A Quicky: Engaging Students - What Does That Have To Do With Literacy?

Yesterday, I was talking with a friend of mine who related 
a simple story to me which bears repeating.

As a storyteller, my friend often visits schools with no more than her voice and her body, charged with the task of entertaining and engaging students with stories for 30 minutes.  She is superb at what she does and, after her presentation, she overheard this conversation.

"I just don't get it," said one teacher to another.

"What?"

"We have all kinds of bells and whistles, quick response exercises, hand and sound signals, technology and yet our kids are always all over the place.  This lady comes in with her voice and a story and suddenly then are mesmerized.  What's with that?"

What is Engagement?

Now certainly familiarity may be a part of this equation but I believe the question is worth pondering.  I also see it, not so much as a judgement of tools, but as a question - how do I engage my students?  Certainly with our tech savvy children of today, our various technology tools are important.  But there is something deeper behind whether those tools work in classrooms or not.  The real questions are

"What authentic teaching can I do that will capture their interest?": 

"Am I so much on the "delivery" channel that I've forgotten the power of teaching?"

The topic is certainly a bit broader than literacy but I see literacy as the doorway to engaging students. What about you?

Michigan State University's National Center for Research on Teacher Learning attacks the issue with some important information:  "Faced with the concerns for classroom time and "effective" use of it, can put difficult demands on teachers.  What it often comes down to is how good are we at helping students construct meaning, including having time to discuss and explore?

Take that back to literacy.  

Are we so into "drill and skill" - repeat the rule back fast - that we forget that education includes thinking?  I've met children who are compliant word callers and decoders but they don't have a clue of how to use reading as a tool to get information they need, to analyze and synthesize what is presented in the text.  Here are a few literacy-related questions to think about in your own teaching:

1.  Do you use read-alouds daily to engage and foster thinking about text?  Engaged Interactive Read Aloud techniques, covered in my new book Before They Read, are a most efficient means of exposing to student what great readers do when they read).

2.  Do you let the size of the class keep you on the "controlling" channel instead of the learning, exploring channel with students?  Professor Deborah Ball shows us how to avoid this pitfall. 

3. What is your goal for any literacy lesson you teach?  The goal MUST always be to nurture and foster the growth of an independent, thinking reader.  It can never simply be what I call "reguritation of facts" even when we are teaching facts.  What do those facts mean?  What is their significance?  Those are much more improtant questions..

4.  What does your writing instruction look like?  Writer's Workshop is a terrific approach to that authentic, engaging, interaction that needs to happen when students are creating text.

Introspection Improves Teaching

Dr. Deborah Stipek of Stanford University says,

 Teachers can motivate students only if they themselves are motivated.  They can make students feel valued and secure only if they feel valued and secure; they can foster enthusiasm for learning in students only if they are enthusiastic about teaching. The school culture can make or break a teacher in the same way that the classroom culture can support or undermine students' efforts to learn.

This thought-provoking paragraph is from her book Motivation To Learn:  Integrating Theory and Practice.

Why not use these questions as a basis for a staff or grade-level meeting?  They really boil down to whether we as teachers are sending learners to the next level or out into the world or whether we are so focused on them passing the "eternal test" that we end up providing only short-term memory/learning.  These questions also tie to the reality of the most common subjects of those meetings: 

how do we get more students to "benchmark" or pass the assessments?

Are you motivated?  If not, how do you change that?

Engagement for both students and teachers is key.

How do you motivate yourself for the challenge of the daily classroom?  How have you equipped yourself with a mastery of the subject matter so you have the freedom to engage your students and teach?  Share your secrets.

Your comments as the authentic voice in the classroom every day is essential on this topic.  I look forward to reading your posts.

Picture Books and Literacy Celebrations In The Spotlight!

Several posts ago, I talked about using picture books as a powerful way to promote content learning and grow background knowledge. Today, I revisit the world of picture books with a few great new titles AND tips for using picture books in a different way to grow both the background knowledge, vocabulary and oral language of both students AND families. But first, a few thanks to my new friends from SE IRA (after these few paragraphs, you'll find the topic at hand):

I recently presented at the SE Regional Conference of the International Reading Association.Thanks to all my new friends in Louisiana for a great time. You were wonderful hosts! also met a couple of new friends I'd like to quickly share with you before going on to our topic:

I made some great new pals like Nile Stanley and Brett Dillingham, authors of Performance Literacy Through Storytelling, Nile and Brett told terrific tales and poems during the Poetry event one evening. Nile was spunky and joined music and poetry for a delightful experience and I have to say that Brett is a mesmerizing and illustrative storyteller, all at the same time.

I also met Hester Bass, the author of The Secret World of Arthur Anderson. If you don't know about this interesting artist, you'll want to explore a copy of this new book and you can find out even more about him through a website on his museum.

Now, back to our topic: While at the IRA conference, over 50 teachers and literacy advocates sat down with me to address a new use for picture books and I'm sharing a few additional resources here for both those who attended my session AND those who couldn't make it to the conference. 

