop participants that they should: "Talk less. Listen more.  Seek balance in the group. Wait (longer than you think you should). Anticipate the next move. Stay neutral."

Tall order.

The Moves of a Discussion Facilitator
It's helpful for facilitators to keep in mind that there are a number of different moves they can make during a discussion to make the way easy for participants. I found this list from a Stanford website, and modified it for the purposes of sharing out just a few moves for their toolkit. A facilitator can (and should):

• Seek ideas and opinions: “What other ideas are in the room?” 
• Clarify: “What I think I hear you saying is…” 
• Summarize: “The main points that have been raised are…” 
• Test consensus: “Is there agreement that…?”
• Harmonize: “We seem to be stuck. How can we move the discussion along?” 
• Gatekeep: “Thanks for that input. What do others think?”
• Steer: “We seem to have gotten away from our purpose. Can someone get us back on track?” 

I gave participants in the workshop the list of cueing words on a handout and then asked them to write down the associated question for each of the words. I hoped that by having them note the questions, they would put them into their working memory for the practice to come in the workshop. 

Incidentally (or not so incidentally, really), when I'm asking students to practice a new skill with what they consider to be elevated language (so formal academic discussion, for example), they are usually pretty reluctant to try out more formal language unless they get a "license" from me to use it. It's awkward to try out new language on your own. The license comes in the form of sentence starters like those I've outlined above. If a student has the sentence on paper in front of them, they are more willing to use it. 

The Distractions 
In a perfect world, everyone in the room would be so invested in the conversation AND able to manage their own inner squirrels that there would be 100% focus on the topic. In reality, that seldom happens. So in the workshop, we also talked all the distractions. I labeled them this way:

• Dominating: A participant who wants to talk the entire time and not yield the floor. 
• Withdrawing: A participant who refuses to participate or separates from the group. 
• Degrading: A participant who puts down or disregards another person's ideas. 
• Holding Side conversations: Yeah, this happens a lot. 
• Distractions (electronic or squirrels): A participant who pulls out a cell phone or otherwise finds distraction in the room itself.  

I charged the group with thinking about how to deal with each of these while keeping the bigger goals of the group discussion in mind.

"The greatest gap in the world is the gap between knowing and doing." Practice. 
It's easy to say all of the above, but it's hard to practice all of the above. So I wanted to create a practice opportunity for them in the moment, and some took a swing at facilitating in the workshop.

I asked each table group to designate a facilitator who wanted to practice facilitation skills. And then I posted a topic for discussion and asked them to run the discussion for five minutes. Topics were pretty low stakes (improvements for the dorm, cell phone policy). And the only target for the discussion was to "explore the topic."

To try to make the experience more authentic, I also designated a distractor at each table. So that the facilitator wouldn't know who the distractor was, I distributed a playing card to each person at the table besides the facilitator. And for each conversation, I called out a number. A person holding that number card had the option of doing one of the distracting behaviors during the discussion. My thinking was that designating a distractor would mean that each facilitator would have to deal with at least one facilitator. I asked that the distractor please respond appropriately to correction.

I'd love to say that this activity went perfectly, but there were two problems: 1) There just wasn't enough time. 2) The distractors got into their distracting, and people were distracted by the distractors.

Time: My guess is this would work better if we had 10 minutes for each "micro discussion." It would give the facilitator long enough to have to work to keep the discussion moving. We also then needed time to give feedback to the facilitators about their facilitation. We didn't have that time at all. And that's the point--we get better at facilitating when we have the chance to learn from our facilitation.

Distractions: I think time would have probably helped here, too, actually. Having enough time to deal with the distraction and then get the discussion back on track for the facilitator would have helped their experience. I also think I should have done at least one round (if not more) where there were no designated distractors to give participants time to get in the rhythm of discussion. Being a distraction wasn't a naturally spot for a number of kids to be in, so it was a lot of fun, but it might have taken away from the bigger point.

Two big successes. 1) We got to have some conversation about professionalism among their peers. We acknowledged that it is difficult to correct a distractor, especially when a distractor is a friend. But we also talked about how that happens throughout our lives--we have working relationship, and we have friendships, and sometimes we have to navigate both at the same time. 2) I could hear the language of facilitation in the form of the sentence starters coming out of facilitators, and I could hear the discussion moves being made. I'm hoping that the language might stick enough to make their next discussion facilitation better.

Three and a half years in the life... leading a curriculum team

I recently resigned from a position I have loved for the last three and a half years--Humanities 10 Curriculum Team Leader (CTL). I'll still be on the team; I just won't be leading it. Choosing to step down was difficult. Before the work I've done with the team gets too far in the rearview mirror, I wanted to capture the arc of my experience here.

When the two Humanities Department Chairs offered me the opportunity to step in as Humanities 10 CTL, I had no idea how central that role would become to my work or how many opportunities it would afford me to work with colleagues all across campus. In the way that Culver’s mission commits to “developing and nurturing the whole individual,” my role as CTL and work nurtured me—it became an opportunity to develop the curriculum and personnel of the department and, by extension, to work with adults across the school. In turn, I experienced incredible personal and professional growth.

For a long while, my favorite meeting of the month was with my Chairs. Together, they mentored me into the CTL position, helped me make several course corrections along the way, advised me on personnel and programming questions, rooted me deeply in the foundational principles of the department’s work, and then gave me wings to develop the tenth grade curriculum and team. They encouraged collaboration among the members of the Leadership Team (the Chairs plus the other level CTLs), and we made strides towards vertical alignment in the department for a more cohesive department curriculum. They set a tone of respect and professionalism, and they could both be trusted.

