Best Practices – Page 12 – Mrs. Love's Blog-0-Rama!

Posted on October 29, 2015 October 29, 2015

How to teach a novel.

There are veteran English teachers shuddering ‘tsk tsk’ at the title of this post, as if to suggest it’s a simple process, and doesn’t take years of practice, studying, and scholarly pursuits. And reading. A lot of reading. (And if you’re a middle school teacher, some dislike that age group of literature: I find it to be some of the most honest and terrifying. Really think about The Giver? Nightmare fuel.)

About two weeks ago, one of my colleagues, who ventured on a long time ago to do great things, asked me if I was still teaching the “Journey of the Hero” unit which I played an integral part in developing. When we worked together, he even gave me a gift that belonged to his grandfather, a copy of Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth. I sighed and said no, that I had asked if I could update it to embed CCSS, since the Common Core seemed perfectly aligned to something as accessible as the journey of the hero –it is a unit that lends itself so beautifully to showing patterns of thought to develop thematic concepts. But, no matter. It’s not the only thematic game in town.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.8.9
Analyze how a modern work of fiction draws on themes, patterns of events, or character types from myths, traditional stories, or religious works such as the Bible, including describing how the material is rendered new.

But the move in our district seems to be choosing more stand-alone novels, without context or connection to other content areas, and that’s fine. It’s fine because it helps teachers focus on specific close reading skills, and not worry about how does it support other content areas. That may be a traditional approach to English/Language Arts, the ‘whole class novel’ as opposed to novel or text sets that are thematic and tied to multiple concepts and curriculum. I’m not really sure. It’s one of those tidbits I packed from reading Kelly Gallagher: things change, and change back, and be a critical thinker of what to keep, and what to throw away.

This is a long excerpt from How To Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster. If you want “How to be an English Teacher” this is it. Fortunately, not only do I have engaging authors like Foster when I want to brush up on my subtext and genre themes, but I have my husband and sons, who love to talk about the big ideas, no English degree necessary.

OKAY, SO HERE’S THE DEAL: let’s say, purely hypothetically, you’re reading a book about an average sixteen-year-old kid in the summer of 1968. The kid— let’s call him Kip— who hopes his acne clears up before he gets drafted, is on his way to the A& P. His bike is a one-speed with a coaster brake and therefore deeply humiliating, and riding it to run an errand for his mother makes it even worse. Along the way he has a couple of disturbing experiences, including a minorly unpleasant encounter with a German shepherd, topped off in the supermarket parking lot where he sees the girl of his dreams, Karen, laughing and horsing around in Tony Vauxhall’s brand-new Barracuda. Now Kip hates Tony already because he has a name like Vauxhall and not like Smith, which Kip thinks is pretty lame as a name to follow Kip, and because the ’Cuda is bright green and goes approximately the speed of light, and also because Tony has never had to work a day in his life. So Karen, who is laughing and having a great time, turns and sees Kip, who has recently asked her out, and she keeps laughing. (She could stop laughing and it wouldn’t matter to us, since we’re considering this structurally. In the story we’re inventing here, though, she keeps laughing.) Kip goes on into the store to buy the loaf of Wonder Bread that his mother told him to pick up, and as he reaches for the bread, he decides right then and there to lie about his age to the Marine recruiter even though it means going to Vietnam, because nothing will ever happen for him in this one-horse burg where the only thing that matters is how much money your old man has. Either that or Kip has a vision of St. Abillard (any saint will do, but our imaginary author picked a comparatively obscure one), whose face appears on one of the red, yellow, or blue balloons. For our purposes, the nature of the decision doesn’t matter any more than whether Karen keeps laughing or which color balloon manifests the saint. What just happened here?

