Category Archives: common core curriculum

On Reading Opening Minds by Peter Johnston

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opening mindsI’m just now finishing Peter Johnston’s wonderful book, Opening Minds. I loved his earlier book, Choice Words, and this one is a great read, too.

School will start in a couple of weeks. Each summer I find myself reading something nourishing for the soul, not a “how-to” book on teaching technique, but something that inspires, that makes me stop, get that vacant stare in my eyes, and dream. Johnston’s book does that for me.

I love his clear description of learning mindsets — fixed v. process or growth — that emerges from Carol Dweck’s work, and his emphasis on the language of inquiry and the place of uncertainty and tentativeness in learning. But what I want to think about now is how his ideas about a learning community (his chapter on thinking and working together) might help provide a context for some of the important Common Core related work we will need to do.

I’m moving from third to fourth grade next year. As I’ve been studying the fourth grade ELA Common Core, I notice that much of what it seems to be about is using evidence to begin to make arguments about ideas. For instance, here’s some standards from the Reading Literature and Informational Text sections:

Standard 1: Refer to details and examples…when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences.
Standard 2: Determine a theme (main idea) and explain how it is supported by key details…summarize…
Standard 3: Describe/explain…drawing on specific details/information in the text…

Note the heavy emphasis on providing evidence to understand a text, or justify a point of view or an interpretation. This is yet another step towards more formal argumentation than was present in the third grade standards.

A look at the upcoming Smarter Balanced (SB) assessments also shows that finding evidence in texts will be “tested” when Iowa (likely) adopts the SB assessment within the next two years.

Setting aside for now whether these SB assessments really do ask students to think, come up with their own ideas, and engage in meaningful intellectual work, Johnston’s book helps me understand that the real reason students might be interested in reading closely, citing evidence, and thinking deeply about texts is not because I (or the State of Iowa) tell them they have to, but because when learners are engaged in real intellectual work they become intrinsically interested in what others are thinking. One cites evidence because one cares to communicate an idea worth communicating. Johnston notes research that shows that when students are engaged in a learning community that values conversation and ideas, they are much more likely to cite evidence (and more of it), to entertain the possibility of multiple interpretations, and think more flexibly and synthetically than when learning is more about individual performance and skills. Johnston notes:

“Children who have learned to think together in dialogic groups learn to take each other seriously. Students learn to listen to and find each other interesting, and these become the properties of the learning community.”

So, this upcoming year I can meet the Common Core Standards by teaching the kids some skills like how to generate ideas, cite evidence, and offer interpretations, OR, as Johnston seems to argue, I can concentrate my energies on creating a learning community where kids do those sorts of things because they are interested in the ideas of fellow humans.

pathway to follow I know which pathway I want to follow! For now, I’ll have to trust that when the tests come ’round the mountain riding six white horses when they come, the kids will be ready because they’ve cared enough about ideas to know why they cite evidence in the first place…

In Search of Explanations: A “Close Reading” in Science Class

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With the Common Core Standards (CCS), educators are thinking a lot about “close readings.” Close readings often are second or third readings designed to deeply understand ideas and meanings, while analyzing how those meanings are conveyed. Close reading is A LOT of work; they require A LOT of motivation. How’s a teacher supposed to DO THAT? And with third graders?

In a recent post, “Finding time for close readings,” Burkins and Yaris urged teachers to see close readings as a thinking activity that we routinely do, not just something we plan to teach at a single moment.

To us, close reading is reader action which involves the synthesis of a host of comprehension strategies, hence it is relevant in any teaching context. Because close reading is performed by the reader, it can be practiced within the context of all teaching structures. When we read aloud, we can reread and ask students to cite evidence and elaborate their thinking in ways that lead to new ideas about text. When students work with texts during guided reading, we can ask questions or lead discussions that require that students return to the story to carefully reread in ways that help them notice details that they didn’t see the first time around.

I think I can share an example of this kind of thinking about close readings.

Our science unit of study has been water and its properties. Last week, I wanted the students to get a sense of the concept of diffusion as a way for them to understand the concept of molecules. Molecules are difficult for third graders to really understand, and since diffusion is difficult to imagine without understanding molecules, I thought it might be good to combine a simple demonstration with a close reading to help them understand how molecules help liquids “mix themselves.”

To do this, I stole a demonstration idea from Walter Wick’s book, A Drop of Water. Rather than have the students read the book and look at the pictures in it, I simply reversed the order of events. To start, we dropped food coloring into a cup of clear water and took some time lapse pictures with our IPEVO webcam. Here are the images we got.

