Ariel Sacks, contributing author of, Teaching 2030: What We Must Do for Our Students and Our Public Schools – Now and in the Future, and author of the recent article, Writing the Neighborhood (Education Week, Teacher PD Sourcebook Spring 2011) gives us a wonderful writing exercise for students that not only promotes writing skills through authentic work but also promotes community connections, reading, speaking, viewing, listening and higher order thinking skills.  It is an exercise that is interdisciplinary allowing students to write history.  Sacks took her ELL 8th grade students from East Harlem on what I would call a “walk-about” of a neighborhood next to their school.  As you read through her process, think about all the different literacy skills her kids employed while engaged in this authentic writing task.  Here’s Ariel’s powerful Writing the Neighborhood assignment process:

• Exploration: Ariel designed “trip sheets” where students, while walking the neighborhood, were asked to map the blocks surrounding the school, record the names of businesses, sketch ornate buildings, and record observations of people.  When they returned from their tour, students shared-out their “noticings” or “wonderings”.  Ariel recorded their observations on a piece of chart paper.
• Topic Selection: Next, with Ariel as their guide, the students identified which responses they wanted to investigate further.  To narrow the topics to three, Ariel gave each student three colored stickers to place next to the items they believed were the most worthy of study.  The three topics with the most stickers were then chosen for further research.  Topics included graffiti, racism, small businesses vs chains, etc.
• Research: Students then searched for relevant information about their topics.  Once Internet articles and books were identified, as well as other resources such as local news-letters, Ariel modeled how she takes notes from these types of materials and showed her students how she thinks out loud, asking and recording questions that will require further investigation.  Then the original research began.  Note: most likely there won’t be a lot of published information about a specific neighborhood and therefore, the students will have to conduct research on their own.  Ariel does this by teaching the students how to write survey questions that will generate both anecdotal information but also yield numerical data, e.g. questions that will result in yes or no answers and or multiple choice questions.
• Conducting Surveys and Interviews: Students won’t likely be eager to head out on the street to conduct interviews, so Ariel provides an opportunity for the students to spend a class period conducting interviews with each other.  Through this role play they brainstorm the possible situations they may encounter and how they may respond.  As an aside, I was part of the Obama Fellowship program during his initial campaign for president.  We role played how we would approach folks to register to vote and practiced how we would respond to both negative and positive feedback.  It was very helpful.  We had our script and we practiced how to always respond positively and with respect.  One other thing Ariel does, that I think is brilliant because she sets her students up for success, is she asks store owners ahead of time if they would be willing to be interviewed.  In the end these students have connected with their local community, they have had positive interactions with adults in their community, and they have taken the background information they got from research materials and infinitely enhanced their knowledge and experience.  Ariel relates that they will now go into the writing assignment with a richer narrative context.
• Writing: Ariel scaffolds towards the ultimate writing assignment by offering her students pre-writing exercises.  She has them write and give short informal speeches on their topics.  They conduct exploratory writing until they land on a big idea or critical statement from which to build their final article.  She teaches them how to use quotations and citations.  She also distributes all their collected survey data and interviews to the entire class so that students can use each others’ primary source materials.
• Feature Article: Students finally write their feature articles, which are designed to inform as well as include analysis and interpretations.  Ariel asks students to include their personal experiences with the caveat that they don’t let those experiences dominate the article.

Fellow educators, if you use Ariel’s methodology, please report back and let us know how it went or contribute your ideas on offering students experiential learning opportunities.  Thanks for reading!  C

I found myself chuckling as I read Kelly Gallagher’s article, Can Reading be Saved?, (Education Week’s Spring 2011 PD Sourcebook).  He related there are many things influencing students to not read these days including: electronic entertainment such as Facebook and texting, rushing off to work or ball practice, and literacy poor home environments. Although, like me, he disagrees with the title of Mark Bauerlein’s book, The Dumbest Generation, he agrees, as do I, that kids don’t really know much about what’s going on outside of their own worlds stating, “Kids these days seem to exist in a kind of self-referential bubble – living for the thrill of peer attention.”  Then he really gets to the point when he nails schools for unwittingly exacerbating the problem relating that, “Schools are where kids go to hate reading”.  That’s where he got a chuckle out of me because it’s just so ironic.

Gallagher, a teacher in Anaheim, California, relates that his 9th grade students have been going to school under the cloud of NCLB for nearly a decade now and as a result, and this is a generalization, they have learned that reading is about passing a test, it’s an academic or functional exercise.  Nor do his 9th graders appear to comprehend what they are reading at a deep level.   In Gallagher’s estimation, this challenge is a cultural issue as much as a curriculum issue.  According to research, and here’s another generalization because I sure see a lot of adults on planes reading tabloids, adults who read deeply are much more involved in their communities and civic life.

