Rules or Tools of Grammar

I just found the most wonderful example of how Jeff Anderson's Patterns of Power can illuminate how we apply Author's Purpose and Craft to Grammar. Tara Salmon, from Highland Park, and I have composed this lesson exemplar for you as an exemplar for the Region 16 Grammar Geeks course.

I know Jeff...and he would always agree that grammar is about how we craft language to impact the reader. Our standards require us to go beyond the grammatical structures and rules to explore how they help us as readers and writers. 

If you are skimming the article - look for when I change the font.

The lesson below is an exemplar of how grammar is connected to how we read and write with craft and purpose. 

Standard: Complex sentences with subject-verb agreement and avoidance of splices, run-ons, and fragments. (Composition, Editing: Grades 6-12, Di)

Focus Phrase: I will write complex sentences using correct punctuation and subject-verb agreement. 

Invitation to Notice: Because he was small, Stuart was often hard to find around the house. Stuart Little, E. B. White

To Consider:   

• Rule: When the AAAWWUBBIS comes at the beginning of a sentence, a comma follows. If the AAAWWUBBIS comes in the middle of a sentence, there is no comma needed. 
• Craft: What is the impact on meaning and prosody when those structures are used? How is the author using those structures to develop the character, advance the plot, or express theme?

Invitation to Compare and Contrast:  

• Because he was so small, Stuart was often hard to find around the house.
• Stuart was often hard to find around the house because he was so small.
• Note the grammatical differences between the two sentences. Note when a comma is needed and when it is not.
• Note the impact each has on you as a reader. What changes in terms of the writer's emphasis? What changes in your visualizations and comprehension?

Invitation to Edit:  Compose the sentence in both ways and analyze the effect on character, theme, and meaning.

• When his best friend disappears from her nest Stuart is determined to track her down.
• Stuart is a lover of adventure although he's shy.
• Since he lives in New York Stuart is used to city life. 

Reflection: What did we learn about writing from this author? What changed? Name the effect of the change you wish students to consider.

What is the IMPACT of using the dependent clause first? What is the IMPACT if the independent clause is used first? For the example here, I would say that the author's purpose is to emphasize how SMALL Stuart is. The main point is not that he is hard to find - that's just an example. The main point - and emphasized throughout the book is that he is SMALL. This is important to establish his character traits when he is introduced because it is a huge contrast to the optimism he marshals despite the huge deck stacked against him. I guess what I'm saying is that we have to go beyond grammatical structures and rules to express how they give us vehicles for power and beauty in discerning the author's message and the ability to craft our own contributions.

Teacher's Application to Writing: Here's how I'm using it today: "Because I was already irritated before entering the building, I continued to find it difficult to focus throughout the rest of the day." I'm liking this better than the other way around: I continued to find it difficult to focus throughout the rest of the day because I was already irritated before entering the building. The second version makes it seem like the point was the difficulty in focusing instead of the CAUSE. It also delays the emotion until the ending of the sentence. I want my reader to feel my irritation way before the end of that sentence.

Fixing Fluency Practice

Seeing Past the End of My Nose

Many teachers have kids practice with fluency passages and folders. Repeated reading helps kids increase their reading rates. Read too slow and comprehension suffers. On the flip side, reading too fast can do the same thing.

Something is missing here. Like most things, we stop too short with our instructional practices. We make student activities about doing stuff instead of doing stuff because there is a reason to do so. Fluency is no different. (Ask the kids: Why are we doing fluency practice?) And since fluency is now in our ELAR TEKS all the way up into 8th grade, we'd better get ahead of this before we institute classroom practices and routines (and add more tests) that do harm in the name of standards and assessment.

If we have kids practicing fluency passages and graphing their improvements with repeated readings - and that's all we are doing with it - we are teaching rote skills without meaning. Kind of like writing your spelling test words three times each in different colors. Might as well memorize a random list of phone numbers. It's a waste of time.

Experience It:

Read this article called Bad Dancers and time yourself. Give it your best shot with fluent expression and prosody.

This passage has about 319 words. After 8th grade, reading this passage aloud should take a little less than two minutes to read aloud. How'd you do?

Fluency is a TOOL

Fluency is not just about how fast, how expressive, and how accurately you decode and phrase text. Instead, fluency is a TOOL that good readers use to help them make sense of text and monitor their comprehension. 

Yes, fluency includes: rate, accuracy, expression, phrasing/prosody. But readers USE those four things for adjusting the reading performance: adjusting for purpose and genre, adjusting for decoding and comprehension, adjusting for silent, oral, or performance purposes that include the audience and the delivery of the message. But I think most classroom models for fluency only focus on the first four. If so, we divorce student from how fluency helps us make and communicate meaning. Fluency instruction must include a focus on making meaning, meatcognition, and conscious choices about what good reading requires. If we don't focus on fluency as a tool, then we make reading a mindless think about calling words correctly and quickly. Instead, we make reading about finishing.  Fluency is supposed to be about understanding and using text for our purposes as readers and thinkers and doers. 

