Posts filed under 'Literacy'
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
A few months ago we received a request from Jennifer Sanders from Oklahoma State University to donate a couple of Stenhouse books for a literacy project she is leading in Belize. We happily obliged and in March she and a group of undergraduate and graduate students from OSU traveled to Belize City to work with teachers, children, and community members to improve literacy education. Jennifer is now back in the U.S. and she shared some of her experiences with us.
Teachers in Belize show off their copies of Strategies That Work
The two story, concrete school buildings had open-air classrooms with louvered windows for light and the occasional Caribbean breeze to pass through. The classrooms reminded us of classrooms in the U.S. with educational posters, alphabet lines, mathematics conversion charts, and children’s work hung on every available surface. But nearly everything in the Belizean classrooms was hand-made. Hand-made alphabet cards, with both Spanish pronunciations and the English letter names, were posted above the chalk board, and clothes lines were strung across the room to hang and display student work. Since resources were scarce, the teachers were innovative by necessity, using clear packing tape to “laminate” word cards for phonics games or turning cardboard boxes into tables for the reading corner or the drama center.
My eleven education students and I had the privilege of working with teachers in two primary schools in Belize City during spring break, March 12-20. Eight of my students were master’s degree students seeking a reading specialist degree, one was an elementary education undergraduate student, and two were doctoral students the literacy education program at Oklahoma State University. All but the undergraduate student were practicing teachers, and their expertise was invaluable. Our main goal was to provide literacy education training for the Belizean teachers, many of whom had little formal teacher training.
We provided afterschool workshops in comprehension strategies, writing craft lessons, and phonics/word study along with classroom demonstration lessons on these topics that the OSU students taught during the school day. Stenhouse generously donated copies of Strategies that Work, Crafting Writers, and Spelling K-8 for the 15 Belizean teachers and administrators with whom we worked. The professional books were extremely appreciated by the teachers: The day after the writing training session, we saw one teacher run into her classroom, grab her copy of Crafting Writers off her desk, and go out into the hallway to show another teacher something she read in the book. The teachers were hungry for information on effective teaching strategies, and we were excited to see this type of enthusiasm!
We also brought five high quality children’s books for each teacher, purchased with grant money from the International Reading Association, which we used as mentor texts for craft lessons and as read-alouds to teach comprehension strategies from Strategies That Work. All of the teachers, Belizean and American, said that one of the most significant things they learned that week was that they could teach many literacy skills with “just a good book” – that they didn’t need all the teachers’ manuals, pre-packaged curricula, or bells and whistles; just a good book and their knowledge about effective literacy instruction.
The OSU students also led a poetry workshop after school with students in Standard 3-6 (approximately U.S. grades 4-7). The children read a variety of free verse poems, learned about various poetic elements, and wrote poetry of their own. Craft lessons from Crafting Writers, such as her lessons on word choice that demonstrate how to put words on a continuum based on variations in meaning, make for excellent poetry craft lessons. Paper and pencils are luxuries in most Belizean schools (one teacher said, “Paper is like gold.”), so the children were eager for the opportunity to read and write poetry and were even more excited to be able to keep the poetry “books” they made that week. This poetry workshop was the highlight of the OSU students’ day and a very rewarding experience for everyone.
In the end, the literacy training seemed to be a success: the Belizean children enjoyed the lessons and were excited to participate in the reading and writing lessons we modeled; the Belizean teachers seemed to find the strategies and training useful and relevant; and the OSU students gained confidence in their own teaching abilities while learning a few new strategies themselves. All of this teaching and learning was possible because of the collaboration and contributions of the many partners involved: the Peacework nonprofit organization, Stenhouse, Pearson, the International Reading Association, the Belizean Ministry of Education, the Belizean teachers and principals, and Oklahoma State University students, faculty, and administration.
