In the Classroom: Teaching Reading

In the past week I’ve read two completely oppositional articles on teaching.  The first was “Tyranny of the Test: One Year as a Kaplan Coach in the Public Schools” by Jeremy Miller.  It is a superb piece providing a disturbing, real, and moving view of the specifics of legislation that has made Kaplan such a player in the schools, the sad realities of testing, teaching, and more.  The second was “Students Get New Assignment: Pick Books You Like.”  This is a very different sort of article, Mokoto Rich is a reporter for the New York Times, not a teacher, and so she comes to this topic quite differently — following a teacher as she begins this “new” method in her classroom — children choosing their own reading material.

The method is one of choice — individual reading rather than the whole-class-reads-one book method.  It isn’t, for all Rich suggests it is, new.  It was around when I started teaching in the early 70s and was around even earlier among those with a progressive mindset.  Choice is at the heart of Montessori, open classroom, whole language, constructivism, and many other pedagogies that have waxed and waned in popularity over the years.  I’m glad Rich featured Nancie Atwell, someone who inspired me twenty years ago with her seminal book, In the Middle.  She, along with others, gave me some  excellent tools that helped me to fine-tune a method I already had been using — now known as readers’ workshop.

A few years after that I spent a summer at Princeton studying classical children’s literature. I came back to my classroom determined to bring some of that magic into my teaching.  Since then other experiences have helped me to continually refine how I teach reading.  At the moment, in broad sweeps (leaving out the specific lessons that I do), here’s an overview:

• Independent Reading.  My students are all expected to always have a book they’ve chosen to read.  The only homework I assign is to read for at least 30 minutes a night. I monitor the reading by having the children write the book title and the pages read.  I can easily determine how their reading is going by those pages.  If a child is only reading ten pages in 30 minutes night after night, for example, something is wrong and I will investigate.  I encourage them to drop books they don’t like and work hard to help them find ones they do.  Periodically I invite them to prepare readings from these books for the class for our weekly Literary Salons.   I have private conversations with them about their readings. They write about the books in response journals (and on blogs).  All the stuff mentioned in Rich’s article and many other places.
• Reading Aloud. I always am reading aloud a book, ideally one the kids can’t get themselves yet. Last year I read The Graveyard Book and When You Reach Me before they were published, for example.  I’m still mulling over the first book for this year.
• One Book for the Whole Class.  I do believe in occasionally reading a book together. I think that there can be a very special experience when a group comes together over a book.  And I have to say, I don’t get the vehemence some have against doing this. While I understand how it has been done badly, it can also be wonderful.  I mean, what about those communities that read books together?  Book groups?  Book clubs? Why can’t teachers orchestrate something similar in their classrooms?  Certainly, I hope I do.  We begin the year with Charlotte’s Web and end it with The Wizard of Oz. Both are wonderful experiences.
• Group Books.  We do a study of historical fiction prior to the kids writing their own.  As part of the preparations I have the kids read books in small groups.
• Research. Sometimes I think people are so invested in getting kids to love reading that they forget that there is all kinds of reading.  Sometimes it is to get information.  My students read widely when working on their historical fiction stories about Mayflower passengers. They read primary sources, secondary sources, all sorts of stuff.

Okay. I could go on, but I won’t.  Reading is so many different things to so many different people so it stands to reason there would be many different ways to teach it and many different ways to learn it.

In the Classroom: “Poor Kids” and Reading

The latest to give his list of summer reading books for kids is Nicholas Kristof, op-ed columnist for the New York Times.  In “The Best Kid Books Ever” Kristof writes:

In educating myself this spring about education, I was aghast to learn that American children drop in I.Q. each summer vacation — because they aren’t in school or exercising their brains.

This is less true of middle-class students whose parents drag them off to summer classes or make them read books. But poor kids fall two months behind in reading level each summer break, and that accounts for much of the difference in learning trajectory between rich and poor students.

Like so many similar well-intentioned pieces, this column bugged me.  Not only are the books Kristof recommends unlikely to end up in the hands of one of those “poor kids” this summer, even if they were in their hands, they might not speak to them at all.  The suggestions pouring in from his readers seem equally myopic— I see next to none considering what the actual reality is for those at-risk children.

If Krisof is so concerned about those “poor kids,” I wish he’d devote a column to them rather than listing books that he and his middle-class kids liked  — why are these “poor kids” not reading? What programs for them are working? Why? And what books are they liking?   What books (or other media, for that matter) are helping them keep those I.Q. points from bleeding away. (For that matter, check out Walter Kirn’s “Life, Liberty, and the Persuit of Aptitude” for another perspective on testing),  Rather than producing yet another list of books for us children’s book lovers to carp over, I’d like to see someone instead really examine those children who are struggling in school, what happens to them over the summer, and why.

