Poetry Pedagogy (or just an alliterative title for a post)

Whenever I try to slow myself down to try to understand what I'm doing when I read, I learn something about myself as a reader. Whenever I get to talk with my colleagues about what they do when they read, I learn something about teaching reading.

This week's wrestle as a level was over poetry reading.

We started by reading a poem called "If They Should Come for Us" by Fatimah Asghar (posted at the bottom of this post).  It comes from the Poetry magazine, March 2017 edition. Our fantastic facilitator asked us to think about this question, "What do I do when I read?" as we read the poem. And somewhere in my notes, I jotted down the question, "How can I help students do the same?" That second question is funny--the ambiguity of "the same" is what led me into this blog reflection.

We all read the poem independently, and took notes. And then our facilitator asked the question of the room: "What did you note when you read?" 

I was listening for things I could "teach" my students. I was thinking, "Oh, if he noticed that, then I should teach them that." I wondered about people noticing rhyme scheme. Or noticing word patterns. Or noticing punctuation. 

And then my colleagues started talking. And they didn't notice anything that I noticed. In fact, four different colleagues spoke about their experience of the poem, and they each spoke of something completely different. One went to the earth/moon imagery of the poem. One focused on the ampersands (I love ampersands, but I didn't even notice they were there). By the time they were finished speaking, I realized we weren't talking about how to teach our students to read poetry, but we were talking about how to teach students how to find their own lens through which to read poetry and engage with a text. 

I wonder if it is less about what I do when I read and more how I can support students to do something as they read. And then to turn that something into interpretation. We're really interested in developing critical thinkers who can entertain multiple perspectives and multiple interpretations; how do we get them there?

What I offer here is less a lesson plan and more of a line of thinking that might turn into a lesson plan for me at some point. We know that one of the strongest determinants of a student's ability to interpret a text is their ability to connect to that text; we always bring our own background with us when we sit down to read, and if we are at least within our zone of proximal development on the difficulty of a text, our brain will be making connections to whatever it can as we read intentionally. 

So the first question I might ask students when they do a read of a poem is, "What did you connect with in this poem, and why?" As I read the poem the first time, I very much connected to the phrase "my people, my people" in the poem. And it made me wonder and think about who gets included in "my people" for this poet? For me?

And I wondered if just starting there. With all kinds of connections from a class of readers. Would be a great starting point for discussion. "What did you notice? What did you connect with?"

And then, as I listened to my fellow teachers talk about the poem, I thought, "Wait! This is the point in this reading lesson!" It is to guide students to make their own connections with the poem. And then those connections they make will give them the lens to look through to interpret the poem. For me, I was interested in the repetition of that phrase--I could go through the poem and ask myself or others discussing the poem how that repetition contributes to the meaning of the poem. For my &-appreciating colleague, perhaps the analysis of the poem becomes about the use of punctuation (or the not-use of punctuation). Both seem to be valid lenses through which to analyze this poem. 

And that's it. It's not really about teaching them to look for repetition or word choice or punctuation or sonnet form... at least not at first. It's about helping them to realize the power of noticing. And then helping them take that noticing one step further to analysis. And then facilitating the comparison of their analysis up against another classmate's analysis. 

My point? (And I do have one--I'm wordy today.) Sometimes I can look at things at the ten-foot level when I should be looking at them at the 100-foot or 1,000-foot level. Instead of trying to teach this poem (10-foot level) or this particular literary device of repetition (100-foot level), there's a way to start them at the 1,000-foot level that they can connect with themselves. All about those personal lenses. 

Poetry. To wrap this school year. 