The revision of the “What is Humanities?” document (one of the foundational department documents) by the 2014-2015 Leadership Team started on a Friday night in April of 2015. The 9th grade CTL and I had a meeting about some Leadership Team work, and that conversation fueled a Friday night revision frenzy on my part that then led to a series of email messages and LT conversations about curriculum design (and revision of the document). What a team that was.

The work of the LT in 2015 was in concert with the development of the tenth grade curriculum.  In 2013, when I first came back to Culver, I was handed a small Amazon box of five books. While the level's curriculum clearly didn't begin with my arrival, I felt I needed to find more direction than what I had in that box. The Writing Program (in its most boiled down form, a common writing assessment given to the entire tenth grade) was in its infancy, and the tenth grade team had no idea what we were doing in assessment design; it was a year of building the bridge as we crossed it with our students in tow. For some assessments, we were modifying the rubric the day before; for others, we were still modifying the test itself the day before (despite our collective understanding of the importance of backwards design).

February 6, 2015 was my first level meeting as CTL. The Chairs had given me three clear targets that I shared with the Humanities 10 Team at that meeting:
• Writing Program 2.0—aligning assessments to reflect the skills and content of the course
• Humanities Units—building units based in a common text/context
• Grading Course Goals

And that day we started moving beyond just the “texts” to actual “units of study.” At the time, we didn’t even have a name for the units—just the titles of the central texts. Our first day of work on a unit articulation started with this question about our Term 3 text and the team’s answers:

The Swallows of Kabul—At the end of a unit of study based in the text of The Swallows of Kabul, what are the key understandings to come from that unit for our students?
• environment and its impact on the characters of the novel
• geography—how to learn about geography
• how people respond to their environment
• isolation—physical and metaphysical, effects on sense of self
• various forms of violence
• Islam—what it is and what it isn’t, define terms of extremism and fundamentalism
• Islam/elements of Islam
• Taliban—what allowed it to come into power
• fundamentalism versus devotion
• metaphor (and other literary devices) and how they function within the work and beyond the work (what are the stories of the characters in the book a metaphor for?)

This was the beginning of a three-and-a-half year journey of Humanities curriculum development for the tenth grade team. Because we all had books, and we had all been teaching books, we started with the books. But we had a lot of work to do to articulate how each unit would contribute to our students’ understanding of what it means “to be persons, understood holistically, and to live human lives governed by human ends” (WiH 1.0).

As the Hum 10 team changed each year, I continued to work with each new team to develop the unit articulations. We went from that first fuzzy list of concepts to well-defined understandings that help students understand the relationship between text and context. We discussed the unit articulations before we taught the units, then we met again at the end of a unit of study to revise them. We vetted supplementary sources for each unit in an effort to expose students to a variety of types of texts within a unit (WiH) and to prompt a deeper dive into the context for each central text. We left space for individual teacher experimentation and autonomy. We became the level that was teaching students “-isms”—imperialism, cosmopolitanism, fundamentalism, globalism.

The Writing Program
As we developed the unit articulations to ensure that we were teaching Humanities units, I also pushed the level to design and deliver Writing Program assessments that were in congruence with the skills and content of the level. I also pushed us to develop the assessments and the accompanying rubrics prior to the terms in which we would be using them. Over the course of three years, the level went from major overhauls of the rubric ( versions 1.0, 2.0, 3.0) to adjustments (versions 5.1, 5.2, 5.3) to tweaks (versions 7.0, 7.1). The rubric was meant to reflect the writing skills we were teaching in our classrooms.

When the ninth grade team made adjustments to their writing expectations, I made sure that the tenth grade team worked in concert with them so that students would experience a more coherent progression through the writing instruction at the levels. When the eleventh grade team made the shift to American Studies with APLAC, the tenth grade team modified the language of the rubric to more closely reflect the language of theirs. I pushed the Leadership Team to have conversations about the 11th grade writing targets so that the work at the lower levels would support students’ transition to the rigorous curriculum of the eleventh grade. When new members joined the team, I onboarded them to the Hum 10 Writing Program and then listened to and incorporated their suggestions for improvement into each assessment and rubric.

We also developed the Writing Program assessments themselves. As each unit articulation was refined each term, the level chose a content focus for the end-of-term assessment that reflected what the level valued in that unit.  Then we revised or developed the assessment from that choice. We weren’t teaching to the test, we were testing what we taught. We all learned more about assessment design.

We evolved the format of the assessments and scoring. I listened to the level’s concerns about the in-class essay format of the assessments, and I developed a proposal for a multi-draft out-of-class essay (OCE) format that the team vetted, modified, and tried. When we weren’t satisfied with the first version of the OCE, we modified the process again. When teachers expressed concerns over the amount of time they were spending scoring other teachers’ essays before then spending a weekend reading and commenting on their own students’ essays, I developed a proposal for a new system of scoring that would still align with and honor the principles of the original Writing Program design while allowing teachers more time with their own students’ essays. After the tenth-grade team tried and liked the new scoring system, the ninth-grade team adopted it, too. And as we developed the assessments, we developed as teachers. Together. And all without tears (no small feat given the culture of the level early on).