In the Classroom: Don’t Blame the Book

I know that I am, like, annoyingly old-fashioned about this, but it seems to me that a big part of the problem is that we have lately empowered students to think that their reading of a book is inherently good and/or interesting.

Too often, we teach kids that all readings are created equal and that there are no bad ideas and etc.

But kids are not in school so that they can tell us what they think about Holden Caulfield. They’re in school to learn what to think about. And whether or not you like Holden is not, imho, the most important or interesting thing you might be thinking about when reading Catcher.

It’s not Holden’s fault if people read him poorly.

Those fighting words are from  John Green in his response to a recent New York Times piece on kids’ dislike of The Catcher in the Rye and, perhaps more significantly, its main character.  I recommend reading the article, reading John’s response, and then — most of all— the comments. For many of them are from high school kids and quite a few of them are fans of Holden.

To me the missing ingredient in this discussion is the teacher.  A great teacher can make most books interesting. (Mind you — I’m not saying likable.  You can enjoy the experience of reading and talking about a particular book — say Catcher — without necessarily liking it.) Now I know that all too often teachers in schools sadly make the experience of reading a book together as a class a misery.  But I have to say that I believe that done right it can be transcendent.  With a great teacher a group becomes a community discussing and considering and wondering and thinking hard about all sorts of stuff by way of a great book.  It bugs me that there is such a negative view about community book readings — IN SCHOOL SETTINGS.  After all, people are big on book groups and whole towns and cities reading a book together. Yet too many of these same folks tear up and spit out teachers and schools for doing something similar.

Good teachers guide and prod and get everyone thinking hard. I teach 4th graders and I like to think I’m able to do this with our study of Charlotte’s Web and am arrogant enough to think I could do it with Catcher in the Rye. It doesn’t always have to be just personal.  Sometimes reading is about something else — about ideas, about the world, about all sorts of stuff. When we do a close reading of Charlotte’s Web we consider the circle of life, irony, nature, death, and tons more.  The kids move outside of their personal response to consider those of others and whether those change their own. The conversation is  exhilarating.  For the kids and for me.  As wonderful as when I first did a close reading of the book with U.C. Knoepflmacher at Princeton in 1990.

I don’t think every book in the classroom needs to be done by the whole class, but I think it is a shame if some aren’t.  Be it Catcher or Charlotte’s Web or another book that is full of meaty stuff to tussle with, to consider, to rail against, or to love.  Books and teachers and students together can create extraordinary classroom communities.  Don’t rule them out.

In the Classroom: Evolving Technology

Franki at A Year of Reading has been thoughtfully considering new literacy tools in a number of posts this year.  Now she is focused on how Ipod Touches can be used in the classroom.  Now I have to say that due to many years in a fourth grade classroom exploring new tools I am a bit cautious about any particular thing.  I’ve had an IPod Touch myself for a year and I love it, but I have to admit I haven’t been interested in using it with my students.  Why?  Because I’m fortunate in having more than I have time for to use with my students.  But I’ll be following Franki’s journey with interest and perhaps she will convince me to feel differently.

I am very fortunate in being in a school that is very focused on using computers in every possible way.  We do our reports to parents online and they get send out as pdf files.  We communicate with email, blogs, moodles, etc.  Starting in 6th grade, every child gets a laptop.  In 4th grade we’ve had some sort of portable wordproccessor since the early 90s. (For how we got going on this see my article “Empowering Young Writers with Technology,” Educational Leadership, April 1994.)  This year we got netbooks for every fourth grader and they’ve been fantastic.  We are using ee pcs, but I think there are now others to use as well.  The kids do all their writing on them, internet work, email, photos, and more. They have been just wonderful!  (Especially after years other machines that were not nearly as easy to use.)  They aren’t, I don’t believe, that much more expensive than Ipod touches, yet do so much!

As for using Ipod Touches in the classroom I have the same reservations with them that I had earlier with Palms (there were educational outreaches for them too), and other smaller objects that don’t have keyboards and such.  You see, I’ve been  involved in classroom use of technology for a very long time.  (Starting when I worked at an AV  Centre in Sierra Leone in 1975.  I followed that with an MA in educational technology and another in computers and education. Came to my current school as a computer specialist and have been variously doing this stuff for several decades.)  What I’ve seen is it is tricky to consider what is going to be viable and workable in classrooms and what is not. What follows are some thoughts on various tools Franki and others are using or thinking about using.

