We've Seen the Model - Now What?

Lisa Weiss contributed today's post. For more information, read Lisa's other posts about her district's "laser-like focus on the intentional use of literacy in service of our contents."

My vision of how this would play out changed once we returned from winter break. I thought that once teachers had the look and feel of the gradual release, the next steps would be planning for that same process of modeling and guiding writers. Time was provided each week during January collaboration times for such planning, and I had February 4th set as a time for teachers to come together to look at student writing--to see how their modeling, and use of GRR worked for their students.

By mid-January teachers were asking for more time to prepare. As I had conversations with teachers it was clear that this was an entirely new way of providing instruction, and fear was ruling. It became abundantly clear that we do not have a culture of learning established in our secondary schools. While it was not a shocking revelation, it was an insight that forced me to reflect on how starting with belief statements, or starting to build a culture of learning, would have been wise. Since I missed the boat on that critical aspect of professional development this year, I considered how we might be able to lead teachers into that culture shift next year. Turns out this was a glaring problem to many of the secondary leaders, and we are currently engaged in the messy work of planning how to foster that culture with teachers next year. More on that in the fall...

Back to January: I have the sense about me to listen to what the teachers say, and they were saying, “Slow down!” I knew it was necessary to pull back, and allow more time for teachers to plan for writing models, but applying the brakes was a disappointment because there was a tradeoff of time involved. To provide more time on the GRR, we were not going to be engaged in learning about and practicing close reading with the depth I had envisioned. I also felt, in some ways, that by allowing more time that some teachers might think we were sending the message that we do not need to continue using the GRR when the message was quite contrary. The message was this: We’ve heard you. We’re going to slow down and allow for more time to plan. We will not throw a new strategy at you in April, but….we need to continue practicing the GRR when modeling writing because the GRR is not going away, nor is our focus on writing.

The revised plan created more time in January for learning about the GRR with articles, videos, excerpts from Better Learning, and additional teacher demonstrations of modeling student writing--all dependent upon what teachers needed in each building. February was the new time frame to be engaging students in GRR when teaching writing; reading the writing students completed was also an expectation.

March 11th was the date that was designated for reviewing student writing and having conversations about the writing. I created a student work protocol, and placed teachers in small groups, with an English teacher or a literacy or instructional coach in each discussion group. I felt the English teacher was critical to the success of the conversations because, as teachers of writers, they hold the most insights when analyzing student writing. In the end, feedback was overwhelmingly positive! Many coaches reported that people, again, were saying that this was the best professional development session they had been to--we had similar feedback in December! The literacy coaches who were sharing this feedback, all commented about the depth and quality of conversations that took place. It was a time devoted to thinking about students, their writing, and the feedback that could be offered to students, and teachers appreciated the process.

We spent March engaging students in another round of writing, so the April literacy-focused professional development session was an additional opportunity to read, converse, and analyze student writing. The last (May) collaboration session of the year will focus on our data from English and social studies classes, the data sources for W4 and W9 goals; I am excited to receive all of it, as I have had many conversations with excited literacy coaches--boasting about the writing growth students have made this year. I’m anxious to see what that means as a district, and wondering what that means for professional development next year...

Coaching Teachers in Supporting Student Centered Writing

Bobbi Campbell contributed today's post. More of Bobbi's thinking can be found here.

The following resource was created after a discussion with a grade seven team of Language Arts and Social Studies teachers.  The problem they were trying to solve was two-fold:

1. How do I get my students to engage in the revision process?

2. How do we conference with every student in a timely way? 

Because of these issues, I created the following document specific to argument writing. As we engage in student-centered coaching cycles with teachers, we need to remember that the focus must be on student evidence of learning. Student learning includes building choice within parameters (promotes self-efficacy), shifting the cognitive load from teacher to student, and promoting the growth mindset by allowing students to reflect on the process of revision and the direct correlation to writing improvement. 

CLICK HERE to access the complete document 

(which includes differences between revision and editing, an argument criteria checklist, and directions for use).

The beauty about student-centered coaching is that whatever resource you create, the measure of its effectiveness includes feedback from the students themselves as well as teacher reflection on the adult implementation. Implementing this resource to support the revision and editing process is  recursive in nature and may require numerous iterations until success is achieved. The important piece is that we use evidence of student learning to shift our practice, or to problem solve next steps.

Characteristics of Effective Writing Instruction

Marci Glaus, English language arts consultant at the Wisconsin Department of Public instruction, contributed today's post.

