Sometimes, the interactions of others as we exchange ideas and seek solutions becomes something really cool. And the medium of social media becomes a text worthy of its own rhetorical analysis.
Interesting flow...
2. Then I posted this.
3. Then people responded:
JS: Comprehension is and always will be the primary goal for reading. We need to be more focused on that as the message rather than the skills and strategies that we assume will be on the test. My suggestion would be to have children develop sustained and deep conversations about text. Covering three basic aspects of comprehension 1. What is the issue/message, main idea, author's intent or purpose? 2. How does the author convey the message (organization, vocabulary, tone, similes and metaphors, etc.). 3. How does it add to our own understandings (based on background knowledge, knowledge of other texts, etc. or evaluation of the piece). Students need to realize that comprehension is the ultimate goal of reading.
Me: Love that. Now she needs specific lessons. I'm finding that while some people can understand the theory, they have difficulty in deciding what they are going to have kids do in the classroom. Teachers seem to have difficulty understanding what a good lesson that values this approach to comprehension should look like. Do you have a model structure?
JS: I personally like the reader's workshop model in which I can send you an article. What I am working on with secondary students is having their inquiry drive the reading materials. So they tell me what they are interested in and I find current event articles (such as the NFL protests) in which they have an invested interest in. I have them read and take notes with a guiding question in mind (which practices some basic skills) and then they partner or form groups to discuss the important question and then come back as a whole class. We have a great conversation about the article that includes everything you want to cover.
Me: -I teach that to them. Here's the complication...teachers have to give CBA's based on specific elements like plot, etc. This is a problem in ELAR because we don't teach CONTENT, we teach PROCESSES. The disconnect comes when teachers are supposed to have specific lessons that can then be measured by a multiple choice question that has not been created by a psychometrician, but is still supposed to predict success on STAAR for progress measurement in school improvement efforts. The second problem, is that teachers do not understand what the steps are for specific TEKS instruction inside a workshop model that does not involve the Madeline Hunter or 5E models. I guess, I'm asking for something more concrete because what I'm giving them with workshop model formats doesn't seem to work for them in reaching the right level of rigor and problem solving required by the assessment. (And I'm not making the point here that the assessment is too difficult.)
RSJ: Ralph Fletcher writes in his latest book, Joy Write, that all the hard work that Calkins, Ray Wood, he and others put into the Writing Workshop has gone to pot b/c districts have programatized (is that even a word?) that approach? The Reading workshop is headed in the same direction.
RSJ: One solution would be to teach plot, summary, etc. as the academic vocabulary that we want students to use during these "deep and sustained conversations." We are doing a huge disservice to our students when we teach them that reading = the parts of a story and devices an author might employ. But a bucket-load of what Dr. Smith and you and I are talking about and a dollar, will get you exactly a dollar. B/c it cannot be "measured," which is to say, it cannot be measured on their rubric: what are we calling those, Dr. Smit: Rubbish Rubrics?
RJS: Look at this quick clip of Oprah as she set up her book club: super cool is when she says, I want to get the country to get to read again, but what she means is reading involves both reading the text but just as importantly, an authentic discussion including readers who liked the book and those who didn't.
MP: We collect question stems and lead4ward strategies to use to make sure we don’t stop with those questions, but move forward from those questions to deeper questions
Me: Margaret : what do you do about the Rigor that's involved in the answer choices as opposed to the stem ?
MP: We also have students analyze what exactly they are being asked. They have to justify almost all their answers with text evidence.
MP: We use like question stems and answer choices on our classroom quizzes and in class discussions. Our kiddos have been performing well on cfa’s from recently released tests this year. You have to really look at what is being tested and how it is being asked. We have to do our homework
MP: We study the answer choices and use good choices on our classroom quizzes . We often use similar or like question stems on our them as well
4. Then one of my professor friends sent this document. A great description of the reader’s workshop.
Hudson, A. K., & Williams, J. A. (2015). Reading Every Single Day. Reading Teacher, 68(7), 530-538. doi:10.1002/trtr.1349
5. Then we completed the following exchange through email:
Me: Love it. Most of my followers will recognize the format. What they don’t understand is how to lead specific minilessons inside that format. They literally don’t know what to say/teach/model. SO frustrating.
The teachers need a model for how to show how a reader uses those terms to comprehend a text. It sounds unbelievable, but teachers don’t know what to say in the minilesson because they don’t know how to use plot to comprehend either. That’s what I need help developing for them. I don’t know how to fix that.
JS: Yeah I imagine as the STAAR and TEKS and other tests make reading an unnatural process.
The article talks about incorporating mini lessons through journaling in which students write down their thoughts on their reading and the teacher constantly models her expectations for these journal entries through her own entries and through close reading strategies. So you can still incorporate those strategies you need for the test within a more authentic framework.
Me: Unnatural? Yes. Abusive sometimes…absolutely. Antithetical to what we know should work…bullseye. I totally agree with the workshop approach – but ultimately, that’s not working for our folks. Some just don’t get it. Others don’t know how to model for the minilesson. They only know how to have kids copy definitions and annotate the text for where they think they see the plot elements. Rote application.
We can argue all we want for authentic instructional approaches that don’t divorce kids from the love and productive cognitive activity involved in real reading. Ultimately, we have to figure out how to get that done inside the standards and accountability movement. And right now, there’s a huge gap in balancing authenticity, teacher knowledge and application, and getting results. Applying the workshop model -been teaching and modeling that for over 20 years now. It’s not getting STAAR results. So…what else can we do?
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