Motivating Readers

This week's reading really got at the heart of my concerns as a future teacher of adolescents.  More than anything else, we want our kids to be reading.  Yet I find myself consistently wondering how the most current set of standards are going to help teachers engage students.  Ultimately, getting kids to read falls on the shoulders of the teachers.

The reading on Zach Morales this week made me think a lot about my own development as a reader.  I thought a lot about the amount of informational texts that the Common Core is pushing teachers to incorporate into classroom learning.  As an adult, I have developed what one might call a taste for informational texts.  I read them often and enjoy them.  I love essay and newspapers, and informational texts probably make up the majority of the reading that I do on a day to day basis.  However, I came to informational text with a love of reading and a passion for current events.  I first had to fall in love with reading.

Most of us love stories.  We live our lives in story.  Sit around any dinner table in the country and hear families and friends recount stories.  There is no lack of love for stories in the nature of adolescents, but there is a gap between what teenagers love and what curriculum demands.  Ultimately, I learned to read into the depth of a story and the implications behind more complicated text by reading avidly and questioning deeply and having teachers model those behaviors along the way with texts that genuinely intrigued me.  If all of those parts hadn't aligned, I doubt I would have pursued becoming an English teacher to this extent.  To motivate, we must strike a balance between what students needs to know and what students want to read.  Ultimately, we need to find a way to focus our teaching and our schools around developing skills that can be transferred to many types of readings, than committing ourselves and our classrooms to the agenda of an inflexible curriculum.

Beyond the curriculum, the issue of informational text arises.  To me, it seems ridiculous that literature should only occupy 8% of the total academic reading students are expected to do weekly.  Literature is the love in reading.  Literature is where the voracious need for stories is satiated.  Certainly, students should be reading informational texts that inspire them to learn more and to go into the world with action and purpose.  Informational texts can be highly relevant, and when properly vetted, teachers can inspire curiosity that sparks critical thinking, debate, and motivation.  However, standards that blindly push towards tougher and frankly drier reading are unlikely to change the attitudes and behaviors of students reflected in the brief video we watched this week. 

I was really struck by the idea mentioned in "Assessing Adolescents' Motivation to Read" that schools are devaluing literacy activities that students are adept at performing.  High school students spend a large part of their days reading and deciphering messages that could require the same thinking skills demanded of reading informational texts, if only schools could direct learning in the classroom toward these types of texts.  In their future careers, students will need to know how to read many kinds of messages, and it's up to teachers and schools to shift their focus away from very narrow definitions of acceptable texts and start incorporating texts that students are motivated to read.  Valuing what students already do is a good way to empower students to think about their lives with the same critical lens we ask them to turn to their studies.  Ultimately, if we are charged with educating thoughtful and critical citizens, we have to find a way to empower them with text.

Writer's Workshop and Book Choice

The biggest takeaway from the readings and in class discussion with Ms. Eckburg was plan and you will succeed.  If there's one major point that was driven home it's that planning is an absolute essential to making the workshop a good use of time in the classroom.  When done successfully, writing workshops can lead students to meaningful creation and huge advancements in writing abilities.  Planning plays an essential role at every level.  Cris Tovani talks about the necessity for planning the actual workshops themselves in order to keep students on target and direct learning in meaningful ways.  Ms. Eckburg reinforced that it not only took significant planning throughout, but also a very organized approach to documentation in addition to clear and well-adhered to procedures. 

The other big takeaway is culture.  Culture is an absolute necessity to success in writer's workshops.  First, the classroom culture must respect reading and writing, valuing it as a pathway to meaningful life experiences.  Second, students must respect one another and the teacher, understanding that sharing writing and providing feedback to one another is an extremely sensitive and vulnerable experience and that treating peers and their writing with a fair amount of reverence is necessary to carry such a weighty responsibility.  Ultimately, fostering this culture means knowing your students and letting them know you.  This kind of culture can only be built out of a reciprocally respectful and trusting relationship.