June 17th, 2010
Graphs can be a wonderful tool for teaching students to think visually. And just as we teach students that different words convey different meanings, we can guide students to think about the different relationships and ideas conveyed by, say, a line graph vs. a bar graph or a pie chart. In I See What You Mean: Children at Work with Visual Information, Steve Moline discusses the importance of choosing the right graph as well as effective ways to introduce the graphs to students.
In introducing graphs to students, allow them to design all aspects of the text. This means it is better to hand the students a blank page rather than a sheet of “graph paper”.
1.You can use a graph to present information when you want to compare quantities. Don’t make a blank graph sheet for them “to fill in”. Let the children design the graph.
2.You can work on a graph over different time periods:
- in one session (what we ate yesterday)
- over a week, adding a little each day (weather details)
- over a longer period (“how many of our seedlings grew leaves?”).
3.The graph can be made in different ways:
- on a large sheet of paper, scribed by the teacher during a class discussion in which everyone contributes
- different children add a piece of information each day to the one graph
- pairs or individuals make lists and later they compile them into one graph….
“Which graph should we use?”
Different kinds of graphs — column, line or pie — compose the same information with different (sometimes unintended) meanings. Choosing an inappropriate graphic text to express the data can have the effect of sometimes misleading or confusing the reader.
For example, in one grade 5 classroom, the students were discussing favourite TV programs and commercials as a whole-class activity. The data was scribed on a large sheet of paper by the teacher in the form of a simple bar graph, using labels and counting marks:
The students were then asked to design another kind of graph which recomposed this data. In Warren’s pie graph of this information (Fig. 9) the data has been recomposed as wedges of pie.
Warren has performed some computations to get to this point, since the total number of preferences (30) divided by the degrees of the circle (360) needed to be multiplied by the “score” for each program. A protractor was then used to measure the units of the circle for each wedge of pie. The actual scores out of 30 were also added to the text as labels (such as “Coca Cola 8″); these labels work as a parallel expression in words and figures of the same data expressed graphically in the pie wedges.
On the other hand, Chantal and Bianca chose to recompose the same information as a line graph (Fig. 10).
Whereas the intention of the text is clear, the continuous line that moves across the graph from left to right suggests a continuity through the data that does not exist. There is no actual process or sequence represented by this line. The information would have been presented without this misleading element if the line were replaced by a separate column for each label (as in Fig. 2, page 68), since there is no particular significance in the order in which these labels have been placed from left to right across the text.
Moline also discusses other types of graphs as well as time lines, maps, and tables.
April 6th, 2010
If you are looking for a classroom activity that combines literacy and art or if you are looking for a new tool to help students think deeply about content matter, then The Artist’s Book retreat might be the best summer professional development event for you. Join JoAnn Portalupi, author of Craft Lessons and Nonfiction Craft Lessons in a week-long retreat to explore your artistic side and to take back a creative, fun activity to your students in the fall.
The Artist’s Book: A Retreat by the Sea
JoAnn Portalupi and Shawn Pelech
For the last three summers Shawn Pelech and I have traveled to Lubec, the most down east town in Downeast Maine, for intensive weeks of painting. During these retreats we experience the energy and learning that come from spending unhampered time in a community of like-minded peers. In between sessions of easel painting, we watch for eagles, visit beaches where sea glass still abounds, treat ourselves to homemade sweet rolls from the local bakery, watch the fishing boats come and go. Always, when we return to our easels, we find ourselves renewed by the quiet time spent in the rhythm of this humble town perched on the edge of the sea.
It was into this space that we dreamed of the workshop we are offering July 18 -24, 2010: The Artist’s Book: A Retreat by the Sea. Shawn and I share a love of both painting and teaching and this topic, the Artist’s Book, is the likely marriage of our talents and interests.
What is an Artist’s Book? In this workshop we will view the Artist Book as a creative expression where form and content work together to convey a maker’s intent, understanding that the maker will borrow on selected aspects of the book form.
