What Are You Reading: May 2015

1. Andrea says, "I am reading - and I know this may seem strange - What’s Math Got to Do With It? by Joan Boaler (the revised and updated version for 2015).   It's really about changing our mindset about mathematics instruction and I find it absolutely fascinating.  I share an office with our math coach and she recommended that I read it."

2. Heather is reading Endangered Eliot Schrefer. She summarizes it as follows: "Sophie is visiting her mother in the Congo.  Her mother is passionate about saving bonobos and Sophie ends up taking care of a bobonbo she names Otto.  Then war breaks out where Sophie is and she needs to try to save both her life and Otto's life."

3. Heather is also reading Brown Girl Dreaming in which author Jacqueline Woodson uses verse to tell her story about growing up in South Carolina in the 1960s and then moving to New York.

4. Julie is reading Kay Psencik's The Coach's Craft - Powerful Practices to Support School Leaders. It is about using coaching to build the capacity of school leaders.

5. Diane is reading 10 Things Every Writer Needs to Know by Jeff Anderson. She says, "I love the layout of this book as it seems to be very user friendly.  Jeff Anderson focuses on developing the concepts and application of ten essential aspects of good writing—motion, models, focus, detail, form, frames, cohesion, energy, words, and clutter. Throughout the book, Jeff provides dozens of model texts, both fiction and nonfiction, that bring alive the ten things every writer needs to know. I can see using this book as a book study.  He has quotes for each chapters and gives you ready to use strategies that I have shared with my teachers."

6. Barb is reading More Than This by Patrick Ness.  It's the April Read on Wisconsin book. She says, "Ness’s 400+ page YA dystopian  novel begins with a first-person narration by Seth who commits suicide by drowning himself. He wakes up in a town he once lived in with his family; however, it is completely abandoned. He has to figure out what’s going on (after life?) and how he will survive. It has some CRAZY twists. I’ve wanted to throw it across the room at least three times."

7. Bobbi says this about Gretchen Owocki's Common Core Writing Book, K - 5: "I love this book because it is practical and easy to use. Owocki illustrates how the standards can bring out the best in our students, while engaging them in rigorous content."

8. Heather is reading Don't Call Me Ishmael by Michael Gerard Bauer. She explains, "Ishmael does not get along with the class bully, Billy.  When a new student, Scobie, starts school, he helps Ishmael come out of his shell."

9. Carrie is reading Drive by Daniel Pink. She says, "In his book, Drive, Pink talks about what motivates and inspires humans to achieve their goals and find satisfaction. A great read to inspire both teachers and students to strive for fulfillment in their daily lives."


10. Diane is catching up on her young adult fiction to find connections to disciplinary literacy. Someone recommended she read The Barn Burner by Patricia Willis. Diane says, "The story takes place in 1933  during the height of the depression era.  14 year old Ross leaves home after his father wrongly accuses him of stealing and his mother tells him to get out, Ross roams the countryside sleeping in barns and doing odd jobs. When the barn he is sleeping in catches fire, Ross is afraid people will think he did it. He decides to stay with the family that's taken him in until the barn burner is caught. Staying with the Warfields reminds him of his own family. As time passes, Ross wonders will he be able to go home some day? This book is centered around the theme of Ross trying to prove his innocence."

11. Barb read The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins. She says, "This one has been passed between the cubes of the DPI literacy consultants. I read it (listened to it, actually), and then Laura and Marci read it, finishing within days of each other. It's a captivating mystery told from alternating perspectives of three unreliable narrators."

Acronym Intersection: CRP and S&L

Laura Adams, literacy consultant at the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, contributed today's post.

Professionally, this school year has been about two things for me: speaking and listening and culturally responsive practices. These areas have been the focus of my professional learning and, consequently, the focus of professionally co-developed resources. As I reflect on my journeys in these areas (which, like any area of professional growth, are on-going), I think about the places that these areas intersect.

I like intersections because I think that’s where meaningful learning and growth take place. Think about the intersection between reading and writing, or coaching and teaching, or teaching and learning, and at the point (or points) where those two things meet, you’ll find new ideas and great a-ha moments that lead to new ways of thinking and doing.

So here are my reflections about the intersection of speaking and listening and culturally responsive practices.

I speak and listen differently when I’m in different groups (immediate family, extended family, friends, literacy colleagues, colleagues in education, professional organizations, church groups, etc.) because each group has different ways of speaking and listening. This is probably not a new idea to you, my literacy-minded reader, but then I started to think about how I learned what speaking and listening behaviors were appropriate in the different groups I belong to. While I was growing up, there was a great deal of emphasis placed on the speaking and listening practices that occurred around the dinner table of my immediate family. My Dad was the authority. We listened to him speak and responded when called upon. He would ask follow-up questions or give directions about who was to complete which household chore before the next dinner time. So, in other words, the speaking and listening practices that I learned around the family dinner table set me up for success in school.