The second part of the new professional learning on writing from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction focuses on research related to 21st century expectations, characteristics of effective writing instruction, the writing process, and balanced assessment. It includes different resources in support of research and practice including example writing processes, videos, and handouts. 

It is important to note that writing is represented as composing, working through a process, as opposed to something like filling in a worksheet. This professional learning begins with the assumption that we require that all students write. Lessons and units are based on big ideas, and there is an emphasis on educators sharing their own writing process/es to explicitly teach strategies for writing, highlighting the recursive nature of a writing process. Discussion and inquiry are a major focus for teaching a variety of writing tasks as well. There is a video that works through some of the research and an example writing process if you prefer to use it for that portion of the presentation. You can find the presentation in PowerPoint and Google slides formats, along with the video and handouts through the following link: http://ela.dpi.wi.gov/ela_writing

This professional learning begins and ends with English language arts educators’ beliefs about the teaching of writing. The importance of first identifying beliefs so that we can build upon them with support from research and experiences is paramount in improving teaching and learning. The materials on the website include the presentation in PowerPoint and Google Slides formats, a brief facilitator’s guide, and a resources tab which includes all of the handouts.

21st Century Writing Expectations: Examining Task, Audience, and Purpose

Marci Glaus, English language arts consultant at the Wisconsin Department of Public instruction, contributed today's post.

As many of you know, the Literacy and Mathematics team at the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction provides professional learning materials on various topics based upon perceived needs from the field. Many of these resources are produced in a train-the-trainer format, allowing for a broader audience. Based on information we gathered from across the state through survey data and conversations with educators, it was apparent that there is a demand for professional learning on writing. We found that the biggest needs were around the following topics:

•      Teaching students how to use the writing process and technology to produce and distribute writing appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.

•      Develop a balance of explanatory informative, argumentative, and narrative texts for different purposes and audiences.

As the Wisconsin DPI English Language Arts Consultant, I have built resources surrounding these topics and solicited feedback from some of the best English language arts educators in the state. I am thrilled to debut the finalized version of this professional learning today.

The first part of the professional learning, and the part that I write about today, focuses on 21^st century expectations, how these relate to the teaching of writing, and the examination of task, purpose, and audience with digital and print mentor texts. All of this begins and ends with educators’ beliefs about the teaching of writing to recognize and build upon their knowledge and experiences. This interactive professional learning provides the time and space for analyzing texts written for different purposes and audiences and discussion of current writing tasks from your school/classroom context.  While there is time for exploration of different technology tools for writing, the major focus of this portion of the professional learning is to first recognize the purpose for writing, the context for writing, and then the exploration of the various modes in which writing could live. You can find this part of the professional learning through the following link:

http://ela.dpi.wi.gov/ela_writing

The materials on the website include the presentation in PowerPoint and Google Slides formats, a brief facilitator’s guide, and a resources tab which includes all of the handouts. There are short videos that a facilitator may choose to play that cover the research portions of the professional learning as well. Finally, while there are mentor text examples already built into this presentation, facilitators are encouraged to replace them with texts appropriate to their context as needed. 

Later this week, I will provide an overview of the second part of the professional learning on writing. 

I Love the Learning, Yes, I do. I Love the Learning, How About You?

Andrea Reichenberger contributed today's post. More of Andrea's thinking can be found here.

I love new learning.  But I can count the number of times I have lost hours of my life that I will never get back sitting at a terrible conference, or a bad professional development listening to a speaker with no presence or personality, or one who speaks at his/her audience for hours in a monotone voice (Bueller...Bueller.) What disappointed me the most were the professional development sessions that were designed, but not modeled, after what we know is best practice in instruction.  That was always extremely frustrating to me.

No matter how bad the professional learning opportunity, as a learner, I force myself to take something away from it.  About five years ago I attended an RtI summit in a neighboring state.  It was death.  The presenters used a register of speech and vocabulary in which I had no background for context.  It was really difficult to learn anything, but I sure tried. It was a long bus ride (thank goodness it was a coach) back to the district, so I had some time to reflect.  Upon exiting the bus, my building principal asking me what I thought of the conference.  I was frank in my response.  “It was terrible,” and then I paused, “but I took away one very important lesson.”  

“What’s that?” she asked.

My answer was simple, yet profound because it ended up being a turning point in my teaching career: “I need to go back to school and get my reading license.”

I enrolled in a reading program and began classes two months later. If it hadn’t been for that God awful RtI summit, I wouldn’t be where I am today.