One of the most interesting pieces for me to read was the article about book choice from the New York Times.  I really believe strongly in book choice, however, I think it's unlikely that many of us will start out jobs in high schools where we will be given limitless freedom to choose the texts we assign our students.  I have been placed for student teaching recently and already my cooperating teacher has emphasized that at no time in her 10 year career in teaching has she been given a choice of what to teach her students outside of occasional supplemental or short texts.  It seems to me that a great deal of the success that Ms. Eckburg has in her classroom getting her students to read a great deal of texts has to do with her freedom to allow the students to read whatever they choose.  A big goal for me once I have my own classroom will be to find a healthy balance of student choice reading along with required texts.  I believe strongly that an incorporation of student directed reading is an important element to cultivating a lifelong love of reading.

Write Like This, Chapters 1, 8, and 9

I have been developing a unit plan with two of my classmates intended to examine beauty standards with 8th grade students.  The final product must be aligned with the common core standards. We decided early on that we wanted students to write a found poem as a final assessment for the unit.  However, in looking for writing standards that closely matched our assessment, we began to feel a bit of pressure around the standards.  They didn't match the types of writing that we were trying to illicit from students and we began to worry that the connections we were making between standards and actual activities felt tenuous.  A huge takeaway for me in chapter 1 was the emphasis on moving beyond the standards and pushing students to do more types of writing that are applicable to their lives.  As a teacher candidate, I sometimes feel that the standards are to be treated with what seems to be almost biblical reverence.  However, the standards leave gaps and exclude practical writing skills in particular.  Students need to know more than argument, informational, and narrative writing.  Students need to know how to deliver a solid work report, write a professional email, and understand how writing poetry can help one understand the mechanics of language and in turn read and write better.  Chapter 1 was extremely affirming, because Gallagher encourages he readers to teach the standards and then some. 

Chapter 8 discussed the art of polishing the paper.  To me, this aspect of writing is actually the most important part of the writing process.  The strongest writing comes from multiple writing sessions because once the basic ideas are on the page, the author has time to devote to actually making the content shine with style and finesse. I really loved the RADaR model for revision because it emphasizes craft and style, two aspects of writing which make an impact and an enjoyable experience for readers.

Chapter 9 focuses on showing writers how to write properly.  Modeling is always a concern because it's a huge part of showing students how you think, but it's often hard to make thinking explicit.  This is especially true with writing but also especially important.  However, teachers can use everything from the emails they write, to using mentor texts, to revising their own writing with the class to demonstrate how strong writers think.

Argumentative Writing

My biggest take away from the reading this week was to set students up to start thinking about what works to persuade them when thinking about argumentative or persuasive writing.  Student may be able to recognize that they are being persuaded and may even be able to identify the persuasive techniques being used to move them to action.  However, unless teachers have established a strong foundation of questioning in the classroom, students often fail to fully investigate the credentials of those persuading them.  This problem was evidenced in the Lapp and Fisher article.  When the teacher asked students about the credentials of the organization they had recently donated to in order to send aid to Tokyo, students quickly began second guessing the organization and wondering aloud that they should have checked its credentials.

In chapter 7 of Write Like This, by Kelly Gallagher, I thought the "Four-Square Argument Chart" was an excellent organizer to help students map out their thinking and begin the process of developing and defending their claims.  We often ask students to consider the weaknesses in their arguments and address them directly in their papers.  This assignment actually allows them to chart out an argument before writing.  I think it's an excellent tool for developing a strong stance in writing.

I also appreciated the "Drafting the Problem-Solution Paper" section of the chapter because it provided a strong introductory model for argumentative writing.  Gallagher also mentioned that the model for writing the paper should be thought of as a guideline for reluctant writers and not a mandate.  This point is so important since many writers get stuck in the typical models of writing they are taught in schools and often find it hard to craft essays outside of standard formats. 

Conversations About Literature

Immediately upon beginning this reading, I was reminded of the short story we read in class called "Death in the Afternoon."  I thought about how many layers of meaning were revealed through the various interpretations of the text around the classroom.  I thought instantly of hearing how others picked up on details that I had missed that completely shifted my perspective on the text.  Conversation around stories is natural.  We seek out guidance when interpreting events in our lives, and making the extension to texts we read seems like a logical next step.  However, students need time to engage in meaningful talk, investigate layers of meaning, and develop strong conversation skills surrounding texts.