And then I started to think: What if they hadn’t? What if the speaking and listening behaviors so valued in my immediate family, critical for me to understand in order to connect with and relate to those people I was sharing space with day to day, were different from those behaviors valued in a school setting? Would I have learned those academic speaking and listening behaviors? Would I still have relied on observation to teach me how to speak and listen in other groups? Would I have been able to navigate back and forth between those worlds? Would I have graduated as an honor roll student? Would I have received that university scholarship? Would I be where I am today?

And, if that had been the case, how could my teachers have helped me to achieve academic success?

First, I would have needed my teachers to accept and respect me as I was versus being told that my speaking and listening behaviors were wrong. Second, I would have needed lots of modeling and for my teachers to reveal their thinking about how they said things or why they said things the way that they did. Third, I would have needed lots of guided practice in academic speaking and listening. Fourth, I would have needed that practice to be engaging and meaningful; for it to be applied to a specific situation or context that I could care about.

So what about you, my literacy-minded reader? What speaking and listening behaviors are valued in your groups? How did you learn them? What did you need to achieve academic success? And what can you do tomorrow to support ALL your students?

What Do You Do When You're Overwhelmed?

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

What do you do when you are overwhelmed?  I have an interesting coping mechanism for this...avoid, avoid, avoid, until it is impossible to ignore the mountain of work seeping through every crack and orifice, extending out at least 3 feet.  Sometimes the workload is self-imposed; sometimes it is because of the choices I have made (working full-time with a 75 minute commute, mother of three...yada, yada, yada, yada) and mostly, it is due to the demands of being an educator - I know anyone reading this blog...are you out there bloggess?, knows exactly what I am talking about. Plain and simply, the demands can make one question education as a career choice.  But this blog is not about questioning your choice, because we all know we are in education for a myriad of reasons, mostly centering on making a difference in a child’s education.  This blog is about taking care of yourself, so that you CAN take care of the education of children.

Lately, our district focus has been on the following agenda items:

• Gradual Release of Responsibility
• Equity Traps
• Growth Mindset
• Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Practices
• Focus Standards: W1, W5,W10, SL6, R1, L6, R10

While the areas of focus are extremely important, none of it matters if you are stressed, overwhelmed and unsupported.  I can hear your questions now…”This is our job, we have to learn, do, pay attention to all of these agenda items!” - yes, you do, but first we need to practice self-care so that we can be more efficient, more focused, more open to learn new things and try them, and gosh darn it, happier.  

The following list of self-care or sanity savers are not prescriptive, or necessarily healthy for you, but they work for me.

• Force yourself to exercise. I personally get up at 4:30 to get the darn thing out of the way.
• Choose yoga if you know you will be in meetings all day.
• Kickboxing if you know you will be working with difficult people.
• Tae Kwon Do if you know you will be working with someone higher up on the food chain
• Weights if you have to present in front of a large audience (you may sweat and have to take off your jacket, showing your arms, hence the weights).

• Phone a friend who will make you laugh.
• Keep positive notes, letters, emails handy and retrieve them when you need some cheer.
• Go to your favorite takeout place and get dinner for the entire family.
• Open up an expensive (my expensive bottle is probably not your expensive) $12.00 bottle of wine and have, not just one glass, but two!!!!!!!!!!!!
• Stop at T.J. Maxx on the way home and purchase a small pick-me-up item.  Nothing major, just a little treat!
• Journal. Put it away. Take out journal and read it. Write back to yourself.
• Step outside and look up to the sky.  Take a deep breath and stretch  your arms, reaching towards the sky.
• Hug your loved ones.
• Get at least 7 hours of sleep, no matter what tasks will be left undone.
• Paint your toes.
• Read a trashy novel, followed by something of quality.
• Repeat to yourself: you did your best, forget the rest.

So, if you want to be a happier, more productive employee, take care of yourself by practicing self-care.  Your colleagues and the kids will appreciate it!

A Research Conundrum

Marci Glaus, English language arts consultant, at WI DPI, contributed today's post.

There are several places we go as educators to find research in support of teaching practices. One tool educators use to support their practice is professional books. While many of these professional books are not entire volumes on research the author/s conducted, there is value in learning from them as leaders in the field, along with the research that they cite in support of the purpose of the book. The focus for this blog post stems from an interesting experience I had with a professional book while searching for appropriate research for a project I have been working on about teaching writing.

