Defining Leadership...on the Shoulders of Giants

On June 14, 2019, my father died. I wrote his obituary. And I wrote the eulogy I read at his service. I stopped writing for “publication” after that (to the extent that this blog is a publication of mine…) 

Paul Simon’s “Graceland” lyrics have been in my head for months: “I see losing love/ Is like a window in your heart/ Everybody sees you’re blown apart/ Everybody feels the wind blow.” The wind has been blowing. And it’s been hard to come back to write here. It’s not that I haven’t done my fair share (what does that even mean?) of writing and reflecting; it’s that it’s often been too raw to be shareable. 

My father was deeply committed to the community in which he lived. He was a probation officer at the 58^th District Court for years, and he served not only the community at large but his probationers individually. He also was head of a number of community service organizations at their inceptions—Community Action House, The Good Samaritan Center. Of course, it wasn’t always easy to see the layers of his service when I was growing up seeing him come home from work (and arguing with him over who got to read the sports section of the newspaper first). But at his service, judges and former probationers sat side by side to honor his memory. And I am grateful for the stories they shared. 

"If I have seen further, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.”—Sir Isaac Newton

This fall, I tried to get back into the rhythm of the school year and found my dad present in everything I did. I was unsure how to negotiate the transition back to school—my new students’ parents asked me if my parents still live in Michigan; I hadn’t prepared for that one: “My mom does, but my dad just passed away, so I guess just my mom lives there now…” And I’ve no idea how to navigate those waters yet. 

So it should be no surprise that my dad was ever-present in my mind when I engaged with a colleague in an email conversation about how our leadership school might define leadership. 

Why define leadership? Our school has a mission, and the opening phrase is that “Culver educates its students for leadership and responsible citizenship…” So to do that work, we need to have a common understanding of what we mean when we say, “leadership.” For some of us, that starts with a definition. 

Culver went through this exercise a number of years ago—there’s a “hard card” that shares the fruits of that effort: “Ethical Leadership is empowering others to achieve legitimate organizational goals while balancing the welfare of the individual with the needs and requirements of the group; ethical leadership arises from the balance of legitimate authority and moral virtue: courage, wisdom, moderation, and justice."

In a recent conversation, another definition was proposed: “Leadership is the practice of building and sustaining campus communities that live the Culver mission.” The second is clearly more concise than the first, but I wondered what we were missing through that concision.  

“It’s kind of like wrestling a gorilla…”

And that’s where the wrestling comes in. The writing that follows is my thinking on how we might define leadership; it comes from a message exchange I had with a colleague in one of my personal reflective moments this fall. And as I look back now, I can see how I was drawn to this particular argument (the need for balancing the needs of the individual up against the needs of the community) given my own sensibilities, my research, and my dad’s giant shoulders. 

Here are my musings in response to that second proposed definition (largely unedited from the email I originally sent): 

“Culver educates its students for leadership and responsible citizenship in society by developing and nurturing the whole individual—mind, spirit, and body—through integrated programs that emphasize the cultivation of character.” 

What does it mean to educate students for leadership in society?

In the mission statement “in society” is connected both to “leadership” and “responsible citizenship.” So if we are educating our students for leadership in society, our definition of leadership should be about leadership in society, not only leadership at Culver. This line of thinking also aligns with the aspirational nature of the mission statement—we are educating our students to go out into the world to lead well (presumably) and to be responsible citizens. 

If we substitute in the current working definition of “leadership” to the mission statement, it might be easier to see the objection that people have to including “campus communities” and even “that live the Culver mission” in the definition: 

“Culver educates its students for the practice of building and sustaining campus communities that live the Culver mission and responsible citizenship in society by developing and nurturing the whole individual—mind, spirit, and body—through integrated programs that emphasize the cultivation of character.” The piece about “sustaining campus communities” takes away from the mission’s target to send our students prepared into society. 

“To be a Culver grad” should mean to be equipped with a set of leadership skills  that can be employed to positively impact society. This is why it seems important to have a Culver definition of  leadership that is “portable” for our students and for our adult community, as well, rather than one that references “campus communities.” 