 

A few days later we clicked through the images forward and backwards several times (a close reading of images!), observed the changes, and tried to describe what happened. The kids came up with ideas like these:

  • At first the green kind of burst like fireworks.
  • The green spread out all over the cup.
  • The green seemed to drop down from the dark green spot on top and up from the dark green spot on the bottom.
  • The green looked almost like ribbons sometimes.

I introduced them to two word sets — concentrated/concentration and diffuse/diffusion — to help them explain what happened. “Spread out” became diffused. “Dark green” became concentrated. I was really pleased with how well this worked. Having the vocabulary emerge from their need to describe helped us understand why scientists need a specialized vocabulary: it helps them be more accurate and precise!

Then we asked questions that seemed to demand explanations. Here are some samples.

  • How did the green diffuse through the whole glass so evenly?
  • Why did some concentrated green stay on top?
  • Why did the green look like fireworks when it first dropped?
  • Why did some concentrated green sink to the bottom?

Finally, I told them we were going to read a piece of informational text that might help us answer some of our questions. This is what scientists do when they observe something that is puzzling; they go try to find out if anyone else has thought about those questions, too.

We read this short piece from Walter Wick’s book out loud, pencils and highlighters in hand to find the parts that might help us answer our questions.

From, Walter Wick, (1997). A Drop of Water.

 

I saw some puzzled eyes when we reached the word “molecules” (I had explained what molecules were in a couple of previous lessons, but our knowledge was not yet complete or sophisticated.) Then several children let out a collective “OHHH!” when we reached the third paragraph. Highlighters came out and pencils scratched. When we reached the end, I asked the children if they thought they knew the answer to any of their questions now. Of course, they could see that this helped them answer their question: “How did the green diffuse through the whole glass so evenly.”

I asked the children if they could turn their papers over and explain the answer to another student. That was fun to watch. They struggled and struggled with forming an adequate explanation. Many wanted to turn their papers back over because they forgot many of the details. Talking revealed to them the holes they had in their explanations.

Finally, I told them that they had experienced something a lot of readers experience, myself included; that is, when they find the answer to a question, they often experience an “Ah-ha!” and a sense of satisfaction. But, sometimes a reader has to reach another level, when you have to actually use what you know, and this requires careful reading and thinking. I told them we were going to re-read the part that would help us develop a more complete idea of diffusion so they could explain it to others. I mentioned that this is something that I do all the time when I’m trying to figure out how to explain something to them, or when I want to really learn something well.

We re-read the last paragraph very slowly, pausing at each sentence, sometimes even at each phrase, in order to check to see if we could explain what was happening. To help visualize what was happening on the molecular level, we acted out being molecules. We imagined how we would act if we added heat, took away heat, if we added green food coloring what would happen to that food coloring. It took us about 20 minutes to read and process the text, including reading the entire piece once and the third paragraph one additional time very slowly.

Based on their second explanation attempt, the children came away with a better understanding of how molecules act in a liquid, how diffusion happens, and why diffusion wouldn’t happen very quickly in a solid. In the process, they speculated on how evaporation occurs (“Maybe the molecules bang against each other so hard that some get knocked out of the liquid?”) and even got a rudimentary understanding of electrostatic bonding in molecules (“Water molecules act sort of like magnets. Sometimes they attract each other and sometimes they push each other away.”)

Are we all solid with these concepts? Nope. And I’m sure their understanding will “decay” quickly if we don’t talk about molecules again soon. But this close reading of images and text gave us a solid foundation from which to build.

Not bad for a days’ work. And Burkins and Yaris are right, “close readings” can happen anywhere and with anything.

Re-reading to discover author choices — more notes on transitional readers

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In a couple earlier posts I tracked how some third grade transitional readers interacted with the text of a poem by Ted Kooser and with an early chapter book called The Blue Ghost. I’ve been strongly influenced by Vicki Vinton’s suggestion that teachers teach the reader, not the text. I take that to mean we need to listen closely to what students are doing with text and to plan our teaching to address the needs of the students, rather than offer students explicit questions designed to direct their attention to specific parts of the text. (For more on this, check out Vinton’s recent post on grouping.) My primary goal is to help readers build their own capacity to create meaning from texts so they will be able to make meaning on their own, not rely on me to lead them toward the meaning in texts through ever more direct questions.

frameWhile this framing seems like a subtle difference, since understanding is the result of both methods (hopefully!), the difference has immense implications for how readers engage with texts.

I’m writing to report what happened as a small reading group — Cal and Alice — finished an early chapter book.

