Upcoming Sessions: Come Learn with Me!

Here are the upcoming sessions. Can't wait to see you! 

ELAR Book Study - Understanding and Teaching Reading Comprehension Runs the Entire Semester. Opens 9/1/2019
Fluency Systems for the New ELAR TEKS - Grades 9-12 9/12/19
Planning the Six Weeks with TEKS RS: English II - Second Six Weeks 9/17/2019
Planning the Six Weeks with TEKS RS: English I - First Six Weeks 9/19/2019
Writing Systems for ELAR Part One 9/20/2019
Writing Systems for ELAR: Part Two - Revising and Editing 9/26/2019
Independent and Digital Reading Systems for the New ELAR TEKS 10/9/2019
Feedback Systems for Reading and Writing - ELAR 9-12 10/10/2019
Reader Response ELAR 9-12 10/17/2019
ELAR 9-10 EOC Review 10/25/2019
Planning the Six Weeks with TEKS RS: English I - Third Six Weeks 10/29/2019
Planning the Six Weeks with TEKS RS: English II - Third Six Weeks 10/30/2019
When High School Kids Can't Read 11/7/2019

Feedback to Reading and Writing Concerns and Gold Standards Resources

Happy Almost September,

By now, most of you are deep into lesson plans and learning about your students. And I’m just now digging out of being on the road for beginning of the year staff development. I’ve returned to my messy desk to remember our work this month and follow up on your ideas and our session on Feedback. Here are some resources to further your work and growth. I’ve tried to think of one, gold standard resource to support your inquiry.

If you will remember, you wrote sticky notes at the beginning of the session about your needs. At the end, you crossed off items you felt the session addressed. Some of you still had needs and questions. I’ve focused on those concerns below.

Reading Conferences:

• How to fit them in? (If I do it while the others are reading, I lose them.) I’ve had that trouble too. Here’s what worked for me. I sit at the front of the class and read for 2-3 minutes until the class is settled. Then I get up with my clipboard and move to my first student. I whisper as I talk to them. If I keep my voice low, the kids learn to ignore me. If people start talking, I stop the timer. We talk about what they are supposed to be doing and how they can ignore me and focus. Then I start the timer again and move on. I’ve also tried a conference table. I tap a kid, they come sit next to me. We talk. Then they go tap the next kid. Takes more time, but seems to work for other things too. It’s a talk zone in the room when people need to discuss something during independent work time.
• How to extend beyond “whatcha reading and what is it about?” Try the Book Head Heart and 3 Big Questions from Disrupting Thinking. Jennifer Serravallo has some good ideas too. Penny Kittle is pretty awesome for the older kids.  And so do Fisher and Frey in Text Dependent Questions. That’s more than one. Sorry. Not sorry.
• Getting them to read: Penny Kittle, Book Love
• Explore New Genres: Google this chick: Teri S. Lesesne.
• Leading Upper Level Classes with Reading Conferences and Small Groups, Tracking Conferences and Setting Goals: Penny Kittle and Gallagher

Reading Comprehension:

• Comprehension is Everything: Reading k-5 Session is coming up from Lead4ward. https://www.escweb.net/tx_r16/catalog/session.aspx?session_id=707626
• This book is AMAZING: Understanding and Teaching Reading Comprehension by Jane Oakhill, Kate Cain, and Carsten Elbro. R16 is having a book study on this now. https://www.escweb.net/tx_r16/catalog/session.aspx?session_id=717280

Reader Response: “Are reading conferences and individual goals the new ‘response’ writing mentioned in the new TEKS?” Yes and no. It’s traditionally been a response to literary text. We’re moving past that.

• Lenses are helpful.
• Shmoop has a good overview of the classic view.
• I’m offering a session on this on October 17^th.

Grammar: “Understanding Grammar”

• As an adult:
• Brushing Up on Grammar: An Acts of Teaching Approach by Dr. Joyce Armstrong Carroll.
• For Pedagogy: Constance Weaver is the Gold Standard for Grammar Instruction
• For Kids: Anything by Jeff Anderson and Gretchen Bernabei. Like seriously. Buy it all.

Writing: “Any strategy that can help a struggling writer gain confidence” and “finding ideas and being confident” and “creating an atmosphere of imagination” It starts with choice and idea fluency.

• Here’s a link to my writing notebook.
• I’ll teach you how on September 20^th and September 26^th.  

Blending Reading and Writing: “Tying it to writing”

• A Resource from a Previous Session
• I took the ideas from Disrupting Thinking and applied them to writing.

Writing Feedback Groups: “Peer vs Teacher: When should I use each?”

• After kids write something, they should participate in a peer feedback group.
• After kids write something, they should ratiocinate and share with a peer feedback group.
• When kids are ready to turn something in, they should participate in clocking with a peer feedback group.
• ALL the time, kids should work with the teacher about their writing.