So, what to do?  Gallagher recommends that 50% of the time, students should be allowed to read recreational material.  It’s hard to argue with that notion especially when I think engaged my secondary students were in reading as they enjoyed a selection recreational materials including magazines, science fiction books, and Internet generated articles.  We read like crazy spending over 50% of our instructional time reading varied resources at varied levels.  It’s the leveled reading material that’s hard to find.

Kelly relates that we need to provide our students high interest texts that kids can actually read.  So, with little monetary resources, how do teachers create a rich literacy environment for their students with varied leveled texts?  I did it by going to my local library where they would let me check out 150 books at a time.  I doubt this is the norm but the local library seems like a viable resource, it certainly was for me.  Apparently Nettrekker also points educators to reliable leveled reading sources on the Internet, but this is a paid service.

Many of Gallagher’s 9th grade students walk into his classroom reading at 4th grade level and up but part of his curriculum is reading Romeo and Juliet.  How does he manage this challenge, that we too face as educators?  Gallagher answers this tough question with several solutions:

• First off, know that all kids should be exposed to the classics because they offer opportunities for “imaginative rehearsals for the real world”.  There are issues in these classics that are very relevant to students today, which makes classics high interest reading material because these same issues apply to their lives
• Accept that your students, with their wide range of reading skills, are going to comprehend at varying levels.  But they still all need to be exposed to the classics so that they know what someone means when they hear a phrase like “Elizabethan tragedy” or “Orwellian”
• Model – Model – Model: Gallagher utilizes his document camera to model what good reading sounds like, how he metacognates as he reads, annotates text, and writes.
• He also uses the document camera to surf the Internet, modeling how to analyze websites for content, a skill often overlooked.
• Gallager brings vocabulary terms to life and builds background knowledge with a variety of resources including images and video.
• Most importantly he utilizes all these techniques to scaffold his students’ comprehension utilizing a variety of resources.  Anyone familiar with “graphic novels”, apparently they are wonderful for getting reluctant readers reading.  They look like and read like comic books but appear to be very effective as they aren’t babyish picture books but offer all the non-linguistic cues secondary kids need to better comprehend what they are reading.

Gallagher also lambastes our focus on testing.  No argument there, I think, from anyone here – although I did get into a whopper of an argument with one of my assessment peers out in a school parking lot, of all places!  She accused, “You don’t believe in assessment!”  Guilty as charged.  Assessment for the purpose of grading schools vs using testing data to inform our instructional practice is nothing short of criminal in my mind, which brings me to this, I just have to wonder what would happen if a superintendent said to her educators, students and parents at the beginning of the school year, “Folks, this year no one is to mention the bloody test.  Let’s conduct a grand experiment.  This year we are going to provide darn good deep instruction on 50% of the relevant standards we identify as meaningful.  We will commit to going deep with those standards 80% of our instructional time.  No one is to even mention “the test”.  Instead, we are going to provide a literacy rich environment for our students in every classroom.  That means your students will not only read our textbooks (no more than 20% of the time) but relevant and leveled fiction books, non-fiction books, magazines, graphic novels, and we will provide access to the Internet, including blogs, web pages and web 2.0 applications for our kids to engage in authentic writing exercises.  Our children will learn how to read deeply and write purposefully.  This year our kids are going to think, they will speak, they will view, and they will read and read some more and then they will write and write even more and we’ll all be the better for it.”

My wager is that district’s test scores would be fine, heck more than fine.   Do such brave superintendents exist?  If you know of any school leaders that have made this kind of commitment out there, please let me know.  I’d like to interview them on how my fantasy district is working out.  I’d also like your suggestions on how to access rich leveled reading materials.  As always, thanks for reading.  Carol

According to David T. Conley, “Test prep instruction fosters shallow learning”, pure and simple.  Conley, in his article, Building on the Common Core, the Common Core standards could “transform education” effectively moving us away from shallow learning, “if educators translate them into new curriculum and instruction to get students college and career ready.”

First, let’s get some background on the Common Core (CC).  Here we go:

• The CC standards were released in June 2010 and developed by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers.  The states had a huge hand in their creation.  This isn’t a Fed thing.
• The CC standards are for English language arts and mathematics but in high school, the ELA standards for reading, writing, speaking and listening, and language are also translated to literacy standards in history and social studies, science and technical subjects.  This is huge because now all teachers, at least at the HS level, are responsible for teaching fundamental literacy skills.  Why they didn’t this for middle schools as well is beyond me.
• The CC are standards, not curriculum.
• By creating a foundation of standards, such as the CC, we can specify key knowledge and skills, make better use of student data, assemble quality curriculum materials, deliver teacher preparation aligned with key content standards; and conduct research where we can better identify what works.
• The standards identify cognitive processes.  If we develop curriculum that aligns to Conley’s five cognitive processes, students will be presented with an engaging, challenging curriculum that supports content acquisition.  This will require that teachers adopt instructional strategies that provide students opportunities to engage in complex, challenging and non-routine applications of knowledge.

