Riding the Roller Coaster

Change is hard- but it can be especially hard for teachers. In the past twenty years, we have learned so much about what Marzano calls "the art and science of teaching and learning" that our career can feel like a roller coaster: just when you think you've got something figured out, you're thrown for another loop! I have found that when it comes to approaching the highs, lows and hairpin turns of teaching, there are two predominant types of roller coaster riders and the group that you land in may be linked to what it means to you to be a teacher.

Rider A: Teacher as Expert
For this rider, to be a teacher means to have established a certain degree of mastery over a curricular area or the stages of childhood development. The opportunity that teaching presents to share this knowledge and passion with students and to open new doors to them is enticing and honourable. There may be a number of reasons as to why one identifies being a teacher in this way, from their own educational experience and models, to their teaching training and, perhaps, even to their own reasons for becoming a teacher. This group of riders can include experienced teachers who have certainly achieved a degree of mastery in their career, and brand new teachers who are entering the profession in a highly competitive market where it may be necessary to present oneself as an expert in order to get a job. Rider A may enjoy the comfort that comes from attaining some degree of 'expertness' and achieving excellence in their career for a time; but, this can feel short-lived as the rules seem to keep changing the profession. New professional learning may be taken as an indictment of present practice and even as a threat to their identification as Expert. The twists and turns of the roller coaster, then, may be experienced as scary, anxiety-provoking or even threatening.

Rider B: Teacher as Helper
For Rider B, where the identification of what it means to be a teacher is not about mastery of content or developmental stages but rather about helping children, the ride can be equally uncomfortable. In the absence of a feeling of mastery or expertness, the committed willingness to help may be the driver. This, too, is noble but the many and varied needs of children can quickly become overwhelming leaving the rider to feel that nothing they ever do is good enough. New professional learning may experienced as a reminder of all of the things that the teacher is not doing to help children, thus threatening their identification as Helper. For these riders, in the absence of the confidence that comes from having established some sense of mastery, the lows of the roller coaster can be quite low.

Complicating matters further for both riders is that teaching is an emotionally-charged profession. Experts and Helpers both entered the profession to make a difference in the lives of children, and the fruits of their labour sits in front of them each day- a constant reminder of how well they are meeting that goal. The students' parents can also serve as a reminder, as can writing report cards, looking at standardized test scores, and hearing about the student's achievements from the next year's teacher. It can be hard to feel good about what we are doing as teachers in such a complex and high-stakes profession. So, how can Experts and Helpers best manage the ever-present and necessary changes that come with such a career?

Making Peace with the Roller Coaster
To make peace with the roller coaster means to accept that change is inevitable. I'm reminded of an Employee Assistance Program poster that read: Things don't change. Attitudes do. Any presented change doesn't need to be received as a threat or indictment when it is viewed from the vantage point of a learner.

A New Rider: Teacher as Learner
The teachers that I work with who seem to manage change the most easily are the ones who view themselves as learners. They are confident that they are coming to the table with good ideas already, but are open to new ones that may enhance their practice further. For them, being a learner does not mean that they have a void in knowledge or practice that needs to be filled, but that they are continually seeking next steps on their own path. This requires setting individual learning goals, seeking supportive resources, evaluating new information in light of existing schema, reflecting on progress toward goals, celebrating successes and setting new goals. In this iterative process, their practice is continuously growing without presenting any threat to their own identity as a teacher. Instead, the learning process reinforces their identity as a learning teacher and allows them to celebrate their learning as a measure of their success as a teacher. These Teachers as Learners know that the roller coaster has ups and downs- times when we feel like we are on top of our game invariably followed by times when we learn something new and are grappling with how to implement it- and this understanding has allowed them to enjoy the ride and even feel invigorated by it.

Teaching As Coaching

In light of what we now understand about literacy development, teachers around the world have been committing themselves to shifting from teaching content (the story) in their language classes to teaching skills (how to read it). This is no small feat because the goal of teaching skills requires a different model of teaching than what has been done in the past. Jeffrey Wilhelm aptly describes this gradual release of responsibility model as an apprenticeship model, based on the earlier work of Lev Vygotsky.

Teaching a student (regardless of their age) to read and write requires bringing these once elusive thinking skills into the light where they can be made visible and thus more readily appropriated by tose who need to develop them. If we think of learning literacy skills, like inferring and writing with voice, as being akin to the learning of any skill, including a lay-up in basketball, then it stands to reason that teachers have something to learn from coaches.