Something is Rotten in the State of Denmark: 

Let's go back to the passage I had you read about Bad Dancers. How we go about reading and approaching a text depends on the GENRE. Teachers tell me, "Oh, we do that. When they get their fluency passage, we tell them that it is expository or narrative." Really? How many times to you open an email and people start off telling you that they are writing to persuade you? How many times to the newspaper headlines and magazines start off by telling you that the text is expository? Never. You have to figure that out for yourself. At least you should. 

Sure, we need to do some explicit modeling with kids and teach them how a good reader goes about diffusing and reading against specific features in each genre. But at some point, kids need to be able to figure that out for themselves and decide how that needs to impact their reading, fluency rate, and comprehension. Fluency passages are the perfect place to practice those skills. 

Fear of Impending Doom

Check out this set of bookmarks from Lead4Ward for elementary and secondary. Which of the genre bookmarks fit Bad Dancers? 

When I discussed this with a group of teachers, they pulled out three different cards: Literary Nonfiction, Expository, and Persuasive. It was quite a discussion that had us re-entering and re-reading the text purposefully to determine which genre fit the best. Get this straight y'all. We were not merely passing our eyes over the text with the goal of reading it faster and without any decoding mistakes. We had a real reason to reread. Having kids reread stuff for no discernible purpose will NOT achieve our Literacy objectives. They might read faster, but they'll be bored as hell and no thinking will be involved. We're not in the robot business, y'all, yinz, you-uns, you guys, youse guys -  regardless of the region you hail from. From which you hail. Whatever. 

First of all, we realized that we read Bad Dancers the first time as if it were a narrative or literary nonfiction. Which means we really didn't "get" what the author wanted us to understand. As we looked for evidence in the text to justify our decisions, we realized the text didn't match our purpose or approach to reading it! 

We zoned in on the Expository bookmark. (Might I mention that we won't be using that silly term in the new ELAR Standards? We'll call it Informational like the rest of the civilized world.) Soon, we realized that there were some nuanced features of persuasion that didn't match the formulaic way we teach kids to write persuasion with the thesis blatantly posed at the end of the first paragraph. (Bad Dancers isn't five-paragraph-blathering-nonsense either.) 

It started to get scary...

...as we realized that the author had a clear perspective and bias about dancing

...as we realized that the author laid out a clear path of logic and reasoning

...as we made discerning distinctions about her opinions and facts

...as we juxtaposed the feasibility of accepting her ideas into our own lives

As we realized these things, we heard ominous music.  What if the topic had been less innocuous and more insidious? Our approach to reading the text would have left our minds open to manipulation at worst and at risk for incorrectly answering multiple choice questions at the least. 

I am stunned again by the moral imperative of our work and service as literacy professionals. We must go further than teaching kids to practice fluency as a rote and isolated skill divorced from meaning and thinking. 

Probably preaching to the choir. So what can we do to beef up our fluency passage work? Because I'm not asking you to stop fluency like I am asking you to stop with the Spelling-Test-on-Friday nonsense. 

As Plain as the Nose on my Face

The genre places demands on our fluency. When the teachers and I read the text again, we used the genre bookmarks to help us ask questions about the text to guide our more critical purposes for reading the second time. We realized...

....a need to make a decision about what we believe about bad dancers. Are there bad dancers in the world or not? 

....a need to see if this idea is feasible: In the way we see and live life, do we realistically see the truth in the author's perspective? What would this idea add or take away from our life choices? 

...a need to trace the author's path of logic and reasoning purposefully laid out for us. How is the author presenting the ideas? Are there any red flags (logical fallacies) that we should note? 

...a need to see the author's perspectives, facts, opinions, and biases. Do we know the differences between those things? Which facts warrant further research to verify? What hidden biases and motives might be driving the author to communicate these points? How do I respond emotionally and intellectually to these assertions? 

Don't we want students to read like that? 

When Throwing a Monkey Wrench into the Fray is a Good Thing

Fluency practice isn't necessarily a bad thing. But we definitely need to throw a monkey wrench into what most of us are doing with fluency practice. We need to interrupt the mindlessness. Here's a suggestion for a more literate, principled approach. 