Tenth Grade Reading
We also grew as readers and teachers of readers. It was apparent that we all had room to grow in our understanding of the Bard. The level started their “text talks” in the back room of Papa’s on Sunday nights in the fall of 2015. We called it “The Bard and some Brews” and some of us fumbled our way through The Merchant of Venice together while enjoying an adult beverage.  Those Sunday night text talks transitioned to optional Tuesday level talks where we read and discussed each term’s central text together. Eventually, individual level members took responsibility for a term’s talks and planned the professional development experience for their colleagues. In years when we added several new members (e.g. seven of our ten level members were new in 2017), we studied the central texts together. In years when most level members were returning, we studied the unit’s supplementary texts. During one term last year, several members prepared and shared lectures for the team. Over the years, several people have shared that those text talks were their favorite meetings of the week.

We taught Purple Hibiscus one year. And we had a horrible book called The Underdogs on our reading list (so none of us actually taught it). We briefly added Frankenstein back into the curriculum for a year. At one point we had four novels and a play. And then the level determined that four central texts would be ideal; each of the five texts we had were “of sufficient depth and merit to bear th[e] weight”(WiH) of a full term of study, and there were only four terms in a year.  While some at the level wanted to take The Merchant of Venice off the tenth grade team’s slate, The Program Chair and I knew that eliminating it would require a larger discussion in the Humanities department about the role of Shakespeare in the Humanities curriculum. Still, we took a gamble and held the conversation hoping that the level would land on Merchant as one of the four texts. It did.

Since that conversation, the tenth grade has not changed central texts. I did learn from the time that we added Frankenstein to the mix and gave teachers little time to prepare during a June Week (end of school year) discussion, that the level needed to be more careful in making major changes to the curriculum. So when members new to the level asked last year about changing texts, I engineered a June Week conversation through which the team could develop both a process/timeline for text review or selection and key characteristics of potential replacement texts and/or additional central texts. I wanted to help level members feel like they had a voice in the curriculum while also helping us all keep an eye on the guiding Humanities principles.

Essential Questions, Justice, and Rationality 
While a number of essential question combinations had been floating around the department and level for quite some time, as each unit developed, a clear common focus seemed to emerge. Our units all addressed issues related to justice in each of the societies we studied. We formalized the adoption of these essential questions for the Humanities 10 year in the Spring of 2016:

What defines a just society? What creates injustice in societies? What makes it difficult to perceive injustice? What is the role of the individual in responding to injustice?

Certainly, these essential questions directly follow the mandate of the school’s mission to “educate students for leadership and responsible citizenship.” After all our other unit articulation and Writing Program discussions, adopting these essential questions breathed new life into our teaching conversations. How would putting these essential questions in front of our students make shifts to our thinking when we taught? To students’ thinking as they wrestled with the texts and contexts?

The question, “What makes injustice so hard to perceive?” demands attention to the rationality work of Kahneman. The question of what defines a just society demands attention to the work of Mills, Bentham, Rawls, Kant, and Aristotle. We have aspirations to make our sophomores “think inquisitively, critically, and reflectively while demonstrating an understanding of “fast and slow” thinking to enhance interpretive, analytical, and evaluative approaches specific to the humanities,” and to add this layer, we have a lot of additional work to do together as a teaching team.

resign: give up, surrender, abandon, submit; relinquish
The Dean of Faculty asked me if there was some project I wanted to finish or some work that I felt I still wanted to do before I resigned my position as CTL. There are a hundred things I’d still like to do. It can’t be one thing. Being a CTL is a complex juggling job, and I’ve been keeping a lot of balls in the air for a lot of years. And as my best friend would say, “It’s not just balls. It’s a ball, an apple, a sword, a candle, a cat, a bicycle… and you are smiling while you do it.” Dropping them all and walking away in the middle of the act is painful (and promises to be a bit dull).

I’ve been on six different tenth-grade teams in the six years I’ve been in the department. One year, we had ten team members. One year, we had five. Some years, Fellows (our "interns") have been the only additions. Some years, the part-timers at the level outnumber the full-timers. To develop a curriculum while attending to the needs of the teachers at the level is a delicate balance, and I haven’t always gotten it right. But I have always worked hard to keep programming goals in mind to make the best decisions for our students, while also focusing on the colleagues in my care.

Levels of Reading and Wil E Coyote

I can't remember learning to read (so I can't remember being taught to read). I have fond memories of the profound sense of accomplishment I felt when I sat on the red beanbag chair (on their orange shag carpet) in my parents' living room and read out loud (in what I'm sure was the most painfully slow and stuttering tones) Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat. I read. A whole book. By myself (to my poor parents who suffered through every page turn but beamed with pride at the end).

I can remember in high school sitting in Mrs. Rocker's living room next to a fire while eating scones and drinking tea and discussing Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and feeling very adult about the whole experience.

And I can remember taking such pride in the marked-up pages of my books at the University of Michigan that I refused to sell them back to the bookstore at the end of the semester. I still have them.

But I don't remember progressing through any sort of levels of reading. Or engaging in different kinds of reading. Or encountering any one text differently from another. Or anyone teaching me how to write notes in the margins of my texts. All of a sudden, I was just at-least-proficient in reading: comprehending what I read, interacting with a text, and knowing when to zoom in and zoom out.