According to Conley and his fellow researchers, we need to “translate standards into cognitively complex tasks and assignments aligned with college and career readiness”.  He relates that above and beyond general content knowledge in key disciplines such as English and mathematics, there are five key cognitive strategies that students need to master to be college and career ready across any content area.

They are:

• Problem formulation – the ability to formulate a problem before leaping to a solution.  The student has to generate plausible hypothesis and strategies to solve the problem.  By doing this, students become aware of the strategies necessary to solve problems.  Ah, so that’s why I need to know X?  I can use it to solve Y!
• Research – once students have explored possible solutions, they need to conduct research, e.g., find information necessary to solve the problem.  Students need to learn to utilize a wide range of information.
• Interpretation – similar to the above process, students also need to learn to organize information.  This is where a teacher pulls out graphic organizers such as two column notes for pro and con lists, tables, grids, outlines of key points, lists of consistencies and contradictions in the data.  What’s the researcher’s agenda?  Did that influence the way the researcher interpreted data?  A students ability to evaluate information and apply rules of relevance is key.
• Communication – ultimately students must be able to present their findings and new ideas to varying audiences.  They must have practice “organizing the output of their research and interpretation and then construct an argument or presentation that derives directly from carefully collected, analyzed and organized information”.  It’s a process with multiple steps that requires modeling and practice.
• Precision and accuracy – students need to “exercise precision and accuracy consistent with the rules of the discipline”.  Again, this has to be taught, moving from novice to expert along a continuum.

Which brings us to the development of common assessments.  Conley explains that when we create assessments we should think of our students placing somewhere along a novice to expert continuum.  “As learners develop their knowledge schema and gain more experience drawing knowledge from their schema, their performance progresses.”  We need to create complex, non-routine ways for students to show us where they are on a continuum and then push them each year to higher levels of cognitive functioning. Makes sense.  If we aren’t already doing that, what are we doing?  No wonder students cram for tests and then forget everything if they don’t perceive that there’s a need to remember.

According to Conley, students need to experience numerous opportunities to use content knowledge to solve interesting problems, grapple with key questions and issues of the discipline and examine social issues.  This creates the schema or mind maps that stick.  To promote further retention, students need to engage in Socratic questioning and creation of problems (problem formulation), investigate (research, precision and accuracy), debate and give presentations and participate in projects (communicate), engaging all five key cognitive strategies every day.

But these cognitive skills must be taught and at their core, teachers must work together to lay down a foundation of academic learning skills so that students can engage in the cognitive strategies.  For instance, teachers should require that students set explicit goals and meet specific benchmarks along a continuum towards completion of a project.  I grimace when my 17 year old had three months to write a research paper but starts it four days before its due because the teacher didn’t require any check-in along the way.  Thus, I get it when Conley says teachers should model study skills and expect students to employ good study skills in both individual and group settings.  That means modeling how to read and re-read for deeper understanding, teach students how to annotate text and take notes, engage students in inquiry based learning through interactive lecturing techniques, require students to conduct daily quick writes, and then allow students to talk it all out through simple think-pair-shares.  Teachers should model what it’s like to think and self reflect on the quality of ones work.  Teachers should encourage and reward persistence with difficult tasks and instill a belief that effort trumps aptitude.

Okay okay!  My God, it’s a wonder anyone takes up this work.  But, if teachers team up and follow the CC as it was intended, the burden of the above responsibilities can be shared.

After reading Schmoker’s book, FOCUS (see my first post), I was rather down on the CC.  Mike wrote that there are too many untested standards.  Especially when our high performing counter parts in Singapore, Finland and the like are teaching 15 standards a year.  He did write about Conley’s key cognitive strategies as a very smart way to narrow down the number of ELA standards.  But Mike also poo poos project based learning, at least until a teacher masters basic instructional strategies.  I get that, but when I read Conley’s key cognitive strategies, I see project based learning in its purest and most beautiful form.

In any event, I think we need the CC and common assessments because the standards “lay out a road map of major ideas, concepts, knowledge and skills” and if they create corresponding common assessments that are formative in nature too, what a win for educators who don’t feel qualified to create assessments.  Common assessments designed  to help us know where each of our students is along the novice-expert continuum is a major plus.  And, even better, as students move about their districts or even out of state, they may not feel so lost.  I also like the idea of teachers using the same assessments so that students experience a level playing field from one teacher to the next but also teachers may feel compelled to ask a peer how they got the results they did and would they share how they went about it.

Thanks for the article, David!  C