Posts filed under 'Literacy'
A child asks a question. Do we answer it? If so, how? How long do we wait before we answer it? If not, what do we say? A child successfully accomplishes something—or fails to. We have another opportunity to say something, but what? My intention with this book is to offer a basis for choosing more productive talk—how to make the most of those opportunities children offer us.
Expanding on the ideas in his groundbreaking book Choice Words, Peter Johnston explores the lasting impact that subtle differences in teacher language can have on children and their view of the world in his new book, Opening Minds. You’ll discover how your words can:
- encourage students to view their abilities and traits as dynamic and malleable rather than hopelessly fixed;
- portray change, mistakes, uncertainty, and disagreement as a normal part of learning and accomplishment;
- invite conversations that are focused on problem-solving and learning processes;
- create a classroom culture of feedback that avoids the pitfalls of personal praise and judgment;
- encourage classroom dialogue and collaborative inquiry through engaging questions;
- enhance social imagination and moral development.
Filled with concrete examples, Opening Minds will change the way you think about talk in your classroom and guide you toward more effective interactions with students. It’s available now, and you can preview the entire book online.
January 18th, 2012
We are surrounded by graphics and symbols as well as words. Maps, diagrams, tables, graphs, and charts are superior to text for conveying many ideas, but are often complex and challenging to understand. And visual information is more accessible to emergent readers, English language learners, and visual learners.
For all of these reasons, it’s essential that we explicitly teach kids how visual information works—how to comprehend it and how to communicate with it. Thoroughly revised and expanded, the new edition of I See What You Mean is a practical guide to incorporating visual literacy instruction throughout your curriculum.
Author and visual literacy expert Steve Moline delves into a variety of important visual text types using activities and scores of examples that naturally progress from simple to complex and concrete to abstract. The book helps you:
- understand the vital role of visuals and how they complement basic text in literacy development;
- integrate literacy with math, science and technology, history, health, and social studies;
- motivate students—often boys—who are judged to be nonwriters and nonreaders;
- extend the repertoire of young writers beyond sentences.
You can now pre-order and preview I See What You Mean in its entirety online. Printed copies of the book will start shipping in late November.
October 31st, 2011
What role do classroom conversations play in thinking and learning?
What skills do students need to explore an important question, idea, or topic?
What structures can teachers use to foster quality conversations in language arts, social studies, science, and other subjects?
Tapping their experiences as instructional coaches, Jeff Zwiers and Marie Crawford share a model for fostering effective classroom conversations in their new book, Academic Conversations. Readers will discover how to:
- build critical thinking and academic vocabulary;
- enhance content understandings far beyond what tests require;
- improve students’ oral language skills—essential for academic and career success, but seldom practiced outside of school;
- assess student learning that doesn’t show up in writing or on tests;
- fortify lessons with rich, authentic conversations through subject-specific methods such as history case studies, creative writing projects, and science labs.
Filled with dozens of activities and examples of real dialogue by diverse students, Academic Conversations will make your classroom a place where students independently initiate and sustain conversations that create, shape, and share important ideas. You can now preview the entire book and pre-order online!
October 19th, 2011
We have two items for this week’s Tuesday blog watch roundup:
Joan Brodsky Schur, author of Eyewitness to the Past, was interviewed by eschoolnews.com about how teachers can prepare to discuss 9/11 in their classrooms. “I feel certain that a school with young children is going to do whatever memorializing they’re going to do in a respectful way towards the people who gave their lives, but also respect the needs of young children,” Joan says. Read the full article here and then revisit Joan’s tips for teaching 9/11 from a piece on the Stenhouse blog.
Over at EdWeek, teacher, author, and blogger Donalyn Miller invited Terry Thompson, author of Adventures in Graphica to share his research-based reasons for using graphic novels in the classroom. “The instructional potential in graphic novels is most evident in the way they motivate readers, scaffold meaning, and adapt easily to a variety of learning situations and settings,” writes Terry. Read the full article on Donalyn’s blog, The Book Whisperer.