"If to do were as easy as to know what were good to
do, chapels had been churches and poor men's
cottages princes' palaces." --Portia, The Merchant of Venice 

Portia will tell us here that there is a difference, of course, between knowing and doing. When I started teaching at the high school, I "did" long before I "knew." When I assigned reading to my students, I'd say things like, "Close read chapter one of To Kill a Mockingbird; come to class with your book marked up."

It should be no surprise that this kind of assignment produced mixed results. If the results I was looking for were deep understandings of a full chapter of a book and the ability to zoom in on exactly the word or phrase I felt students should note while they were reading while also picking up on all the major themes and ideas AND noting unfamiliar vocabulary, then I got a mixed bag, for sure. Why couldn't my kids all close read? 

The answer is simple: I didn't know what I was talking about. I didn't understand that not all reading and writing in texts is "close reading." 

How Zoomed is the reader's Zoom Lens?   
We can't close read everything.
We don't interactively read everything.
We sometimes expect interactive reading while students take on miles-on-the-page reading.

If you disagree with these claims or they don't make sense to you, then this post might be for you.

Miles-on-the-page
I read The Hunger Games trilogy in a weekend. I'd gotten a copy of book one from Scholastic Inc. on a visit to New York, and when I finally cracked the cover, I was hooked. But I didn't close read it. I didn't even interactively read it. I didn't have time; I needed to get to the next page!

In Lemov, Driggs, and Woolway's Reading Reconsidered, this is called "miles on the page" or "quantity reading." And it is a totally reasonable and acceptable approach to consuming lots of text. It also speaks to the idea that "quality reading requires quantity reading. Students must read not only well but also widely and extensively."

So here's the thing--there's a "but also" there. Reading Reconsidered doesn't think of miles-on-the-page reading as one "type" of reading but rather as one component of supporting the growth of young readers. We need our students reading. A lot. They mention that the "time that we allocate to 'reading' [in our classrooms] is in fact spent talking about reading, say, or talking about topics brought about by reading. Less often is that time filled with actual reading: how many road miles students really log with reading is an open question."

So number of pages students read matter. And if we're asking our students to "interactively" or "close read" those pages, they won't cover as many miles. We need to invite them to zoom on out and hit the open road in a book.

Attentive/Interactive
Early on in my teaching, I don't think I was asking my students to do "miles-on-the-page" reading very often. But I was assigning a "miles-on-the-page" volume of reading to them and then asking them to do an entirely different level of reading altogether--attentive reading or, in the language of Reading Reconsidered, Interactive Reading. Interactive Reading (IR)  is when "a reader engages with the text by underlining, marking up key points, and summarizing ideas in the margin."

This! is what I think I wanted my students doing when I was assigning the first chapter of To Kill a Mockingbird. 

Lemov et. al. argue that "in high-performing literacy classrooms, simple habits--how your students mark up text as they read and how they hold a discussion that honors different interpretations--allow inspiring and rigorous instruction to thrive." They also argue that strong literacy programs have a "system for making up" that is "consistent--there [is] a way students [are] taught to do it--but each student mark[s] up different things."

In the school where I work, having teachers collaborate together to create a system for making their thinking visible in IR might be one of the most significant steps we can take in creating cohesiveness in our reading pedagogy. If freshmen coming in learn a system, then sophomores use that system (and expand the tools in it), we'll have a culture of students who understand 1) that there are different levels of interaction with a text and 2) how to make their thinking visible when reading. (Incidentally, the creation of the system alone would be a profound professional development opportunity for the teachers involved--it's really useful for teachers to discuss what they are looking for when assessing student reading; it forces a lot of exciting and important discussion about the teaching of reading.)

Teachers can assess student understanding in their IR notes in the margins of their texts. That's a post for another day, though.

Close
Zoom on in. This is the geek out moment for most literature majors. Give me a half a page of text in Things Fall Apart, and I will mark up every word. I will go from the page level to the paragraph level to the sentence level to the word level. I will notice how many times the main character, Okonkwo, is referred to as fire, flame, ash, smoldering. I will note connections to earlier and later pieces of the text (because I've now read the novel at least fifteen times). I will interpret every Igbo proverb in the margins of the text. The end result of my close read will likely be that there will be more of my writing on the page than there will be of Achebe's.

That's close reading. Lemov and his colleagues define close reading carefully as "the methodical breaking down of the language and structure of a complex passage to establish and analyze its meaning. Teaching students to do it requires layered reading and asking sequenced, text-dependent questions; and it should end whenever possible with mastery expressed through writing."

A "complex passage"--that's not a whole novel. We can't close read a whole novel. We can't even close read a whole chapter without "layered reading." Multiple readings.

And layered readings generally won't happen in a student's dorm room (at least not my student's dorm room) without a very carefully structured set of questions and directions. Most of my students haven't developed the skills to just "close read" without any additional guidance. And that additional guidance takes a lot of planning. This is another opportunity for teachers to collaborate.

Implications--Wrestling Points

• Volume matters. It matters because developing readers should be reading a lot. Regularly. Teachers need to be mindful of how much volume they are assigning (and whether or not their assignments are allowing students to just read). And if volume is the point, then we need to let the students know that is the point, and we need to assess their reading accordingly. 
• If asking students to do Interactive Reading, then don't assign miles-on-the-page volume.
• A successful IR program requires collaboration among teachers in the creation and implementation of a system, and that level of collaboration will ultimately benefit the students in any given program as they spend less time learning the system and more time in the practice of actual reading. 
• If asking students to do Interactive Reading, then don't expect a close reading level of comment or analysis. 
• Close reading requires significant planning on the part of a teacher when working with developing readers. How will we 1) choose the passages and 2) find the time? 

