Taking Reading Beyond "Activity" Status

Across the arch of my career as a teacher, I have traditionally thought of literacy in terms for the ability to read and write with adequate proficiency. Therefore, my reading activities in my courses have were principally designed to support those basic reading goals. And no wonder. That was not only the way I was taught to approach reading as a student, but it was also how I learn to think about it as a teacher in training. The instructional reading courses I took while preparing to be a teacher focused primarily on decoding and fluency, rather than any high-order literacy goals.  

Another influencing factor has been the media’s narrow definition of fliteracy. The word “literacy” today seems to be frequently associated with images of politicized statistics regarding a specific population's (usually poor or underdeveloped populations) mere ability to read and write.

This definition deals with literacy at it’s most basic level; a technical ability to decode and reproduce language. Although, basic literacy is an essential skill necessary to a successful integration into the a world of larger opportunity, it is but a mere starting point for preparation of the type of intellectual empowerment that can lead to entry into college, well-paying jobs,economic success, and participation in the “dominant discourse” that provides access to the economic power.

In his book, Results Now: How We Can Achieve Unprecedented Improvements in Teaching and Learning, Mike Schmoker makes an important distinction between basic literacy and authentic literacy. Schmoker wrote, “Generous amounts of close, purposeful reading, rereading, writing and talking...are the essence of authentic literacy.” He went on to say that these activities “are the foundation for a trained, powerful mind - and a promising future.”

Schmoker felt that students need to wrestled with the text, take it apart, re-read and re-work it through writing and argumentation until they develop a deep understanding of the text and are able to make their own meaning of it. In short, students need to read with a purpose greater than the text itself. Purposeful reading, according to Schmoker, should be guided by a specific, engaging question that provides students with an avenue for exploration, making connections, intellectual exchange, and higher order thinking.

Why then, do educators continue to focus so heavily on basic literacy and comprehension. I know that I myself have been guilty of viewing reading as an “activity” that “I should be doing more of” with my classes, rather than an essential part of a process of higher-order literacy. I have often found ways to squeeze reading into my curriculum, primarily as a means for building vocabulary and comprehension skills, but rarely as part of an integrated literacy strategy.

Sadly, that is how I have traditionally looked at reading as a world language teacher - it’s a checklist item, … but not something as important as grammar, vocabulary and speaking in terms of skill building. I’ve tended to view it as something I should do more of , or something I need to do in order to help prepare students for their future needs in higher level courses and the AP exam.   

So much of my curriculum is indeed integrated; lessons, speaking, writing and listening activities, peer and teacher feedback. However, ever since I began teaching middle school level Spanish classes, I have found it harder and harder to integrate reading as anything other than an isolated activity for a number of reasons. First, I have found it difficult to find level-appropriate resources for my Spanish I classes, especially materials that link appropriately to the themes we are studying and the vocabulary that new language learners possess.

For many of my students, this is their first world language experience, so we are starting at ground zero. However, many of the readings geared toward beginners are very basic and superficial, and lack the substance necessary for meaningful extended writing or discussion activities.

The solution many, if not most, world language teachers utilize is following the sequence, themes, and readings of their textbook. I have found the use of a textbook to limiting in terms of its focus on a narrow set of rudimentary (and often disjointed) content and its limited themes and often irrelevant vocabulary.  The readings in the textbook, although related to the publisher’s selected chapter themes and vocabulary are often very basic and inauthentic. Depending on the book and school budget, the readings can also be outdated and irrelevant. In my last textbook, there were still references to VCRs and VHS tapes. In my view, textbooks provide a clear sense of reading as a mere activity, unrelated to broader literacy goals.

Schmoker, however, does not see reading as isolated activity, but rather as part of an integrated process for building higher-order literacy and intellectual heft. His article leaves me wondering what I can do to integrate reading more authentically into the learning process.

This year, I will be attempting some new approaches that incorporate more, and a greater variety of, writing assignments and related discussions. The challenge will be finding authentic, level-appropriate readings that braid naturally into that literacy process. It will not be easy, and I might make some incorrect choices or try some things that don’t work. However, this year will be a good starting point to find shorter, more relevant readings from different sources. I plan to develop techniques and strategies that allow students to more meaningfully engage with the text through reading, writing and discussion.