If you were an English professor, and not even a particularly weird English professor, you’d know that you’d just watched a knight have a not very suitable encounter with his nemesis. In other words, a quest just happened.But it just looked like a trip to the store for some white bread. True. But consider the quest. Of what does it consist? A knight, a dangerous road, a Holy Grail (whatever one of those may be), at least one dragon, one evil knight, one princess. Sound about right? That’s a list I can live with: a knight (named Kip), a dangerous road (nasty German shepherds), a Holy Grail (one form of which is a loaf of Wonder Bread), at least one dragon (trust me, a ’68 ’Cuda could definitely breathe fire), one evil knight (Tony), one princess (who can either keep laughing or stop). Seems like a bit of a stretch. On the surface, sure. But let’s think structurally. The quest consists of five things: (a) a quester, (b) a place to go, (c) a stated reason to go there, (d) challenges and trials en route, and (e) a real reason to go there. Item (a) is easy; a quester is just a person who goes on a quest, whether or not he knows it’s a quest. In fact, usually he doesn’t know. Items (b) and (c) should be considered together: someone tells our protagonist, our hero, who need not look very heroic, to go somewhere and do something. Go in search of the Holy Grail. Go to the store for bread. Go to Vegas and whack a guy. Tasks of varying nobility, to be sure, but structurally all the same. Go there, do that. Note that I said the stated reason for the quest. That’s because of item (e). The real reason for a quest never involves the stated reason. In fact, more often than not, the quester fails at the stated task. So why do they go and why do we care? They go because of the stated task, mistakenly believing that it is their real mission. We know, however, that their quest is educational. They don’t know enough about the only subject that really matters: themselves. The real reason for a quest is always self-knowledge. That’s why questers are so often young, inexperienced, immature, sheltered. Forty-five-year-old men either have self-knowledge or they’re never going to get it, while your average sixteen-to-seventeen-year-old kid is likely to have a long way to go in the self-knowledge department.

Foster, Thomas C. (2014-02-25). How to Read Literature Like a Professor Revised: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines (pp. 2-3). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

The TL:DR version is there are patterns in genres. Don’t be fooled by surface topics. Dig deeper. Talk. Think.

Recently NPR aired a story about Dungeons and Dragons, and how it sustains current gaming now; however, that was not the the gaming industry that caught my attention, but writers who used the writing involved with D&D, and how that launched their careers. Consider this when planning a unit on reading–connect the story to what students love–they love their own narratives, and incorporate free-form writing with their reading. They love when they see the pattern, and feel capable of understanding the big ideas–the big ideas are accessible and not put out of reach like dangerous cleaning supplies.

Ultimately I tell students trust their instincts–take a risk. What do they think is going on? Spit-ball some ideas, and see what sticks. Metaphorical spit-balls, that is. Please. For teachers wanting to know more about how to teach a novel, I would say the same: trust your instincts, be willing to talk, and open to new ideas about the book. It’s acceptable and encouraged to see another’s view point, and not necessarily accept it as your own. I wouldn’t know half as much if I read in isolation and never talked about movies or books I watched–not that that has to happen all the time. Balance and connection – and willingness to learn something new.

Lenses:

Character
Pattern of plot/story
Symbols
Literary devices: what is the writer doing well, or what seems awkward?
Author’s voice: word choices are not arbitrary
Text Sets: Informational connections to literary texts

As I said in a previous post, Gluing the Wings Back On, all this analysis has somewhat disrupted my own reading life. For fun, I’m reading The Winter Witch by Paula Brackston. It’s a romance. Know how I know? The heroine conveniently can’t/won’t speak, and forces her new husband to communicate with gestures, glances, and inferences. Talk about forcing your partner to truly listen. Every paragraph is a volley of “does he love me, does he not?” and for some reason she can’t write him a note. Her lack of writing literacy hasn’t been addressed yet, and I’m not sure it will be. Sometimes I wish I could read this sort of stuff as a 12-year-old. Unlike The Witch’s Boy by Michael Gruber, which is truly a magical book–a retelling of a classic fairy tale with grit, and takes the patterns and practice of fairy tale into a realm of authenticity and surprise. (It takes a lot to surprise me about a fairy tale, and someday perhaps a romance will surprise me again, too. So far only The Princess Bride and just about anything by John Irving have taught me new narratives about romance. Okay…Jane Austen, too. And The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern.) But I digress – perhaps this is a post for another time: what authors speak to our life’s themes?

Till next time – turning the page.