I have been gathering information specifically related to characteristics of effective writing instruction and I became excited when I was reading a chapter in Routman’s (2014) Read, Write, Lead: Breakthrough Strategies for Schoolwide Literacy Success, because of the following statement and citation: “Not only that, but thinking out loud and writing in front of our students is the number one strategy for improving students’ writing57” (p. 112). This statement was like a gift especially wrapped for me, because I assumed it meant that someone else did the work for me when it came to gathering the research related to writing in front of students, and all I had to do was cross-reference the endnote from the book to get it. I flipped to the endnotes section and quickly found out that she was citing another favorite in the field, Kelly Gallagher. I wasn’t expecting this, but located his book Write Like This (2011) from my shelf and turned to the page cited in Routman’s endnotes. What I found was a conundrum.  

Like I said, based on Routman’s broad statement about a particular strategy being the number one strategy to improve student writing, I assumed that I would be led a meta-analysis on several research studies, or a large-scale research study. Instead, I was led to the following statement from Gallagher’s book: “This bears repeating: of all the strategies I have learned in my twenty-five years of teaching, no strategy improves my students’ writing more than having my students watch and listen to me as I write and think aloud” (p. 15) (emphasis original). While I admire and respect Kelly Gallagher as an authority in the field and a great writing teacher based on his experiences with the National Writing Project and as a leader, I was not convinced that all of this fit with Routman’s blanket statement. One person’s professional observations and evidence from classroom experience did not align with what I thought I would find as support for such a broad proclamation. Even though I agree with him, and even though I have experienced the same results myself as an English teacher after writing in front of my students as a teaching tool, I wondered, is this enough? Can I re-state that the number one strategy for improving students’ writing is to write in front of your students in this context?

After having this uncomfortable conversation with myself, I decided that it would not be responsible to promote the same statement in the work that I am doing. However, I am not abandoning the idea that writing and talking about it in front of students is a great strategy. So, I moved back into the digging that we just have to do in order to locate the research support that is needed in the field. Stay tuned!

References

Gallagher, K. (2011). Write like this: Teaching real-world writing through modeling mentor texts. Portland, ME: Stenhouse.

Routman, R. (2014). Read, write, lead: Breakthrough strategies for schoolwide literacy success. Alexandria, VA: ASCD. 

History of Literacy Coaching: Linking Past with Present

Diane Jenquin contributed today's post. Read more of Diane's thinking about literacy coaching in her previous posts.

Our work as literacy coaches is grounded in a history of 36 years of research.

Literacy coaching was established in the early 1990s as an all-inclusive reform program designed to improve children’s reading, writing, and language skills through embedded professional development.  According to Lyon and Pinnell (2001), the literacy coach, through observation and co-learning, helps the teacher see beyond what is in the classroom to what can improve it and helps the teacher to expand their knowledge base by becoming an ongoing learner, while offering support and encouragement as needed.

The idea of literacy coaching has been documented with research done by Bean (1978). The concept was molded out of the up-springing response to raging criticism of schools after World War II to create specialists that work with small groups, individuals, and teachers to close the gap in the student achievement as a remedial model. Stauffer (1967), however, described this remedial role as a “ bottomless pit.” The concept somehow took a turn to allocating trained specialist and expertise in their areas and utilizing them in only one capacity, that being remediation.  Although the reading specialist was planted in schools as a remediation specialist and consultant, the passing of the 1965 ESEA Act, which provided funding for reading specialists, resulted in reading specialists only working toward pulling out targeted, poverty students.  They were to be a supplemental provider moreover, not being able to demonstrate their expertise with classroom teachers as a consultant.  With the release of the 1980, “A Nation at Risk” the reading specialist role transitioned into more of a teacher mentor and consultant, with a small amount of student remediation.

Learning theories such as the one presented by Vygostky (1978), suggest that individuals learn best when given the opportunity to discuss, reflect, observe,  practice, and apply new learning with others, allow for new ideas to be absorbed.  Further research proposes that the transfer of ideas from the traditional professional development model of one shot workshops is not effective in changing teaching behaviors/practices. Embedded professional development was sparked by the accountability component in No Child Left Behind. This act moved the direction to providing teachers instruction from coaches or mentors to improve instructional practices for the purpose of enhancing student learning. Job embedded professional development can be geared to the specific needs of the teacher and works on concepts more than once, therefore moving to the transfer in their teaching.Thirty years of research grounded in the reading theories of Marie Clay (1979, 1991, and 2004) and Fountas and Pinnell (1996) paved the way to carrying the role of the reading specialist one step farther to the reading coach.

Recently released  are the results of a national survey published in Literacy Research and Instruction (2014) where Rita Bean et al. compares the original research to what is happening currently in the world of literacy leaders.  Take a look at it and compare. 