Some ideas that I have include using social media, such as Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc. to engage students around more current, briefer readings that might be more relevant to their experiences and that will hopefully foster reflection, engaging conversation and debate. I am currently working on setting up a partnership with classes at the Aquinas School in Madrid. My students will be engaged in storytelling through social media this year. They will study how people tell stories through social media, by reading, analyzing and discussing social media pieces. Then they will work in writing teams to tell stories of things happening on the Malvern campus this year. They will hopefully be able to share these written pieces with their partners in Madrid via a shared Facebook page. One goal would be for the students to read each other’s works and provide feedback and comments to each other (in their target language). My hope is that this will add authenticity to the reading, writing and discussion experience and lead to more authentic literacy.

An Indefinite Richness of Significance

An indefinite Richness of Significance

In his 1916 book, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education, John Dewey takes aim at “ready-made”, fixed and rigid educational agendas that focuses on “the mere amassing of information.”  For a book written over 100 years ago, that seems to me to be a powerfully progressive and provocative idea, but one that resonate strongly with 21st century learning.

Dewey warns that content divorced from connections to, and activities related to, the individual’s personal experience risks becoming a “hodge-podge of unrelated fragments”, making the learner’s mind “wooden” rather than “elastic”.

Using history and geography to make his point, Dewey indicates that the intersection between fact-based content and the human experience is essential to fostering the curiosity and exploration necessary to create meaning. According to Dewey, it is the educator’s job to create the environments that inspire learners to seek out connections and meaning. He talks about geography and history as “intellectual starting points for moving out into the unknown”, rather than as ends in themselves.  

As a member of a 6-person teaching team, I have had the experience this past year of designing learning experiences around broad and engaging themes that have served as strong intellectual starting points. Dewey’s talking points in this article resonate strongly for me as I reflect on how differently our 6th grade students engaged with big questions and ideas that drove their curiosity and allowed them to make thematic connections across all six of their courses throughout the year. As the year moved forward, our students began to view content as a tool that was important to being able to explore and make meaning of the themes with increasing sophistication as they connected with experts, authentic texts, and each other in meaningful discussions. It was clear to me that these students were simply learning more stuff, they were developing deep understanding of what they were learning and were able to connect it to many other things in the world around them, leading to new paths of learning.  

6th grade students explain sound wave by walking guests through a guitar build experience.

As I read through Dewey’s chapter called “The Significance of Geography and History”, several “what if…” questions arose for me. What if there was no specific content for a course? What if there were only big themes, engaging questions, and open space and time to explore and connect from an engaging intellectual starting point? How would students learning differently?

What if students in the same class could learn different content (the content they needed to explore a topic of choice and personal relevance) while all working toward the same skills goals? What if although all learners begin together at a common intellectual starting point, they could branch off in direct directions that feed their personal imagination and curiosity and then join together at various junctions within the unit to share ideas, questions, and wonders?  What if the teacher’s role was to facilitate each student’s individual learning path toward specific skills, customizing what content each student learns according to his path? What would that look like? Could it work?  How would that impact the traditional sequencing of content in disciplines?

What if disciplinary content was not so proprietary? What if it simply became big ideas for fostering literacy, discussion, exploration, connections, curiosity and the intellectualism?

Dewey summarizes this chapter by stating: “It is the nature of an experience to have implications which go far beyond what is at first consciously noted in it. Bringing these connections or implications to consciousness enhances the meaning of the experience.” This seems to answer my what if questions quite thoroughly. It is my job as an educator not to merely be an content expert in my specific field of discipline, but rather to provide students with an engaging intellectual starting point and a learning environment that foster imagination, curiosity, exploration, and connections.

As Dewey states, “any experience, however trivial in its first appearance, is capable of assuming an indefinite richness of significance by extending its range of perceived connections.” As I think about my students closing out a unit with an indefinite richness of significance rather than simply a test grade, I wonder what I need to do tomorrow to make that happen more richly for my next unit.  

Collaborative Teams for Teaching and Learning

When I first began teaching, I was surprised to find how individually and autonomously teachers went about their work of educating young people. It was a bit confusing to me, considering that we were collectively responsible for the academic, intellectual, and social development of our students. Yet, most of my colleagues worked alone in the confines of their own classrooms autonomously designing lessons and units. 

