When we first meet a reluctant or struggling reader, sometimes our first impulse is to act in service to this reader. We are teachers. We want to help, and we know a great deal about how to do that, after all. So we act on what we know, and sometimes, what we know does help. But all too often, it doesn’t. All too often, what we know gets in the way of finding out what we need…
When we’re paying attention, we learn things about our students that we’ve never considered before. Over the last three years, I’ve conducted lesson studies in roughly fifty classrooms with over 700 students. As “in the moment” formative assessment assumed a greater role in this work, teachers began to make some powerful discoveries about readers that inspired very specific and effective shifts in curriculum design and instruction. These are some of those stories: 1. Each time,…
Yesterday, I described the pivotal role that assessment plays in defining the unique needs of readers. Today, I thought I would share a tool that emerged from inquiry work I facilitated in several local districts three years ago. Take a peek: GRInterventionIdeas A little bit about that: as teachers began expanding their definitions of what it meant to be a “successful” reader, the assessments they used to define the strengths and needs of those they were…
How do you distinguish reluctant readers from those who struggle? How great is the overlap in the venn diagram that represents these readers as they present in your world? Which type of reader do you have the greatest success serving? Why? How? And most importantly: how do you know? In my world, reluctant readers are those who can read but who, for many reasons, prefer not to. In order to intervene well, I need to…
Happy Friday! Last week, I was beyond excited when Jan Burkis and Kim Yaris invited to guest post over at their place. I took the opportunity to start a conversation there about creating and managing cognitive dissonance. It’s one I plan to continue here next week, as my experiences implementing the Common Core Learning Standards and the six shifts that underpin them have surfaced some new and unexpected realizations about this particular topic. I’m…
When last we spoke, I found myself positioned on a precipice, anxiously confronting the torrent that was Race to the Top. And as mandate after mandate continued to crash and swirl around me, threatening to pull everything and everyone I care about in this field into a hot mess of high emotion and utter chaos, I made an important and very deliberate decision: I put my head down and quietly got to work with all…
I’m gearing up for a winter and spring filled with different instructional coaching experiences. I’m looking forward to this more than any other work I’ve been involved with so far this year because kids will finally be involved. In most of the schools that I am working in, we have spent more than a year wrapping our heads around Race to the Top, exploring the Common Core Learning Standards, and defining what the six shifts…
David Coleman’s mock lesson relevant to King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail offers initial perspective about what instruction with the Common Core might look like. It also raises some important questions, which many of the teachers that I am working with raised throughout our unit design sessions this fall. The teachers that I am working with are eager to know what the six instructional shifts will look like in their classrooms with their students. Some are…
As we’re preparing to engage classrooms full of kids in the shared reading of sufficiently complex text, the teachers that I am working with have made some predictions about the challenges they might face. They want to handle them as pro-actively as possible, so their instructional planning is attending to these hunches. For instance: We predict that all readers may experience increased levels of frustration as they begin confronting curricula and immersing themselves in resources that…
In addition to learning what we can about the art of close reading, teachers that I am working with are also finding their study of the following very helpful as they plan to implement the third instructional shift underpinning the Common Core: Jim Burke’s text, The English Teacher’s Companion (which my former grad students will remember fondly), his work relevant to teaching with questions, and his use of sentence frames (which he touches on in…