Coaching sports is a passion of mine that I've alluded to in an earlier post. When I want to teach a group of eager basketball players how to do a lay-up, I know that I can't describe a lay-up to them or ask them to read a chapter about it- I have to SHOW them what it is. (Sadly, this usually involves a player long-past-her-prime demonstrating a series of movements that usually results in the ball NOT going in the basket.) I tell them to watch me as I model what a lay-up is. I would likely do it a few times (to improve my shooting average), and ask them to watch with a different purpose each time. "Watch what my feet do." "Watch how I push the ball into the ground and then pick it up." "Look at what my hand looks like when I'm done and where I land."

When I've finished with the demonstration, I move quickly into breaking the skill apart into chunks and teaching them how to do each part explicitly. First, we get rid of the balls and just work on the footwork to learn where we would need to take off from and which is the correct plant-foot. I model this part again without the ball and then ask the players to try it on their own- no basket, no ball. After a few tries, I pick up a ball and then repeat a similar process by showing them what the hands do and then give them the chance to try out both movements together.

Then, I watch. To me, this is the most important aspect of coaching- analytical observation. I ask each player to try a lay-up with the ball and I look carefully for the parts that they have going well and where the skill breaks down. Based on a few observations, I am able to send some off to separate nets with some quick instructions of what to focus on as they practice. Invariably, there is a group that is still struggling to get the footwork, the foundation, right. I keep them with me and we drop the balls and go over the footwork again; I give them more instruction, more practice and more feedback. Then, while they practice their footwork, I can circulate to the other players who had the footwork down and observe their ball work to give them feedback. In this way, I am differentiating my coaching for the needs of the players and moving most efficiently to my target- a team of players who can all do a lay-up. (It bears noting here that I do not have 16 different coaching plans, one for each player. Rather, I understand the skill that I am teaching well enough to guide my observation to the parts that I know cause breakdowns and then group according to them which usually results in 2-4 possible groupings.)

By game-time, the players have been explicitly taught to do a lay-up, have been given descriptive feedback to support their progress and have had purposeful practice opportunities in scrimmages so that they know how to use it against an opponent. However, the work of the coach does not end here. During the game, I watch the team and analyze the performance of each player. I make mental and written notes about the next steps for individuals and what skills need to be reviewed again at the next practice. In this way, even their independent use of the skill is monitored, providing the opportunity for further skill development.

This analogy from the world of sports serves to illustrate how the instructional model of teaching literacy would need to shift if we truly wish to develop the reading and writing skills of our students. Teaching a thinking skill, like inferring, involves the teacher modelling the use of the skill, breaking the skill down into parts for explicit instruction, providing purposeful practice opportunities, observing student use to give descriptive feedback and ultimately monitoring the student's independent use of the skill.

The Art of Listening

I had the opportunity to spend the past two days at a coaching institute with Dr. Jim Knight, a Canadian working at the University of Kansas. Over the two days we explored how to use the role of a coach effectively in supporting classroom practice, which included a day devoted to communication strategies that are critical to good coaching. Listening was,of course, at the top of the list. Everyone knows it's important, and most people likely understand it to be a skill, but how many people work at developing this skill? Rather, don't most of us claim to be "good listeners"?

I think that I CAN be a good listener, but I realized during the conference that there are certain conditions in which I listen better than others. Namely, if I am facilitating a discussion, I listen very attentively. In fact, I would claim it to be a strength of mine. If someone comes to me with a problem, they often thank me afterward for being a good listener. If I am listening to someone speak about a topic that interests me, I can listen with laser-like focus. However, in many other circumstances I believe I do not appear to be listening well at all. When I am participating in a learning-conversation, I often find myself excited by new ideas and get into processing-overdrive which usually leads me to talk more than listen as I work these ideas out. If you were to approach me when I am already engaged in a task, you would likley be equally unimpressed with my listening skills. As a multi-tasker, I often feel that my attention is spread too thin to allow in one more stimulus, and to choose to do so may cause me to forget the other things to which I am trying to attend. This does not for a good listener make. So, how can I be so good and so bad at listening at the same time? And how can I improve?