A Final Note

In Kathryn Schulz's excellent TED Talk "On Being Wrong"  she shares the metaphor above for what it feels like when we're wrong. We're Wile E Coyote in the moment before he looks down. We're hanging in mid-air because we haven't realized that we aren't on solid ground any more. But in that moment, being wrong feels remarkably like being right. (And it doesn't make us any less wrong--it just means we don't know it yet.)

 It occurs to me that this is an apt metaphor for trying to grow as a teacher of reading. I don't often get to feel like the roadrunner. And the more I study this area, the more I believe that we're all the coyote. The point, it seems, is to be willing to look down. Often.

Facilitator--One Who Makes Things Easier. Difficultator--One Who...?

I've been wrestling with the skill of facilitation lately--thinking about how we teach it in the dorms/barracks for student leaders, in the classroom for students, and in meetings for adults.

I've been geeking out on etymology, too. So look up "facilitate" in the Online Etymology Dictionary, and you'll see that it has the stem of "facil" (easy)  and "facere" (do). So to make something easy. Facilitating a conversation? The facilitator's role is to make that conversation easy. My best friend doesn't like the term. If teachers are facilitators, then our role isn't to make things easy. It's to make things more difficult. She coined the term "Difficultator." I like it. I can't quite sell it yet, but I'm filing it away with my daughter's term, "detorial" (the detour you take when a student question pops up during a lesson, and you go off script to "tutor" them in that moment).

In the dorms and barracks for student leaders...
Several years ago (I can't remember how many because it was so awful that I long blocked the experience out of my mind), I was invited to be an adult guest in a student-facilitated meeting. I was told it was "an honor" to be invited, so I accepted the invitation. When I arrived at the meeting, I wasn't offered a seat; I was waved over to the corner. The girls in the room went around and introduced themselves to each other. They skipped me. When it got to the meat of the meeting, I was never invited into the conversation. And frankly, they weren't facilitating well. And then when they handed out cookies, they skipped me. That was the last straw. It took me years to accept another invitation to a student-facilitated meeting.

Fast forward to my second go-round at Culver. Our mission: "Culver educates its students for leadership and responsible citizenship..." I have thought about that bad meeting many times in my encounters with student leaders. When I returned back to Culver, I started thinking, also, about the phrase, "When we knew better, we did better." I think we can do better with not just giving our students opportunities to lead, but also giving them feedback on that leadership so that they can grow their skills.

This August, I gave a facilitation workshop for the CGA Seniors. I had all 90 or so (I feel like there were more?) CGA Seniors in the room, and I told them the story of that really bad meeting. And I told them that they would be facilitating meetings during their senior year. And I told them that I was there to help them to not facilitate really bad meetings.

I kicked off with some core beliefs about facilitation:
1. It’s not about me. (Even if it feels like it is.)
2. Facilitation is a complex skill, and it is difficult to get it right no matter how often you do it.
3. There isn’t one right way to facilitate, and there are a lot of wrong ways.
4. Good and bad meetings happen; talking about them productively is where facilitator growth happens.

And then I shared my four keys to backwards design of a facilitation experience:
1. What do we want the outcome to be? (head and heart)
2. What do we need to do to get it there? (the plan)
3. How will we know if the plan is working? And how will we make adjustments if it isn’t working? (accountability)
4. What will we do when we are finished so we improve next time? (meta feedback)

And we focused on the fourth one for this meeting; our focus became about figuring out what a "good" meeting might include so that we can then get feedback to improve for next time. The thing is, students know what they like in a meeting. We all actually know what we like in a meeting. So I asked them to do a "norm-setting" exercise, but I framed it around meetings. If you are in a meeting, what do you want/need from a facilitator?

Groups came up with a list of traits on their own (I asked them to first write individually and then to pare that list down to get it to a manageable number). And those were to become their facilitation targets for the year.

I shared with them this list of facilitation targets in case they didn't already have a full list:

• Develop meaningful agendas
• Communicate “why” of the meeting
• Give effective directions 
• Engage every participant 
• Manage group energy
• Control dominant participants
• Show courage
• Actively listen
• Model expected behaviors
• Have a sense of humor
• Refocus when the group gets off track

But the groups already had a number of these on their lists.

And then I sent them off with these three charges for the class of 2019:
1. Grow your facilitation skills this year.
2. Have more “good meetings” than “bad ones.”
3. Good or bad: Seek out/give feedback on facilitation.

Looking forward to checking in to see how they are doing.

As a leadership opportunity in the classroom...
But I've also been thinking about facilitation in the classroom. So often, I put students into groups and ask them to work together; sometimes I give them roles in those groups. But seldom do I take the opportunity to develop them as facilitators in those moments. (Telling a student they are the "leader" isn't the same as teaching them how to facilitate.)

This one is still very much in development for me, but I'm working on it with the students in my Humanities 10 class right now.

Our course has this goal: Students will speak to communicate and collaborate confidently, deliberately, and articulately in a variety of environments.

So the "collaborate confidently" part intrigues me as does the "variety of environments." The bite I'm going to take out of this course goal has to do with facilitation as collaboration, so I'm going to work on this with my students.