One of the biggest takeaway from this week's texts was from the Socratic Seminars video.  Teachers cringe at the thought of a silent classroom when students are being asked to share their thoughts.  I felt my own heartbeat increase watching the video as the teacher handed the students the floor and the sound of crickets grew in my mind.  I can't say that were I the teacher in that instance, I wouldn't have started to ask questions to get the conversation flowing.  However, the teacher, Paige Price, was wise and stated that you have to remove yourself from the center and let students struggle.  I find myself challenged the most by this idea, even as evidenced by the lesson I taught last week, because I imagine the discomfort of the students.  I remember vividly sitting in class trying to think and drawing blank.  However, when I was in school, teachers often rushed in to add supports instead of letting kids work through the struggle.  It's so hard because you know that the right move is to lay back and let students do the heavy lifting.  Still, retraining your brain allow the dead air is a real challenge that I know I will personally have to work through as a teacher.

I also really loved the reading's thinking skills for language conversation (evaluating importance, taking multiple perspectives, interpreting, and persuading), because I feel they drive at the higher levels of Bloom's Taxonomy.  Having the list of questions to help push students toward using these thinking skills is also a huge help for teachers.  I think it can sometimes be difficult to think of a general list of questions, because we often get bogged down in the specifics of a text.  However, there's a huge benefit to having students questioning literature in ways that are applicable to many texts, as long as these questions really drive at deeper meaning in text.  Having a list of general questions helps students walk away with a set of conversation skills as opposed to just textually specific knowledge.

Deeper Reading, Chapters 8 and 10

It isn't always natural or intuitive to reflect meaningfully on texts.  I struggle with it as a graduate student, even in the blog posts, so I can only imagine how hard students at the high school level are struggling with reflection and meaningful appreciation of text.  One of Gallagher's most insightful responses to this problem was that perhaps teachers have not always sufficiently illuminated the aspects of authorial craft that allow us to appreciate great text.  As he says, telling students that a book is great or important is not a sufficient reason to get students to read the assigned texts.  Not every student will love every text, but ensuring that they understand that elements that go into a text to make it great is at least a reason for why we are reading the text.  Ideally, reading should be a reciprocal relationship, not dissimilar from the relationship between teacher and student.  Exchange should happen between the reader, the author, and the outside world.  When the world of the text seems extremely foreign from the world of the reader, the ability for the reader to make this connection on his or her own becomes strained.  English teachers have to find ways to make the conversation about relevant and familiar ideas, themes, or issues.  I loved the table he used to demonstrate the connection between major themes in the text and real world issues.  Students at the secondary level often get excited to debate, especially when debates include questions of justice and authority.  Infusing discussions of old, classic, or just plain required texts with topics that require debate and questioning often spark students' interest.

In chapter 10, Gallagher discusses methods for getting students to reach deeply into text.  It's easy to think students must have a basic understanding of certain topics, but our students may surprise us.  What seems relevant and newsworthy to one generation may be something another generation knows nothing about.  Therefore, setting students up with a series of questions, ideas, or words, and giving them the opportunity to read multiple times and discuss their reading with others is an excellent way to set students up for success.  I loved that he reinforced keeping the end goal in mind when designing lessons.  Ultimately, we need to think of where student need to be successful, and work backwards to bring them to that point of success. 