Dr. Knight suggests that though there are lots of ways to appear to be a better listener (e.g. body language, mirroring, eye contact, paraphrasing), the most effective way to do this is to simply commit to being a good listener. Decide that you genuinely want to hear what the other person is saying and the speaker will feel heard. This resonated with me because it seems to be the common difference between when I listen well and when I don't- it always comes down to my decision to listen for detail or to skim for the main idea. Other strategies offered by Knight included not making assumptions and asking good questions.

Teachers are exceptional multi-taskers. I believe we often feel forced to skim for the main idea in a sea of stimulus, more often than we really listen for detail. How often do we jump to a simple conclusion in order to keep the ship driving forward? It can feel like to pause and ask a clarifying question may cause a ruinous delay or lead to an answer that detours the whole trip.

This morning, my seven-year-old son taught me about how many opportunities I may be missing as a reading teacher. I've just begun reading the first Harry Potter to him (Oh happy day!) and in these first few chapters I find myself pausing to ask him questions to make sure he is a) still awake, b) still listening and c) understanding what is happening in the story in the absence of pictures. Here is a transcript of the conversation we just had. Harry has just moved into Dudley's room full of broken toys.

Me: ...Other shelves were full of books. They were the only things in the room that looked as though they'd never been touched. Noah, what do you think it tells us that the books looked as though they had not been touched?

Noah: That Dudley loves to read.

(At this point, I am concluding that Noah is strugging to make an inference and we shall have to work on this.)

Me: Explain what you mean.

Noah: Like, he really takes good care of his books because loves them so much so they're kept safe on a shelf.

(If you could see my son's room, you would know that this is not a bad inference at all, except that he is relying too heavily on his own experience here and missing some of the text clues.)

Me: Ohhh, I see. But why do you think it says that nearly everything in the room was broken and that all of his toys seem to have been treated so badly?

Noah: OH! He doesn't really like reading at all! He hasn't even touched the books.

This small exchange is illustrative of the types of opportunities that I likely missed in the classroom. Here, I could have stayed with the conclusion that Noah is not yet inferring from text well. However, by responding with a probing question rather than an assumption I learned that he uses his background knowledge very well to make logical inferences, and that with a slight cue back to the text clues, he made an inference that gave him deeper insight into Dudley's character. Choosing to listen here brought me to a very different conclusion.

Choosing to listen more that we speak in the classroom (and in our relationships, as Knight's anecdotes artfully demonstrate), can make us more responsive and effective educators. The challenge is in the choosing. It sometimes does not feel like a choice that is within our power to slow down and teach the people before us, rather than deliver a curriculum. However, as Dr. Knight reminds us, sometimes the solution is simply the committing to the doing.

Resources:

Check out Jim Knight's blog at: http://www.radicallearners.com/

This reminds me of...

Recognizing that these comments may border on sacrilege, it seems that the reading comprehension strategy 'making connections' may not be all that it's cracked up to be in the end. Deep down, you know it's true! If you've ever tried to explicitly teach students to make connections as they read, you'll be able to connect with this scenario.

Teacher finishes reading a passage of text to her class during shared reading. She asks the class to pause and think about what the text reminds them of. Student raises hand and offers, "This reminds me of when I went to the park." Okay. Another hand shoots up. "Yes?" "I have a park near my house. It's awesome. We go there every day." Okay. Three more hands shoot up and she just knows there are some great tales from the park waiting to be shared. Suddenly we have a room full of readers who have become completely distracted from the text and the teacher knows it. In a noble attempt to save the lesson, she attempts to prompt some metacognitive reflection by going back to the first respondent, "Now, when you made that connection to the park, how did it help you as a reader?" Without a moment's hesitation the student chimes, "It helped me to understand the text better." The teacher is not convinced of this but isn't sure how this lesson went off the rails.


... and it doesn't matter one bit if these same students can accurately identify if the connections they made were text-to-text, text-to-self or text-to-world connections. Thinking of what something in a text reminds you of on demand and then labelling the type of connection it is can't really improve a student's comprehension, can it?!?!