Instead of assigning group roles when I last put my students into groups, I assigned one role: facilitator. Everyone else? Participants. I had an assignment that was broken into four parts. And I had groups of four. So each student was charged with facilitating their part of the conversation; I assigned the order for the facilitators so that I could keep track of who was supposed to be facilitating at any given time.

The three groups of four students were at tables in three of the corners of the room (my classes are small, so I technically had three facilitators working at a time), and I put my chair in the center of those groups. And then I listened and took notes on the facilitation.

I noted moments like "connects two participants' ideas together" or "answers the question herself instead of asking the question of group" or  "redirects conversation to get it back on topic" or "missed opportunity to invite comment from participant A." And when students finished covering the content in their small groups, I shared my facilitation observations with  the individual groups. And then we had a whole-class conversation to fill in any gaps on the content of the conversations.

It's a start. I think the next step is to take those comments and turn them into a frame for their next facilitated conversations. So those notes from last time will become a front-end conversation about the skill of facilitation and what they are trying to practice. At some point, I imagine this might end up in a more formal (formative/summative?) feedback mechanism, but I'm not sure what that is right now.

It feels like this might be the "right bite" for the sophomore speaking goal--can we help turn our student "participants" into effective student leader "facilitators?"

As facilitation relates to norms (meetings for adults)...
I wrote earlier about fine-tuning some thinking on norm setting. After actually going through a norm setting exercise with the teaching team I'm on last year, I reflected on some of the "norms" that were suggested by the team, and they just didn't seem to fit in the category of "group norms." They felt more like calls to a facilitator. And we have a number of different people facilitating conversations at our level, so we decided to separate the two sets of norms out.

We have these "facilitator norms" for the Humanities 10 team:
• Respect beginning/ending time
• Define targets: discussion, dialogue, decision-making?
• Create space for contributions from the room—avoid the ping pong
• Thoughtfully plan agendas + learning/working groups
• Be open to feedback on facilitation

And these "meeting norms":
• Be prepared
• Be present
      o        minimize distractions, listen actively
      o be mindful of air time—taking too much or too little
      o allow ideas to simmer
• Own group decisions
• Assume good intentions

And a final note

There is plenty of literature out there on holding better meetings. And there are plenty of people who complain a lot about having meetings. I'm really interested in both having better meetings and having people who don't complain about having meetings. That's the reason for the wrestle--how can we not just fine-tune our own facilitation skills but also support the development of other facilitators? 

_Reader, Come Home_: Nurturing the Reading Brain

Reader, Come Home by Maryanne Wolf sucked me in with just the blurb on the jacket: "[This author] considers the future of the reading brain and our capacity for critical thinking, empathy, and reflection  as we become increasingly dependent on digital technologies."

Critical thinking?
Empathy?
Reflection?
and READING?
Sign me up.

I was primed to love this text from the start, and then I read the first letter (the book is written in the form of an epistolary with each letter beginning with "Dear Reader.") The author makes some huge promises in the opening letter, and I can't wait to see how she delivers on them. Here is an excerpt:

        All these letters will prepare you, my reader, to consider the many critical issues involved, beginning with yourself. In the last letter I ask you to think about who the true "good readers" are in our changing epoch and to reflect for yourself on the immeasurably important role they play in a democratic society--never more so than now. Within these pages the meanings of a good reader have little to do with how well anyone decodes words; they have everything to do with being faithful to what Proust once describes as the heart of the reading act, going beyond the wisdom of the author to discover one's own.
        There are no shortcuts for becoming a good reader, but there are lives that propel and sustain it. Aristotle wrote that the good society has three lives: the life of knowledge and productivity; the life of entertainment and the Greeks’ special relationship to leisure; and finally, the life of contemplation. So, too, the good reader. [The good] reader—like the good society—embodies each of Aristotle’s three lives, even as the third life, the life of contemplation, is daily threatened in our culture. From the perspectives of neuroscience, literature, and human development, I will argue that it is this form of reading that is our best chance at giving the next generation the foundation for the unique and autonomous life of the mind they will need in a world none of us can fully imagine.  The expansive, encompassing processes that underlie insight and reflection in the present reading brain represent our best complement and antidote to the cognitive and emotional changes that are the sequelae of the multiple, life-enhancing achievements of a digital age. 

…I will suggest that the future of the human species can best sustain and pass on the highest forms of our collective intelligence, compassion, and wisdom by nurturing and protecting the contemplative dimension of the reading brain. (12-13) 

This passage alone raises an incredible number of questions for me as an educator and a teacher of reading. What's my role in cultivating "good readers?" How does that play out in my everyday practices as a teacher? How do I encourage my students to go beyond the wisdom of the author to discover their own wisdom? And, perhaps most importantly, how does the school climate where I'm teaching support lives that propel and sustain our students' becoming "good readers?" 

We're particularly challenged, as educators, by this concept of creating a life of contemplation for our students. There are timelines and deadlines and curriculum maps that all seem to propel us forward, but they don't necessarily give us the time and space for a "contemplative life." Gotta get to this chapter by this point in time so that I can get them through this material and have them read this next thing... (wording intentionally vague). It's not solely the system that forces this kind of thinking--it's also certainly the autonomous choices I make in my classroom to move on. 

The word that seemed to stick with me the most here was "nurturing." While trying to highlight all the details of our current book, I wonder if my pace, my checks for understanding, my trying to dial into the minds of my students during the receptive skill of reading is really nurturing their brains. I hope so, but I wonder... 