Deeper Reading, Chapters 6, 7, and 9

In chapter 6 of Deeper Reading, Kelly Gallagher discusses the benefits of making reading a collaborative process in the classroom.  His points were further driven home by the short video of him teaching an article of the week lesson.  Dividing students up into small groups to work through challenging text is such an effective method because students often feel stuck and hopeless when meaning making stalls in individual reading.  The process of being able to simply ask questions aloud is extremely helpful to determining deeper meaning, and should be incorporated into class time reading as often as possible.  The layers of understanding that each reader brings to the text based on his or her own personal experiences should be treated as a valuable resource in the classroom.  Any time a teacher is doing the bulk of the talking, the teacher is probably also doing the bulk of the thinking.  I did appreciate, however, that Gallagher was quick to recognize that too often simply allowing for conversation can leave room for some students to check out and others to do too much of the thinking.  I particularly liked his strategies for calling group members to present at random.  I also observed in the video that he spent a lot of time talking to the students and making sure they were on task. It's hard to know how to set groups up in a meaningful way, but clearly as the school year goes on, students understand what is expected of them in group work if a strong foundation is laid by the teacher.

Chapter 7 discussed the importance of metaphor in reading.  Text is not only enriched with metaphor, but can be understood through metaphor.  This chapter provided a lot of graphic organizer examples for helping students look closely at metaphorical writing, or write their own metaphors to help them dig deeper into meaning in text.  I thought the addition of these organizers was extremely helpful because coming up with interesting graphic organizer concepts can be difficult. Graphic organizers can also easily become busy work if they aren't interesting and focused on the specific task at hand.  I like the ideas provided in this chapter, but I also like opening the floor to students to use their creativity to develop a graphic organizer that is text specific.

Chapter 9 was my favorite of the three chapters because it focused specifically on reading critically as a usable, daily, critical thinking skill.  When reading is made into a purely academic experience, not only does it feel joyless for a lot of readers, but it often also removes the relevancy and context for real world application.  English students at the collegiate level often speak about their studies in terms of the humanities.  An education in the liberal arts not only teaches us how to think, but as David Foster Wallace so beautifully illustrates in his commencement speech "This is Water," it reminds us that, "'Learning how to think' really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience." Readers need to ultimately learn how to think and learn how to filter.  We want readers to connect with the humanity and the message of text, be it positive or negative, and read the world through the myriad of messages that it bombards them with daily.  Students at the high school level love to seek truth and argue for justice, but it must be made relevant to their lives.  Chapter 9 highlighted a lot of real issues that not only provide students with an exciting topic to investigate further, but also help make students savvier consumers, and ultimately, wiser readers.  When students can make the connection that reading is about understanding the real world, they can learn to be in control of their world because they can read it critically and respond to it in controlled ways. I loved particularly how Gallagher connected his students to the texts by looking for really interesting topics for students to investigate in order to get them excited about reading informational texts.  Forming those habits as a young person can help a person stay involved and informed on critical issues throughout a lifetime.  Ultimately, making reading real world applicable is absolutely necessary if we are going to help our students on the road to becoming truly critical thinkers.

Deeper Reading, Chapters 4 and 5

I was a sophomore in high school when I first read Brave New World and I absolutely hated it.  I hated the generic questions my teacher asked.  I thought the text was transparent and irrelevant.  I couldn't wait for the class to move on to a different text because I thought we were wasting time on an outdated book.  Two years later, on a flight to Italy, I read the book again.  I couldn't understand why I had hated the book before.  I couldn't even remember what had rubbed me the wrong way about it in the first place.  In fact, reading it again, I could see huge implications and relevancy to our modern American life.  I thought about the book for the entire two weeks of my holiday, revisiting passages on long train rides and discussing it with my travel companion at length over many dinners.

There are several significant reasons why my second reading was so different.  The first was that I wasn't being required to read the text.  The second was that I had learned a great deal more about the world, and specifically about the historical context in which the book was written, since my initial encounter.  The third was that I knew the basics of the story, so my mind was free to focus on details. 

With each reading, text becomes more vivid.  Every time we revisit a text, we find a sparkling gem of truth we hadn't noticed before.  Chapters 4 and 5 of Kelly Gallagher's Deeper Reading investigate the importance of both the initial and the second reading of a text.  We have to ask ourselves what is actually happening on the page, and secondarily, what does it mean.  Chapter 4 reminded me of a lot of the fix-up strategies discussed in Cris Tovani's I Read It But I Don't Get It.  Gallagher discusses methods for helping students realize where comprehension is actually breaking down and developing strategies for addressing the breakdown immediately.  Scoring Comprehension and Color Coding (p. 67-69) are two strategies students can use to help identify specifically what they don't know when they are reading.  It's so important to explicitly identify parts of a text that don't make sense because students can immediately know what's wrong and seek help and teachers can understand precisely what students don't know.