Earlier, I reported that these two readers were having difficulty determining what information was important in the text. I could see this because they picked out details, sometimes simply from an illustration, and wove a “logical” story from that information without much regard to information they had read already. Often the story they told was stitched to the written story by a single observation (the face of two characters as shown in an illustration), or a single detail. To compound this difficulty, the story they told themselves became more real than the written story.

Through observing and questioning the children, I came to believe they were not holding a coherent story together if it required using several details from the written text to create that rough draft understanding. These students were noticing details in abundance, but were not able to assign importance to them, or to weave them together into a more coherent whole. As a result, these two readers abandoned details that might have been important to their developing draft. Their understanding often included only a) the most recent details without regard to others they had noticed earlier; or b) a particularly compelling detail (in this case illustrations); or c) details that fit the “logical” story they told themselves, forgetting about the textual details that didn’t fit that story.

How to move beyond that?

One suggestion offered by Vinton was to continue the story to the end (or until it was clear what was happening) and then go back and re-read the text to find clues the author planted early in the story, clues that we didn’t think were important when we read the first time. By doing this, the readers would be able to develop two things: 1) an understanding that authors plant layers of details throughout the story to help their reader build meaning, and that these layers are often redundant; and 2) by seeing how authors do this, these readers would develop their abilities to do this kind of detail sorting on their own. If the readers came to see how authors built a story, then perhaps they would be able to hold a larger number of details in mind as they created their draft understanding.

We finished the story The Blue Ghost and came to understand that Liz was, as was alluded to throughout the story, a “guardian angel” because of her willingness to help Elizabeth (and her grandmother); we saw the importance of the past and grandmother’s place in it; and how sometimes the kind things we do have a lasting importance even though we don’t realize it at the time.

I told the kids that I wanted us to re-read the first chapter of the book again. Now that we knew more about the story, I wanted them to notice details, clues, or hints the author might have been giving us in that first chapter so we might see what we didn’t recognize earlier.

I was fascinated to see how the kids were both completely engaged in this activity and picked out key details that they had missed in their first reading.

Blue Ghost1

First, they noticed the way the author made the distinction between the ghost calling out Elizabeth and the main character’s name, Liz. When they first read that, they didn’t know what to make of it. They realized that Liz was short for Elizabeth, but they didn’t know that it might be an important clue. Reading backwards, they realized that this was a much bigger clue about what was going to happen, and who Liz would meet as the story went along.

Second, they noticed all the space the author spent on the ghost hovering over the trunk, the way the ghost circled the trunk and sank down in front of it. When we first read this, the kids didn’t notice these details at all. They were focused on the ghost, trying to figure out if she was someone to be scared of or not. That’s understandable, but more experienced readers would also be paying attention to the way the author had the ghost hover over the trunk. During their re-reading, the kids saw how much time the author spent on the trunk. They knew the trunk contained Elizabeth’s mother’s Booke of Remedies, which would be crucial to the story later on. The kids were surprised that they hadn’t noticed that before, but clearly saw how the author was signalling something important.

blue ghost2

Next, the kids noticed details that placed the ghost in the distant past. Words like “the long, old-fashioned dress”, and “hair pulled back in a bun” indicated that the ghost was from a time long ago. Early in the story, the kids had focused on the illustration to the right, noticing the similarity in the faces between Liz and the ghost. This was an important detail, since the ghost was a long-distant relative of Liz’s. However, the children had earlier created a “logical” story about how the ghost was Liz’s mother, who had not appeared in the story yet. They carried this confusion into the story quite a ways, despite other evidence that Liz’s mother was not dead, just not present.

As they looked back, the kids could see more clearly how the author was showing them that the ghost was from a time long, long ago. She could not be Liz’s mother.

blue ghost3

Finally, on the re-reading the children noticed the words toward the end of the chapter:

“‘Elizabeth,’ she whispered again. She sounded sad.” and also,

“She motioned, as if for Liz to follow.” and, finally,

“Her fingers touched the place where the figure had disappeared. There was only wall. Solid wall.”

While re-reading, the children could see that these details contained many clues about what we would find out later in the story. The sadness, the motioning to follow, the solid wall all indicted some of the direction the story would take as it unfolded.

What did we learn from this activity? I had told them earlier, of course, that the beginning of a story was important, but by re-reading they were able to see for themselves how densely packed the beginning was with details that were important later in the story. Re-reading also helped the children see how an author can convey meaning through details. Crucially, the children were able to recognize and verbalize how the author was able to plant these details from the very beginning of the story. Thus, readers can reliably keep track of details like this and wonder about them over the course of a story. They can go back and build inferences from not just one detail, but from many. As we read more together, I’ll be asking them to put together pieces from more than one place in the story when they make inferences.

I’m eager to think and write more about this journey.