To link to this article:
Bean, R.M., Kern, D., Goatley, V., Ortlieb, E., Shettel, J., Calo, K., . . . Cassidy, J. (2015). Specialized literacy professionals as literacy leaders: results of a national survey. Literacy Research and Instruction, 54: 2, 83 - 114, DOI: 10.1080/19388071.2014.998355

Utilizing Leadership Strengths for More Effective Coaching

Carrie Sand contributed today's post. Read Carrie's previous posts here.

Recently, I took the Gallup StrengthsFinder personality assessment to learn more about my strengths as a leader. The results were not shocking nor did it really tell me something that I didn’t already know. I thrive on competition: well, I was a college athlete. I like discipline and order: yes, my classroom is centered around routines and procedures and my work station looks like the inside of a filing cabinet. I love work that is significant and fulfills my passion: obviously, I am a teacher. 

According to this assessment, each strength falls under one of the four themes: executing, influencing, relationship building, and strategic thinking. Here’s what did shock me….I have traits that are strong in each one of these themes except relationship building. My first thought...What?!? How can I be an effective literacy coach without strengths in what seems to be at the core of coaching: building relationships. It took a bit of reflection on these results to determine how I can use this knowledge to better myself as a coach and an educator. After this reflection, I decided that the knowledge is actually quite useful to me as a coach.

First, by knowing more about my own leadership strengths I am better equipped torecognize different leadership styles in others. This is a benefit to me because not only can I use my own talents and skills to better work with individuals and teams, but additionally, I can assess and utilize others’ strengths and skills for the good of the team. Also, I am able to tailor my approach to best meet the needs of the individual or team I am working with when I am able to recognize their strengths. If acted upon correctly, this knowledge can produce better conversations, better bonds, and better results for a coach.

Secondly, and probably more importantly, by knowing what my own leadership strengths are, I am better able to seek out and find the kind of people I need on my team to help “round me out” as a coach. These are people who fill in the holes of my personality. Often people tend to surround themselves, especially professionally, with others who have similar personalities to their own. As a coach, I have to surround myself with all types of personalities. By allowing other people's strengths to fill in and build up my respective strengths, I am a better coach. By surrounding myself with those most unlike me, I can be a more well rounded leader.

After going back and looking at my own results, I realize that my strengths serve me well as a coach: I push people by using positive reinforcement; I set high standards and help others recognize hidden talents to reach those standards; I value honesty, integrity, and emulate those qualities through a commitment and passion for my practice.  How can I become better? By finding those empathizers who help me to hear all voices and viewpoints and includers who find ways to get all on board and share their feelings. I learned more about these ideas from the book Strength Based Leadership by Tom Rath and Barry Conchie. I would encourage all coaches to think about their skills as a leader and how to best utilize those skills to be an effective coach.

What Made Me a Reader?

I recently started a professional learning session by asking my colleagues to write about how they learned to read. Of course, I wrote with them. 

I wrote a fast and furious list of words and phrases to represent specific memories. Then, I reviewed the list to see if there was a common theme.

There was definitely a common theme, and I'm a little embarrassed to admit what it was.

Extrinsic rewards were a positive part of my development as a reader.

Book It. Winning a writing contest. Participating in the summer reading program at the public library. Almost winning the third grade spelling bee (I still hold a grudge against p-r-a-i-r-i-e.) Battle of the Books. 

Extrinsic rewards were a big part of my memories of learning to read. At first, this made me completely panic. It doesn't take much of a Google search to find information about how extrinsic rewards do not lead to joyful lifelong reading. Extrinsic rewards are not something research would say creates readers.

So, why were extrinsic rewards so important to me? And, why do I love to read even as an adult despite being "bribed" with external rewards?

Maybe it's because I was a reader before the extrinsic rewards. The rewards were just a bonus for doing something I already loved.

Maybe it's because I was a proficient reader. Reading-related rewards were not embarrassing or shameful for me because I always received one.

Maybe it's because my family didn't live in poverty. We could go to eat at Pizza Hut monthly; I cashed in my coupon for a free pan pizza, and my family bought pizza for themselves.

Maybe it's because some of the rewards were also paired with social activities and collaboration. I didn't just win a writing contest; my family members wanted to talk to me about my award and wanted to hear me read my writing.

What started as a quick writing activity led to lots of thinking and reflection resulting in this conclusion:

I don't need to panic about the significant role extrinsic rewards played in my development as a reader. It wasn't extrinsic rewards that made me a reader. I was already a reader; the extrinsic rewards were just an extra benefit. However, the extra benefit that was fun for me could be devastating for another child - a child who struggles with reading, a child who lives in poverty, a child whose parents or family don't yet know how to support their literacy development.