Sure, there were the monthly department meetings, but most of that time was dedicated to sharing mandates and concerns from the administration, handing down deadlines for paperwork, or simply catching up socially with one another breifly before or after the meetings. Whatever shared time my department and I did have was not very collaborative. It was more a gathering of affiliated, but separate, teachers fitting one more thing into their already jammed packed school day. 

According to "a MetLife Survey of the American Teacher (2009),  today’s teachers work alone—they spend an average of 93 percent of their time in school working in isolation from their colleagues, and they continue to work alone during their out-of-school hours of preparation and grading. Their day-to-day work is disconnected from the efforts of their colleagues, and their pullout professional development is fragmented and poorly aligned with their students’ learning needs" ("Learning Teams and the Future of Teaching" by Tom Carroll and Hanna Doerr). 

This is precisely the environment I have witnessed at many schools over the course of my career as a teacher and a student. This says nothing about the quality of teachers I have learned from and worked with. I've had the honor of being influenced by and working with some extraordinarily dedicated, thoughtful, reflective, and gifted teachers. They were also some of the most time-strapped and over-worked people I have known. 

As I think about my own role on this scenario, I can't help remember, with disappointment, the many times I had closed my classroom door and turned out the light after the students had left, only to hunker down at my desk to plan for the next day. On either side of me, there were departmental colleagues doing the same thing. It was as if we were connected by the same rope (helping our students learn and develop), but both pulling blindly in the opposite direction, trying to move in the direction that we both, individually, felt we needed to be moving. 

Having just completed a two-week summer professional development institute at my current school, I feel as if I finally, after 15 years in education, got a real glimpse of the power of extended and intentional collaborative team time with my educational colleagues. This team of educators consisted of not just teachers, but also key members of the administrative team. We were not merely a group of department members given time to collaborate on curriculum, but rather an inter-disciplinary team learning, questioning, reflecting, discussing, creating, and connecting together so that we can collectively become better educators and a better educational community for our students and their families. 

The experience of having such extended and purposeful time with my colleagues to explore who we are as a community, where we are going in the 21st century, and what practices we need to undertake to get there created a strong sense of connectedness, trust, and shared vision and purpose. It also allowed us to practice the 21st century skills we will need to model for our students. Finally, it instilled in me a new faith in the importance of consistent and purpose-driven collaboration amongst teachers. 

As I prepare for the upcoming school year, I will be thinking a great deal about the role of collaborative teams in education, for teachers and students. What might the formation of collaborative teams look like at the departmental level, at the grade level, at the division level, etc.? How do we go about developing the intended outcomes, structures, and norms of the teams? What does a successful collaborative team look like? How do we plan for meaningful and consistent meeting time in our tight school schedule? 

The following is an article called "Learning Teams and the Future of Teaching" by Tom Carroll and Hanna Doerr, which was published in Education Week. The article provides some convincing arguments for Learning Teams, as well a list of 6 principles and practices of highly effective learning teams. 

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/06/28/36carroll.h29.html?tkn=ZSMFs2AC7bYETQ5RSizXDXlKXS12tJk9HIDA&cmp=clp-edweek

Teaching as a Restless Journey

Teaching as a Restless Journey

Consider How Augustine’s Travels Helped Him Experience Learning as a Journey

Saint Augustine is most commonly known as a Bishop and as the author of Confessions. However, he was, first and foremost a teacher. Although a powerful intellectual and renowned teacher , Saint Augustine viewed himself as a constant learner. In "The Mind of Saint Augustine" by Anton C. Pegis (1944), Augustine is said to have viewed "learning as a restless journey", and that through the journey one acquires experiences, which lead to learning, reflection, and accumulated wisdom. 

This has certainly been the case in my own personal road to becoming a teacher, as well as my growth as a teacher. In my life before teaching, I was extremely restless and unsatisfied with the direction of my life. After moving to Washington State and living on a Native American reservation for two year, I joined Peace Corps and served as a Small Business Development Volunteer in Honduras and Nicaragua for another two years. 

Those 4 years of experience opened my perspective up tremendously and I began to see other possibilities for where my path might take me next. Nonetheless, I sensed that my journey was incomplete and still had that nagging restlessness tugging inside me. 