Thanks for reading! If you’ve gotten this far, you are very patient, indeed!

Sorting through details: Notes on a couple transitional readers

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Here’s a story from inside the dog.

In a recent post I began to explore where meaning broke down during a lesson on figurative language, meaning-making, and poetry. I discovered that some students were not entering the text at a very deep level; they sought literal meaning out of the words in Ted Kooser’s poem, A Child Frightened by a Thunderstorm. This observation caused me to regroup some of my students and focus my instruction and observation on how some kids were making meaning. For one group, I chose an easier chapter book, The Blue Ghost as a common text for us to read. I chose it because the words of the The Blue Ghost are not too difficult to read, and the text is laid out on the page in an easier format for these transitional readers. However, I knew that the plot offered some trouble areas — time travel by going through a wall, the story of a grandmother who is trying to hold onto the past, and an evolving plot that reveals bits and pieces of the past to the main character as she moves through the story.

blue ghostWe started out by looking at the cover of the book, which shows a ghostly blue figure floating above a wooden floor, and the title, The Blue Ghost. Obviously, this illustration and title got the kids wondering about this figure: Who was it? Was it a real ghost? Where was it? How did she die?

The two children in this very small group — I’ll call them Cal and Alice — opened the book and began to read. They took note of the main character (Liz), the setting (her grandmother’s house), and began to puzzle out what was happening. As we read, I tried to stay back a bit, asking questions like this: What are you noticing? What are you thinking about? What makes you think that? I took notes on what they said by filling in a Details – Thoughts – Wonders chart.

Blue ghost p1Blue ghost p2

Away from the support of more experienced classmates, Cal and Alice paid close attention to the arrival of the ghost, but did not notice several clues — her arrival over an old chest, her exit through a wall that had been added to separate the room from the rest of the house — as well as an overall “oldness” to the description of the room that Liz was in. I’m positive that the more experienced readers in the classroom would have noticed these descriptions, and connected them to the old-timey clothes the ghost was wearing. They would have begun to form an draft of the meaning (in Vinton and Barnhouse’s language) that included the long-distant past and something that must have happened in the house.

Instead, these readers focused on the faces in the pictures they were offered. In the picture above, Cal noticed that the ghost looked like the girl and speculated that the ghost was the girl’s dead mother. Alice wasn’t so sure about this interpretation, but then began to agree with Cal as he pointed out how the two appeared to be related. I stepped in and mentioned that we need to look at both the text and the picture to verify that the ghost might be the mom. This picture alone might be some evidence; authors usually give readers a lot of evidence or clues. But as in the poem, the draft understanding of this being the girl’s mother was too enticing to drop. When I asked what made him think that, Cal replied: “Liz is by herself. Where is her mother? Maybe her mother is dead and now she wants to warn Liz about something, or see her again.” I brought up the clothes looking old-timey and that didn’t connect with what her mother might wear. But the evidence I offered wasn’t very convincing and my point wasn’t to hammer home an interpretation, but to show how evidence is used. Cal responded that maybe this is just what ghosts wear, and why would the illustrator make the girl and the ghost look so much alike anyway?

The second chapter dropped the ghost and picked up the grandmother, with an enticing title, “Connections.” The author mentioned that Liz was helping the grandmother move out of her house. Also, we learned that Liz’s mother had asked her to join grandmother, which should have been a clue that she was not the ghost. Alice picked up on this and thought that detail proved the ghost wasn’t Liz’s mother. Cal stuck to his original interpretation by bringing in a ‘logical’ (not textual) argument: “Maybe Liz’s mother died after she told her to go to the house and now she is visiting Liz.” We let that sit for awhile and read on.

As we read, we got more clues about the age of the house, but the children had a difficult time putting this new information — about grandmother and the importance of the long-in-the-family house to grandmother — together with the ghost. As Alice said: “Why did the author introduce the ghost and then we haven’t heard anything else about it since the first chapter?” Their attention started to flag a bit in the second chapter as they expected to learn more about the ghost and, instead, learned only about Liz’s grandmother and her love for a house that was in the family for many generations.

That’s as far as we’ve gotten in the story. Standardized testing (don’t get me started!) and some snow days have derailed our journey. It will take a bit to get us back on the track, if we can get our mojo back.

But I do have some preliminary observations about what has happened.

1. Putting more than one or two pieces of evidence together is difficult for these two students. I’m going to need to work on helping them use more evidence to build a draft understanding. It seems the draft they were creating got built out of a small amount of evidence (for example, the way the faces look in an illustration) and additional evidence was based on “logical thinking”, rather than the text. We’re going to have to practice using textual evidence.

