Off to Illinois . . .

I'm off to the Illinois Reading Council's Annual Conference next week (March 17-19) to present (The BIG Picture of Reading and Engaged Interactive Read Aloud).  Good thing I haven't put away my winter coat!  This year's theme is Literacy Outside the Box.  They have even set up a blog you can go to for the latest on the upcoming meeting. 

Do you ever feel like you are "inside a box" as an educator?  Are you looking for ways to improve your teaching that are liberating, freeing, challenging for you and your students? (do you secretly want to be more "outside the box"?)  This will be a great place to get ideas and get energized.   Think BIG! (And by the way, if you know educators or reading advocates who live in Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Kentucky or Wisconsin, be sure to share this blog with them).

Just a few ideas to start you thinking when I'm traveling to Illinois:

1) March 4, 2011 marked an historic day in the world of reading - World Book Night in London - readings, sharings, free book giveaways, book clubs, and more.  You could each have your own World of Reading Day, highlighting the power of books read individually and shared. 

2) March 7, 2011 kicks off the 2011 Tournament of Books, a March Madness-style competition.  Although this is an adult competition, you can find plenty of ideas for creating your own tournament of books at a school or library.  A cool book/journal to keep track of reading,  your own March Madness of books with student recommendations and voting, culminating in a Champion Book of the Year; use of technology to get down to the Sweet Sixteen with online voting, tweeting, etc.; honorable judges from the community, etc.

3) Appalachian State University (in the NC mountains, a former teacher's college) has a great new tradition,. Summer Reading Club.  Why not start your own version by providing the same book to every student in a class or grade as they go home for the summer?  Set up blogs, wikis, a Facebook page, or other media to communicate about the book over the summer and raise the excitement.  Ask students to identify other books that connect to the chosen on and build a reading chain for the summer to choose from.  Involve your media specialist and local public librarian in creating a reading chain and sharing it with students as they interact with libraries (school or public) during the summer months.  Here's an example of a reading chain:

Diary of a Wimpy Kid (out in a movie 3/25/2011) - there is a series of these titles by Jeff Kenny
Dork Diaries by Rachael Russell.
The Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot
Horse Diaries by Meg Cabot

OR


The Lucky Baseball by Suzanne Lieurance
Lucky:  Maris, Mantle and the Best Summer Ever by Wes Tooke
Keeping Score by Linda Sue Park
Boy of Steel by Ray Negron

Make your own!

Remember that choice is a key factor in whether children will become engaged in reading.  If you'd like to learn more, read about the research of Guthrie and Morgan and Fuchs.

I'd love to meet you!

If you are attending the IL Reading Council event, please come join my sessions on March 17 (8-9AM, 9:15-10:15AM, and 1:45-2:45pm (with autographing of Anytime Reading Readiness and Before They Read, for parents and educators of 3-6 year olds respectively immediately following the 10;15AM and 2:45PM sessions).  What I find with my interactive style of presentation is a richness coming from the experienced folks in the audience.  It really adds to the content and keeps things interesting.   I also promise, as always, there will be plenty of resources and a fine, fun time.  After all, anytime we talk about reading should be an enthusiastic event, right?

Post a comment here to let me know your thoughts about any of this posting or just a "hey, see you at the conference"!  Your words are always welcome.

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.

Reading Loud with Today's Children - The Technique of EIR

Did you know that reading aloud has the potential to be the greatest instructional tool in your teacher's toolbox?  It connects to more levels of learning than any other single activity you can do in your classroom today (according to the landmark report, Becoming A Nation of Readers.  And it helps students see how the strategies and ideas they are learning in the skill-based instruction you provide apply to real reading.  Here are just a few of the benefits:

Exposes students to a richer vocabulary than they may encounter in leveled text (they can often understand up to two years higher in their listening vocabulary than in their own reading vocabulary levels.  You can learn more about this in Reading and Vocabulary Development from The Journal of Instructional Psychology)

Stretches and expands the number of words a child knows

Develops a strong concepts of story and how print works

Demonstrates proper grammar and sentence structure and exposes students to more complex levels than they can manage independently in print.

Exposes students to a variety of different types of stories, informational text and rich literature

Reinforces letter sounds and blending sounds into words (essentials in how our language works in print)

Gives opportunities for students to practice prediction and the order or sequence of stories and learn to evaluate together the validity of predictions as one moves through text

Builds background knowledge

Strengthens listening skills and the ability to understand what they hear

Puts a strong model of fluency (and thinking) in front of children

Encourages higher level thinking while freeing the brain to concentrate solely on understanding the story without the "burdens" of fluency and decoding.

Increases attention span

Builds excitement about learning and reading.

I expect you can find even more connections to your standards and those outlined by a joint listing from the International Reading Association and the National Council for Teachers of English in this simple activity.  When you give students a daily diet of read alouds, especially the Engaged Interactive type, you set a class culture, you layer and support the instruction you do at other times in the day and you promote motivation, as essential a component as the sub-skills we teach if we are to create lifelong readers.

"The truth is, if we can't find time for anything else, we should find time for reading aloud," says nationally  board certified Master Reading Teacher, Lisa Frase.   I couldn't agree more!

Now you are ready to try an EIR in your classroom:

Choose 5-10 minutes (write it in your lesson plan or it gets squeezed out)

Preview the text to look for those connections to your standards, your goals for learning in your classroom.  Look for places that are natural opportunities for you to split open your brain to show students what is going on when you:

predict
question - especially "how" and "why" questions
visualize
re-read
self-correct
think, wonder and ponder
pay attention to context clues to understand vocabulary

Take time to explain what you are doing in quick interjections into the storyline.  It may take you a few times to fine-tune the balance between insertions and moving the story along but today's students are used to a back and forth, multi-tasking, quick approach.  EIR fits that to a T.  It may take a bit more practice on your part if you are used to "sit still and listen" read alouds.  Your students can tell you when the fit and balance are correct by their level of engagement.

To learn more about how to select the right books for this type of read aloud, contact me at cathypmiller@comcast.net.

ONE LAST TIP

Remember when you are planning to deliver an EIR, that it's easy for mature readers to rely on the automaticity with which we use these strategies.  However, those readers who are still growing need explicit examples of how to apply those strategies in real reading situations.  Dr. Michael Pressley speaks to that in his chapter in the Handbook of Reading Research (check out particularly the segment on "what comprehension instruction could be).  EIR gives them that!

NOW YOU TRY!

How does this compare to the reading aloud you do in your classroom?  Has the strict scripting of reading programs and tightly scheduled dates given you the mistaken idea that you don't have time for reading aloud with students?  I'd love to hear questions and comments about what is happening in your school.