Think about traditional picture walking and then let's tweak it a little. Great teachers do that with effective strategies all the time, to make it work for their students and families. Picture walking can be a wonderful tool for engaging families and students reluctant to spend time with books, beyond that pre-reading strategy of scanning the pictures before you read the text. Here are a few tips for using picture books to engage those for whom traditional literacy approaches may not be appropriate or comfortable, that is

Modeling is important. Simply show them how to look first at the outside of the book and  talk about what the story inside might be like.

Then take them inside, beginning with the first page and again just talk about what you see in the pictures. Don't worry about the text (if you've chosen wisely books that are colorful, have a strong storyline supported by the pictures, it will be easy).  Ask the child what he sees, it may be different.

Lastly, after the pictures have been viewed from every page, talk about the story as a whole. What happened? What was interesting? Who were the characters, those who were a part of the story? Would you do the same thing they did?

Taking the concept of exploring a book from an "academic lesson" to a positive experience with their child is the focus. Continue to encourage and coach; even let parents (or students) try it with one another so they get the idea. Give the parent "playing the role of the child" permission to act just like a child in their responses.

Wordless books and nearly wordless books (temporarily remove the intimidation of text and concentrate on engaging the family or student in telling a story from the pictures).  Here are a few to try with many different ages of children and many different families:

Changes, Changes by Pat Hutchins
Do You Want to Be My Friend?  By Eric Carle (Harcourt, 1995)
First Snow by Emily Arnold McCully (Harper Row, 1985)
Free Fall by David Wiesner (Harper Trophey, 1991)
Hector Protector by Maurice Sendak
How to Build A Snowman by Scholastic and Jo Moon
Hug by Jez Alborough
I Can't Sleep by Phillippe Dupasquier, U.S. edition: Orchard, 1990
I Like Black and White by Barbara Jean Hicks, Tiger Tails, 2005
Lights Out by Arthur Geisert
My Friend Gorilla by Atsuko Morozumi, Farrar, Straus and Giroux:  London, 1997
Oops by Arthur Geisert, Houghton Mifflin, 2006
Pancakes for Breakfast by Toni DePaola (Voyager, 1990)
School Bus by Donald Crews (Harper Trophy, 1993)
Sidewalk Circus by Paul Fleischmann
Ten Minutes Til Bedtime by Peggy Rathmann
The Red Book by Barbara Lehman
The Secret of Love by Sarah Burg
The Snowman by Raymond Briggs (Dragonfly Books, 1986)
Truck by Donald Crews
Tuesday by David Wiesner
Yes! By Jez Alborough
You Can't Take a Balloon into the Metropolitan Museum by Jacqueline Weitzman
You’re A Good Dog, Carl by Alexandra Day

I'd love to hear how your experiments with these ideas work in your classroom and with your families!  Please post and share with others through your comments!

Revisit the Read Aloud

Do you miss read alouds? In many of today's classrooms, reading aloud with children has been squeezed out or, perhaps even worse, has become a clinical, teacher-directed instructional piece to the point where it's lifeblood and impact have been depleted.

Take a look at an abbreviated list of values for reading aloud with students:

Pure enjoyment of great stories/growing motivation and interest in reading
Taking students to a different level of understanding of the story (Bloom’s
Taxonomy concepts)
Discussion and reinforcement of story elements
Reflecting on the text and searching for multiple meanings
Exploring the elements and format of print and story
Practicing and modeling specific comprehension strategies such as questioning,
predicting, clarifying, etc.
Building and activating background knowledge
Using inference
Understanding of the writing process, use of grammar, point of view,
writer’s voice, word choice and other writing-related skills.
Introducing and reinforcing vocabulary
Reinforcing content area learning
Modeling and Practicing “think-aloud” and visualization
Introducing and/or reinforcing summarizing skills

This list reads like a list of standards. I expect you can find at least a few of your state's embedded here.

So what's the deal? What I recommend to many teachers is to step back. Look at what you do as a reader when you read text. It is an active and interactive process. You draw on all you know about how to figure out those squiggles on the page and the meaning behind them, almost effortlessly. Our students are still learning about those through comprehension strategy instruction, decoding instruction and fluency practice. So open up your brain. Get off the "lesson" channel and just explore, think, wonder, figure out and celebrate great writing.

It doesn't have to take 30 minutes - try 5 or 10 (most picture books can be read in that length of time). Evaluate the "down times" in your day - waiting for students to arrive, during the "morning meeting"/first few minutes of class, before or after lunch, closing out the day. There IS time.

When you take this approach to reading aloud with your students, it will have an incredible impact.

Do you know about the research behind read alouds (there is actually quite a bit)? Dr. Wesley Sharp has written an excellent article summarizing some of it on Educationworld.com. Dr. Maryann Manning's take includes not only references to research but also personal experiences. My favorite principal of all time, Dr. Reba Wadsworth, has great insight into this area as well. One more resource: Katherine Goldner's action research in conjunction with her graduate studies. It so clearly illustrates the value of such "in the classroom" experiments and evaluation.