"If They Should Come for Us," Fatimah Asghar                                             

these are my people & I find

them on the street & shadow

through any wild all wild

my people my people

a dance of strangers in my blood

the old woman’s sari dissolving to wind

bindi a new moon on her forehead

I claim her my kin & sew

the star of her to my breast

the toddler dangling from stroller

hair a fountain of dandelion seed

at the bakery I claim them too

the sikh uncle at the airport

who apologizes for the pat

down the muslim man who abandons

his car at the traffic light drops

to his knees at the call of the azan

& the muslim man who sips

good whiskey at the start of maghrib

the lone khala at the park

pairing her kurta with crocs

my people my people I can’t be lost

when I see you my compass

is brown & gold & blood

my compass a muslim teenager

snapback & high-tops gracing

the subway platform

mashallah I claim them all

my country is made

in my people’s image

if they come for you they

come for me too in the dead

of winter a flock of

aunties step out on the sand

their dupattas turn to ocean

a colony of uncles grind their palms

& a thousand jasmines bell the air

my people I follow you like constellations

we hear the glass smashing the street

& the nights opening their dark

our names this country’s wood

for the fire my people my people

the long years we’ve survived the long

years yet to come I see you map

my sky the light your lantern long

ahead & I follow I follow

Teacher Prep Programs Under the Microscope--Why should it matter?

"Have you seen this?"

A friend sent me this article from American Public Media on early reading teaching. The summary of the article: "Scientific research has shown how children learn to read and how they should be taught. But many educators don't know the science and, in some cases, actively resist it. As a result, millions of kids are being set up to fail."

What's the problem?  According to the APM story:

The basic assumption that underlies typical reading instruction in many schools is that learning to read is a natural process, much like learning to talk. But decades of scientific research has revealed that reading doesn't come naturally. The human brain isn't wired to read. Kids must be explicitly taught how to connect sounds with letters — phonics.

And what's the bigger problem? The article continues:

  But this research hasn't made its way into many elementary school classrooms. The prevailing approaches to reading instruction in American schools are inconsistent with basic things scientists have discovered about how children learn to read. Many educators don't know the science, and in some cases actively resist it. The resistance is the result of beliefs about reading that have been deeply held in the educational establishment for decades, even though those beliefs have been proven wrong by scientists over and over again.

 Most teachers nationwide are not being taught reading science in their teacher preparation programs because many deans and faculty in colleges of education either don't know the science or dismiss it. As a result of their intransigence, millions of kids have been set up to fail. 

Another friend sent this blog post from Education Week Teacher entitled "What Teachers Should Know about the Science of Reading." This one had shown up in the Marshall Memo that week.

The New York Times covered it, too. In this Op-Ed piece, the writer states that "[i]t’s not just ignorance. There’s active resistance to the science, too. [She] interviewed a professor of literacy in Mississippi who told [her] she was 'philosophically opposed' to phonics instruction. One of her colleagues told [her] she didn’t agree with the findings of reading scientists because 'it’s their science.'"

For crying out loud. Given the amount of time that we teachers spend talking about "Best Practices" or the importance of "research-based pedagogy," it wouldn't seem that there should be so much resistance to change on this topic. The lack of teacher preparation is in the news all over the place.

Secondary school teachers, this is AT us; we just may not know it yet.

I was on a search for some "Best Practices" for teaching reading when I first encountered these articles. My brain keyed in on the "phonics instruction" pieces. The NYT article tells us that students "need explicit, systematic phonics instruction" early in their schooling to have success as readers. Clearly, these articles are directed at elementary-school teachers. Clearly, I'm not going to start teaching phonics to high-school kids. Clearly, this isn't about my kids in my classroom.

Except clearly this is about the kids in my classroom. In our classrooms. How?

Do the math. If elementary-school teachers aren't teaching reading well, then elementary-school students aren't all learning to read well. Elementary-school students become middle-school students, and middle-school students become high-school students. And those are the kids in my seats.

According to the NAEP Reading Assessment from 2017, only 64% of American eighth-grade students test "at or above proficient" in reading. So 36% of American eighth-grade students are testing below proficiency.

It gets worse. In Reading for Understanding, the authors note that "[a]ccording to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), two- thirds of U.S. high school students are unable to read and comprehend complex academic materials, think critically about texts, synthesize information from multiple sources, or communicate clearly what they have learned.”

So some students are coming into high school underprepared to read, and an even greater number are leaving high school unable to read well.

Wait, aren't we teaching them to read in high school, too? 
More from Reading for Understanding: 

When students are unprepared for the academic literacy demands in their courses, many teachers feel frustrated by their own unsatisfying “solutions” for helping them, or find themselves turning to a handful of defaults that serve only to postpone or compound students’ problems.  