As a teacher, I am a learner first. I love attending conferences, workshops, and network meetings. I ALWAYS take away something new, and I’m usually excited about it.  Recently, I attended an orientation for a class I am taking with the Fox Valley Writing Project (Shout out to Lisa Weiss!) and even though it was an orientation, I walked away with some new ideas, and  I’m really excited about this learning opportunity.  

When I plan professional development, I do my best to design it so that everyone can take away new learning and apply it in their own instruction.  I ensure that I’m not doing all of the talking, I model, explain the purpose, and offer choice,  I build in collaboration, I provide guided practice, and I create independent tasks. But there are still teachers who seem to hate professional development, and I struggle to learn and understand why.  Just as when I’m in the classroom, I ask myself, what do my students need in order to meet the standards and how can I make the task engaging and relevant?  As educators, I feel strongly  that we should all be learners and model this for our own students.

What do we do when teachers don’t want to learn or keep up with best practice?  One of the ideas we are exploring  in our district is working toward empowering them.  We’d like to offer more choices for teachers and allow them to “chose their own adventure” in professional development--make it more focused on inquiry. We even asked teachers if they would be interested in being a part of the planning and delivery in the 2015-16 school year so we can look at creating teams.  We had quite a few teachers express interest.   This idea is still in it’s infant stage and will involve a great deal of collaboration and planning.  I know I will learn a lot as we go through the process and guess what?  That really excites me because I love new learning!

Using Assessment for Classroom Decision Making

Jaimie Howe contributed today's post. More of Jaimie's thinking can be found here.

Over the last 4-5 years the use of assessment in our district has really evolved. Below is a look at the progression of how assessment has looked in my building specifically.

In my building, we have always tried to use assessment to make decisions , but in the past it was much more informal and observational – mostly just used to form reading groups; partly due to limited assessment options.  Our knowledge and thinking started to shift back in 2011 as we began to gain knowledge of building systems and the RtI Framework.  Now with more systems in place and more knowledge of assessment, we are starting to use it more effectively with many other areas of instruction and for many other purposes.

There have been several things that have been implemented that were crucial to our shift in thinking and ability to start to use assessment more effectively.

• Standards Based Report Card: We implemented a Standards Based Report Card in 2011 for ELA. This caused us to see the need for assessments to align and be more systematic rather than only informal or observational.  

• More Assessment Options: We also began using the DRA2 in 2011, which gave teachers the opportunity to look at each individual child more closely and select specific learning targets for students.  It also allowed teachers to consider grouping students by skill/strategy versus reading level based off of the DRA2 Class Profile.

• District Assessment Frameworks: Each grade level has an Assessment Framework indicating which assessments they need to give and when.  It is organized by type of assessment (screener, diagnostic, formative, etc.).  This creates so much more consistency and common knowledge across buildings in our district and specific grade levels.

• Master Schedule and Intervention Block: Implementation of a master schedule and an intervention block in 2012 made it so much easier for us to have a consistent collaboration schedule.  This was imperative for us in moving forward.  It gave us the opportunities we needed to look at our assessments more closely and make decisions as a team. Below are the consistent collaboration times that we use each year; however, much more collaboration happens as needed.

• Grade Level Teams meet 2x per week during MAPE (45 minutes: 1 day – ELA, 1 day – Math)
• Grade Level and Cross Grade Level Teams meet with Literacy Coach 1x per month. (½ hour - before school)
• Unit Teams (K-2 and 3-5) meet with Math coach 1x per month. (½ hour - before school)
• Individual Grade Levels with resource teachers (SPED, psych., lit. coach, etc) ½ day every 6-8 weeks (4x per year) – includes analyzing assessments and instructional planning
• Opportunities for ½ day release time for instructional planning to create common assessments and/or collaborate around assessment.

This consistent collaboration schedule has been imperative in the work that we do. Without collaboration, it would be nearly impossible to use assessments to guide our instruction. We are trying to develop a system where assessment is a precursor to instruction; telling us what to teach, not just how students did.  This takes time and a lot of hard work, but it’s worth it!

Wisconsin's Specific Learning Disability (SLD) Eligibility Criteria

A new episode of Literacy Live is posted. It's all about finding data sources within your balanced assessment system that could be helpful when an IEP team is making an eligibility decision for specific learning disabilities.

The episode can be viewed here:
https://sites.google.com/a/dpi.wi.gov/lit-live-assessment/home/literacy-data-and-sld-eligibility