I'd love to hear from real teachers out there using (or not using) read alouds. What have your experiences been?

Tim Rasinski and The Role of Fluency Instruction

I was thrilled when my copy of IRA's The Reading Teacher came in the mail yesterday. If any of you are members of the International Reading Association, this journal is one of the best in terms of practical ideas.

This month Tim Rasinski (as he does so often) pairs with a classroom teacher. This time the two discuss how reader's theater can create an academic pathway to grow students' fluency. I hope that those of you with experience with reader's theater review this article's abstract as well as the article itself if possible. On the online version, there is even an idea for using Jan Brett's book Hedgie's Surprise in a reader's theater environment from Read Write Think. If you have not used reader's theater in your classroom, now is a great time to try it, especially with the detailed approach outlined. Tim's website also provides a great list of sources for reader's theater scripts. You can even have your students create their own as part of a writer's workshop or groupwriting experience.

One point of the referenced article is particularly important in today's classroom with an increased focus on fluency. The purpose of improving fluency is increased comprehension. I fear that in the past few years, many schools have swung the pendulum too far in the direction of focusing purely on speed and the result, as Tim and Chase talk about in this article, is children that can read like a house afire but have little understanding of what the meaning behind the text is. That can be terribly damaging to their ability to read increasingly complex text as they move forward in their schooling.

I saw this first hand as I conducted a research study on fluency and the influence of family reading on first graders' growing fluency. In a study conducted in schools in GA, AL, TX and TN, about 80% of the students we asked to read a leveled piece which included inference could not identify what the children in the story were doing (building a snowman). Many students immediately upon finishing the one minute reading (timed so we evaluate all the students within a reasonable time) asked, "how many words did I read?". It seemed they had nearly been "programmed" to ask that, even when there was no direct evidence that this is what our assessment was attending to. In fact, I recommended this response to our evaluators who heard that comment: "I wasn't paying any attention to that; I wanted to listen and see if you sounded like you were talking when you were reading and whether you understand what the story was about." Although this was not the focus on the study, it was indeed a wakeup call.

Educators must be very careful as we work with students to improve their fluency that we do not minimize or sacrifice expressiveness, pacing, automaticity in word recognition, and decoding. Worst still, if speed is our primary focus, children get the mistaken idea that fast word calling is reading. That is simply not what makes a good reader. Whether we are working with beginning readers in kindergarten or first grade, or older students still struggling with reading, we must be sure that we are sending the messages that fluency is a tool, that reading is squeezing the juice of meaning out of text. If we do not send that message loud and clear, we may see children benchmark on fluency assessments but their comprehension (tested more frequently that speed of reading and much more important) will suffer.

Certainly we want our young and maturing readers to be fluent, but we also want them to be able to think deeply and widely, analyzing and evaluating what they read, rather than simply regurgitating facts. That takes excellent, engaged teaching, giving some time to fluency, but always going back to the focus and purpose of reading, to gain meaning from that text.

I'd love to hear about your experiences with reader's theater and how you are using it in your classroom. How are you putting fluency in its correct perspective with your students?

Reinventing the Read Aloud

Engaged Interactive Read Aloud is the best way to connect with Facebook savvy, blogging, and texting students because it mirrors that same quick, back and forth interaction, while embedding strong examples of what our brains do when we as mature readers read. I've been developing the technique for years, based on research from great thinkers like John H. Guthrie, Catherine Snow, Marilyn Adams, and S.J. Barrentine.

It takes enthusiasm, familiarity with the text, and a willingness to expose your thinking process to your students but the great news is it works with K-12th graders. And it doesn't take much time but a daily dose of even 5 minutes can make a tremendous difference in the comprehension skills of your students. That will bring a return in higher test scores, stronger reading skills and thinking students.

There's not space here to explain the entire process but here's a taste.

Step 1: Share a purpose for reading this text aloud with students. It doesn't have to be your entire purpose because your focus for them is engagement, hooking them in. However, you do want to set the stage.

Step 2: Have students predict, talk about what they know about the subject matter, prime the pump for the new information they will gain. Make sure that you do this, not in a strictly instructional way, but conversationally. Remember that you want them hungry for read aloud so you have to be a great commercial for it.

Step 3: Read from the text, explaining out loud (and using whiteboards and other tools ready at hand to illustrate) what your brain is doing as you read the first line or two. It might be an explanation of how you decoded a difficult word (make that a joint exercise - "how did I figure that out?"), it might be an illustration of how you took what you already knew to make sense of the author's statement. It might be raising a question that you want to remember as you continue to read. It might be just a wondering, pondering moment in which you think about the meaning behind the text, in many layers.

Get the idea? Remember you have to be as much a teacher as an entertainer as an enthusiastic and passionate deliverer. Try this new version of read aloud in your classroom tomorrow and let me know how it goes!

My in-service trainings this year will be concentrating on this technique which can be taught to not only professional educators but also librarians, paraprofessionals and parents. We all need to be on the literacy team.