An Artist Book might be as simple as a commonplace book of literary lines gathered in accordion style fashion or a fictionalized journal depicting the life of an immigrant ancestor compiled with photos and artifacts into a handmade stub book. Or maybe it breaks the bounds of the traditional page-turning book and becomes a sculpted memorial told through images, objects, and design.
An Artist Book may be:
- an object of art
- something made by hand
- a tool for interdisciplinary learning that invites students to think deeply about content area subject matter or
- a way for students to show what they know
If this sounds intriguing, we invite you to let the rhythm of the tides create a place where you can discover this tool for yourself. Workshop participants will explore a variety of print-, paper-, and book-making techniques as they create unique Artist Books of their own. Time will be available for interested participants to reflect together with instructors on how to bring this tool into the classroom.
For more information, please visit our website at www.artinlubec.com
March 31st, 2010
In Synchronizing Success: A Practical Guide to Creating a Comprehensive Literacy System, literacy leader Maren Koepf tells the story of how her elementary school developed and implemented a schoolwide literacy plan. One of the key steps, according to Koepf, is developing a shared voice among teachers. administrators, and parents. In this selection from the book, Maren talks about how you can overcome barriers by keeping the lines of communication continually open.
To activate a comprehensive vision, you need to keep a finger on the pulse of what works and what does not. Here, the component of shared voice becomes a critical measure of the real obstacles along the path. A continuous feedback loop from key role groups helps literacy leaders make decisions that will take hold. Your constant role is to identify the barriers that impede progress and to find ways to remove those barriers for each role group (teachers, students, administrators, parents):
*Barriers to learning
*Barriers to implementation
*Barriers to participation
While listening to teachers express aggravations about the ineffective systems or insufficient supports for implementing commendable practice and recognizing the burdens and constraints placed on administrators to meet the state, district, and staff expectations, I realized certain barriers needed to be removed to liberate a new paradigm.
“I don’t have time to go looking for the books or materials to go with every mini-lesson,” argued Kerry after a lunchtime inservice to share resources for teaching the strategy in question. Kerry had to plan for four reading groups, three word study groups, and math and science, so her exasperation was evident. Kerry is an outstanding teacher; her plea was not about resisting change so much as requesting support. If we expect our teachers to maintain high standards of instruction, then we must provide them with extensive levels of support. In response to Kerry’s expressed frustration, a list of library books suited for demonstrating specific comprehension strategies was generated. Instruction was not limited to these few texts, but the list alleviated Kerry’s pressure with ready materials for manageable planning.
Teachers, parents, and administrators are dedicated to helping students achieve. Sometimes we simply have differing perspectives on how that should be accomplished. Each member of a school organization enters the challenge from a different vantage point, and those points of view need to be articulated. Throughout our process at Moreland Hills, various teachers or parents have either disagreed with decisions or made adamant requests for additional resources or clarifications. Rather than viewing these communications as adversarial, we recognize them as treasure troves, revealing obstacles that need to be addressed.
Allow the differing points of view to provide you with a more inclusive understanding of what needs to be better aligned, supported, or eliminated.
Koepf goes on to discuss two more tips for creating a comprehensive literacy system through the use of shared voice:
*motivating a community of innovators and problem-solvers
*instigating a tipping point
March 9th, 2010
In his new book, Conferring: The Keystone of Reader’s Workshop, Patrick Allen writes:
“Reading should be left somewhat organic. When I confer, I am having the opportunity to talk one-on-one with a reader. About what he is thinking, in the moment… and he is able to beguile me with his thoughts as a reader– holding my attention, interest, and devotion to his coming to know.”
In his most recent podcast (recorded during the CCIRA Conference in Denver), Patrick shared some stories about students coming to know and becoming empowered readers through conferring.
Download Patrick’s podcast (2MB).
Read more about Patrick Allen.
February 18th, 2010
“Many primary teachers understand the important link between drawing and writing,” writes Liz Hale in her book, Crafting Writers, K-6. Drawing is a preparation for writing and instruction of drawing should be taken just as seriously in the primary grades as instruction around writing skills.