Blogs

I’ve been blogging with kids for three years now and it gets better every year.  Check out all my teaching with blog posts for more on this.  I’m a huge, huge, HUGE fan of classroom blogging! (Here’s a presentation wiki I did recently on this.)

Podcasting

I was skeptical of podcasts at first.  I paid attention to how others were using them in classrooms, but wasn’t sure what they really brought that was new and worth extra sidework (editing them and such).  A couple of years ago I started using them here and there in my classroom.   I do something called Literary Salon where kids do readings from books and we did a number of them as podcasts and I put them on the class blog.  My favorite of these were the ones we did with my (as I chose it as a member of the committee) Newbery winner, Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! There had been questions about kid appeal and the podcasts were great at showing their enthusiasm.

Last year I came up with another way to do podcasts that worked even better this year.  Our theme in fourth grade is immigration and one way we consider it is the kids’ own “migration” from a small lower school to a big upper school.  At the end of the year I had a class of incoming 3rd graders interview my 4th graders about this. The questions were the same ones my students had used in the fall for an oral history of an immigrant and in the spring when they researched and wrote a work of historical fiction about the Pilgrims. The questions worked well for all three situations.  And the podcasts are terrific.  Some samples are here, here, and here.  This year I also had them do podcasts about their Pilgrim stories. I was so pleased with them — check out this one and this one for a taste.

I’m at a point where I can use podcasts as casually as I use chart paper.  The kids can do it too.  We taught them to do just about everything and I had to do nothing!  When that happens the technology works, in my opinion.  But whether you specifically need to do them with Ipod Touches, I don’t know.  With the ee pcs the kids are able to record, save, and then put the podcasts on their blogs.  I’m less clear how this would work with Ipod Touches.

Flip (and similar) Cameras

A couple of years ago a wonderful tech teacher I know visited my class and urged me to buy a bunch of flip cameras to use. But I was again skeptical.  I’d done a lot of movies with my class over the years, but they always involved a lot of editing on my part.  I didn’t see the point of non-edited films — they wouldn’t be good, I wouldn’t want to show them, and the kids could do just as well without them. So I thought.

This year I began using a flip camera in a few ways that got me very excited — I had someone film lessons for conference presentations and I realized that they were great resources for the kids too.  A few weeks ago my class did a debate that we filmed (Resolved: Is the MGM Wizard of Oz movie a good adaptation of the book?), but when it came to figuring out what to do with it I became overwhelmed. Because the raw footage was raw, the sound was bad and major editing is needed for me to use it.  I will indeed use it (for a presentation at NCTE in November), but it is going to take a lot of time to edit it into something worthwhile.  So I’m still skeptical.

Smartboard

I’ve had a Smartboard for a few years and I do love it — I use it as I did chartpaper (and the way many teachers use overheads) — I can write with the kids, in front of the kids, show them something on the web, annotate something, and so forth.  I love it — but I can’t say I use it in terms of touching the screen — there are some games and such, but they seem very doodady and gimicky to me.  At least for language arts and history — seems much more worthwhile for math.

This coming school year I’m planning on a new afterschool club — book bloggers.  Kids who were in my class in previous years will be able to blog again and those who weren’t will be given blogs of their own as well.  We plan on having these kids read ARCs, new books, and generally give kid points of view.  We may do some podcasts, movies, and other stuff — who knows!  So that along with the work I do in my classroom shall keep me thinking about how we can best use new technology tools comfortably in the classroom.

Gail Carson Levine on Writing

The Writer’s Oath

I promise solemnly:

1. to write as often and as much as I can,

2. to respect my writing self, and

3. to nurture the writing of others.

I accept these responsibilities and shall honor them always.

The above is at the end of the first chapter of award-winning fantasy writer, Gail Carson Levine’s Writing Magic, a terrific book for kids who want to write fantasy stories.  My fourth graders write them every year as part of our Cinderella unit and I have found this book an excellent resource.  They love taking the above oath and they love repeating Gail’s first three rules:

1. The best way to write better is to write more.

2. The best way to write better is to write more.

3. The best way to write better is to write more.

Long long ago (before Harry Potter) I was a huge fan of fantasy literature, but could find nothing about teaching it so ended up writing a book about teaching it myself.  Now it is much more acceptable to use it in the classroom, but most books on teaching writing tend to focus more on other genres.  A longtime fan of Gail’s novels, I was delighted to see her book and discover how excellent it is.  I’ve known Gail ever since she won a Newbery Honor for Ella Enchanted (long story for another blog post) and so knew she had been teaching writing to a small group of kids for years. This book is the thoughtful outgrowth of those experiences along with many examples from her own experience writing fantasy.