I'm guessing I'll be back with more references to this text. In the meantime, I'm off to nurture the contemplative dimension of my reading brain through some off-screen time. 

Eye in the Sky--360 Cameras and Classrooms--The "after" and the learning

It's been nearly a month since I returned from from NYC and the Teaching Institute at Spence (TiAS); school has started, kids are in my seats again, and I'm trying to get myself into the rhythm of a new school year. I went back and read my previous post on the vulnerability of taping classes and posting them for the world to see pre-Spence experience; you can see my thinking here. My sense and thinking post-Spence is exactly what it should be after a profound professional development experience--dramatically evolved from what it was a month ago.

Feeling empowered--the curating of the videos
The fantastic facilitators of the TIaS watched the submitted videos of the participants before we arrived, and they curated the videos for us. Yes, we were going to look at our teaching, but we were going to dial in on a five-minute segment of our class, not the entire eighty five minutes. When it came time to look at our videos, the facilitators suggested that we zero in on one of the three segments they selected, but they also allowed us time and space to choose our own segment if those curated segments didn't speak to us. That felt incredibly empowering.

Feeling empowered again--creating a question of practice and a protocol to unpack the question
The TIaS facilitators also empowered us to design our own question of practice. I am really interested in how I talk with students about their engagement in the class and how we measure engagement, so I asked a question of my practice: how can I more effectively measure student engagement and communicate with them about that engagement so that they can grow?
From that question of practice, I developed a rubric I thought I might be able to use in my classes this fall. Then I developed a protocol to tune the rubric. Then I asked my fellow Institute goers to participate in the protocol to tune the rubric while we watched a segment of my class.

Takeaways to Take Forward
The biggest surprise for me (and something I wasn't even thinking of before I went); I don't have to watch the entire class to learn something about my teaching. A lot can be gained from focusing on just five minutes of a class.

There is incredible power in allowing an observation or taping of class to come from a personal question of practice. While I have had several administrators ask me, "What would you like me to look for?", that somehow isn't the same as getting to develop the question myself about a targeted segment of a class that is on tape, one that can be rewound and reviewed and reconsidered.

That everyone has some skin in the game matters, too. At TIaS, we had a small community of teachers who spent their week building trust and developing a common sense of both vulnerability and support. When I was partnered with other teachers, and I opened my classroom to them, and they opened their classrooms to me, we were able to have a great balance of inquiry and reflection, a sincere desire to lift up one another’s practice while also tuning it, and incredible care taken in giving each other feedback. I wonder if observations would feel differently (better?) if the observer would become the observed in a reciprocal, collaborative arrangement. 

Protocols help democratize conversations, but they can also feel constraining to participants. Finding the right balance between the use of a protocol and a time for "open coaching" helps to honor both modes of discussion. 


Finally, I said multiple times during the week that I feel more and more like teaching is brutifully messy work, and when we try to clean it up (through observations, protocols, curriculum development), we make it even messier. I'm reminded of all the times I try to clean up a quarter-sized drop of paint, and that quarter-sized drop suddenly becomes a foot-long smear on the hardwood. Perhaps I've taken the metaphor a bit far. Anyway, the messiness and the struggle to clean it up is where growth happens. My favorite norm for our week together at Spence--embrace each other's messiness.  · 

Eye in the Sky--360 Cameras and Classrooms--The "before" and the taping

https://www.wired.com/2016/12/review-kodak-pixpro-sp360/
Image credit to website above.

When I got the preparation request for the Teaching Institute at Spence, I admit that I groaned. Submit two recorded classes? From my fourth term classes? With me in the recording? So that I could later watch them? With other people?

The last time I recorded myself teaching was in 2013 when I was going through the National Board Certification process. I was submitting video of my teaching to meet some specific requirements for the certification. To record my classes, I recruited a student from my school's AV club to do the taping. I carefully planned a "perfect" class full of activities and student interaction and feedback loops and assessments. I set up the classroom perfectly for taping--students carefully grouped, materials prepared for distribution, and space for the student with the camera to move around. And on the day of the taping, the carefully over-orchestrated class went perfectly! I was elated. Perfect. 

Then I got the video home.

The student filming had forgotten to turn the sound on. I had a recording of my perfect language-based class with no sound. And no way to recover it. 

I would have to record again.

"Culture of Privacy?" 

Judith Warren Little's excellent writing  "Professional Development in the Learning-Centered School"  highlights the importance of "moving from a culture of privacy to teacher learning community"(17). But for crying out loud, it's not easy. You'd think that in the social-media-loving environment most of us live in today that taking one more "extended selfie" in the form of a videotaped class wouldn't be a big deal. 

I'm not alone in my anxiety over taping my teaching, although a google search looking for evidence of this anxiety online yields few results. Maybe we just aren't all that open about it? Anecdotal evidence from conversations with fellow teachers over the years confirms that I might not be alone in my trepidation. One friend is more wound up about watching herself on tape than she is about having the Head of Schools visit her class. When I hung the 360 camera in my classroom in preparation for recording, a number of teachers stopped in and freaked out just because the bracket for the camera was there. 

The most complex of the questions I am confronted with when watching my own teaching is, "Does what I think is happening in my classroom match what is actually happening in my classroom?" (Hint: The answer is almost always no.) 

But there are a number of other questions (major and minor, real and ridiculous) that might run through my head. Do I seriously put my hands in my pockets that often? Is that what my voice really sounds like? How did I not notice _________ happening when I thought class was going so well? 