August 30th, 2011
It’s always helpful to know what fellow teachers/authors/bloggers think of a particular book before your purchase. So here are three recent reviews from the blogosphere to help you decide.
Gresham Brown at Room 241 reviewed Debbie Miller’s book Reading with Meaning. While the book has been around for a few years, Gresham finds that its ideas and inspiration are still very much relevant in every classroom.
Julie D. Ramsay’s new book “Can We Skip Lunch and Keep Writing?” got an enthusiastic thumbs up from Dr. Frank Buck on his blog Get Organized! “Can We Skip Lunch and Keep Writing? contains so much dialogue, I truly felt I was right there in the classroom with the students. I started reading one afternoon and found I was two-thirds of the way through before I could put it down,” he writes.
Franki Sibberson at A Year of Reading says that even though Cris Tovani talks about high school students who struggle with reading in her new book So What Do They Really Know?, “the big issues of assessment, testing, using assessment to inform instruction, student ownership, grading, etc. are all very universal.”
August 10th, 2011
There are scores of business books about speaking, making presentations, and other essential oral communication skills, but when it comes to teaching the art of speaking, resources for the general classroom teacher are lacking. That will soon change with the arrival of Well Spoken: Teaching Speaking to All Students.
Erik Palmer came to teaching after a career in the commodity brokerage business, where oral communication was a crucial part of the job. When he moved to the classroom, he incorporated speaking in all the subjects he taught because he saw the lasting impact it had on students as a real-world skill.
In Well Spoken Erik convincingly argues that developing effective speaking skills is worth more time than it usually receives in classrooms, and concisely sets out a framework for teaching speaking that can be used from elementary to high school.
You and your students will find practical strategies for crafting, delivering, and evaluating speeches, with applications beyond formal presentations—from interviews and discussions to debates and answering questions in class. Each chapter includes a list of ideas for discussion or practice and a concluding chapter provides 17 practical lessons that engage specific skills.
Well Spoken will inspire you to elevate speaking as a critical lifelong skill in your classroom, and give you the confidence and knowledge to do so. Preview the entire book now; the print version starts shipping in early April.
March 21st, 2011
There’s already a lively discussion going on over at the English Companion Ning site about Tim Gillespie’s recent book, Doing Literary Criticism: Helping Students Engage with Challenging Texts. The group is discussing Chapter 1 this week.
In a pre-discussion thread, one of the participants, Rikki, asked Tim how he thinks literary criticism should be introduced to struggling students and whether they would benefit from it. Here is a part of Tim’s response:
As Rikki notes, this doesn’t seem like very welcoming territory for our secondary students, especially those who struggle. However, my experience with my high school classes—mixed-ability groups as well as open-door AP Lit sections—is that if we cut to the heart of various critical approaches, provide a bit of clearly-expressed background knowledge, and offer some supportive activities, many students will feel welcomed to the topic. That is what I tried to do in my classroom and what I have tried to share in this book.
I can’t pretend it’s an easy task, however. It’s not. We are talking about challenging students with challenging texts and ideas. But whenever I got lost in the “lit crit” swamp, my students always forced my attention back to the goal of this journey—to empower them as readers and critical thinkers—and to the essential idea that supports that goal: there are many possible ways to come at texts. With a variety of different-functioning tools in their interpretive kits, readers have a better chance of constructing solid and personally satisfying meanings. So this is our challenge and joy (and occasional headache): how to convey this rich, reader-empowering idea to our students.
Do you have a question about the book? Here is your chance to get a response from Tim and from a community of readers and teachers. And if you don’t have a copy of the book yet, order at www.stenhouse.com and get free shipping by using code ECDLC during checkout.
March 7th, 2011
What does it mean to be “literate” in the 21st Century? Johanna Riddle tries to answer that question in the introduction to her book Engaging the Eye Generation: Visual Literacy Strategies for the K-5 Classroom. We offer you her broader view of literacy in this week’s Quick Tip.