2. I must try using these explicit words — rough draft understanding of the story — so they can see that we don’t have to fit all new details into an already existing understanding. We can shift our understanding as we get new information. While we have talked a lot about this in large group, I can see that was especially difficult for Cal to internalize, as he had a very difficult time letting go of the mother-as-ghost draft.

3. The kids missed some crucial details about setting and costume that might have helped them get a better sense of what was happening. They read the details about the house and room, even noted some of them, but weren’t able to use them in their early draft understanding of the story. They didn’t know how to assign importance to them. Is this just experience? What can I do to help them see the importance of setting, especially early in the story?

4. I can see why Cal and Alice abandon early chapter books so readily. The second chapter’s introduction of a new character — grandmother — threw them. They experienced this chapter as a movement away from the real story, the story about the ghost, rather than as crucial background to the story. More experienced readers would have held their early understanding of the ghost next to the new information about grandmother for longer into the book. They would have produced a more nuanced and observant draft of what was happening. Without being able to do that, the second chapter became less relevant, less interesting. If I wouldn’t have been reading with them, they probably would have abandoned the story at that point.

So, I’m hoping to get back to The Blue Ghost after tests are over. What a huge hole these blow in our instructional day/week/year. Whew.

As usual, if you haven’t been reading Vicki Vinton’s blog, especially her last two entries that explore in depth conversations with two readers in reading workshop, please check them out. You’ll also be able to see how they have influenced my thinking, too. Many thanks to her for that work!

I wish we’d ask ourselves some questions

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Sam Chaltain (on shopping for a school for his 3-year old child) suggests you ask these questions and listen to the response:

  1. What is your definition of success — and how do you know if you’re reaching it?
  2. What aspect of your school are you most proud of — and where do you need the most work?
  3. What’s the general profile of your faculty — and how long do they stay?

Each of these questions is designed to drill down on how well a school understands what it does — and why it does it. Surprisingly, many schools haven’t thought about this as much as they should. They may have some generalized notion of success in terms of test scores or general statements about a child’s development. They are likely to know what they do well. They have to know how many of their teachers come and go each year. But if they can’t speak really clearly and specifically about what success will look like for your child — and do so in ways that go beyond just academics  – and if they can’t identify quickly where they still need work (because all schools, even the best ones, have room for improvement), you have good reason to wonder if they really have a plan worth investing in.

We’re coming up to another District Leadership Team meeting. Right now, I know we can’t answer these questions on anything but the individual level.

I struggle with how to be an effective agent of change without being too obnoxious. When does raising questions cross the line? Where IS the line when it comes to questions? All I want is for us to talk, to get some vision. We (and I) blunder on.

What I’d like to see

I hate being just a complainer. Here’s what I wish would happen. I’ll have to see whether I can make it so.

  • Create an ongoing Google Groups conversation about the above questions. As a reference point, remind ourselves that our goals should create innovative curriculum that highlights the Universal Constructs as outlined by the State of IA Common Core, and instructional practice in a manner that is consistent with the Characteristics of Effective Instruction (also in the CC.) A forum like this will aid in transparency and provide a place for people to lodge their observations (even complaints) so we can move on from them toward next steps, while keeping us focused during our face-to-face time.
  • From this discussion,
    • develop a rough draft understanding of what our goal is for learners
    • gather data (anecdotal or otherwise) and generate a rough draft understanding of where we are moving forward and where we are stuck
  • Explore WHY we are stuck in particular areas. This need not be in-depth at this stage, just some working assumptions / thoughts.
  • List making. Generate
    • a small set of high impact “stuck areas” to devote a lot of effort towards.
    • areas / initiatives to highlight and study to understand their effectiveness.
    • an ongoing “coalition of the willing” who can pursue their willingness in both an online and face-to-face way
  • Gather data for all of the above. Engage in transparent conversations that develop, and communicate a plan. Areas for new learning could be highlighted, resources for that new learning could be gathered and housed (or linked) online.
  • Professional learning communities could be formed around these areas using some of those sources as seeds. Key would be a way for the PLCs to share out what they have learned to colleagues and the community (!). Transparency is the best form of accountability!
  • Revisit the whole process continually.

Why is this difficult to imagine? I mean, I’m just a third grade teacher and I came up with this list in a couple of minutes. This is just good teaching.

So…now…do I send this link on to the District Leadership Team?

UPDATE: I won’t send it out. As George in the comments below said, a better way to proceed would be to build credibility through linking to a larger conversation. However, the practice of writing has helped me think through some of what I think we are lacking. In particular, we need to build a culture of learning. Administrators complain about teachers not being curious or learners or innovative thinkers. Some even say lazy. But where is the curiosity, learning, and innovative thinking from the other side? I’m ready for the conversation. Where is it? Just sayin’.