More generally, teachers may try to teach “around” the text altogether with lectures and PowerPoint presentations, or they may try to “protect” students from dry or difficult texts with alternatives that never challenge them or help them grow as readers and learners.

I'm in that crowd of teachers who "feel frustrated by their own unsatisfying 'solutions' for helping them." You?

We secondary-school teachers have a challenge... 

We need to pay attention. If the teacher preparation programs are getting air time in the national news, then we have a great opportunity to learn about what our kids are learning and not learning. 

We need to take responsibility. I can remember sitting across the conference table from a middle-school Language Arts teacher a few years ago. We were having a round-table on a struggling student, and she said, "Well, who is going to teach him to read?" I was baffled. "YOU are!" I wanted to scream. (She was the kid's "Language Arts" teacher, after all.) But she wasn't going to teach him to read. Because she wasn't willing to take responsibility for it. We all need to take responsibility here. 

We need to figure this out. We've identified that there is a problem. But we also know our present "unsatisfying 'solutions'" aren't necessarily making our students into better readers. The interesting thing about all this research on teacher preparation programs is that it isn't addressing secondary-school teacher preparation. If those programs aren't preparing teachers to get all students to proficiency (or mastery, really...let's shoot for the moon...), then we need to prepare ourselves to do that work.

Wrestle on, teacher friends. 

Students talking reading--skills, not books (or "Annotations, again.")

Still missing the mark over here. 

I listened to my students prepare for their portfolio conferences today; these are their student-run conferences in which they reflect on and share their thinking about their reading and writing and content understandings. I ask them to consider their learning towards three course goals for their conferences. But this is the one I’m thinking about right now: 

read challenging texts for nuanced comprehension, thoughtful interpretation, and creation of connections across texts in order to develop compassion for others and cultivate conceptual knowledge;

I overheard one of my students… (okay, more than one of my students) say, “One of my weaknesses in reading is annotations.” 

Me: “Why is that a weakness?”

Student (all the students): “Because I don’t do them.” 

Me: “So why is that a weakness in reading?”
Student (all the students): “Because you told us to do them.” 

Rinse. Repeat.

Even after I pointed out to them that their annotations were just making their thinking visible on the page and were really evidence of their nuanced comprehension, thoughtful interpretation, and creation of connections across texts, a number of them still came to their portfolio conferences and talked about how annotations are a weakness, not about which skills those missing annotations might represent. 

I’m missing the mark because I haven't taught my students reading in a way that helps them really enter into conversation with the author or the text rather than in a way that has them thinking about what I'm requiring them to do. I also haven't spent enough time studying with them the different kinds of thinking that happen when we read. 

In her excellent book A Novel Approach: Whole-Class Novels, Student-Centered Teaching, and Choice , Kate Roberts writes about the challenges of "trying to get a sense of what your students are doing as readers." She writes, "The invisibility of reading is a barrier to teaching reading: we must find ways to peek inside the minds of our students." In the margin, I wrote, "YES! YES!" One of the challenges to teaching reading is that it is a receptive skill, not a productive one. How do we get in our students' heads so that their whole conversation with the text doesn't stay in their heads? 

Roberts also highlights the hurdles that emerge as we do the work of annotations: "First off, students don't find it natural to stop in the midst of reading and write down their thinking (neither do I for that matter). And yet we need them to do so. Secondly, when students do write, often they do not push themselves to practice the work of the unit, but instead rely on safe strategies that they know can fill the space, and then they move on." Yes. This. 

Well, most of this. While Roberts doesn't find it natural to stop and write while reading, I actually do. With the exception of novels I read for pleasure and library books I'm not allowed to write in, I tend to read with a pen in my hand. I try to teach my students to do the same with our class novels. But Roberts' note about her own habits is a good reminder to me that we don't all approach texts the same way. 

It's the second part of her comment that I really connected with: "When students do write, often they do not push themselves to practice the work of the unit, but instead rely on safe strategies that they know can fill the space, and then they move on." "The work of the unit." I need to better define what that "work" is in my classroom. Roberts' argument is that we should not be teaching books but that we should be teaching skills. She writes, "When reading a whole-class novel, it is difficult to separate content from skills and to choose to focus largely on the latter... When we lessen the focus on the content of the novels we teach, we can focus more on the skills we want readers to get better at any time they read." My students are struggling to see the skills work of the unit; they see the book. 