Posted on October 10, 2015 October 12, 2015

Got the whole data in his hands…

This may not have much to do with the topic, but I always think a little Carl Sagan thrown in on a hopeless Saturday morning to be a good thing to get some perspective. Everything from Ben Carson wanting to use his magic time machine and give guns to Jews, (and others who think he was right, who also have no idea how anything works), to folks conflating their religious beliefs with their tax dollars. Me? Shrug. I’ve got big data to keep me warm for a few hours! Seriously – no snark, promise –this is fun for me–looking over ideas from charts and exploring what’s behind the numbers.

Visible Learning by John Hattie (2009) takes on ‘meta-analysis relating to achievement.‘ This book is a gift from our new administrator, and I am grateful for it. In a nutshell, there are over a hundred concepts that have been tried in education to promote student achievement. The word “achievement” has a mental bookmark for me, because I need to stop and look up the definition of achievement in this context.

After a few attempts around the Interwebs, I came across this:

Achievement and assessment

1. What defines ‘achievement’? Is it student results in standardized testing or are there other measures?

Achievement relates to the subjects typically taught in schools, with the preponderance in math and reading (followed by Science, Social Studies) and fewer in the Arts. In terms of the Visible Learning research, there is a good mix of standardised tests, state tests, researcher constructed and teacher made tests.

That still doesn’t quite answer my question, but I’ll take this to mean students are meeting or exceeding the expectations of the content at any point in time. No need to stir more into the pot.

Examples/Glossary and links to instructional methods are here.

A colleague and I were discussing at lunch that most of the reports, when investigated further, need to be considered through a critical eye–to me, the data are a tapestry. If, say for instance Home Life is not judged solely on the basis of its number, but on the complex responses of parents to children’s schooling, then it does have an impact when taken out of its data silo. The concept of parent ‘surveillance’ hit home with me especially in this day of instant progress and missing assignment reports. I’ve been guilty of this, and perhaps we need to look at our grading reporting systems so we don’t enable parents to be supervisors or spies in their children’s education, but seek to aspire as Hattie suggests. Looking at classroom size–this needs another review. If you’re at 20 to 30 there isn’t much difference, but if you get to classroom sizes of 40, yes, that has to impact learning, if those 40 are relenting to peer pressure and not tracking the instruction. Teasing out one factor from another is difficult. But maybe I’m just clinging to the Old Gods of Educational Myths.

Grant Wiggins wrote on article back in 2012 on Hattie’s work, and there are a few editorial comments/changes. It’s a good article, and I suggest reading it.

Here is the big snake of data: (click to enlarge)

1. Self-report grades

Self reported grades with John Hattie from Cognition Education on Vimeo.

If some of the systems in place in the positive zone on the lower rungs of impact aren’t in place, does this impact the upper rungs?

John Hattie’s Summary: Know thy impact from Cognition Education on Vimeo.

Well, ultimately, his message is clear: allow for risk and listening. I would add one other factor which I am not sure he addresses, and that is student influences on one another. Perhaps he does, but it’s not clear where it is in the data belt.

Overhearing students tell another to “not to do the work,” and adding that peer pressure and ridicule their friends when they do like school is HUGE. Perhaps this is covered under another of Hattie’s data point umbrellas, but in middle school where friendship and belonging are the rings that rule them all, it’s something to be mindful of. Students work ethic is affected by their peer groups, and using that knowledge to move the momentum back to achievement (it’s cool to be smart/gain knowledge) is a value that can help all students.

What’s your take away from Hattie’s work? Is he just another educator trying to sell a program? A scholar supporting important messages? I value the focus: the intentional focus on not getting spun out by the distractions or misdirections in educational conversations. If meta-analysis provides evidence of key educational concepts that have the greatest impact, then those focused conversations may be of great value.

I believe the larger vision is to align his work with those of our PLCs, so I plan on giving this some thought. It took my group about five collective hours just to agree on what a good summary is, but I have hope. This means we’re truly thinking and evaluating, and not taking things at surface level. (My mantra: ‘retell is not a summary…retell is not a summary….retell is not a summary’). One thing I do know is we’re a pretty savvy group of educators, and we’ll figure it out. This gives us some clarity, and what to reprioritize.

Posted on September 7, 2015 September 7, 2015

It’s working.