Deep learning — The importance of time

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After reading about it in a blog post, I’ve been studying the National Research Council and the National Academies of Sciences report, Education for Life and Work: Developing Transferable Knowledge and Skills in the 21st Century. The authors argue for educators to focus on “deeper learning”, by which they mean learning that transfers knowledge from one domain into another. This requires careful attention to not just the content knowledge of learning, but also cognitive competence (problem-solving, analysis, interpretation), and competence in the intrapersonal (grit, work ethic, integrity) and the interpersonal (collaboration, empathy, communication) realms as well.

Three areas for deep learningFor deeper learning to occur, teachers “should use modeling and feedback techniques that highlight the processes of thinking rather than focusing exclusively on the products of thinking.” So, we teachers should strive for not just knowledge transmission, but developing the student as a thinker. Furthermore, this process isn’t easy. The authors go on:

“sustained instruction and effort are necessary to develop expertise in problem solving and metacognition; there is no simple way to achieve competence without time, effort, motivation, and informative feedback.” (p.10)

Theirs is a holistic model that requires time, sustained effort from learners, and good teaching. It’s also where, I’m hoping, the CCSS are pointing us, if we are able to take control of them from the powers that be.

Which brings me back to some questions I have about the whole reading basal issue that I’ve been obsessing about. Three pop into my mind immediately:

1. Will a basal series help us carve out sufficient time to think and do?
2. Will a basal series help students develop the habits of good learners?
3. Will a basal series help teachers develop the skills they need to teach deep learning?

This is a lot to think about so I’m going to break this into (at least!) three posts.

Here goes with the first question.

Will a basal series help carve out time to think and do?
The National Academies report argued that there is no way to develop deep learning without “time, effort, and motivation…” The cognitive, intra- and interpersonal competencies they’ve outlined take a lifetime to learn. That’s a lot of practice!

I’ve looked at a couple of reading basal series. Wow. They are jam-packed with skill-based instruction. Each day has way more phonics, grammar, writing, and reading lessons than a person could possibly push kids through in a day, unless you were doing just that, pushing kids through them. When you push people through lessons, where can the deep learning happen? How can you explore the same idea in different contexts? Create time for play that engages learners and piques their interest?

The authors of the National Academies study suggest that we need to focus on a few key ideas explored very, very deeply. Sure, with a reading basal we can point to the date and time that we “covered” the material, maybe even when we “assessed” the material, but does that time and attention promote deeper learning of fundamental concepts, develop metacognition and problem-solving expertise, develop solid intra- and inter-personal skills?

Reading basals are wide and shallow. They won’t help us carve out the time, or focus our attention on the kinds of issues the National Academies report highlights. We need to focus on a few, really important ideas; give kids lots and lots of practice developing expertise with these ideas; and allow them the chance to apply these ideas to other domains. That’s the way deeper learning occurs.

Students need to have time to reflect on what they’ve done, and to ask questions. If we are presenting them with “skills” all the time, there will be no time to reflect, explore, try, and fail, then try again.

As you can see, I’m skeptical about all the skills that are supposed to be so necessary for students to learn. If we don’t give students time, then how will the skills be developed in other domains and to the depth they need for life and learning?

I’ll think more about these next two questions in some upcoming blogs posts.

UPDATE: I’ve also been reading a great book, Making Thinking Visible. Thinking and deep learning are connected, obviously. I worry about the way basal series keep learners very, very busy learning skills for the short term, and not so much thinking at a deeper level. Here’s the authors of Making…:

“…coverage is the ultimate delusion of those who place the act of teaching (or presenting) above the act of learning. It is a deceit perpetuated on a grand scale in education. A deceit in which both teachers and learner implicitly agree that in the name of achieving coverage of the curriculum, only superficial and short-term learning will be expected. However, to achieve insight and understanding, one must have the time to think about and with ideas.” (p. 242. Bold added by me for emphasis.)

The importance of being flexible

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Soon our school district will make a decision about whether to purchase a basal reading program. I’ve been thinking about this decision here, and here. This blog will explore what I think could be done.