To lessen the emphasis on the content of the novel and sharpen the focus on reading skills is a challenge in my particular teaching context for a number of reasons I've written about in earlier posts.    I teach at a college preparatory high school that puts a heavy emphasis on content. We build our entire units around novels (the text and context) and not around skills. But we also are currently confronting the fact that our students are still developing readers (not coming to us as "fully baked" as we long thought they might have been). Fortunately, a unit plan doesn't have to be a matter of one (the content) or the other (skills). A shift to this kind of thinking will certainly mean a stronger shift in pedagogy, though. 

The annotations conversation that started me down this rabbit hole has gotten me to a place that seems obvious. It's a familiar spot at the crossroads of knowing what needs to be done and actually doing what needs to be done. Portia in The Merchant of Venice seems to get it: "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" (1.2.206-08). She's not my favorite character, but she somehow seems to get it--it's the doing that's hard. Deliberate, articulated skill instruction for students needs to be done. I've been hovering around it forever. Taking stabs at it periodically. Asking kids to read often. But I haven't necessarily seen a path that I thought was the right one to take with my kids. Roberts' book (along with Lemov's book) helped point me in my current direction. 

The Doing

On annotations and teaching, Kate Roberts writes this beautiful sentence: "And yet it will be difficult to think of your teaching as anything other than a pleasant invitation to be politely declined if you do not find a way to connect much of the writing about reading your kids do to the lessons you have taught." My students have been politely declining my invitation to annotate for quite some time. The "lessons" she is referring to here are the lessons of comprehension, interpretation, and making connections across texts--the lessons of reading skills. Ouch. I suppose we can all hope that if students are going to decline our teaching, they will be polite about it. But I'd rather hope that my students are going to jump in, book and pen in hand, and learn and grow in my class. 

I'm rethinking how I'm going to approach our fourth (and final) term of the year with my current students to make the reading skills stick. The annotations they are (or aren't) writing aren't the skill. The skills are the skills. Roberts looks to Grant Wiggins to make an argument about transfer and the importance of transfer. That's where I'm leaning as we end the year--I want my students to leave sophomore year with skills that will transfer. Roberts quotes Wiggins:

Arguably transfer is the aim of any education. Given that there is too much for anyone to learn; given that unpredictability is inevitable; given that being flexible and adaptive with one's repertoire is key to any future success, it stands to reason that we should focus our "backward-design" efforts on the goal of transfer, regardless of what and who we teach (and in spite of pressures to merely "cover content"--which ironically inhibits transfer and worsens test scores. . .) The point of school is not to get good at school but to effectively parlay what we learned in school in other learning and in life. (Wiggins 2012)  

When my kids are talking about writing annotations because I ask them to write annotations, they are thinking about being "good at school." That's where I'm missing the mark. Time to focus again on them being good at reading.

Transfer on, teacher friends.

Discussion Poker--A new twist (for me) on an old problem

February.

Tuesday morning.

First block. 

Kids I've had all year. 

Kids who have had each other all year.

How's class discussion #183 going to go? 

My classes are quite comfortable with each other, for better (they generally like each other) or for worse (they have fallen into patterns of behavior that make a class conversation predictable). Joe will speak first. Kelsey will argue with whatever Joe says. Carlo will jump to Joe's defense. Nate and Brooke will sit quietly and watch the chaos unfold. 

Or the ping pong will commence. Mike will throw out an idea. Jiyuan will use the phrase, "To add on to that..." and then make a comment that really has no relationship to whatever Mike has just said. Add a third student. Repeat. 

I wanted to manage two different discussion challenges; I wanted to shoot for more equitable participation in class discussion, and I wanted to build my students' awareness of different discussion moves that they could use to build an idea. 

http://jeffzwiers.org/tools

I've had this poster from Jeff Zwiers in my classroom in various forms over the last few years. I love how it asks us to think about building ideas. Together. But I've had limited success with getting this in front of students in a way that has really supported their conversations. Until Tuesday morning. Because February in northern Indiana breeds a special kind of desperation for creativity.

Discussion Poker 

The plan for the day was to discuss a chapter from our central text that we had read the night before. They had a reading guide that they had completed and could use that to fuel the discussion, but they also all had notes in the margins of the texts from their own reading. 