In Chapter 5, Gallagher discusses an important element of second reading, identifying not only what the text says and what it means, but also what the text doesn't say and how that impacts meaning too.  So often we are trained to see what's only on the page.  However, in both simplistic and complex ways, authors exclude information that's either implied or subverts the meaning of the text.  Gallagher talks about the excluding of information when reading statistics, but in fictional and nonfictional texts, the exclusion of information may be an intentional craft device.  Sometimes authors want readers to understand an emotion through inferences without explicitly labeling the emotion.  Sometimes leaving out specific information is a craft device to create doubt in the mind of the readers.  Left out information, as Gallagher illustrates, may also unintentionally subvert the meaning or the validity of a text as well.  This aspect of text is typically revealed in a second reading because it often takes zooming in on the details of a text to begin to see what's missing. 

Another essential aspect of the second reading is examining how the text actually works and why it matters.  The second reading is really where students can move from the lower levels of Bloom's Taxonomy, to the higher levels, analyzing meaning and evaluating validity.  The second reading helps move students toward the standards the Common Core charges teachers with upholding. 

Deeper Reading, Chapters 2 and 3

Kelly Gallagher's Deeper Reading Chapters 2 and 3 focus on teaching challenging texts and focusing the reader on the text at hand.  In my Reading in the Content areas course, we talked a lot about various strategies for creating meaning in text and tackling challenging texts.  Gallagher's book almost feels like a continuation of that same discussion, which was largely driven by Chris Tovani's text I Read It But I Don't Get It. 

In chapter 2, Gallagher essentially describes how he sets up his class for the reading of a text and walks readers through the lesson that he uses with students.  Each piece of the lesson is specifically crafted to touch on various levels of comprehension and reflection of learning.  In particular, I was specifically drawn to page 17 where Gallagher drives home the importance of collaboration in making meaning and identifying how a text works.  We comprehend 70% of what we discuss with others.  If this is true, than we need no other evidence for giving students ample opportunity to discuss, reflect, and create with one another.  I particularly like the idea that students collaborate as a group to make sense of literary devices by actually creating sentences using those devices.  The lesson described in this chapter is a strong approach to increasing comprehension and helping students read deeply without frustration.

Chapter 3 focused on the how to get the reader centered on the reading.  In particular, I appreciated the focus on capitalizing on students' previous learning and making learning relevant.  I believe these key elements are essential to the success of literally any lesson.  The section of suggestions for framing new texts was extremely useful.  Although I have been exposed to many of these strategies, I thought it was really useful to see how they can be applied to readings in creative ways.  For example, I loved Gallagher's idea to have student's locate references to "Big Brother" in various genres of art and media in beginning a unit on 1984.  When beginning a reading with a kind of scavenger hunt of media, you give students a chance to approach text with a sense of background knowledge which is rooted in pop culture.  I think one of the best ways to increase interest and focus the reader's attention is to put the subject and ideas in a text in a language students understand and bridge personal interests with academic learning. 

Mechanically Inclined, Part One

Jeff Anderson's Mechanically Inclined gives educators a practical and incredibly refreshing approach to teaching grammar.  Instead of treating grammar as a stand alone series of lessons wherein students are mindlessly asked to correct worksheets full of poorly composed sentences, grammar is taught as an integral part of writing.  Anderson encourages attention to grammar and mechanics not merely through correction but by examining how authors use grammar effectively.  This shift in attitude is assuredly as exciting for teachers as it is for students because it removes all of the rote responses from grammar instruction and focuses on how to write exciting and interesting prose.  Perhaps most importantly, Anderson's approach emphasizes art and play in authorship.

