Reading Workshop: Here We Come

Jaimie Howe contributed this post. Click here to read more of Jaimie's thinking.

My reader’s workshop journey continues as I start to engage in the professional development that surrounds my district’s purchase of the Lucy Calkins Units of Study for Teaching Reading. Have I told you how excited I am?!   Yes, I’m sure I have as I’ve written several posts this year around the process my district has gone through to get us to the point of planning full implementation of a reading workshop framework next fall.  I can’t wait!

Our first professional development opportunity came on one of the last in-service days of the school year.  The district sought out the expertise of CESA 6 and invited Nicole Lehr to share her knowledge and experiences with the Lucy Reading Units of Study.  Grades 3-5 spent the morning with Nicole and grades K-2, the afternoon.  I was lucky enough to attend the entire day.  As I listened and engaged in the presentation, there were plenty of moments that validated my thinking, some excellent reminders, yet also several items I knew I needed to dig deeper into as they are integral components in the success of a reading workshop.  The two at the top of my list are text bands and learning progressions.

Why Text Bands?

• We use them to confer with readers
• They give us a better grasp on the books our students are reading
• We use knowledge of the text bands to help students tackle the work they will take on in their own books

Why Learning Progressions?

• They can act almost as cue cards by giving pointed, specific tips about a student’s next steps
• We can use them to teach transference across genres
• Understanding them allows us to be able to place the work the child is attempting to do and place it on a larger map that charts pathways to proficiency

Lucy provides two excellent resources in her kits that offer invaluable information about the reader’s workshop: A Guide to the Reading Workshop (Primary and Intermediate) and Reading Pathways.  My next step is facilitating a book study over the summer using these resources to build a deeper understanding of text bands and learning progressions as well as the reading workshop in general.  Hopefully this will prepare us to get the most out of the professional development in August from the Teacher’s College Reading & Writing Project and for successful implementation in the fall.

The most exciting part of this whole journey will be witnessing the extraordinary growth in our students’ literacy development and their flourishing love of reading due to great teaching and tons and tons of opportunities to read and write.  Lucy says it best:

Powerful instruction produces visible and immediate results; when youngsters are taught well, the thinking, talking, and writing about reading they produce becomes far more substantial, complex, and significant. Good teaching pays off. When you provide students with constant opportunities to read and to write and when you actively and assertively teach into their best efforts, their literacy development will astonish you, their parents, the school administrators, and best of all, the students themselves.

Lucy Calkins, 2015

We Get What We Plan For

Andrea Reichenberger contributed this thinking. Click here to read more about Andrea's work.

I’m a planner. Others will argue that I overplan, but I’m comfortable with that.  First, I think about the end goal and then I think about what evidence I’m going to use to assess whether or not I am getting close to that goal. Lastly, I plan the baby steps I need to implement along the way.  As it turns out, this is the philosophy of “Backwards Design.”  I love the concept of Understanding by Design (UbD). Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins have developed a thoughtful format that guides teachers to purposefully plan for student understanding.  Get it?  Understanding. By. Design.

What I’ve learned over the years is that when I don’t plan, I don’t get the learning I want to see from my students.  As I work with teachers through backwards design, I am reminded of how important it is to think through the goals of our planning and ask ourselves if they are meaningful and authentic.

What is it that we want the students to know and be able to do by the end of our units?  

What standards are we REALLY covering?  Which do we need to put more focus on within the unit?

How will we plan our assessments and performance tasks so they lend themselves to transfer those learned skills and knowledge outside of the classroom?

What daily goals or learning events do we need to plan for in order to guide our students toward that understanding?

How will we provide our students the effective feedback they need along the way?

I have to remind teachers that the planning process isn’t linear. I found myself modeling my thinking in front of one English teacher and then again in front of a class of 26 teachers from around the district. Not only did I need to think through the Big Ideas or Enduring Understandings (Students will understand that…), the essential questions, the standards, and the assessments all at the same time, I also needed to make sure I was using them all to keep my focus.  As I did, some of them changed.  I did not create my end of the unit activity and hope that everything aligned. I ended up revising, deleting, and creating several times along the way.

This work has resulted in many “aha” moments.  We are learning that we don’t plan a unit around a textbook or around the title of a book. We need to design them around the skills and the understandings we want students to come away with. Essential questions need to be open-ended and thought provoking. We are also discovering that when we don’t plan with big ideas or enduring understandings in mind, it is almost impossible to differentiate our instruction for those who require it.

Even though UbD provides several tools for teachers to use, we don’t have to use them. I encourage teachers to use the tools which work best for them. It is more important that they take the time to think through the plan.  It is exhausting, but well worth it. It hurts my heart when I hear teachers say “Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it.” or “Can’t we just buy a textbook?” We went into this profession for a reason.  What kind of messages are we sending to our students if we decide that we are done planning our curriculum units or that we don’t want to think too hard?

If we think through our planning for student understanding, we will get exactly what we planned for.

Embracing a Workshop Model (Part 2)

Jaimie Howe contributed this post. Click here to read more of Jaimie's thinking.

Click here to read Jaimie's original post about embracing a workshop model.

Finally, I’m getting around to updating everyone on my district’s progress in moving forward with a Reader’s Workshop Model district wide.  Below, I will briefly explain the process our district took to evaluate the Lucy Units of Study for Teaching Reading, links to resources we used, and, ultimately, how we finally came to our decision.

Starting in November, the district formed a team to review the Lucy Units of Study for Teaching Reading.  The team consisted of classroom teachers K-5, special education, intervention specialists (Title 1), District Reading Specialist, and district administration. Each of the elementary buildings were equally represented.  We met for two half days and 2-3 one hour after school meetings.  During those meetings we spent most of the time in grade level groups reviewing each grade level’s materials. We used a rubric created by Louisiana Believes (Louisiana Department of Education).

