I participated in a prompt study at TEA recently. While there, I learned about some important resources that are used for evaluating passages that are chosen for STAAR. Some - we already knew: There is an entire PROCESS that is used to make sure everything is in line with what students will need developmentally and in terms of fairness. The primary tool used in this process is the TEACHER'S decisions. We should be proud of that.
Specific word lists are also used for passages, questions, and prompts. These help ensure that the vocabulary won't interfere with the content that is being assessed. You might check out these resources. I didn't know about any of them.
1. Teacher gives background powerpoint/lecture about culture and history.
2. Teacher activates schema and vocabulary for the text. Kids copy definitions and forget.
3. Kids read one at a time, or teacher reads, or a recording is played. (Notice the purposeful use of passive voice there.)
4. The teacher stops periodically and interrogates with leading and funneling questions.
5. Kids annotate the text. Or sleep. Or google the answers.
6. Kids take a multiple choice reading quiz to judge comprehension.
7. Sometimes they write a literary analysis essay.
8. The teacher complains about how these kids can't read or write.
No wonder kids hate to read. And no wonder they have nothing to write about. GEEZ!
Problem One: I tour schools and ask to look in the classrooms and bookrooms. This is what I see. There are no books. In the bookroom, there are tattered sets of TKM and book sets with unbroken spines from the last textbook adoption. There are no contemporary texts. There are no diverse texts.
There is nothing to read, y'all. Unless you count NewsELA passages.
Solution One: Buy books kids want to read.
Problem Two: Administrators and teachers don't really know what else to do. And some believe, "My English classes looked like this, so by God these kids ought to comply." And then they blame the kids for being awful human beings: passive, apathetic and unmotivated, and ignorant.
But good teaching is about getting KIDS to do the work. Good literacy teaching is not about what the teacher is doing. And really - heresy to some so hang on - the ELAR classroom is not even about what we are reading. Effective literacy instruction is about how the teacher helps the KIDS do the work and the thinking about any text. Look at the left side of the TTESS Rubric if you need language to describe what this looks like.
Solution Two: Teachers need models of what classroom instruction could look like. And we have to do more than tell them to give kids choice and to implement "workshop." Most teachers don't know what that means. (And it certainly doesn't fit well in the linear lesson plan mandates, but that's a problem for another day.) What could/should the classroom routine look like? Teachers need sample design features that help them know what the sequences should/could look like in a 45 minute period with kids like theirs.
So. Ditch the dead ELAR reading routine from the 19th century and pick something that might actually work. Even better, send me your ideas. I'll add them to the list.
When I was an assistant principal, we had our teachers turn in a running record for every kid every week. Teachers complied. But I'm not sure how much it helped the teachers show the kids how to grow. The teachers dutifully marked MSV. And then what? Check! Moving on!
Not really what we were hoping for as an administrative team.
Recently, I met with a group of teachers to examine what we were supposed to learn about teaching readers from the running record. I'm a little hesitant to share this with some - I know that many of you are much more knowledgeable about guided reading and Reading Recovery. You'll probably be able to pick apart my analysis and conclusions.
Your scrutiny is worth the risk of delivering these messages:
1. Completing running records and marking MSV can be a colossal waste of time if it doesn't lead to instructional decisions that help students become better readers.
2. Analyzing miscues and selecting teaching points (and even praise points) is about noticing the trends in student behaviors that impact the performance the most. It's not about what theindividual errors are; our work is about why students have done so and what they can do instead.
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:
My friend Sarah and I plan a day to collaborate each month to plan the staff development she will conduct at her campus. As we looked at the TEKS Resource System YAG and IFD, we realized that we still had many questions about how we needed to approach the work. What could we do to help teachers understand the approach the needed to take with Expository (3rd grade), Informational (4-11th grades) and Literary Nonfiction (12th grade)? We started with 5th grade - not sure why. What we found and the process we discovered was powerful learning, y'all. (Note that we are also working to integrate the NEW Standards with our current work.)
Well. Who cares...
Let me get to the point. STAAR addresses questions for Informational texts in FOUR different ways that have important implications for rigorous, aligned instruction and performance assessments. And I don't think we are teaching it that way.
Over the 6 year history of STAAR, 5.10A has been assessed 18 times - averaging 2-3 questions on each administration. (Note that in all 18 cases, the standard has been assessed ACROSS multiple texts.) 5.10A has been dual coded with Figure 19 2 times. 5.13B has been assessed 2 times. I used the lead4ward IQ tool to find the questions and identify the frequency.
So what does that mean? When you are looking at your YAG for Informational text, it would behoove you to make sure that you are planning instruction correctly for such a highly tested standard.
And because of the nature of this standard, it also has the potential to help students create a deeper comprehension of the entire text that should enhance performance on other standards.
Performance assessments do not necessarily include the type of thinking required for success on STAAR. If the work we are asking students to do does NOT include these nuances, then we are not really teaching the standard.
We must revise our performance assessment to include the reasoning processes reflected in how this standard is interpreted and assessed by TEA.
We must create text SETS that allow students to experience this work across multiple texts.
In planning for our new standards - we must connect this work beyond reading a text for comprehension and toward reading texts like writers to examine our own intentions/purposes and craft choices that deliver those to the reader.
There are FOUR CATEGORIES that define how this standard is assessed.
Simple and Straightforward: Author's Purpose + Main Idea. Y'all - this is NOT about PIE. TEA explained this in a presentation to CREST. Basically, kids are reading the verb and making their selection. They aren't reading the rest of the stem. In addition, these questions address purposes of sections of text and why they were included as well as the purpose of the entire purpose of the passages.