I appreciated seeing the process of developing the working Culver definition of leadership from the original Northhouse definition. I wonder, though, if in trying to translate pieces of the Northhouse definition across to the context of Culver, some key pieces of Northhouse’s definition were lost in translation. I also wonder if the original definition captures how we conceive of and teach leadership at Culver.  

Specifically, Northhouse’s definition includes a reference to “an individual” and his/her influence on a “group of individuals.” In the Culver definition, the “individual” as an agent of the practice of leadership is missing. I’m not sure that is as significant, though, as the omission of the individual from the phrase “building and sustaining communities.” 

When I first read the proposed “Culver Academies” definition, I was most struck by what felt like the utilitarian nature of that definition. And the question, “But, what of the individual?” (WiH 1.0) popped in my head. Northhouse’s original definition hints at individuals who make up a “group,” but there are certainly other definitions out there that speak of a leader’s target to not only build and sustain communities but also to care for individuals in the process. 

Brene Brown: Leadership is “taking responsibility for finding the potential in people and processes, and having the courage to develop that potential.” 

Simon Sinek: Leadership is “inspiring action” and “creating environments where people thrive,” and “taking care of those in your charge.” 

Kouzes and Posner:  "Leadership is the art of mobilizing others to want to struggle for shared aspirations." 

How might we make sure that a Culver definition of leadership includes not just the communities that our leaders build but also an expectation of the leaders to care for the people who are in those communities? The aspirational nature of the mission statement calls for an inspirational definition of leadership to guide our work. A clear definition of leadership can push us towards clarifying the kind of leaders we would like our students to be and become. Our mission statement includes the word “responsible” with “citizenship” but offers no modifier for leadership. What an opportunity we have to explore that missing modifier here in our definition. 

Over the years, as I’ve introduced Culver to people, I’ve started time and again with the mission: “Our mission at Culver is to educate students for leadership and responsible citizenship…” No one ever asks me what I mean by “responsible citizenship,” but nearly everyone asks, “What do you mean when you say you educate them for leadership?” I can talk about the systems and the classes and the positions. But imagine the power in telling someone that “our students are educated to create environments where people thrive by inspiring action and taking care of those in their charge” (Sinek). Or imagine a Culver grad applying for a job and being able to clearly say that they are educated in “taking responsibility for people and processes in a community”(Brown).  It matters that the definition of leadership is both inspirational and aspirational for educators and students alike. 

I heard concern in conversation about context. It feels like the definition of leadership should be the “what.” But the context is the “how” and maybe even the “where” of leadership, and that shouldn’t necessarily go in the single-sentence definition itself. Rather, a second statement might read something like, “In order to develop as practitioners of leadership, students at Culver are mentored in building and sustaining campus communities that live the Culver mission.” 

Or I wonder if we might be able to capture a definition of leadership that reflects the language, thinking, and spirit of the Culver mission statement. I have always loved that the mission statement clearly puts an emphasis on community through “responsible citizenship in society” and the individual’s significance within the community through “nurturing the whole individual.” As we designed the summer leadership curriculum, we thought a lot about Daniel Goleman’s modes of attention: focusing on yourself, focusing on others, focusing on the broader world. We teach students about the importance of knowing the people that they lead and about balancing the needs of the individual up against the needs of the community. Culver’s mission statement seems to call for this—nurture the whole individual so that they can become a responsible citizen in society. To that end, I would propose a definition that looks something like this: “Leadership is the practice of nurturing individuals while building and sustaining communities.”  If I circle back to the opening substitution exercise, the Mission statement then reads: “Culver educates its students for the practice of nurturing individuals while building and sustaining communities and responsible citizenship in society by developing and nurturing the whole individual—mind, spirit, and body—through integrated programs that emphasize the cultivation of character.” 

Incidentally, I know that most definitions of leadership are concerned with a “goal.” In the definition above, the goal is building and sustaining a community. This definition seems, perhaps, like a Kantian approach to leadership—the ends and the means to the end are intertwined, though.  And both Brown and Sinek seem to view the “goal” as less important to define than the process by which we would reach that goal.

I look forward to continuing the conversation. 

To my dad...
As I look back now, I see his voice echoing in my argument above. "But what of the individual?" was the way that he lived his life.

And I am better for it.


Wrestle on, friends. 

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. 

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.