In my undergraduate education as an English Literature major, I wrote a lot of academic text.  I remember getting through that first year of college and feeling quite proud of the improvements I had made as a writer and as scholar.  However, I didn't really get writing until a particularly persnickety teacher sat me down and explained that good writing isn't just about grammar and message, it's about style.  Style is what makes a paper a delight to read.  Style is about using rhetoric, even in academic and nonfiction writing, to make the reader feel something.  Style is essentially about manipulating the reader into viewing something from a particular perspective.  Anderson's approach to grammar instruction emphasizes style in addition to mechanically correct writing.  In fact, it's almost as if Anderson wants his students to believe that style and mechanics really cannot be separated.  He also asks that readers collect ideas from writers and investigate how grammar works to make reading exciting.  As soon as I got that advice as an undergraduate, I started regularly reading writers who wrote nonfiction prose creatively.  I read the New Yorker and the Economist weekly.  I read almost all of David Foster Wallace's creative nonfiction.  Slowly but surely, I started seamlessly replicating a lot of the rhetorical devices these writers employed.  However, as a future English teacher, it never occurred to me to teach grammar in the same way.

Until reading this text, I was fairly terrified of the idea of teaching grammar.  Even for a student of English, grammar is intimidating because the rules are complex, the teaching approaches are typically dry and tired, and by the time most kids get to high school, grammar has practically become a torture devise.  However, I can definitely see myself implementing a lot of his approaches on a regular basis in my future classroom because the emphasis on writing well and enjoying reading and writing as an art.  In particular, my top five teaching strategies and tips are as follows:
1. Collecting great sentences or bits of writing to study and inspire.  Including students' original writing in the collection of great sentences.
2. Posting great sentences on the walls around my room. 
3. Sharing a "writer's secret" regularly and using the secret during writing instruction and freewriting.
4. Using the writer's notebook per the guidelines presented in Mechanically Inclined
5. Read a stimulating piece of writing before each freewriting session and build freewriting time into lessons frequently.

Close Reading

Close reading has become a kind of catchall term in recent years to describe a deep investigation into text.  However, for trained students of English Literature, the close reading is a technique of New Criticism, sometimes referred to as the Formalist approach.  While Formalism is a common way of investigating texts and is traditionally learned in schools, and a particularly good way to analyze poetry, it can have some drawbacks as well.  Therefore, I remain personally hesitant to say whether or not I am in favor of this approach taking such a dominant role in the classroom as a result of the Common Core.

As was mentioned in the book article from Text Complexity: Raising the Rigor in Reading, Reader Response criticism grew out of New Criticism as a kind of reaction to the idea that texts should be studied in a vacuum.  However, the ways in which we process art is colored by our own personal experience.  Furthermore, authors themselves are both consumers and producers of culture, and therefore create within the larger context of their world experience, sometimes in unconscious ways.  It is for these reasons that we must approach close reading with caution.  In my experience, close readings may be extremely insightful or they can be terribly superficial, devoid of any real substance or understanding. 

As with most of the Common Core, there is a huge window of opportunity which given talented, well educated, and creative teachers, can lead to deep understanding and incredible improvement in student learning and skills.  However, my fear is that a return to close reading, without a real definitive set of professional development on how to use it effectively, will only lead to history repeating itself.  As a secondary student, much of my literature education centered around close readings.  Much of that education felt uninspired, uncreative, and completely dry.  Making meaning without context can often make learning disconnected at best and detrimental to deep thinking at worst. During my undergraduate, most of my professors took an approach to literature called New Historicism, which as the name suggests, puts significant weight on the world within which literature is created.  For me, this approach to study made literature connect to life.  I was somewhat alarmed to see the Shanahan article suggest that the same kind of preparation that was so essential to my understanding, should be decreased significantly under the Common Core. While I understand that the goal is to have students interacting with text, context can make a huge impact on meaningful reading. 

While I like a lot of the ideas of close reading, I do hope to see examples of teachers conducting close reading lessons with some flexibility to employ effective teaching strategies such as background education on the author and an examination of context.  Without some flexibility, how can students truly be expected to evaluate text for validity and quality?  One must have an understanding of context and texts with which to compare to truly get at the meaning and value of a text.