The practice of making connections certainly didn't help thirteen year-old Hailey, a student of mine who struggled with reading. She confirmed all of my suspicions and taught me about the problem with connections. Following a week or so of modelling, explicit instruction and some student practice, Hailey ran up to my desk breathless with excitement. "Oh my gosh! I know what I do wrong now when I'm reading!" I was intrigued- all this life, interest and excitement from a girl who was usually underwhelmed with anything that happened in the classroom. "My problem isn't that I don't MAKE connections, it's that I make too MANY connections and I get distracted from what I am reading because my mind starts to wander and I forget what I was reading about!" Hmm. Fascinating. "Hailey, while you are thinking about these connections, are your eyes still going left to right over the lines, or are you stopping to think before you read on?" She paused and answered, "No, my eyes keep going and then I don't know what I'm reading." We came up with the first step that she would pause her reading when she caught herself connecting and let her mind go before bringing her attention back to the point where she left off in the text and continuing to read. Seemed pretty simple, really; but, something amazing was happening here. Hailey was beginning to monitor her comprehension, a necessary step before comprehension strategies can be applied independently. We could think about the usefulness of the connections she was making as a second step.


In order for a connection to be helpful to the reader, I believe it has to be used rather than just made. It should be a means to an end, rather than an end unto itself. My good friend and Chicagoan, Gretchen Courtney, uses the term viable connections to describe the type of connections that will help a reader. For a connection to be viable, you'd need to use it in some way, and likely in the service of another strategy. For example, what happens when I visualize? While reading a descriptive passage that takes place on a beach, I find myself picturing the waves, feeling the roughness of the sand, hearing the gulls, smelling the saltwater. Where do these images come from? I tell my students that our brains are like filing cabinets of all of our experiences and knowledge. When I say 'beach', most people have a beach file whether they have actually been to the beach or just seen one on television. Some people will have thicker files than others. I may be able to recall a family trip to the beach, whereas someone else watched an episode of 90210. The point isn't whether or not we drew on text, self or world information; rather, the point is that were able to use something from our experience to help us visualize the scene in the story, deepening our comprehension.


Similarly, how could you possibly make an inference without connecting what is written in the text to what you know? When I read "he bounced the ball on the ground before passing it to his teammate, who shot and scored a three-pointer", I can infer that the sport they are playing is basketball because I know that basketball is one of the only sports that you need to bounce the ball and that uses the term 'three-pointer'. I connected my sports knowledge to the text to draw a conclusion about what was happening. I think, more often than not, our connections are best used in combination with other strategies. (There are two graphic organizers included at the end of this post that require students to use the connections that they make.)


Perhaps an example of a viable connection made in isolation is when I am trying to understand a character's feelings or motivations by thinking about a time when I felt that way or did the same thing. An important distinction here is that I am connecting to a concept presented in the text, rather than to a comparatively insignificant detail. You may find that students gravitate toward connecting to random details in texts, rather than to greater concepts. Think, "I have a dog, too." We can coach students to deepen these connections or abandon them through our questions. "So what do you know about having a dog that can help you understand how this character might be feeling?" Or, "How does your connection to the dog help you to understand what's happening in the story right now?"


I don't think we've gotten it completely wrong with 'making connections'; but it seems to me that our role as teachers is to coach students to make viable connections and to understand (truly) how their connections are helping them, or not helping them (as in Hailey's case) as readers.



References:
Gretchen Courtney and Associates at http://www.literacyconsulting.com/

Resources:

Email me at: teachingthekidsinthehall@gmail.com and I will send you these graphic organizers at PDF files.

How do you teach resilience?

Resilience has always seemed to be this magical, elusive quality to me... you either have it or you don't. My brother and I have discussed this- we both feel like we must have had a good dose of it to overcome some of our challenges growing up. Beginning my teaching career, I intended to keep an eye out for kids who were struggling and help them turn their lives around.


It didn't take long until I met Justine, the younger sister of one of my Intermediate students who displayed a high degree of athleticism but who just couldn't seem to keep out of trouble. With the enthusiasm and naviete of a second year teacher, I thought I would take Justine on as a project, determined to help her turn her life around. Justine displayed a natural talent for basketball that I have not seen equalled by any student that I've coached to date. It was an obvious choice to take her on my basketball team, despite her being a year younger than the rest of the players. This was an opportunity for me to give her an outlet, to keep her engaged in school and to try to teach her some positive communication and conflict resolution skills. (Clearly, this latter goal became urgent when chair-throwing was her response to being subbed.)


My efforts extended to building a relationship with her mom, finding a coach to take her on a competitive team outside of school, soliciting the funding for her uniform, assisting her mother with coordinating the transportation to get her to practices, etc. When she came into my class the following year, I only saw it as an opportunity to continue to support her more regularly and I collaborated with her special program teacher to find the best ways to achieve this. I had real hope that she would be able to overcome the odds stacked against her.