In this week’s Quick Tip, Liz takes a look at the skills that make up “good” drawing and eventually, good writing.
Drawing Strategies
It is sometimes useful to teach general drawing strategies before getting into a lot of specific ways to draw. Many of the craft techniques in Table 6.1 reflect more detailed drawing, and some drawings are not as conducive as others to adding smaller details. I’ve seen many primary drawings that have four main ingredients: a house, one big flower, grass, and a sun. Sometimes the sun is in the corner and sometimes it’s in the middle of the picture. There are variations of this (sometimes there’s a bird too), but the important point is that these drawings indicate that students think they always have to show “the whole scene” in a drawing. But when the whole scene is shown, then there is less room for details. This is somewhat similar to upper elementary students telling the “whole story.” They are so busy explaining everything that happened that there is very little time to mention any details.
One day this past year, I was planning to model a lesson on drawing small objects in a first-grade classroom, something the teacher and I had discussed in a previous inquiry meeting. But when I went around the classroom that morning to see the most current entries, I saw all these house-sun-flower pictures. I visualized the lesson in my head and suddenly it didn’t seem to fit with what these first graders were doing. How could I ask them to add in details when there wasn’t really any room on the page to squeeze in anything? I decided to transfer the zoom-in technique that students were doing with writing in the elementary grades to drawing. During the lesson, I modeled my own “zoomin” drawings. First I showed them a drawing of my sister and me at the beach. There was an ocean, a few small stick figures, a huge sky, and a sun in the corner.
I then showed them my zoom-in picture, which depicted the same beach but without a lot of white space. I had zoomed in on just the red buckets and our hands making a sand castle. I pointed out that because I didn’t try to draw the whole scene, I could draw the sand castle and the shells, even the buckets with their white, plastic braided handle, with much more detail.
Zooming in, whether in drawing or writing, works best after an original version has been created that attempts to tell the whole story or show the whole scene. After students get the whole story or the whole picture on paper, it’s easier to then choose and zoom in on one part. This is true even when adults write. One of the first personal narrative entries I wrote in graduate school was about the day my twin sister burned her knee at the beach when we were eight years old. I first wrote an entry that started with arriving at the beach for dinner and ended with rushing to the car to get ice and bandages after she burned her knee. It wasn’t until I went back and wrote about isolated events—feeding bread to seagulls, the moment my sister actually burned her knee—that I was able to write with much more detail and dig underneath to the significance of this memory. Even now when I write about a memory, it is almost as if I have to get the whole story down before I can figure out which parts might have more significance. Any time I write, of course, I might naturally zoom in on certain parts, which is what we want students eventually to do. Zooming in, whether it’s with writing or drawing, ideally is not left only for official revision times. In the beginning, however, it’s important to validate that there has to be some scaffolding before this happens naturally.
Another craft strategy to consider in the primary grades, particularly second grade, is to have students draw pictures in the margin of their notebook entries, rather than complete scenes. This idea came from conversations with several second-grade teachers at the Tobin School in Boston who felt that many of their students were ready to spend writing workshop just writing rather than writing and drawing. They wanted students to build up the writing stamina they would need in third grade, but they also knew how important drawing was for writing. They also weren’t sure it would be wise to make a cold-turkey switch in the middle of the year from drawing to no drawing.
So, rather than decide between “all or nothing,” we showed students how to draw smaller pictures in the margin. Students could still draw pictures and details to support their writing, but there wouldn’t be a lot of time taken up with drawing the whole scene. Figure 6.5 is an example of this technique.