So, after my tour of service in Nicaragua, I took two months to backpack throughout Central and South America. During the long bus rides through some of the most devastatingly beautiful and poor areas I've ever seen, I took the time to slow down and reflect fully on my experiences of the previous four years. 

One day, on a bus ride from the southern tip of Ecuador to Peru, a realization hit me that I had never considered before. During my work teaching micro-entrepeneurs how to more effectively manage their business, I was really happy and enjoyed the work immensely. However, the real epiphany was that it was not the business part of the experience that I enjoyed, but rather the teaching. That was the moment I decided to "become" a teacher. 

Fifteen years later, I am still "becoming" a teacher, and I suspect I will be for the rest of my life. My first few years I learned how to survive in the classroom and refine my own knowledge of the content. I was definitely more of a student than a teacher back then. As time went by, I found that I was more comfortable and confident in the classroom, but could never fully feel a sense of having "arrived"at my destination. Each successive year, I have found myself tweaking, exploring, questioning what I do, and yet I still feel a restlessness as a teacher to continue seeking. 

Teaching indeed is a journey which requires growth and learning through experiences and reflection. I continue to drawn on my experiences of working and living in Nicaragua as a volunteer and later as a director of a service-learning organization. They inform my approach to teaching and learning every single day. However, as Augustine taught, "everyone's learning journey is life-long", and we need to continue to make "steady progress rather than meandering"(Cracked Pots and Brave Hearts: Augustine on Teaching and Learning; Gary N McCloskey O.S.A.). 

Some of the most important experiences I've had as a teacher over the past 15 have been outside of the classroom, in professional development, brainstorming and sharing ideas with other teachers, researching new pedagogical approaches and teaching strategies, and reflecting on successes and failures in the classroom. The more experiences I have, it seems, the sharper the focus of my journey becomes, and the less meandering I do. 

Sharing that journey with a small group of colleagues from my school during a two-week summer institute has enriched my experiences. It has provided me also with some important critical friends (like Ambrose to Augustine) to support my learning and my teaching. 


It is truly incredible how the reflections of a man who lived some 1600 years ago can hold such relevance and truth today. So teachers, go forth and journey. 

Is the Soda Can Mightier than the Book?

Is the Soda Can Mightier than the Book? 

Over the past week, I have been working with a group of educators in a research cohort. At the beginning of the week, we brainstormed ideas for a project-based  learning (PBL) or action research project that would address a concern or question we share commonly regarding education in the 21st century. After some discussion, debate, and compromise, we decided on researching more informative student performance reporting options. One of our essential questions that is driving this project is "what role should grades and performance reporting play in 21st century education?" another important question behind our research project is "how can report cards more accurately inform students, parents, and teachers about what students know and can do, and with what level of proficiency?" A third important question for me is "what does learning look like and how can we provide timely, accurate, and informative feedback to students and parents about a student's learning process?"

As a Spanish teacher, I have a pretty good understanding of what language learning looks like in practice and I can articulate that pretty clearly to my students and their parents.

In Spanish class, I can listen to a student speak in an interpersonal situation in Spanish and gauge their ability to negotiate meaning, ask and answers questions, navigate major time frames, circumlocute, speak in paragraphs rather than discreet sentences, etc.

However, when I step outside of my discipline, my ability to visualize and articulate what authentic learning and mastery look like in, say, math or science, is weak.

Today  I came to understand much more clearly what learning in science is by selling my kitchen cabinets on Craigslist. 

This afternoon, a man came to my house with a bulky conversion van to pick up some cabinets I was selling on the Internet. The man who lowered himself from the driver's seat walked toward me wearing construction work clothes and a few conspicuously placed tattoos. By appearances, this was a man who worked with his hands and knew his way around a workshop. When we arrived at the kitchen to disassemble the cabinets, my suspicions were confirmed when the man borrowed some tools and went straight to work, disconnecting the cabinets with extreme efficiency.

As we worked, we talked about all sorts of things, from music, cars, home repairs, and global trade. At one point, I asked what he does for a living, and predictably he told me that he used to be a contractor. However, that was in between his jobs at Lockheed Martin (building airplane fuselages) and his current job at Princeton University (working on hydrogen fusion). He went on to explain the physics and engineering behind fuselage design and the science behind developing sustainable and green sources of energy by means of hydrogen fusion.