I dealt three cards to each student. Face down. They were intrigued. Even excited. Some of them immediately turned the cards over. Others followed directions and left them alone. Sophomores. 

I told the class that we'd be having a conversation, but that the cards in front of them determined the kinds of mental moves that they'd be allowed to make during the discussion. The types of comments/mental moves: 

A-4 -- ask a question to create or clarify. 

5-9 -- make a statement using the text to create or fortify the conversation

10-K -- negotiate or present a counter-argument. 

Students turned all three cards face up in front of them. 

As a student made a comment, they flipped the appropriate card over. The only other ask I made of them was that they seek balance in the participation in the room, so no student should turn over three cards before every student in the room had turned over at least one.  

And they were off. 

The Reflection (Where the real wrestling happens...)

I told my students that I have been teaching for 20+ years, and this was the first time I was trying this activity, so I needed their feedback on our trying something new together. They were full of ideas. Here's what they said I should consider:

•  Deal one of each mental-move family to each student, so that every student is required to make all three of those thinking moves in a discussion.
• Allow students to trade cards with their neighbors. Some students had a comment they wanted to make, but they didn't have the right card to make that type of comment. 
• Figure out a way to make it into a poker game. (This was as far as this thinking went--they didn't have anything more to offer beyond their enthusiasm). 

I loved the balance that it brought to the discussion. And I loved seeing the students (like their foreheads were scrunched up in thought) trying to think through how to appropriately add to the conversation using their cards rather than sharing the first thought that came to their minds. 

I loved the energy it brought to a Tuesday morning class. Full disclosure, though, that energy didn't translate to my second block. There was some funk in the room, and students didn't fully embrace the approach. Even in that block, though, the deck of cards helped remedy some of the funk. Students who were primed to butt heads coming into the conversation because of some carryover from their previous class together had that behavior neutralized by the deck of cards--they had to choose their moves wisely. 

This one will make a reappearance in my classroom at some point with some modifications. I'll update as I work to improve on it. 

Wrestle on, friends. 

"Why privilege the teaching of reading?" Maryanne Wolf answers.

My department (Humanities) was in a meeting to kick off the school year. The facilitator asked the room to answer this question: "What do we value about reading?" There were a few softball answers and a couple of more poetic responses before one colleague said, "I'm wondering why we are privileging reading over other skills." 

My System 2 kicked in and stopped me from doing a whiplash-inducing head turn with an accompanying jaw drop. I ran through a number of scenarios in my brain. Was this a genuine "wonder?" Was my colleague just being provocative? Did one of my colleagues really think that reading isn't the thing? What answer should or would I give to that "wonder?" 

I've come to appreciate that question. And I've also finished Maryanne Wolf's book Reader, Come Home . If you don't think that we should have a sense of urgency about encouraging our students to become stronger, readers, do look to her book for inspiration. 

Why should we privilege reading? 

“The atrophy and gradual disuse of our analytical and reflective capacities as individuals are the worst enemies of a truly democratic society, for whatever reason, in whatever medium, in whatever age” (Wolf 199). 

“It is therefore very urgent right now to support curricular efforts aimed at producing citizens who can take charge of their own reasoning, who can see the different and foreign not as a threat to be resisted but as an invitation to explore and understand, expanding their own minds and their capacity for citizenship”(Wolf quoting Martha Nussbaum 199). 

“The most important contribution of the invention of written language to the species is a democratic foundation for critical, inferential reasoning and reflective capacities. This is the basis of a collective conscience. If we in the twenty-first century are to preserve a vital collective conscience, we must ensure that all members of our society are able to read and think both deeply and well.We will fail as a society if we do not educate our children and reeducate all of our citizenry to the responsibility of each citizen to process information vigilantly, critically, and wisely across media. And we will fail as a society as surely as societies of the twentieth century if we do not recognize and acknowledge the capacity for reflective reasoning in those who disagree with us” (Wolf 200-201). 

“The good readers of a society are both its canaries—which detect the presence of danger to its members—and its guardians of our common humanity”(Wolf 202). 

Mic drop? Wrestle on, reading friends. Especially reading friends.