But, she never made it to that competitive basketball team, she broke every last commitment she had negotiated to remain on our school team, she ran away from home, got caught with drugs... it went on and on. I felt helpless. Over the next couple of years, I watched her downward spiral and continued to hear stories about her as she progressed into high school, always remorseful that I failed her.


I drew the conclusion from this experience that Justine must have lacked resilience.
How unfair that some kids were born with it and others weren't. And what did this mean for my future attempts to help kids who lacked it?


Last Fall, I had the opportunity to hear Dr. Bruce Ferguson (of OISE and Sick Kids' Hospital in Toronto) speak about his research on resiliency and his experiences working with at-risk youth. His assertion was that resiliency was indeed necessary for these kids to overcome their circumstances, but that resiliency was most certainly something that could be developed. Having no pen or paper at hand, I began to thumb-type notes madly into my phone while trying to maintain some degree of eye contact lest he feel I had checked out of his keynote address.


Dr. Ferguson suggested that there were certain characteristics that would promote resiliency and that could be developed in students; they are as follows:

- good natured and affectionate

- effective emotional and behavioural regulation strategies

- good cognitive abilities and problem solving skills

- a positive view of self

- good social skills

- a sense of self-efficacy

- a future orientation

- ability to delay gratification


Further, these characteristics could be developed through:

- self-development

- self-management

- self-awareness

- problem solving

- social awareness

- relationship building


I ruminated on these ideas over the winter and was so excited to have the opportunity to hear Dr. Ferguson speak again in Kingston this Spring.(He has since been seconded by the Ministry of Education to work in 8-9 Transitions.) At this keynote address, he stated that there are four key factors in creating positive change in youth:

1- Youth Characteristics account for 30-40 %

2- Our relationship with them can account for 25-30%

3- Their hopes and expectations account for 10-15%

4- Modelling/technique accounts for a further 10-15%

This means that an adult who builds a positive relationship with an at-risk youth, and helps them to develop a future orientation for themself can have a stronger influence (up to 45%)than the youth's own inherent characteristics. These odds would be further improved with some focused modelling and direct instruction of some of the skills listed earlier.


This has reaffirmed an earlier belief that I had that teachers can be "oddsmakers" for kids who face seemingly insurmountable obstacles. But, I didn't have it right with Justine. Good intention and sheer determination were not enough. With a "do-over", I would direct some of that energy into becoming more skilled at teaching problem solving, self-awareness, self-management and other skills that would help to promote the resiliency that seemed to be lacking.


Some advice from Dr. Ferguson:

Start where the young person is, recognizing that they are doing the best they can with what they have; find out what their skills/attitudes/beliefs are and why they use them the way they do; and, recruit them as partners in change.

Teach a Boy to Think...

During the three months that I decided to teach literacy all of the 7th and 8th grade boys at my school, leaving the girls in the capable hands of a colleague, my mind was opened to just what these facinating creatures do- and don't do- while reading.

In the first month, I decided to try to teach them the the comprehension strategy of visualizing while reading fiction. The night before, while doing some pleasure reading of my own, I caught myself visualizing a scene at the beginning of a chapter. I remember getting to the bottom of that first page, and thinking: "Really? Some people don't do this while they read?" It occurred to me that I visualized the most when there was a descriptive part of the book (like setting up a scene at the beginning of a chapter), when I was confused and trying to figure something out or when a scene reminded me of something a I had experienced before. It also realized that it was the visualizing that really enhanced my experience of the text, that the ability to see the text like a movie in my head was what made the reading enjoyable.

Armed with this discovery, I went into my classroom the next day with a text I was particularly excited to read to the boys: To Build a Fire by Jack London. This is a classic man-vs.-nature tale of a lost explorer who faces death by freezing in the wild. The opportunities London created to visualize with his descriptions of the setting and the details of frostbite were abundant, and so I began.

After reading a particularly detailed scene, I paused and asked the boys how many of them could visualize what was happening in the story. Of the twenty-six students, not one raised their hand. Chalking this up to a vocabulary problem, I rephrased, "When I was just reading that scene to you, how many of you could see it happening in your head like a movie?" Aha! Glimmers of understanding as the cloud of confusion passed, but still, only about six hands were raised. As I surveyed their faces, I quickly recognized that these hands belonged to the boys who voraciously read fantasy like Harry Potter and Eragon. Hmmm....