As our culture and communication continue to expand, the world grows ever more connected, and technology increasingly integrates our daily lives, the criteria for becoming a literate person in the twenty-first century also extends beyond traditional boundaries. Consider that the search engine Google produces more than 338,000 responses when prompted for “definition of literacy.”
Although the debate persists about whether it is reasonable to address so many characteristics in our literacy framework, most educators would agree that a literate person today must be able to do more than accurately read and write text.
The North Central Regional Education Laboratory, building on the work of the International ICT Literacy Panel, identified eight essential categories of literacy in today’s knowledge-based society:
• Basic Literacy: The language and mathematics skills needed to function successfully on the job
• Scientific Literacy: The ability to understand scientific concepts and processes to make good personal and social decisions
• Economic Literacy: The ability to identify and analyze the advantages and disadvantages of public policies and economic conditions
• Technological Literacy: The ability to understand and use the tools of technology to reach identified objectives
• Visual Literacy: The ability to “interpret, use, and create visual media in ways that advance thinking, decision making, communication, and learning”
• Information Literacy: The knowledge and skills necessary to find, analyze, and synthesize information using technology
• Multicultural Literacy: The ability to understand and respect differences among cultures
• Global Awareness: The ability to understand the world’s interconnections
New learning standards reflect these broader views, incorporating technology, visual, and communication skills into benchmarks for traditional introduction subject disciplines. An amalgam definition of twenty-first-century literacy might read like this:
reading and writing,
listening and speaking, and
analyzing and communicating
through a range of socially contextual symbols, including
texts and images,
in any combination
relevant to the individual or culture
Rather than merely “new,” today’s literacy is multidimensional, incorporating many different ways of receiving and expressing information and often involving creative collaboration. Visual literacy is central to such communication.
Writer John Debes coined the phrase visual literacy in 1969, but the idea of communicating and interpreting messages through visible actions and representations has been around much longer. Cave dwellers, drawing their images of great hunts, were documenting and archiving stories for future generations. Today’s Mandarin characters are elegant refinements of ancient Chinese pictographs. Byzantine and early Renaissance artists made generous use of symbols and icons to communicate meaning to a largely nonreading public. For example, they usually dressed central figures in particular colors and included a reed or scroll to indicate that the subject was a writer, a scribe, or an educated person. Other symbols were more subtle but still suggestive, and people of the era understood the visual messages portrayed in these “art stories.” When the advent of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century made books accessible to a wider range of the population, the definition of traditional literacy—the ability to read and write at a particular level of competency—took shape and became the generally embraced mission of educators everywhere. As innovation changes the way we understand the world, our definition of literacy transforms to include new ways of interpreting information.
The Age of Information, a term signifying the shift from the primary production of physical goods to more knowledge-based industries, has introduction included many challenges, but it also has unleashed an exciting universe of ideas, opinions, and perspectives. I first accessed the Internet in 1994 while taking a graduate course in educational media. I saw something unfolding that would revolutionize the way we learn and communicate. As an educator, I was fascinated by the richness and potential of this medium. As an art teacher and administrator, I have always been interested in the communicative aspects of visual imagery. Modern media and technology applications have refocused visual literacy. No longer an elective course of fine arts studies, visual imagery, fueled by technology and connectivity, has raced to the front and center of communication.
I also see a pressing need in education to recognize and respond to the world as our children know it. Technological innovations that once seemed exotic extravagances—the Motorola 2900 series cell phone, circa 1988, available at the hefty price of $2,000, comes to mind—now form the landscape of our everyday communications network. Today’s cell phones enable 85 percent of Americans to communicate verbally, textually, and visually on a whim; to connect to the Internet; to download music, videos, or up-to-the- second stock quotes; and to take photographs, organize daily schedules, or access directions to the nearest restaurant. More than 60 percent of America’s teens own their own cell phones, and more than 90 percent have regular access to one (Entner 2008).