And then there are the questions about the broader audience for the filming. What will the tape be used for? For the NBCT filming, it was evaluative--a successful class and my reflection on that class were keys to getting my certification. A filming to be used for evaluative purposes adds a whole host of anxieties. Who will evaluate? What will they use to evaluate it? How will they calibrate their evaluation of my teaching against others? What context will they need in order to understand the class and its participants and my relationship with my students? How does my reflection on the lesson tie into the evaluation? 

For my upcoming week at Spence, I had to tape two classes before the end of the school year and upload the videos to a google drive. As part of the week (first week of August), we'll analyze our videos (it's one month after the end of the school year and one month before I go to Spence as I write this post). I decided to tape four classes--two 45-minute classes and two 85-minute classes. I thought it would be interesting to watch the same group of students twice (in a shorter class and in a longer class), and I also thought it would be interesting to watch the same lesson plan as it played out with two different groups of students.  

360 Degrees of Observation--The Set Up 

Rather than use a traditional camera for capturing a class, I opted for one of our school's 360 degree cameras. I was intrigued by what I had heard about the technology--I could watch my class at nearly any angle, follow an individual student's experience throughout the class, and even zoom in on a student's work in progress (this didn't turn out to be exactly true). I also thought I could focus on individual conversations in the classroom (this also didn't turn out to be true with the tech I had). 

A fellow teacher crafted special mounting brackets so that we could hang the camera from our classroom ceilings. I don't have a picture of that setup, but the bracket isn't subtle. People walk in the room and say, "WHAT IS THAT?!?" And then they tend to duck as if something is flying at them (I can't explain why) when they think that the bracket has a camera in it and that the camera is on. 

A tip for anyone interested in using a setup like this is to mount the bracket in your classroom for a couple of days before actually taping the classes. Doing this gave me and the students time to get used to the equipment. After a few days of having the bracket in the classroom, I added the camera. But I didn't video with it. Again, we were all just getting used to it hanging here. And then before I actually took a shot at taping an entire class, I hit record a few times with the camera with the kids in the room. They'd ask me, "Wait, are you taping this?" and I'd tell them I was just trying out the technology (I was). 

On that note, the same questions that pop up for teachers about taping classes pop up in students' minds. Why? What will this be used for? Can "they" see me doing the thing that I'm not supposed to be doing during class? (My students seemed to imagine someone akin to Big Brother watching the classes as they were happening. Since the camera can be controlled wirelessly, these aren't unreasonably paranoid thoughts.) So it's important (and fair and ethical) to communicate clearly with your students about the point of taping a class. My students liked that I was using it to reflect on my teaching. And they liked that I was limiting access to the video (by making the link on Youtube private and only sharing it with people who needed access). 

On the days I chose to tape, I started the recording before class started so that I could capture the students coming into the room and lessen the "Is that thing on?" questioning that happened whenever anyone approached the camera. (Every video starts with me staring with my head tilted at an odd angle at the camera for an inordinately long time  saying something like, "Yep, I think this is on!"). I established with students that I might be taping any class that week (or every class that week). And because the students understood the purpose of the taping and they trusted me, it didn't seem to be a big deal to them to walk into the classroom with the camera already on. Students either ignored the camera altogether or addressed it directly at times that we were taping. 

The Aftershow--To Keep or Not to Keep (and How?) 

I hit record when the kids walked in. Hit stop when the kids walked out. And then I decided whether or not that class would be a keeper for Spence based on my answer to one question: "Does this class feel representative of a typical day in my class?" Unlike my NBCT teaching video where I was looking for the "perfect" class (a class I no longer believe exists), for Spence I wanted a class that would allow me to look critically at my teaching on a typical day--warts and all. (In a typical class, I have kids who over participate, who under participate, who get up for a drink at a totally inappropriate moment, who have their cell phones out when I tell them to put them away, who might unleash a word of profanity, who say something else inappropriate, who wrestle with messy ideas, who ask a question I've already answered, who don't listen to my directions... and who all do the opposite of these things.) 

So I finished the work with the cameras, and then I had to start the work to convert the videos to a usable format. Want those details? Shoot me an email. It was a sharp, sharp learning curve. And time consuming. But I won't consume any blog space with the technical details for now.

I'll be back in August to post again after I've had a chance to do the film analysis with my soon-to-be-friendly-friends at the Teaching Institute at Spence. I'm intrigued by this technology as it can be used to improve my teaching, but there's also some anxieties...

Quicknotes:

1. I'm guessing feeling anxious about taping a class is normal. Knowing the why? and the who? and the what after? of that taping might help. 

2. Getting to a mental space where it's okay, expected, almost exciting to watch a "typical" class day is helpful. Class doesn't have to be perfect. Getting excited about a hot mess of a class is also a pretty great place to be (a crappy class that can be analyzed is better than a crappy class I didn't tape so might not learn from). 

3. Exposing the kids to the camera and any associated technology prior to the day(s) of taping makes the actual day of taping much easier. 

4. I clearly have no idea what to call what I'm doing--filming? video-ing? taping? What do people call such a thing now that there's no film? No tape? 

I'm looking forward to seeing how the analysis protocol unfolds in August. As I was going through the taping process, I was thinking through a number of ways I might like to use the camera more regularly in my class next year. Here's hoping for some inspiration as early August rolls around.