I stood there at the front of my classroom, book in midair, my mind racing from one thought to the next: Do these boys who read fantasy visualize because they read fantasy or do they enjoy fantasy because they visualize? Is it really possible that twenty of these students don't visualize as they read? No wonder boys hate reading fiction! What else do boys not do while reading that never occurred to me before?

Bruce Pirie is quoted in the Ontario Ministry of Education's Guide, Me Read? No Way! A Practical Guide to Improving Boys' Literacy Skills:

"If we leave [the] processes of reading and writing cloaked in mystery, telling ourselves that it all either comes naturally or else it doesn't, we surrender to voodoo pedagogy. In voodoo, privileged people, objects and rituals are invested with secret magical power, and to some of our students it certainly seems that there must be mysterious, unnamed powers needed to do well in English."

So, I read to them and modelled my own visualizations. We read together and I encouraged them to do the same through drawing and with the support of graphic organizers. We discussed how to incorporate the use of all five senses in visualizing. We read. We practiced. They improved. It had not occurred to many of them before that they actually had a role to play as a reader that came with responsibilities attached to it- like thinking. There were a lot of eyes going left-to-right over print, with very little else going on. This is not reading- a point that they had yet to understand.

It was the possibility for the next steps that really excited me. If you could teach a student how to visualize while reading, what else could you teach them that they might not do otherwise? This was the moment for me as a teacher that I learned that it is possible to teach comprehension strategies, and that there is hope for adolescent readers entering high school who continued to struggle to with reading. My strategies to support these learners prior to this experience really just amounted to offering some textbook-coping strategies and ways to get around text. I knew that I wasn't impacting their actual reading ability because I wasn't actually teaching reading...

yet.

References:

London, Jack. To Build a Fire. www.jacklondons.net/buildafire.html

Me, Read? No Way! A Practical Guide to Improving Boys' Literacy Skills Ontario Ministry of Education. www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/document/brochure/meread/meread.pdf

Kurt- Huh. Who knew?!?!

Kurt was a grade eight student in my class, slightly taller than the other boys mainly due to the fact that he had been retained a grade earlier in his elementary career. At thirteen, he was reading at a 4th grade level and experiencing general learning difficulties as a result. Where this may have made another student disengaged and more challenging to teach, Kurt was one of the nicest kids I ever taught.

In the few years prior to teaching Kurt, I had been reading and learning about teaching reading comprehension. My first book, I Read It But I Don't Get It by Cris Tovani, opened my eyes to a whole world of teaching that I never knew was possible. I was very aware of the fact that the students coming up to me in grades 7 and 8 were not all reading at grade level (I had been dilligently collecting data to prove it, but doing little in response) but I had never really known I could do anything about it before reading her book. Was it really possible to teach an adolescent to read? Wasn't it too late? I had thought that my best bet for these kids was to give them some coping strategies for all of the mountains of text they were sure to face in high school. The idea that I might actually be able to teach them to read was intriguing.

With a sense of optimism and a spirit of adventure I decided to test this out. I had been dabbling with teaching some comprehension strategies at the same time I had been learning more about boys' literacy. In the year Kurt was in my class, I had decided to engage in an action-research project wherein I took all of the grade 7 and 8 boys for the literacy block, leaving the girls to my teaching partner. My plan was to engage them with great texts, hands-on learning activities and to teach them a few comprehension strategies. In the three months of this project, I really hoped to improve their attitudes about reading thereby motivating them to practice more so that they could become better readers.

...and so began the testing! I conducted pre- and post- attitudinal surveys as well as tests of word recognition, oral reading and comprehension (using the Brigance Inventory). All initial tests confirmed what I knew in my heart: I had a class of mainly struggling readers who did not enjoy reading and were not excited to read more.

And, I have to say, the teaching was a thing of beauty! I turned the first month into SURVIVOR! We read survival stories, played survival games and plotted our own death-defying survival plans to escape numerous situations of peril. I was never more excited about my teaching and the boys responded in kind. I was sure I was onto something! I taught visualizing using descriptive texts from Jack London and Gary Paulsen. (During this time, Kurt was able to receive a little extra support from a literacy tutor with whom I collaborated so that she was providing additional practice opportunities for the strategies I was teaching.) Incidentally, Kurt ate the survival stuff up! He was an outdoorsy-kid, who wrote to me in his journals of the fort that he was building out of scrap materials on his property.