“To succeed in the academic world, students must be proficient in both reading and writing,” Mary Burns, Senior Technology Specialist at the Center for Online Professional Education in Newton, Massachusetts, reminds us. “But to navigate in the real world, they must also be visually literate—able to decode, comprehend, and analyze the elements, messages, and values communicated by image” (2006).
Such accessible tools make collaboration and information sharing a way of life. Our students were born into this world, and they explore it fearlessly. Why isn’t this enthusiasm for discovery through technology a part of their daily educational landscape? It was a question that gave me, a teacher with practically zero technology skills, great pause. How could I possibly hope to empower children when I didn’t even understand their world?
Blend that soul searching with a belief in the potential and power of education for all, place it within a solid framework of core disciplines, and you have an unparalleled opportunity to grow a generation of creative, multiply skilled, lifelong learners. How could a teacher possibly pass up that chance?
November 9th, 2010
My students found the emphasis on literary criticism generally fresh, intellectually engaging, and useful. Many of them said they appreciated having a vocabulary of criticism and multiple ways of approaching a text.
Literary criticism has great potential for expanding students’ repertoire of reading strategies and cultivating their independence as critical thinkers. Award-winning high school teacher Tim Gillespie distills many years of continuously refined practices in his new book, Doing Literary Criticism.
Tim sets out three principles: students should be doing (and not just reading) literary criticism; they should be exposed to a variety of critical perspectives; and nothing should be done to smother the pleasure of reading. He then presents a rigorous curriculum featuring eleven critical approaches, each with an overview of benefits and limitations, teaching suggestions, and practical activities. An extensive CD included with the book provides reproducible overviews for students, essay exam questions, a bonus chapter on postmodern criticism, and more.
As policy leaders and standards increasingly call for more critical thinking and challenging texts, literary criticism is poised to fill the role. Doing Literary Criticism will help English teachers make the most of this rewarding subject. Print copies of Doing Literary Criticism are due in mid-October, but you can preview the entire book and pre-order online now!
September 15th, 2010
In Pulling Together: Integrating Inquiry, Assessment and Instruction in English Classrooms, Leyton Schnellert and his coauthors present a comprehensive answer to the current big ideas in teaching: formative assessment, backward design, inquiry learning, strategic teaching, and metacognition. In this edition of Questions & Authors, Leyton talks about the origins and inspiration for Pulling Together, and how he and his colleagues find connections between English language arts and inclusive education.
Pulling Together emerged through collaboration with my colleagues Krista Ediger, Mehjabeen Datoo, and Joanne Panas. Over the last few years, we have met about once a month to build text sets, redesign lessons, explore strategy instruction and wrestle with assessment. However, somewhere along the way, we began to realize that the various approaches that we were pulling apart and trying to make our own actually supported one another. Our inquiry then became something more satisfying and even elegant – an attempt to pull various practices together.
Pulling together seems to be a theme for me; I have spent much of my teaching career finding connections between my two passions: English language arts and inclusive education. For me they go hand in hand, classroom communities with diverse student populations open up opportunities to explore multiple perspectives and literacies from the inside out. Krista, Mehjabeen, Joanne and I use inquiry as a planning and teaching framework because inquiry invites students to engage with ideas and experiences by asking questions and developing and sharing their own perspectives. Planning from our knowledge of students – what they know and believe, looking at their strengths, interests and stretches – helps us to develop culturally relevant curriculum. For us, ongoing formative assessment plays a big part in inquiry-oriented classrooms.