Rosa Verdu, a teacher of a combined class of first- and second-grade English language learners, found the margin drawing technique particularly helpful because of the large range of abilities in her classroom. Her first graders continued drawing larger pictures while she taught the new drawing strategy in several group conferences to her second graders. The students loved it! So did we. Students were writing more, but we had not asked them to let go of drawing either. Drawing in the margin also allowed students to highlight objects and people at different parts of their memoir stories. They did not have to choose just one moment from their stories to capture in their drawings. Because there was no scale in terms of size, it was easy for them to draw objects with more detail. These small drawings in the margins also gave a colorful, inviting tone to the writing and the notebook in general. I’ve since thought about teaching this to some of the older grades as well. If I were a fourth or fifth grader, I would feel even more attached to my writer’s notebook if there were a few colorful pictures in the margins reflecting the content of my stories and memories.
November 10th, 2009
This week’s Quick Tip, an essay by Lesley Mandel Morrow, explores how schools and homes can support each other in creating meaningful literacy experiences for students. Literacy learning doesn’t just take place in schools and teachers need to recognize and celebrate the rich diversity of literacy experiences students have outside of school. This essay appears in Family Literacy Experiences: Creating Reading and Writing Opportunities That Support Classroom Learning by Jennifer Rowsell.
Home and School Working Together
by Lesley M. Morrow
I have the wonderful opportunity to watch literacy development with my two grandchildren, three- year-old James and six-month-old Natalie. My daughter, her husband, and grandparents have read to James and Natalie daily from the time they were born. We look at books, talk about the pictures, and read stories. Books are all around my daughter’s home. There are accessible bookshelves in their rooms. There are books in the kitchen, the bathroom, and play areas. James sees his parents reading frequently—professional literature as well as novels, magazines, and newspapers—and at times they join them with their own books. In addition to books there are magnetic letters and numbers, paper and pencils, markers and crayons. Playing with these and books bring as much joy as playing with dolls and trucks.
Family literacy encompasses the ways family members use literacy at home and in their community. Family literacy occurs naturally during the routines of daily living and helps adults and children “get things done.” Examples include using writing or drawing to share ideas, composing notes or letters to communicate messages, keeping records, making lists, following written directions, or sharing stories and ideas through conversation, reading, and writing.
Although literacy activity is present in one form or another in most families, the particular kinds of events that some families share with children may have a great deal of influence on school success. Conversely, the kinds of literacy practised in classrooms may not be meaningful for some children outside school. Family literacy must be approached to avoid cultural bias, and activities must be supportive rather than intrusive.
Schools need to view families as partners in the development of literacy. Because no two communities are the same, family literacy programs need to be tailored to the needs of the individuals they serve:
• Hold meetings at varied times of the day and days of the week, in accessible locations that are friendly and nonthreatening. Provide transportation if no public transportation is available or if parents do not have a way of getting to meetings.
• Provide child care and refreshments at meetings.
• Work with parents alone, and with family members and children together. There should be sharing times when family members and children work together.
• Provide support groups for families to talk about helping their children and to find out what they want to know.
• Provide families with ideas and materials to use at home, including easy literacy activities that family members consider useful, such as talking and reading about childrearing concerns, about community life problems, etc.
• Include the opportunity for parental participation in school activities during school hours.
Likewise, teachers should help promote parental involvement in children’s education: informing families on a regular basis what is happening in school and how they can help their children; involving families in school activities during the day and providing activities for families to do at home. Families need to feel that they are welcome in the classroom:
• At the beginning of the school year, send home the literacy development goals to be achieved for the grade level you teach, in a format that can be understood by all.
• With each new unit of instruction or literacy concept, send home a letter to let families know what you are studying and what they can do to help.
• Invite families to school for parent conferences and school programs.
• Invite families to help with literacy activities in the classroom, such as reading to children, helping with bookbinding, taking written dictation of stories, and supervising independent activities while teachers work with small groups and individual children.
• Send home activities for families and children to do together.
• Require some feedback from the parents or child about working together.
• Suggest home activities such as writing in journals together, reading together, visiting the library, recording print in the environment, writing notes to each other, cooking together and following recipes, following directions to put together toys or household items, and watching and talking about specific programs on television.
• Participate in homework assignments together.