What I think of when I see the new hall pass vest... — What I think of when I see the new hall pass vest…

If you live in my part of the country you are experiencing a glorious day today. It’s Labor Day, 69 degrees F, 57% humidity, 5MPH wind. It’s beautiful. Clear blue skies, a hint, a soucent of apple-crispness and promises of an effervescent fall to follow. Ah, lovely…

It’s mellowed me out when I think of my first week back to school, not that I needed much mellowing in truth: it was a wonderful week. We have new admin, new support staff, and new rules that make a lot of sense for students and teachers. The only ones that threw me off were when students can get into the building, which of course I made sure to send out an (incorrect) all-staff email and was summarily and kindly corrected. (It was concerning when students can get into the building, which is a good change –I always just made a pass for the student ahead of time, but this way there will be more flexibility.) The other change that threw me off was the whole-school hall passes: we have a safety vest for ALL THINGS PASSING, and I kid you not, in the first fifteen minutes of class a kid was called to the office and another had a nose bleed. The nose bleed won, and got blood on the vest. (Biohazards are part of the job.)

I am hoping our new principal allows us to manage two passes: the vest for bathrooms, water fountains, and lockers, and one pass for nurse/office. We’ll see. Her philosophy includes ‘no stupid rules,’ and I’m sure she will support us supporting our students.

And I have to say, I am noticing the shifts, and not just with new admin, but with teaching practices in the elementary grades. When asked to ‘turn and talk,’ students in my class did so with ease and honesty. They really did TURN AND TALK – ! — so perhaps some of these pedagogical practices are taking root. There are so many good ideas out there, so much I want to share and discuss, it’s exciting. And once again I am reminded of the nature of the middle school child: when discussing dress code, got in a lively and engaging debate with one 7th grade girl about our culture of shaming, etc. while other students (mostly boys) looked around wondering what the heck was going on. The disparity in development, awareness, and social cues are vast, but that’s what makes middle school kids awesome. But think about it–what if some teacher said, “Hey, I have a great idea! What if we let kids talk about their ideas!” and other teachers said “What, are you crazy?! Kids can’t be trusted to talk.” Nothing would progress.

And there are a few metaphorical grubs and vermin under the rock. As excited as I am to try and share new ideas, and refine some solid ones (I feel very pioneering when I think of my Burning Questions unit, for example, and other original units I created). I was told in a meeting when I asked about starting a “genius hour” that “We can’t do that” by a colleague. Not sure why, or what her reasoning is, just a “no.” But hey, some folks are the proverbial “not the boss of me,” my students are, so I’m going to try it anyway. Cult of Pedagogy just reminded me of this, and so I’m going to think about its implementation when the year gets chugging along.

But how to go about this? Well, I guess I’m using my 20% time to figure it out! One thing, it’s not a ‘free for all’ time:

JG: Is there a “wrong” way to do 20 percent time?

AJ: The worst thing you can do is assign this project and then sit back and say, Alright, it’s on you guys, 20 percent time, learn what you want! I’m here if you need me! That’s the worst way you can do it. It doesn’t work out. The teacher has to be more active in this learning experience than anything else. Because students need coaching. They need to be connected to the right resources, to the right people. They need help on their projects. There are going to be pitfalls and failures, and they need someone there to kind of say that’s okay, that’s what it’s all about.

I’m not sure how to structure this at first, or when. This LiveBinder is a great place to start, as this bread-crumb starter of an Edutopia article. I am really liking the idea of “pitching” a project as my starting place for them.

My students are chomping at the bit, happy, and engaged–I don’t want to mess this up. I don’t want negativity to undermine them. I can’t help the watchdog in me. I am hoping I can get some support from other staff members, but if not that’s okay. I’ve got the Internet and my PLN, and my students have me. It’ll all work out.

Posted on July 1, 2015 July 1, 2015

How to [anything]

“How to” is married to “how come?” They are partners in our curiosity and creativity.

But along with this great beauty comes something much harder to bear. What do you do about the answers that lie beyond your reach?