I stood there mystified as this handyman with work-calloused hands explained to me, with clarity and great enthusiasm, the process of fusion reaction in which hydrogen nuclei collide, fuse into heavier helium atoms and release tremendous amounts of energy in the process.

Later, while loading cabinets into his van, the buyer  (Mike) engaged my son in a conversation about car design. Mike went on to explain key elements of automobile design, much to the delight of my car-obsessed 10-year old.

I  left the conversation to go to the garage to grab a measuring tape. When I returned, Mike was explaining to my son how he was in the process of inventing a new kind of motorcycle made from soda cans, designed with the physics of an airplane fuselage to increase the strength of the aluminum cans as to make it safely road-worthy.

Listening to Mike talk was like being in the most interesting science class I could imagine. He made science seem so exciting, fun, and practical. This was not the science that I studied in school, but I wish it was.

I told Mike that I thought he'd make a great science teachers. He laughed and told me that the two most influential people his life were science teachers he had in high school. He said that he couldn't wait to get to science class to see what they would do next and what they, the students would be learning to do next. AS he spoke, I noted that Mike continued to use the word "do" when he referred to his science learning.

When I asked if he studied I science in college, Mike responded that he never went to college. He said, "I didn't need to go to college to study science. I do science everyday." He told me that his teachers didn't "teach" him science, they taught him how to "do" science.

I found out later that Mike will be working with a hydrogen fusion program in France called Iter using the science he learned to "do" in high school from two influential teachers who knew that the real  measure of learning is being able to do something out in the world with what you have learned.

After Mike left, I began to wonder what his grade in his science classes were. Was he an A student? He didn't strike me as the kind of guy who cared much about that. I could be wrong though. Nonetheless, I began to wonder again. If Mike did get A grades in his science class, how did his A compare with the A of his classmates. 

Surely not all of Mike's classmates came out of those classes with the same level of application and synthesis as he did. I would guess that there were several A students in that class that would have little idea of what hydrogen fusion even is. 

So how might that hypothetical A grade informed those students about what scientific skills they possess? 

What if Mike received a C in science because he didn't do his homework or didn't do well on rote tests, but he was masterful at practical application of scientific principles? 

Would Mike think of himself as simply an average science student? Would that be an accurate evaluation of his science skills? 

What makes a science student excellent? Averaged numbers? Demonstrated skills to work within the scientific model? How do we communicate that accurately to students?

Somewhere along the line, someone taught Mike what skills a good scientist possesses, whether explicitly or implicitly. He continues to use those lessons everyday in complex and authentic situations that might one day benefit all of us. 

Is the soda can mightier than the book in terms of science skills? I don't know the answer to that question yet.  However, I am pretty sure that helping students understand what scientific skill sets they need to "do" science led to some pretty impressive results for one Craigslist buyer. 

The following is a Ted Talk video by a  9th and 10th grade physical science and biology teacher on Standard based grading: 

Standards Based Grading and the Game of School: Craig Messerma

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bn_sCLoQNVs

Making the grade

Making the grade

There is a lot of debate about grades and what qualitative data on student performance really report. What is an A or a C and how do those grades inform about what a student can actually do within a specific discipline? 

Yesterday, a colleague in my action-research cohort framed the question in terms of an analysis of his golf swing. He commented that if a golf pro were to observe his golf swing and afterwards simply respond "that's pretty good" or "nice job", it would provide him with almost no information about his golf swing. Sure, it would be a nice affirmation from a qualified pro, but it wouldn't tell my colleague much about what technical aspects of his swing he is doing well and which parts need work. Therefore his swing will just continue to be "pretty good", whatever that means. 

http://www.golfdigest.com

My cohort group's discussion over the past few days has focused on how to make reporting students' progress (i.e. grading) more informative for students, parents and teachers. We all agreed that grades are generally lacking in informative detail for a variety of reasons. 