• Invite families to school to share special skills they may have, to talk about their cultural heritage, hobbies, jobs, etc.
• Send home notes when a child is doing well. Do not send notes only for problems.
• Provide lists of literature for families to share with their children.
• Hold meetings for family members and children about progress and projects.
We need the help of families to support the work done in school to promote literacy. All parents can help in some way, and schools need to be persistent in involving them in the literacy curriculum and finding how they can help in a way that is comfortable for them.
August 18th, 2009
As comfirmation hearings begin for Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court, Robin Turner wonders how educators can better nurture their Latino students. In his book, Greater Expectations: Teaching Academic Literacy to Underrepresented Students, Robin describes how he uses the concept of familia in his classroom to improve his students’ academic performance.
Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court has brought media attention to her identity as a Latina and has generated much more controversy than her rulings. Most people have heard of her assertion that “a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”
The notion that by virtue of her experience as a Latina, her approach to judging will be different has earned her scathing rebuttals from many. Implicit in her statement is the question of whether one’s culture can in fact affect how a person goes about judging, or for that matter, how a person goes about performing just about any role.
It’s a question that I think educators need to ask: does a person’s culture influence the way he/she performs as a student? And if so, how do we educators adjust our practices to accommodate such diversity?
Just about anyone in education knows the dismal college-going statistics of underrepresented students. By 2025, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, one out of four K-12 students in the United States will be Latino. Based on a study by the U.S. Senate Education Committee, if the numbers hold true, then a quarter of our school population will belong to an ethnic group that is four times as likely to drop out of high school as the mainstream.
Now, if I were the manager of a baseball team, and a large group of my players weren’t hitting, I’d talk to my batting coach and make some changes in our practices.
It’s probably time to do that with education.
A recent report by The Tomás Rivera Policy Institute noted that young Latinos relied “on the family for emotional support, to contribute to the well-being of the family, and to stay physically engaged by either living at home or visiting often, participating in family events, and staying in touch.” In my observation, family events often have a much more communal feel to them than similar gatherings from other ethnic groups. Anyone who has witnessed firsthand a quinceañera, as opposed to a “sweet sixteen,” has probably seen the difference.
As a result, a classroom that makes use of community will probably produce more successful students than one that does not. While there are scores of students that still thrive in independent, non-social, learning-in-solitude kinds of classrooms with straight rows, the numbers are thinning by the year. In the age of Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace, the social dimension can’t be overlooked.
In my classroom, we call this realization of being knit together into a community of collgebound students familia, and it’s one of the ways that I have altered my instruction to accommodate students from various cultural backgrounds.
A classroom with familia offers explicit instruction with multiple opportunities for input from both peers and teacher when it comes to writing. Students use class time to speak with each other—not just with the instructor—about their writing. In a class with familia, students regularly interact and assess each other’s writing as they go through the process, focusing on aiding each other rather than competing with each other. Activities like literature circles, writing/reading workshops, Socratic seminars, and pair-shares offer students the opportunity to operate in an environment that accomodates and utilizes cultural strengths rather than lamenting a perceived lack of motivation.
For example, in my earlier years, I struggled with teaching Animal Farm. I would attempt to walk students through the novel, pointing out the various passages that I thought related to today, in an attempt to make the book come alive. After trying to push them through the book, I’d assign a paper—something like, “how do the pigs capture and maintain their power”—and then watch the disliking of the novel intensify. With no invoking of familia, it was a lifeless experience.
This year, after reading Kelly Gallagher’s Readicide, I pulled way back. My freshmen simply made T-charts based on what they noticed as they read. Every day, we started with them sharing their T-charts, in groups and then as a class. Amazingly, nearly all the concepts that I would’ve chosen were noticed by my students and created great teachable moments—the ones prompted by students asking questions that they really want answers to. At the end of the novel, I did have them write what message they see in the book, but we spent a great deal more time discussing what the overall messages were, and then in small writing groups responding to what we were producing. I wrote with them, as a member of their community, and modeled revising strategies throughout the process. Their papers were deeper and more well-developed than in past years.