The rubric correlates to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and allowed us to really break apart the materials into chunks and determine strengths and weaknesses in specific areas.  Below are the specific components that were represented.

I: Text Selection

II: Foundational Skills

III: Questions and Tasks

IV: Scaffolding and Support

V: Writing to Sources and Research

VI: Speaking and Listening

VII: Language

Components, I, III, IV, and VII were very strong in all grade levels.  The other components also scored well across the board; however, ranged a bit more between grade levels.

Along with the rubric, teams also viewed many of the online resources/videos available from Heinemann: Units of Study for Teaching Reading and the Reading and Writing Project.  I highly encourage you to take a look at these if you’re considering implementing a Reader’s Workshop Model in your district.

At our final meeting, we met an analyzed a spreadsheet that had been created, compiling all of the grade level’s rubric scores. It seemed everyone agreed that we should move forward with purchasing the materials; however, a final decision was not made until all participants participated in a Google Form Survey, allowing each individual to voice opinions and/or concerns with the potential of moving forward.

We just got the e-mail last week indicating that the kits have been purchased!  I am so excited to be a part of this process and look forward to writing more about how we proceed with professional development and implementation of the materials.

Fan of Choice

Andrea Reichenberger contributed today's thinking.

Those who know me well know that I am not a huge fan of the whole class novel being used in the English/Language arts classroom--at any level. We strive to develop a love of literacy in our students by offering choice at the younger grade levels. Why do we want to take those choices away in the upper grades?

Much has changed in what we know about literacy instruction, but much has also changed with the students who walk into our classrooms everyday. Therefore, we need to rethink our practices.  I don’t believe that we MUST teach what may be considered a classic or the canonized literature that is so often a part of many high school curriculums. Don’t get me wrong.  I LOVE Pride and Prejudice, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Crucible, Catcher in the Rye and every Shakespearean comedy I’ve ever seen performed. If I really thought about why I loved these particular classics though, it was because I had a specific connection with each one. Because I love them, I have read them several times over and dug deeper with each read because I WANTED to and because it was my choice.  But I HATED (loathed might even be a better word) The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment--no matter how passionate my English teacher was. I didn’t care to read them, so I bought the Cliff Notes. (We didn’t have the Internet to access SPARK notes in the “old days.”)  I think it is also fair to say that my opinion of what constitutes a “classic” may differ from that of a teacher who is significantly older or younger than me. A novel that was released within the last 10 years MIGHT just be considered a classic. This could be true of many titles by authors like Gary Soto, Jacqueline Woodson and Chris Crutcher just to name a few.

When discussing curriculum, coming to agreements about titles can become a means of contention among teacher teams.  But these agreements shouldn’t be about us, they should be centered around our students. Who are those kids sitting in our classrooms? What choices can we offer that they will be able to connect to?  We have to think about those choices, and although many classics contain universal themes, we also need to think about whose perspective we are analyzing and why. My suggestion is to shift the conversation--instead of talking about titles,we should discuss how to incorporate deeper themes, how to address text complexity and accessibility, and how to create authenticity.

Before I begin to receive hate email, I should clarify that I do believe that teaching a whole class novel can be done--if it is done well.  Unfortunately, rarely have I witnessed a novel being taught really WELL except when used as a mentor or anchor text.  When used in this capacity, it is much more purposeful. I’ve seen too little planning and too many fill-in-the-blank worksheets.  I’ve seen too many unit tests on a novel with a wide array of low level recall questions that do not push the students’ thinking.  I’ve seen too many teachers having discussions where they are doing all of the talking and asking questions of the students in a manner I refer to as the “guess what I’m thinking” game. I’ve also seen too much reading with no writing and too much writing with no reading. If the whole class novel is going to be used, I believe that there needs to be significant instructional coaching and learning in order to be implemented in a way students can appreciate, embrace, and truly learn from.

We need our students reading and writing more, not less. Whole class novels can pull us away from that goal if we aren't careful. One of my favorite videos was created by Penny Kittle with her students in 2011.  I meant to make my own when I asked some of my former students the same questions. You shouldn’t be shocked that they had the same answers and responses.  

When teachers are designing units, they should not be designing a (insert any novel title here) unit. Units should be based around essential questions or universal themes in literature. So, in a sense, units shouldn’t be units---they should be more focused on inquiry.

Units should be designed in a way that enables reading, writing, speaking, and language use to work together hand in hand. We shouldn’t separate these skills but rather think about how they can be integrated together.

We should be designing units that offer authentic literacy instruction with real-world purposes that are relevant to all of our students. (I would also argue that this should happen in all content areas.) We should teach with the standards in mind and make sure we understand them, but not necessarily use them as our starting point.

Yes, we need to find powerful literature to incorporate into our units, but we also have to incorporate a wide variety of text types to help support our essential questions that will build students’ skills in different venues. This may include choosing video clips (but not entire movies), speeches, poems, songs, short stories, informational texts, and even picture books.

Lastly, we need to offer choice. In Regie Routman’s book, Read, Write, Lead, she cites the research of  Peter Johnston and Gay Ivey and well-known teacher researchers/practitioners including Nancy Atwell, Donalyn Miller, Kelly Gallagher, Penny Kittle, Donald Graves, and Lucy Calkins.  Choice is often the game-changer for elementary, middle school and high school students who are not thriving as readers and writers. Choice increases student engagement.  Student engagement is something I am a HUGE fan of!