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.

"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. 

_Reader, Come Home_: Nurturing the Reading Brain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Curricular Innovation--Numa Markee and the Writing Program

In thinking about making changes to our Writing Program by layering in new types of writing to our existing curriculum, I've also been kicking around some memories of one of my favorite graduate school classes. The central text for the class was Numa Markee's book called Managing Curricular Innovation . Even better, though, the instructor of the course was Numa Markee himself. In our small class of four or five (LOVE graduate school!), we did an intense review of the programming of a local intensive language program. It required that we look at the program at every level--from the personnel to the curriculum to the students' perceptions of the program, and we then made recommendations for innovation. And it revealed to us all just how complicated curricular innovation can be.

That being said, this morning had me thinking about some specific steps we'll need to go through in order to be effective in this coming change to add analysis writing into the curriculum:

1. "the what"
I wrote this in an email to another member of the leadership team this morning: "Our first step together is to define "the what" of analysis writing. While APLAC does put an emphasis on rhetorical analysis of nonfiction pieces, we can also teach our kids rhetorical analysis of fiction and teach them literary analysis, as well. The question for us is to what end we would like the kids to unpack a text. Perhaps most important here is that we develop precision in our language with each other and around what kind of analysis they are doing--this will help them to know what to look for. We can't make the assumption that the department has any sort of common understanding at this point of what it means to analyze a text and write that analysis, so we need some common resources from which to work to understand the what (APLAC docs, sample analytical essays/paragraphs, HOs from Ts who have taught the skills...) before we can figure out the how and the when." 


One thing, in particular, that I'm thinking about is how we develop our own "teacher language" around analysis. It's messy work, but if we can get the language consistent across levels, students will have clear branches to hang their thinking hats on as they work their way from 9th-12th grade. 

The last time we rolled out a "type of writing" in the form of the Writing Program, we had to spend quite some time getting faculty to calibrate expectations and understandings about what we were doing. Unfortunately, we were doing that calibration as we were teaching students. It made for some really difficult conversations because faculty were often walking into conversations after having done something with their students and then were realizing they may have poorly directed their students. I'm hoping we've learned from that experience that there are important foundational conversations that need to happen before we can roll out instruction to students. 

2. "the how"
I remember learning in Numa's class about early, middle, and late adopters. I'm still interested in that idea when bringing a change to the curriculum. How can we roll out a change to help everyone understand it and buy into it? Given the particular context of our department as it stands right now, there's definitely not a one-size-fits-all rollout model. For me, it's important that the CTL (curriculum team leader) gets to support the individual level in determining the path that works best for the personnel and curriculum of the level. If we can clearly determine that end target for each level, then allowing the people at the level to figure out the path will be most helpful.

3. "the when"
I was actually hoping to have the first conversation at the 10th grade about this in June Week (a week of meetings at the end of a school year) of this past month, but we needed to do some clarifying at the department level first. Those conversations are going on now. And so when I'm thinking about "the when" of curricular innovation, I'm thinking about which conversations have to happen behind the scenes before the conversation happens with the level. I'm hopeful that we'll be able to pull together the necessary materials to get this information out to my level in August of this year. We certainly need to get our kids doing this kind of writing this year because we need our kids to be prepared for the eleventh grade. The thing about "the when" is that nothing happens quickly in curricular change (unless you are the only person delivering on the curriculum).

Scaffolding the Academic Success of Adolescent English Language Learners by Walqui and van Lier

The first chapter of this book is called, "A Pedagogy of Promise" followed by the subheading, "Helping Students Become What They Are Not Yet", and the text delivers both theories and methods based on this sense of optimistic pedagogy. While the focus of the title of the text is on English Language Learners, teachers of all students should consider implementing the instructional design outlined by the authors.

Vygotsky fans will get excited about this book because his theories are the root for the practice. The density of the first chapter made me want to read it twice and furiously take notes in the margin (although I had borrowed the copy, so I couldn't!). I'm a geek for theory. If you aren't a geek for theory, though, the first three chapters should be enough to convince you that the "sage on the stage" mentality of old-school teaching is not the most effective way to reach students.

The last three chapters of the book are dedicated to the actual practice of what they call "QTEL" or Quality Teaching for English Learners. These practices are rooted in these five principles quoted from p. 81 of the text (my computer is not letting me put quotes where I want them):

• Sustain academic rigor in teaching English learners
• Hold high expectations in teaching English learners
• Engage English learners in quality teacher and student interactions
• Sustain a language focus in teaching English learners
• Develop a quality curriculum for teaching English learners

 For me, personally, there were several lightbulb moments in the text. I need to spend more time in my class on the quality of my student interactions. I always struggle in that aspect. I want the kids to work together on tasks, but that is often reduced to one student doing the work and other students then copying from that one student. This book suggests several task-designs that would support more positive student participation.

I need to focus on giving students multiple opportunities to focus on both accuracy and fluency in the language. I use sentence frames a lot in my class, but that often limits what the students produce. And then there is a "right" or a "wrong" moment that doesn't support them thinking on their own. So I need to move beyond my focus on accuracy to giving them multiple opportunities for expression.

I also need to up my game in terms of academic rigor for the students. If I can get the first two pieces above in order, then I can certainly increase the rigor for the students. The expectations are high in my class. Often, the academic rigor is high, as well. But I think I can be doing more in terms of using the students' background to improve their opportunities to interact with higher-level thinking activities and to solicit the language needed to work through those activities.

There is a very clear, three-step design to units of study. The first step is to prepare the learners, the second is the scaffolding of their interaction with a text, and the third is in extending the ideas of the text. (That's the part that I personally loved!) Lessons are objective based. There are plenty of examples of "real-life" teachers using these methods, and teachers should walk away with some ideas that they can use in their classroom immediately.