RolfstackingrocksWhat needs to be done
I think any successful solution must address the following immediate problems:

  1. K-5 curriculum to be vertically aligned. Teachers need to know that what they do builds on the work of other teachers. Any ELA decision must end with a vertically aligned K-5 curriculum.
  2. Teaching resources identified and purchased. Teachers are spending a lot of time gathering resources for lessons. An ELA decision must identify and purchase grade level materials — mentor texts, book sets, big books, word work components, etc. — so teachers can spend more time learning and teaching.
  3. Bring district curriculum and instruction up to the Common Core standards. Everything that I’ve been reading lately tells me that the CCSS represents a large leap in what we are asking our students to know and be able to do. Our decision will have to not only align with the CCSS, but provide support for deep and meaningful teaching and learning to happen.
  4. Be flexible enough to change as more is known about CCSS. Our understanding of the CCSS is evolving. In fact, my optimistic side wants to believe that good teachers can wrest control of the CCSS movement by talking about the way it emphasizes thinking over skill instruction. We’ll see if that happens, but at the very least, this is a rapidly evolving environment so flexibility will be important.
  5. Integrate science and social studies units of study into ELA curriculum. With the emphasis on informational text and persuasive reading and writing, it only makes sense to more fully integrate science and social studies units of study into our ELA curriculum. This would allow us to more seamlessly move between ELA and content areas, which is one direction the CCSS is pushing anyway.

These criteria sound like they could justify a basal series, I guess. The ones that I’ve seen — Houghton-Mifflin and, only online, the Reading Street 2013 from Pearson — certainly provide vertical alignment of skills; plenty of resources can be purchased, and they try to integrate science and social studies into the ELA instructional sequence.

The reading basal series: Inflexible and ponderous
Reading basal series are, to my mind, an educational equivalent of the Soviet-style five-year economic plans. They provide lots of details about who needs to do what and when, but are unwieldy and inflexible.

Once you’ve purchased a reading series, unless your district has a lot of money, it will be “for keeps” or at least for the next 8-10 years, which is as close to keeps as you get in education. Do we know enough about how the CCSS are evolving to purchase a first generation reading basal? How will our understanding of the CCSS change over time? Already the creators of the CCSS have issued further updates about the standards. As I delve farther and farther into them, I can see that they are in a state of evolution. That’s a good thing! But how will our understanding of them change over the next several years? One guarantee: we’ll be thinking about them a lot differently in three years than we do now. A reading basal is set in time, now, and can’t evolve. Furthermore, fidelity to the program is highly recommended because it is so…er…complete!

Another big question I have about a reading basal series is how well they are able to integrate science and social studies with reading and writing. Next Generation science standards aren’t out yet; they are being developed now. I haven’t heard about social studies standards at my grade level, but if there is any kind of fight over them like there was in the ‘90s, they will take awhile to implement. With the CCSS’s emphasis on reading informational text, we’ll see more and more connections between science and social studies content learning and ELA reading and writing learning. What happens when you’ve purchased a program for a large amount of money, and then you have to tweak and change it to integrate science and social studies?

For these two reasons, I’m wondering if it wouldn’t be better to opt for a solution that is small and flexible, rather than large, complete, and ponderous.

There’s another reason that I’m skeptical about a reading basal: I think they really don’t reflect a learning orientation; they don’t understand how people learn. If the CCSS is about high standards (and it appears they are), then instruction alone won’t get us there. Our classrooms need to focus on deep learning, which clearly involves the learner’s approach to subject matter, rather than merely covering skills from a scope and sequence.

I’ll try to explore that in my next post.

Learning and “feelings”

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PathwaysLately, I’ve been trying to understand the Common Core (CC) standards; what they are, what they mean, and their implications for teaching and learning. To help with that task, I’ve been reading a good book by Calkins, Ehrenworth, and Lehman, Pathways to the Common Core, and devouring a great blog by Jan Burkins and Kim Yaris. I’ve also been taking a workshop through my area education association (a regional source for professional development), and I’ve been talking to my colleagues.

One thing all have said is that the CC is moving away from reader response theory toward the text as the all-important element in the reading experience (back to ye old, New Criticism.) Certainly one of the developers of the CC, David Coleman, has (eloquently?) pointed this out through statements like this: “…as you grow up in this world, you realize that people don’t really give a sh*t about what you feel or what you think.” To justify this stance, Coleman goes on to say, “It is rare in a working environment that someone says, ‘Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday but before that I need a compelling account of your childhood.” (I first came across Coleman’s quote in a post about the last NCTE annual convention at Vicki Vinton’s top-notch blog.)

One way Coleman is right
First of all, there just aren’t teachers who think a “compelling account of your childhood” is sufficient to succeed. That’s a straw man, David. It makes your point by trying to make teachers look stupid. I don’t like that.