1. Have students read the fluency passage appropriate for their independent reading level to their reading partner. Have the partner time the reading. Perhaps you could even use the Synth App to record, share, and respond to each other. Consider graphing the first rate if that really matters. I'm starting to wonder if graphing the speed/rate is sending the wrong message about why we do this work.  
2. Students then pull out the genre bookmarks to discuss and decide which genre the text best fits. They should highlight text features and evidence to justify their decisions. (If you want to have a quick check for students working independently, write the genre on the back of the passage. They can self-check and adjust before moving on to the next step. 
3. The Lead4Ward genre bookmarks list the demands each genre places on the astute reader. We can use those demand to guide our purposes for reading! Students discuss those purposes and turn them into questions to guide their reading. (You can use the ones we composed from Bad Dancers listed in the previous section.)
4. Student reread the text again, using their questions to guide their purpose for reading. Students time the reading and chart the results. They should change their rate at times to make sure they are attending to sections of the text that warrant closer inspection. (Of course, this will have to be modeled during Read Alouds and Shared Reading time in the Reading Workshop block.) Students can discuss the questions and ideas with their reading partners.
5.  Students conduct a third re-reading to practice the basic elements of fluency (the first four) and to bump up their reading rates up to grade level expectations. They can chart and compare the results over the three readings. Or you can throw those out the window and let the kids create a Reader's Theatre, Choral Reading, or Dramatic Reading of the text. You might even have the kids complete the final reading at the guided reading table to offer final support and feedback for where they could head next or to resolve problems that remain.  
6. With their partners or during the whole class debrief at the end of Reading Workshop, discuss the experience. In your second reading, what adjustments did you make? Why? What impact did that have about your understanding and reasoning about the text? 

Additional Resources: 

Some more resources: 

Fluency Handouts from the TEA Reading to Learn Academy: These handouts show you the following things:

• How to set up fluency folders with graphs and handouts
• How to set goals for fluency
• How to add a comprehension element to fluency practice

Finally, here's the collection of stuff I'm curating on my bulb digital portfolio for Fluency. 

Writing is supposed to DO something to the reader...Feedback Protocols

When you write something, it's supposed to DO something to a reader/audience. Giving students authentic opportunities to test their ideas on real readers just makes sense. It blends reading and writing. It involves everyone in literary analysis and critical thinking. It gives writers a reason and focus for revision. 

Joyce Armstrong Carroll and Edward E. Wilson shared powerful grouping strategies to structure how we can create communities of writers in our classrooms (2007, p. 67-89). I started collecting these feedback strategies and groupings in my digital portfolio.

Over time, I've collected other strategies for the collection. This week, I am working in The AP Vertical Teams Guide for English (2002) to create a session on the penultimate chapter of this incredible resource.

I've adapted three of the strategies as feedback protocols and included them here for you:

PAMDISS
The Four Bases of Effective Writing
Peer Evaluation: Hitting the Target

Armstrong-Carroll, J. & Wilson, E. E. (2007). ACTS of teaching: How to teach writing. Heinemann, Portsmouth, NH.

The College Board. (2002). The AP Vertical Teams Guide for English, 2nd Ed. College Entrance Examination Board.

Essential Lesson Structures: Comprehension Card Sort

Essential Lesson Structures: Comprehension Card Sort:

Part One: Exploration and Gathering Information

1. Scan the material for headings, topics, highlighted words, boldfaced words, italicized words, etc.
2. (For nonfiction) Prioritize the sections in the material. Which sections of the text seem to  have significance or importance to you personally? Scan these sections for specific information.(For fiction) Read through through the text as a whole. Then go back to sections that surprised you, confused you, or confirmed what you already knew.
3. Using note cards, write one thought, definition, important point, etc., per card from the information you are reading.
4. If time permits, read sections you have not perused.

Part Two: Consolidation and Collaboration

1. Collect the cards from those in your group.
2. Stack, shuffle, and deal the cards to each member until they are all gone.
3. One at a time, read aloud what is written on your card. Lay the card face up on the table. Do not stack the cards. All cards should be exposed so they are visible to everyone at the table.
4. Categorize the cards into major topics by similarity or main idea.
5. Using a different color of note card, label the categories. Make a table display so that all information can be viewed.
6. 

Part Three: Refining and Reflecting

1. Working alone or as a table group, visit the other tables to see their displays.
2. Discuss and annotate your document for key ideas new to your group or your own thinking.
3. Reflect: What information did you see on most tables? What information did you see what was not included at your table? What is/are the most important thing(s) that you learned?

Part Four: Whole Class Debrief

1. As a class, debrief the content of the text. Consider using the What, So What, Now What Format.
2. As a class, debrief the experience in terms of social and behavioral collaboration. Consider: What worked well? What needs improvement?

Adapted from Robert J. Garmston and Bruce M. Wellman Presentations that Teach and Transform ASCD (1992).

NOTE: Aimee Coates and I adapted this strategy for the Anne of Green Gables text. We decided that we would give the labels that we wanted to give the kids to use in categorizing their ideas from the text. Technically, this is called a "closed sort."

Then we had the kids take the stack with the exposition and compare them with other elements. I think it would be really easy to make a T chart and list piece of text evidence that could be directly traced back to something that was introduced in the introduction. We thought of a new question too: How do Anne's character traits complicate the problems with her aunt?