By way of example, the B in Spanish class does not typically provide us with much information about a student's ability to use interpersonal communication to resolve a situation with a complication. Nor does the C in science elaborate on his understanding of how the water cycle processes might impact climate changes. Not that we would expect this kind of specific detail to show up on a report card, but the stand-alone B or C does not provide the student with any informative feedback about what specific skills he is strong or weak in, and to what degree. Worst of all, there is nothing a student can do at the this point because the grading is done and the goals have been measured. Now it is time to move on with whatever grade and skills he may have acquired. 

Robert J. Marzano, PhD, a leading researcher in education,framed the conversation with another sports analogy:

"Think of a baseball card — when you looked at Mickey Mantle’s card, it didn’t say an A on the back. It included his fielding average, hitting average, homeruns — then you know why he’s a good player. Why would we give a student just one grade?"   
(http://www.mlive.com/news/bay-city/index.ssf/2010/11/qa_standards-based_grading_exp.html)


Public schools (all of them, I would suspect) have been using standards to develop their curriculum for some time now, but few schools use standards to inform about what the final grade means in terms actual abilities. Here we are talking about Standard-based grading, which is a grading system that provides information about how students are performing against a set of clearly defined learning outcomes, typically state or common core standards. 

With standard-based grading, "there is no single mark for a course as is traditionally generated by averaging or combining multiple scores across the duration of a class. Unlike traditional grade reports, standards-based grading measures students’ knowledge of grade-level content by reporting the most recent, consistent level of performance. So, a student might struggle in the beginning of a course with new content, but then learn and demonstrate proficient performance by the end of the course." (http://www.sumner.wednet.edu/studentfamilyservices/academics/pages/sbgparentfaq.html)

The focus here is on all students developing certain levels of developmentally appropriate proficiency in particular skill sets and demonstrating them through a series of assessments throughout the school year. Some student might get there more slowly then others, but all are provided meaningful feedback along the why in order to identify areas of weakness and to learn to strengthen those skills across the continuum of proficiency until they meet the standard. Some students might just meet the standard while others  exceed the standard, but all would need to meet the course standards in order to more on to the next level or grade. 

This is quite different from receiving a C in French 1 and limping on to the French 2 with whatever foundation you have built at the first level. Most of the time the C in French 1  might tell you that you covered chapters 1-7 and that you know how to use the basic present tense, and have some basic vocabulary related to school, food, self, and family. However, it tells us nothing about what a student can actually do with that content knowledge. 

Last winter, I visited Casco Bay High School in Portland, Maine to observe their exploration-based learning model. While there I learned that they also use standard-based grading. Watching the teachers and the students in action, working actively and fluently with the standards in the classroom, I came to understand the value of setting clear learning outcomes for students and making them a requirement for everyone for course completion and advancement. The students clearly understood the skills they would need to demonstrate and at what levels of proficiency they would need to demonstrate them in order to earn course credit and advance. One student even explained to me that she was able to choose whether she wanted to shoot for an "Meets Expectation" or "Exceeds Expectation" on an assignment that asked students to use a piece of Spanish-language Caribbean literature, to describe how their ancestry influences  their identity. She told me that, at first, she was unsure she had the written communication ability in Spanish to reach the project's proficiency goals. However, as she worked on the project, discussed the theme with classmates, self-evaluated against project rubrics, and received ongoing feedback from her teacher, she slowly began to identify and understand her weak spots in her essay. One day, she decided to change her proficiency goal to "exceeds". When I asked her what she needed to do to reach that new goal, she was easily able to articulate that strategies she would need to implement. She ended by telling me: "Nobody is allowed to not meet the standard; it just doesn't happen here. If you keep up your habits of work, the teachers will work with you until you have the skills to meet expectation." 

Wow. What trust these students have in their teachers, in the learning process, and in their own ability to succeed. "That's what I want for my students.", I found myself thinking when the student finished.  

So my essential question for tonight is "what would be the impact of using standards based grading in a small affluent private school where GPA is seen as an essential tool for advancement educationally and professionally, and where teachers are accustomed to working and developing their own curriculums and grading systems autonomously?"

The following is a video that will illustrate the Casco Bay model: 
http://vimeo.com/43992570

Here is a PDF explaining Casco Bay's grading model.
http://cbhs.portlandschools.org/files/2012/07/Casco-Bay-Family-Grading-Guide.pdf