Need for More Writing Feedback Examples:

• https://www.bulbapp.com/u/sample-analysis-and-feedback
• Patty McGee: Feedback that Moves Writer’s Forward: How to Escape Correcting Mode to Transform Student Writing

Your Fan,

Shona Rose

ELAR Concerns and Gold Standard Solutions

This summer, I worked with a group of teachers in a one hour ELAR Think Tank. We generated questions and discussed how to resolve them. As a follow up, I gathered one gold standard resource that related to our concerns. Here's what I sent them. 

Happy Almost September,

By now, most of you are deep into lesson plans and learning about your students. And I’m just now digging out of being on the road for beginning of the year staff development. I’ve returned to my messy desk to remember our work this month and follow up on your ideas and our short time in the “Think Tank.” Here are some resources to further your work and growth. I’ve tried to think of one, gold standard resource to support your inquiry.

Motivating and Encouraging Readers:

Book Love by Penny Kittle

Motivating and Encouraging Writers: 

Choice in writing and the development of idea fluency is key. Here's a link to my writing notebook. Linda Reif's Quickwrite Handbook is a must. 

Mindset for School: 

Bright Minds, Poor Grades by Michael D. Whitley, PhD, has been extremely helpful to me. Here’s a review of the content.  Here’s a link to the book.

Going Beyond the Surface in Reading:

Disrupting Thinking by Kylene Beers and Bob Probst

Fluency in Relationship to the New TEKS:

Timothy Rasinski is the gold standard in Fluency right now. Here’s a website chock full of resources. In terms of the new TEKS, what you need to remember is that it’s about more than rate. We need to remember fluency is a tool we use and adjust to monitory and create comprehension. It includes rate, accuracy, prosody, in light of the genre characteristics and reading purpose. We also need to be thinking about fluency in terms of what it means to listen fluently to others and various media, write (handwrite and type) quickly and accurately, and how we can think fluently. Fluency is about more than reading.

Editing:

Grammar Keepers 101 by Gretchen Bernabei. I’ll be offering a session that goes deeper into Revising and Editing on September 26^th . Session one on Prewriting and Writing is on September 20^th. And I can’t help it. One More. You have to look at Jeff Anderson’s stuff if you haven’t seen it.

Combining Sentences:

The gold standard on this is Killgallon and Noden.

Grading:

Papers, Paper, Papers by Carol Jago . Here’s a session and resources based on her book and other thinkers. Believe it or not, my best advice about grading is to stop doing it. 😊

Still Thinking:

The idea of expression (speech) vs reading (mental). Very interesting.

Still Writing:

I write about things like our session here: https://roseshona.blogspot.com/

Loved thinking with you all! Hope to see you again and soon. Enjoy your year.

Your Fan,

Shona Rose

Graphic Organizers as Prewriting are a Prescription for Bad Writing

Graphic Organizers aren't designed for prewriting. They are for organizing. You can't organize nothing. When we use graphic organizers to prewrite, we are prescribing thought and ideas. "Fill our your graphic organizer, boys and girls." And it almost always turns out badly. You can't tell people what to think or say. No wonder kids stare blankly at this workshit masquerading as a graphic organizer and realize they have nothing to say.

Recently, I read about a hundred 4th grade STAAR essays. Except for 4 kids who didn't do what they were taught, the rest of them started with a two-sentence intro (most of them beginning with a question or alliteration), followed by three paragraphs beginning with First, Next or Last, and ended with an "In conclusion" paragraph that repeated the second sentence in the introduction.

There was pretty much nothing in the paragraphs except for undeveloped ideas and repetition. The paragraphs didn't say anything. Nothing was developed. Stuff repeated. Like, over and over. Badly. None of the ideas added to the thesis. The sentences just listed and repeated stuff we already heard. You know what I mean?

Let me repeat something purposefully as a contrast: graphic organizers used for prewriting are prescriptions for organizing nothing. You don't need a graphic organizer until you have something to say and know why you need to say it. (I'd say the same thing for adding similes and metaphors, but that's another rant.)

When you know what you want to say and why you need to say it, then you make a decision about how you need to organize it. And you use multiple organizational structures to do that. The one most teachers (and one spouted by a popular "writing program") have decided to teach - first, next, last - is actually one of the worst to use when you only have a short space (26 lines) to communicate.

Recommendation:
1. Use the graphic organizer to organize only after you have used some actual prewriting strategies.
2. Teach kids how to choose the organizational structure that is the best delivery system for their audience and ideas and the writing situation.
3. Teach kids strategies to say more about each idea and how to connect the ideas in one paragraph to the other ideas in a way that connects back to the thesis.
4. Stop using a graphic organizer as a formula to bypass what it means to actually write something worth reading.

Independent Reading: Not a Willy-Nilly-Free-For-All

Some stuff is just true:
Getting kids into good books, giving them time to read...this volume and access is what improves literacy. In all kinds of ways.
It's also true that we have to get kids passing those darn assessments. In all kinds of ways.

Many of us are embracing choice and independent reading. Good for us. We should. But it is also true that we have much to teach within that approach.

Michael Guevara shared three strategies this week that provide some answers I've been searching for.

1. Card Tricks
2. IVCC Response 
3. Dog Ears 

It's true, you're gonna love the solutions.