At the conlcusion of teaching Animal Farm, nearly all my students actually enjoyed the novel and appreciated its content. Let me repeat that, my freshmen actually liked reading Animal Farm. All I did was get out of the way and let the force of community, of familia, do the work.
Sotomayor, in another statement from a speech in 1996 that has been garnering media notice, related that she “found out that my Latina background had created difficulties in my writing that I needed to overcome….My writing was stilted and overly complicated, my grammar and vocabulary skills weak.” That starting point is probably a common one for many of our students. The only question is whether or not the educational institutions can turn from their test-happy ways and really engage the full range of students through familia and other adjustments to pedagogy.
July 13th, 2009
The group of teachers at Riverside Elementary School in Dublin, Ohio wrapped up their book study for the year, but not before sending along reflections from three teachers about how they implemented some of the strategies and ideas. The group will meet again in the fall to continue the discussion and to ask author Ann Marie Corgill some questions about her book, Of Primary Importance. Catch up on what the group discussed earlier.
From McKenzie, 3rd Grade Teacher
Corgill spends a lot of time during her writing workshop studying the genre before getting students started with a writing piece. One of the focus studies for third grade is for students to spend time learning about and writing literary non-fiction.
I tried to spend more time with students observing and examining the genre before we started writing within the genre of literary nonfiction. I began this study in my reading workshop by introducing and reading books that fit this genre. I spent a lot more time choosing mentor texts than I have in the past. After some time reading this genre in my reading workshop, I moved the study into my writing workshop. We looked at many books that fit the genre and began a chart in our writer’s notebook. The chart contained four columns: The title and author, the organization of the book (ie. Question/answer, ABC, etc.), how the author engages the reader, and finally an example of one of the previous two columns. This helped the students focus on how authors present factual information in an interesting way. As students started thinking about their own writing, they were able to identify what they wanted to do in their writing that really caught the readers’ attention while providing factual information.
Next year, I would like to look through our learning targets and identify two or three genres for students to study and write during writing workshop. I am going to try using Corgill’s template for her unit of study curriculum map. In this curriculum map, Corgill identifies what students should have, understand, and be able to do. She has also compiled a list of mentor texts for each unit of study. The last piece of her curriculum map is how she will assess students. Corgill doesn’t just assess one piece of writing from the unit of study. She looks at many writing samples, she documents student writing conferences, and looks at the reflections of her students as they have gone through their writing journey. I found the sample reflections to be very informative when determining each students learning within the unit of study.
From Debbie, Reading Teacher
Although I am not a classroom teacher doing writing workshop, Of Primary Importance helped with greater understanding of how I can further develop and build those important connections between reading and writing. “When students are consistently exposed to different types of literature it increases student’s motivation to write the kinds of books they read” was one quote that meant a lot to me as a reading support teacher. I can continue to encourage and support them to read a variety of genres.
Another area that I found of interest was the section on nonfiction. To avoid copying from the test when writing nonfiction, struggling readers will need additional practice with putting their reading into their own words. I will reflect on more ways that I can help them with this so that they can make the “slow and steady” progress in their writing.
From Laura, 2nd Grade Teacher
After reading the book Of Primary Importance, I have a lot of new ideas for my writing workshop next year, as well as how I am going to connect reading and writing workshop with my required content areas. One great idea I plan to implement next year is the idea of dividing the year into 3 areas of focus, fiction, non-fiction and poetry. I had to rethink how I would incorporate all I need to teach into these areas, and I have a good plan in place to try out next year. After reading the book, I also see the importance of taking time to set up your workshop and not just jump right into it. I will take the first 6-8 weeks to set up and talk about expectations etc. I think I will have a better outcome for my writing workshop if my students know exactly what the next step is in their writing, where everything is, ,and what to do when they finish. It will save me a lot of explaining the same things over and over again!
June 24th, 2009
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