Through teaching English language arts and co-teaching with peers (in my role as a resource teacher), I have learned to invite students to tell their stories and develop their own insights. Instead of looking for right answers, I ask students to develop an idea and/or interpretation and to explain their understanding using evidence. When there is an aspect of oral or written language that we all want to develop – a common outcome – I invite students to generate criteria with me. Even if criteria or rubrics exist, I prefer to involve the students in figuring out what our shared criteria might be and invite them to find positive examples of these criteria in their own and others’ writing and thinking. In my teaching I work from a belief that all students bring experience and skill – I don’t expect all students to at the same skill or knowledge level, but what I do communicate is that each of them needs to move from where they are as a learner to a deeper, more accomplished place. In my planning and teaching, I’m asking students to pull together their background knowledge, the texts they read and create, the criteria we develop together and the mini-lessons I teach to help them get closer to those criteria. Together my students and I make curriculum together. The learning outcomes or standards are part of this curriculum, but so are we.
Inquiry learning builds enduring understandings and thinking strategies. In Pulling Together we show how we have combined inquiry, formative and summative assessment, and strategic teaching. Within inquiry units we find that we can both (1) help students to develop deep, conceptual understanding and (2) explicitly build the thinking skills they need to help them develop these understandings. In each unit we focus on a few key thinking, reading, and writing skills. This is how we develop thoughtful readers and writers, who choose to read and write beyond our classrooms.
To help us in this process we:
1. Start with the end in mind. We look at the learning outcomes and/or or standards to determine what we want students to know and do in a unit. We also think about what themes and/or aspects of the human experience we can students to explore. Then we group these into one or two big ideas. By the end of the unit, we want students to:
- link examples and ideas across texts and explain how they are related to the human experience
- explain how technology shapes the way we live our lives
- use more than one medium to analyze and share a personal example of technology impacting how they communicate and behave
2. Recast big ideas as questions that can be explored through inquiry. Joanne, Krista, Mehjabeen and I were able to shape an entire three month unit around the questions:
How does communications technology shape our humanity?
How do we communicate with each other?
How does technology impact the way we communicate?
How does the way we communicate change the way we behave?
How does communications technology humanize and/or dehumanize us?
3. Plan one or two performance assessments for the unit. These allow students to show the understandings and skills they have developed. For this unit students:
- wrote a personal essay on the topic how communications technology impacts them personally
- created a video, blog or broadcast (ie podcast) on how communications technology affects humanity/ society/other groups
- reflected on their learning in their metacognition journals
4. Engage in lots of formative assessment especially descriptive feedback and student self-assessment. These activities and assessments are not usually for marks, but rather to help students practice working with ideas and approaches, getting feedback along the way. In this unit:
-students co-created a personal essay, guided by the teacher, on the topic “how does YouTube affect behavior?”
-they created a communications technology timeline
-They participated in quickwrites, a class blog, group discussions, information circles, and read and discussed articles on the impact of technologies
-wrote a reflection on their learning in their metacognition journals
5. Teach mini-lessons use gradual release of responsibility for key knowledge and skills.
- Students saw a teacher model ways to brainstorm ideas, start essays, create a flow for their ideas and back up their ideas with examples.
- The strategies and approaches used and practiced along the way were the same ones they used in the performance assessments.
- By the end of the unit everyone had a change to see examples and practice with feedback related to criteria.
- All students had more success as they got personalized feedback related to shared criteria.
For Mehjabeen, Krista, Joanne and I, we are working to help students develop foundational skills for working with texts, ideas, each other and beyond the classroom. What is key for us is that it is the thinking skills and communication approaches that allow students to deeply engage with and understand complex ideas and information being taught. This is a principle of inclusion – all students have a right to access ideas and techniques that can help them to develop themselves and engage with others and the world.
It is exciting for us is to hear and read how students’ thinking and understandings are developing. By spending this extended time developing thinking skills, we have found that our students are able to grasp increasingly complex ideas and synthesize information and concepts with insight and appreciation. Using inquiry and performance assessment has also helped students to see the unique perspectives of their peers and any number of ways that these insights can be represented and communicated. This provides us with a deep satisfaction as teachers; pulling together inquiry, formative and summative assessment, and strategic teaching is helping our students to develop the ability and sensitivity to appreciate diversity and difference.
July 29th, 2010
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