And now this incredibly thoughtful writer has just started a blog! In her introductory post she writes, “For my blogging life, I intend to post once a week, and I will probably blog mostly about writing, but I don’t know that for sure.”

I look forward to seeing where she takes this new writing vehicle.

In the Classroom: Kid Podcasts on Writing Historical Fiction

My fourth graders have spent the last few months considering historical fiction and preparing to write their own about the Pilgrims.  They’ve done a ton of research about these long ago immigrants (including an overnight trip to Plimoth Plantation) and are all diving into their first story drafts.  On Friday we taught them how to do podcasts and now you can listen to the ones they did in which they tell you about this project, their characters, their research and more.  I’m very proud of them!

Dorothy May Swan

Elizabeth Ann Warner

Dorothy May Rawlins

Samuel Hopkins

Mary Anna Dodge

Cooper Brewster

Dorothy-Ann Annie Cook

David Winslow

DW’s character on the journey

Elizabeth Brown

Teaching With Blogs: Capable Child Bloggers

This is the third year I’ve been doing blogs with my fourth graders and it has become such a natural part of the fabric of my classroom that I haven’t been blogging here about it at all.  However, a couple of weeks ago two  colleagues and I did a  session on blogging with elementary students at a technology conference and I thought some readers of this blog might be interested in it.  And so the powerpoint and wiki we put together for our presentation are here for your reading and viewing pleasure.   (They even broadcast our session and supposedly will be posting the video sometime in the future.  I’m very eager to see it myself!)

In the Classroom: Reading Aloud

I do all sorts of read alouds, but the most important are the ones where I do an ongoing novel with the kids just listening and enjoying themselves. That is, they don’t have to talk (in fact often I won’t let them), answer my questions (or, worse, someone else’s say in a worksheet),  or feel an sort of obligation to do anything other than listen.  That is what I did with The Graveyard Book, The Underneath (still have to do a post about that), and now the forthcoming middle grade book by Rebecca Stead, When You Reach Me.  A sixth grade teacher after my own heart about this is Sarah at the Reading Zone who has a terrific post up today about her reading aloud beliefs and practices.

In the Classroom: If You Knew Time Like I Knew Time

The other day I started to read aloud a not-yet-published book set in 1979. The kids and I spoke about that being some time ago. One child said, “Oh yeah, that was when the Depression was.” Another’s face light up — ” You watch “Lost” don’t you? Right now they are in the 70s!”

Picturing the Past

Can we teach history in a way that really engages students’ imaginations? How to make best use of outstanding historical books for young readers as well as primary sources? Join award-winning authors and fellow educators as we explore ways to help young people form their own memorable pictures of the past!

The above quote is from the brochure describing “Picturing the Past,” a superb conference at the JFK Presidential Library and Museum in Boston I had the great fortune to be part of this Tuesday.  Sam Rubin, Esther Kohn, and other staff members did a truly outstanding job designing, planning, and running this event.   I was honored to be in the company of children’s book creators Walter Dean Myers, Ellen Levine, Wendell Minor, and Martin W. Sandler and follow educators Myra Zarnowski, Rhonda Clevenson, Mary Kelleher, Jessie Gerson-Nieder and Trevor Wrankmore.

The day before the conference some of us were taken on a tour of the JFK Presidential Birthplace. I had been joking beforehand that every time I saw the words “presidential birthplace” I would think of a log cabin (a bit too much Lincoln centennial perhaps?), but now that I’ve been I will no more. This house was indeed where Kennedy was born, but the family moved when he was three. In 1967 the Kennedy family bought back the house and Rose Kennedy worked to restore it as she remembered it in 1917.  So it is a fascinating melange of her memories (as opposed to any sort of historical verisimilitude) her memorializing of her slain son, and something of what life was like in 1917 Boston.  Absolutely fascinating. That evening we enjoyed a lovely dinner at the Lineage Restaurant in Brookline (and I should say the butterscotch pudding is as good as all the reviews say it is).

The conference itself was, as I wrote above, superbly planned and managed.  I enjoyed the sessions I was able to attend, the museum itself which is completely engrossing, and our private tours of the Hemingway Collection and another room for the Kennedys.  The space, designed by I. M. Pei, is extraordinary, facing out into the harbor.  I thought it was pretty cool that I got to do my workshop in the Mural Room.  It has the mural that was originally surrounding the White House pool. Later it was turned into a press room.  But the mural is still there and I enjoyed having it around me as I spoke about the way I teach history.