However, what if we teachers don’t ask our students to think deeply enough, clearly enough. No teacher likes the “I have a puppy, too” response to literature, but maybe we’re not asking enough of our students. Maybe we ask students to write personal narratives too many times, and don’t ask students (or ourselves!) to question what we discover from that reflection. Maybe, like Coleman, we indulge ourselves in a straw man or two to joust, rather than push to figure out the real issues we need to deal with.

If so, then we need to do a better job of teaching better thinking. We need to help students see the larger world around them, to interact with that world, and to wonder and to learn from it, too. That’s a big and noble project. And, if this is what David Coleman means in his vulgar way, then I’m hep with that jive.

One BIG WAY Coleman is wrong
While employers won’t ask for compelling accounts of childhood, it’s just not true that no one “gives a sh*t” about what we think and feel. Authors care. They construct their stories around our feelings. Advertisers care. They don’t sell their products through convincing argument that we carefully consider before we act. They play directly on our feelings. Politicians care. While we think we make decisions based on careful analysis of policy decisions, there are many studies that show we actually decide based on how well those decisions fit the narratives we have about the world.

Thinking, fast and slowIn fact, as I’ve been reading Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, I can see just how much our intuitive, feeling, emotional self is wrapped up in all of the decisions we make, in all of the data we analyze, in all of the actions we take. Our minds often fit evidence to intuitive belief; we don’t often change belief based on evidence.

Wouldn’t it be a good idea to know that self a little bit better? To see how it thinks? To understand what it believes? On the most basic level, what would the last 3-4 years have looked like if some mortgage lenders, or investment bankers, or re-insurance executives had said, “Johnson, I need those profit margin projections by Friday, but don’t forget to reflect on how your decisions reveal what is most important about you, as a person, and what they will say about me, as a boss.” A little CRITICAL engagement with ALL of one’s feelings–not just avarice–might not have been so bad.

An example from the classroom
So, what does this all have to do with classroom teaching?

I was thinking about all this stuff the other day and decided to return to a set of questions that came up while we were reading Bruce Coville’s, Goblins in the Castle. There’s a section, early in the book that introduces a character (Nurse) and then drops her in the castle moat within the space of a sentence. We never hear from her again.

NurseThe kids didn’t know what to do with this information at first. They worried about the main character, William, who was without the Nurse as he grew up. They worried about the Nurse because they hadn’t experienced a lot of stories where characters are introduced, then “gotten rid of” in this way. What to do with this? For quite awhile in the story, the students really wanted her to come back into the story, even inventing a possible re-entry for her as the wife of Igor, William’s new friend from the dungeon below the castle. It was clear to me that the students thought this would be a satisfying way to connect some loose ends together.

That never happened.

So, after the story was over, I thought about what we might learn from our earlier wonder about Nurse. What if we just made it EXPLICIT that authors want readers to feel things, and then we could take those feelings as evidence of something important in the story. Instead of dismissing our feelings, what if we really try to examine them, find out what they are, how they were created by the author and us, and what that means about what the author wanted to say? In doing so, WE become part of the story.

I started out like this:

We know that authors talk to us through details. We know those details make us think about things…but they also make us feel certain ways. We know that the author was making those choices about details for a reason. Do you remember that time early in the story when Nurse fell in the moat and was never heard from again? Here: I’ll re-read it for you. This time, I want you to pay close attention to what you are feeling as you hear about this event. See if you can figure out how the author was trying to make you feel that way.

It was a fascinating discussion.

The students almost universally felt “sad.” We pushed that feeling because “sad” is one of two or three default descriptions of feelings in third grade. As we pushed, words like “worried about William’s future” emerged (“He’s just a little baby! I was worried that he’s lost the one person who was taking care of him like a parent might take care of him…) Also “lonely”: (“That part made me feel so lonely. Now William doesn’t have anyone who really loves him. Later we found out that the Baron doesn’t even remember his name after eleven years! That part made me feel so lonely. It reminded me of how much my parents mean to me.”)

We then went the next step, which was to ask: Why would the author have wanted you to feel lonely and worried for William?

Their answers searched to connect pieces of the story together, to explain how by making us feel William’s loneliness so strongly early on in the story, to surface our concern (worry) for William, we felt so happy that he found Igor later and was successful in his task. And when Coville added the character Herky, who we decided seemed like a cross between a family pet and a little brother, and the character, Fauna, who seemed like an older sister, we could FEEL the strength of William’s growing “family.”

I think this discussion points me toward making feelings a BIG AND IMPORTANT PIECE of evidence because people really should (and do) “give a sh*t” about them. Rather than be satisfied with the “I  have a puppy, too” response, I’m going to try to drill down into those feelings more deeply. What, exactly, are you feeling? What did the author do to make you feel that way? Why did the author want you to feel that way?