I have only had one teaching job to date, and this past spring I wondered if the grass might be greener. I’ve been honest with employers and interview committees of why I may be seeking other opportunities, and subsequently why I decided to stop having those conversations for the time being. I am overdue for some professional growth opportunities: those moments have been truncated and stagnant with past administrators (note: this is not a criticism, just a different leadership style and priorities). There has been a lot to learn from sitting on that side of the interview table, and I’ve also been sitting on the interviewer side, too. I can’t and won’t divulge details of what candidates offered, nor where I took missteps. (Okay: I’ll share one: I pointed out a typo on the questions for a high school ELA position, joking that I wondered if it was a test. The unsmiling faces and defensiveness of the teachers interviewing me assured me no, it was not intentional, and their senses of humor, in short supply anyway, quickly evaporated. Is it sour grapes to say it probably wasn’t a good fit if they didn’t get my irreverent sense of humor?)

Sorry for the detour. This is intended to be a discussion about ‘how to teach [fill in the blank]. A colleague and I noticed none of the ELA candidates spoke to reading instruction other than an aside, and all (and I am not being generalizing or global here) spoke about writing instruction and their work in that area. Some spoke about presentation and the listening/speaking standards; however, reading was the afterthought.

I am wondering if maybe the questions themselves lent the respondents to focus on writing, or if there is some message that’s being telegraphed about writing instruction being neglected. I wonder if others believe I’m not a competent teacher of reading because I talked about my work with PSWP/NWP, and my work with reading instruction is quiet and deep. (I would have thought my masters in children’s literature as engaging reading instruction, my National Boards certification, or my multiple novel units/curriculum would have demonstrated adequately my skills, but I am terrible at self-promotion.) This is the only reason I can think some jumped to this Island of Conclusions.

"To be sure," said Canby; "you're on the Island of Conclusions. Make yourself at home. You're apt to be here for some time." — “To be sure,” said Canby; “you’re on the Island of Conclusions. Make yourself at home. You’re apt to be here for some time.”

This not only deeply offends me, but these dangerous assumptions create a climate of defensiveness and undermining. And I am struck by how much I’m not laughing about it now, either. And perhaps those multiple candidates did not speak about reading because teaching reading is about as difficult as it gets. Our responses and biases toward any text are as complex as a dream, and twice as difficult to describe or explain.

Why is reading difficult to teach? While many articles focus on teachers’ actions as the culprit for why reading is a “instructional ghetto,” many voices strive to underscore the inequity of school-readiness. I know whose parents have the luxury of time to read to their children, and those who don’t. I’ve encouraged many students throughout the year to read to younger siblings. I’ve done book talks, librarian discussions, close text and annotating lessons, and a text-rich classroom.

Personally, I’m returning to basics, as well as refreshing some tried and true approaches. I’ve linked this before, but it deserves another read, to think about engaging texts not in terms of difficulty, but in terms of thematic thinking. Close reading need not be the pulling the wings off the butterfly, but expressing the beauty and anguish in language; not being afraid to teach the fundamentals of reading. By the time I get students in eighth grade, there will be a handful in every class who do not know that the vowel sound changes if you had an ‘e’ at the end, or to chunk sound patterns instead of the laborious ‘sounding it out.’ Their prior teachers did nothing wrong: the gaps come from our never-ending push through of students and not knowing their strengths and weaknesses.

One thing I plan on doing intentionally and wholly this year is teaching reading with love. Not the kind of love that is mushy or some kind of Facebook sentimental glop. The kind of love that is dangerous, and full of conflict and struggle, as well as safety and agreement. I’m going to hold that baby multiple ways, but never, ever drop it.

Posted on June 27, 2015 August 30, 2016

Agility.

For years, a continuing lament of teachers is students’ ‘learned helplessness.’ I witnessed this time and again: students who eschew pencils on the ground or break them then repeatedly asking for another, treating provided materials with disdain, echoing phrases of “I don’t know” or “I don’t understand,” and waging a war of attrition: who’s going to break first– me or them–when it comes to clarifying instructions or letting them become overly frustrated? (I usually just answer questions with questions, but somehow that doesn’t always inspire.) How could they NOT be getting this?! The learning targets and success criteria are written with great thought and precision every single day: why won’t they look at the board, and tuck into this delicious buffet of knowledge and enlightenment I’ve offered? The old phrase ‘students should work harder than the teacher’ often didn’t happen. Some folks think grit may be the answer, but to date no one knows how to ‘teach grit,’ or even if it should be taught.