For the second month I planned a unit on Civil Rights that spanned the Underground Railroad to Martin Luther King, Jr. and decided to teach questioning as a reading strategy. These boys were reading everything I had- biographies of Malcolm X, stories of slavery- and they were even initiating conversations about what they were reading with each other in the hall! This had to be working! The third month didn't have a theme, but the focus was on inferring and I saved all of my best tricks for that instruction: graphic organizers, engaging short texts, etc.

Judgment Day! The three months went by quickly and it was time to run the post- survey and tests. I started with the attitudinal surveys, confident that my efforts would yield improvements in attitudes about reading. Survey says: BUBKAS! Their results were completely flat- no change. With a heavy heart, I proceeded to the reading tests. One by one, I was realizing that the boys were actually showing improvement in the three areas of their reading. In fact, thirteen of the twenty-six boys improved two or more grade levels in reading comprehension! This couldn't be right, could it?

And Kurt? He had sky-rocketed from reading at a grade 4 level to reading just beyond the 7th grade level... in just three months! Fearing I had completely messed up the data, I had a colleague repeat the tests with a number of students. The results held. It was recess and I ran outside without a coat to find Kurt. I approached him on the yard, arms crossed, very seriously, and said, "I have to ask you something. Do you think that you are a better reader now than you were three months ago?" He replied, "uhhh, ya". To which I challenged, "Really?!? You think you can read harder books now than you could just three months ago?" "Ya," he laughed nervously. "WHY?" I asked bewildered, "What made the difference?" All of the brilliant lessons that I had planned on predicting, questioning and inferring ran through my mind, the carefully-selected and engaging texts, the rich class discussions, the one-on-one coaching conversations... which of these gold nuggets that I threw out there would be the one he claimed as the difference-maker? He replied: "Well, now when I get to the end of a paragraph and I don't know what it meant, I just go back and read it again."

Really, Kurt? REALLY!?!? That's it? I realized I said this out loud when he responded, "Yup." All I could say was: "Well... it worked. Good job!" This was one of the strategies that we had discussed incidentally in discussing monitoring comprehension that he had been practicing with his tutor; and apparently, it made the difference because in three months, before high school, Kurt had succeeded in closing his reading comprehension gap by jumping more than three grade levels in reading.

Looking back on this, it is my surprise that it worked that is most interesting to me. After all of the reading that I had done, why didn't I believe that it would work? Hadn't I planned a whole action-research project on the very premise that it would? But, faced with the dramatic improvements that the data revealed, I was more inclined to believe I had somehow messed up the testing! This experience really taught me that "seeing is believing"; and, that with the hope of helping their students, many teachers will try just about anything that seems logical even if they don't actually believe it will work. It wasn't until I saw the results of my own students with my own eyes, that I actually believed it was possible to teach an adolescent to read.

Perhaps, the only person more surprised that it worked than me- was Kurt!

Reference:

Tovani, Cris. I Read It, But I Don't Get It: Comprehension Strategies for Adolescent Readers, Stenhouse, 2000.

Welcome to my blog!

Thanks for visiting my blog space, a place to exchange ideas about the challenges and triumphs of teaching adolescent students. If you are a teacher of adolescent students, then you will be familiar with the "kids in the hall", the ones who rarely seem to make it through a day without spending some independent time in the hallway. These are the students I want to talk about, because they are the ones who have taught me the most. I plan to tell you stories about actual students I have taught (pseudonyms will be used) and what I have learned from them. It is my hope that you will learn from them, too, and perhaps share your experiences back with me.

I was not typically a kid-in-the-hall, except for a short period between grades 5 and 6 when I got bored in school and looked for trouble of the worst kind: pre-teen girl drama! At that time, I did spend some recesses outside of my principal's office copying dictionary pages- clever!- to atone for some 'ostracizing' (I did look it up, Miss Z!) that I may or may not have done with my free time. Other than that, though, I was a model student who loved school. My brother was not so lucky. He was your typical 'kid-in-the-hall'. I'm dedicating this blog to my brother, Gavin, for whom I wish there were more teachers willing to make their classroom a place where he felt he belonged.

There's the bell...