As a matter of fact, Sarah and I found very little PIE going on in the verbs used in the stems or answer choices. Here's a list of the words we DID find:
Author's Purpose Given + Main Idea + Text Structure Sometimes, the questions tell the students what the purpose is. Incorrect answer choices give viable/true details while correct answer choices reference the main idea of the whole text. In some questions, answers also imply text structure - linear/chronological, cause and effect, etc.
Author's Purpose + Main Idea + Text Evidence These questions give text evidence in the stem and/or answer choices. The answer choices will include a verb about the purpose and add content that references the main idea or viable details from the passage. Sometimes, the questions even name a move that the author makes (specific language used, directly addressing the reader, etc.) and asks why the author would have done such a thing.
Making Inferences about the Author's Purpose for Including Text Evidence Students are asked to evaluate why an author would have included a piece of text evidence. Answer choices list viable details, but only one of them is directly connected to the main idea/purpose of the entire passage and the particular piece of evidence cited in the question.
WE MUST expose students to the type of thinking they must do when they read and write in real life. And that's never about PIE. And when we move beyond that - we'll see better results on STAAR too.
Most of the time, when I look at the work people are doing with the new TEKS for ELAR, I see that thinking isn't really addressed. I watched a video recently that had some good ideas that I'd like to take further.
Dr. Gibson presented the classic sing-song poem, Ring around the Rosie to establish that the text is simple, but the understanding of the text is not. To really understand this piece, one must ask WHEN this was written and WHY it was written. She then explained the macabre meaning of the text.
The WHEN and WHY are directly connected to specific strands in our new TEKS:
Inquiry and Research:listening, speaking, reading, writing, and thinking using multiple texts. The student engages in both short-term and sustained recursive inquiry processes for a variety of purposes.
Author's Purpose and Craft: listening, speaking, reading, writing, and thinking using multiple texts. The student uses critical inquiry to analyze the author's choices and how they influence and communicate meaning within a variety of texts. The student analyzes and applies author's craft purposefully in order to develop his or her own products and performances.
But here's where the problem begins:
Most of the time...in the past maybe...teachers addressed this by telling kids the historical background of the text. (I've seen some great and engaging lectures and powerpoints on the background of King Lear and Fahrenheit 451.) Teachers explain the when and the why. But how is a reader supposed to know that there is something more to know about the text? How does the reader know how to think about a text? How is the reader supposed to know that there might be something more to consider?
Without examination and explicit teaching of how one processes and analyzes texts, we are teaching Ring around the Rosie and NOT our standards. How can we teach students to know when Inquiry and Research are warranted to aid comprehension and analysis? How does one use Author's Purpose and Craft to reveal the meaning?
If we don't figure this out, when kids encounter a more complex text, they will - again - be relying on the teacher to give the background and context of the work or continue in uniformed oblivion about the text's purpose and message as well as how a critical reader uses inquiry, multiple texts, and connections to craft meaning.
While I agree with the premise of the video (that we can use simple texts to teach complex thinking skills for the first exposure), I do not think that asking complex questions about simple texts is going to be any more fruitful than holding hands and singing Ring around the Rosie as we fall on the ground and pretend to be dead. We might as well be.
Task levels focus on the whether something is right or wrong, the content of the text or task. Process levels focus on how something is done, how we know, the thinking. Self-extending levels focus on the awareness a person needs to identify problems and what needs to be done next. Don't we need students to be able to understand HOW they comprehend and read? Don't we need students to be the ones who notice and respond when something isn't working.
Here are some of the questions posed in the video about Dr. Seuss' Yertle the Turtle. All of these questions focus on the CONTENT of the text and nothing to do with how one would do something similar if given another text.
1. What is the author's purpose for writing the story? Why would I care or want to know? How would I figure that out if I wanted to?
2. What is the main idea not stated in the text? There's an idea not stated? How did I miss that? What would I look for so I'm not fooled next time? How did the author slip that in there without me noticing?
3. How does the theme apply to leadership today? The question tells the students exactly which pieces of content to focus on to make the connection. What happens when no one is there to tell them to focus on leadership? What happens if there is another possibility?
4. What environment represents the pond? Again, the question focuses on the content of the text. As a reader, how would I know to ask that question if the teacher wasn't there interrogating me through the text? A better question might be phrased like this: Authors use the setting on purpose to help you make connections to their message or theme. When you look at the setting, what are you noticing that might give you a hint about what the author is trying to convey?
5. Who could be Yertle in your world? Again...asking content questions. These questions and the discussion that follow will not help readers navigate the SKILL - the THINKING - required to answer the question. Students will not understand what they are supposed to do and notice when they read the next text, especially a text that's harder to read than Yertle the Turtle.
No wonder kids aren't transferring their learning to new and more complex texts. We aren't teaching them how to do so!
I loved these two quotes from the video:
"Cognitive demand is about the complexity of the task and the mental processing required to complete it."
"Rigor is measured by depth of understanding."
Agreed - but the examples shown in the video STILL don't get us to the ideals expressed in the truths of these quotes.
Asking leading and funneling questions to students about texts that have answers directly related to that text alone will not lead to the ability to transfer that skill to another text. Simply said: asking questions about the text itself - the content - are not going to work. It doesn't matter what level they are on Blooms. It doesn't matter what DOK you assign them. It's not about Ring around the Rosie, or Yurtle the Turtle, or King Lear. Y'all, it's about teaching people what to do, what to ask themselves, and how to THINK with any text.
