During lesson study debriefs over the last several years, the teachers that I support shared their observations relevant to a variety of focal points. Often, they lingered over what they noticed about active participation, questioning, and the facilitation of large group discussion. As a pre-service teacher, I was fortunate enough to learn a great deal about active participation from my cooperating teacher, Janell Lindstrom. She coached me to question in ways that engaged learners and…
1. Frame it positively. I notice that all too often, readers assume that unless they are reading fast, reading accurately, and making perfect meaning from text, they are failing. Several weeks ago, as I was guiding high school readers through an incredibly complex passage, we began by unpacking this fallacy. “So, reading hard stuff is kind of like seeing a live performance of Shakespeare,” someone in the room suggested. “The language might kind of wash…
I spent Saturday with teachers and writers at the WNY Young Writers’ Studio. Our season is winding down, and everyone is swimming in the depths of the projects they’ve been working on for some time. We’ve built a lot of background knowledge together over the last nine months, and yet, it’s never enough to satisfy our needs. This is a good thing. Great writers are researchers, after all. They may dream big dreams, take some…
Students’ ability to read complex text does not always develop in a linear fashion. Although the progression of Reading standard 10 (see below) defines required grade-by-grade growth in students’ ability to read complex text, the development of this ability in individual students is unlikely to occur at an unbroken pace. Students need opportunities to stretch their reading abilities but also to experience the satisfaction and pleasure of easy, fluent reading within them, both of which…
Yesterday, I opened a conversation about the roles that assessment and intervention play in attending to the needs of struggling and reluctant readers. Would you like to know the most important thing I’ve learned over the years? That it’s important for me to put what I believe and what I’m passionate about aside in service to others. When it comes to assessing the needs of readers, the data we’re looking at don’t provide answers either.…
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…
I’m wondering what the unintended consequences might be of mandating the removal of any one of these parts from the whole? But I’m also wondering what the unintended consequences have been of putting a reading block that looks like this in place without using assessment to inform how each event is serving learners best and adjusting how they operate in response to what is learned. Lately, I’m often asked whether or not teachers “should”…
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…