If asked what the learning target/success criteria is for any given lesson, students are trained to parrot back what’s on the board, robotically and usually, joyless. If an evaluator is in the room, this signal from teachers to students is an expectation, and often students are pulled away and quietly asked, “What is the learning target today?” as a check-point for the teacher. The locus of control and agency shifts from student engagement to teacher accountability. And the learned helplessness increases.

I now know why.

And I want my colleagues to pay attention and collaborate with me, and see if we can do better.

How we learn to be helpless—and unlearn it

Learned helplessness keeps people in bad jobs, poor health, terrible relationships, and awful circumstances despite how easy it may be to escape. Learn how to defeat this psychological trap, thanks to the work of Martin Seligman.

BY DAVID MCRANEY

Here’s Seligman’s experiment in a nutshell: a box, electric shocks, dogs, and a tone. When the dogs hear the tone, receive a shock, they would jump to the ‘safe’ side. In the second group, they took away the tone, the dogs learned to prepare on their own, and learned to go to the ‘safe’ side. Bring back group one, no tone, and the dogs gave up –whimpered and cried–they learned that without the signal/tone, the dogs had no chance of an ‘epiphany’ or mindset growth.

When Seligman put those three groups in the room with the electric floors and wall, groups one and two quickly learned to jump over the wall when the tone alerted them to incoming shocks. The third group did not. Instead, they curled up on the floor and whimpered. The previous experiment had taught them there was no point in trying to figure out a pattern. It was as if they thought bad things just happen sometimes, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Even though they could have escaped the pain, they didn’t even try.

Could it be in all this talk about growth mindset having students parrot back learning targets is the complete opposite of what we’re asking them to do? Are we asking them to give up, that there is no point in trying to figure out what the purpose of any given lesson is because it’s handed to them?

We need to change things up, but what exactly? I did my own experiment last year, by which I covered up the learning target/success criteria, taught the lesson, and as an exit ticket had students write down what they thought the targets were. Approximately 60% of students were either spot-on (develop an argument as to whether or not aliens exist) or darn close (claim/evidence/reasoning) and about 30% confused it with the performance task (work well in a group/do group work). This happened toward the end of the year, so they had been accustomed to the ‘tone’ of the learning target all year, so that they stopped hearing it. By requiring them to think and reflect, they owned the lesson much more deeply.

Some might argue that learning targets and success criteria show students what happens in ‘the real world.’ Yes and no: depends on which ‘real world.’ Minimum-wage jobs have very strict guidelines and protocols, and do not encourage free-thinking or innovation. If you ask me today the weight and required temperature of a Starbucks’ latte I could probably recall that information. My husband and I were talking about this, and his 25 years of experience in design and UX tell a very different story: if you’re hired by a company in a salaried job, you’d better come prepared to think on your own, and offer your own insights and experience. No one gives you a ‘learning target’ script. This may be one cultural factor which Chinese and Indian educational systems speak of — they are highly trained in routine and computational thinking, but not innovation. Their words, not mine.

And just why is thinking critically so darn important, anyway? The world doesn’t come with warnings. I want my students to be hungry for learning when they come in my classroom, not passive and spoon-fed. I don’t want them to ask ‘why we have a bell?’ when I say I am the one to dismiss them. I want the end of the class to come as a surprise because they were so deep in their work they lost track of time. I have seen this less and less during the past two to three years of the “Learning Target/Success Criteria” regime. We need to spring from our haunches, prepare and adapt. It’s one thing to have drills and escape routes: that provides options. It’s altogether a different beast when we suffer from the notion that nothing we do will affect change. (Including taking down a flag as step one when there are so many other steps to take, too.)

Innovation’s enemy is learned helplessness. All of us need to be ready to jump and move. This has potential for deep implication in the inclusion model classroom, whereas in order to get all students moving forward, some have had years of entrenched learned helplessness and distract the teacher’s energy so that the process and purpose gets stuck in the mental mud.

The learning targets and success criteria should not become the ‘tone” for students to put aside all of their thinking, to passively accept they know the end game, so why play at all? This teacher activity (and observed by evaluators) has taken up way too much discussion and educational space for their return on learning time investment.

I would love your ideas and thoughts: I believe in purpose, I believe in objectives/goals/targets, and assessment and responsiveness. What ways do you keep students from wallowing in learned helplessness?