Why Are Students Compliant Rather Than Inspired? Re-examining Traditional Practices and Empowering Teachers to Empower Students

[Notes from a session with Kathy Collins, Angela Bae, Michelle Baldonado, and Cathy Skubik]

Readers’ Notebook vs. Reader’s Notebook according to Dr. Gravity Goldberg:

• If the notebook belongs to the reader, then it’s singular possessive.
• If it’s a notebook that the teacher is having the students keep, then it’s plural possessive.

If we all go on a trip, and then make a scrapbook, we’d collect different things.

What if reading notebooks were more like scrapbooks of our reading lives? Each individual might look for and collect different things.

Observed: KIds were being compliant, but not necessarily engaged. Why?

Goldberg’s Mindsets and Moves Lens: Admiring Lens (Taking an appreciative stance)

What are the kids showing us they can do?

• Traditional practices:
  Reading logs
• Partnerships/talking about reading
• Writing about reading

Reading Logs

Gut check: Routine is established, but something feels like it’s off. Is something we are doing causing compliance vs. engagement.

• Reading logs: Reading levels, parent signature.
• Is it an essential tool, or a love of reading killer?
• Podcast at Teacher Learning Sessions with Jen Serravallo
• Mindsets and Moves: Students regard volume and recording data as the goal of reading.
• Time adding up minutes was taking time away from reading.

They tried having the kids design the reading log.

Partnerships

Observed what is happening

New idea: Rather than talk about book, talk about your thinking.

“I think… I noticed…” (About the book)

Coaching into partnerships to lift the quality of discussion and shift the focus from just retelling to discussing thinking.

Writing About Reading

She sees a lot of approximating, but is it compliance? Are they doing it because they are being asked to do it by their teacher? Are we getting bright ideas, or are we checking boxes off?

What Readers Really Do: Teaching the Process of Meaning Making 
by Dorothy Barnhouse et al. 
Link: http://a.co/dhiqlnI

Dynamic Teaching for Deeper Reading: Shifting to a Problem-Based Approach 
by Vicki Vinton 
Link: http://a.co/gg0jXr1

Reading Projects Reimagined: Student-Driven Conferences to Deepen Critical Thinking 
by Dan Feigelson 
Link: http://a.co/aagrrNr

If you feel like you have more compliance than engagement, give yourself time, and listen to kids. It takes time to change, but it's worth the effort.

We need to pay attention to our gut check rather than focus on maintaining control and following curriculum. According to Gravity Goldberg, we ARE the manual.

Learning Process and Craft Strategies from Authors

[Notes from a session with Varian Johnson, Kate Messner, Jennifer Serravallo, Amy Ludwig VanDerwater, Sarah Weeks, and Kat Yeh]

What’s a strategy?

• Series of actionable steps
• Helps to break down the work of a skill
• “Generalizable” (teach the writer, not the writing)
• Authentic
• Something to outgrow

To develop writing strategies:

1. Spy on yourself as a writer.
2. Notice what writers do in mentor texts.

Prompt: Think of a strong emotion. Make a list of a couple memories that connect to the emotion. Pick one and write a scene.

Think about kids who don’t write when you ask. Rather than consider punishment, think of it as an opportunity to help the kid with engagement.

Spy on yourself: During the quickwire, how did you stay focused and write for the entire time?

Sarah Weeks:

Photo prompts really works for starting a story.

What do you notice? What do you see? What do you think they’re thinking? How does it make you feel?

Make a Story Arc

Decide where you want your story to start.

Decide where you want your story to end.

Then worry about the middle.

Kat Yeh:

All writers get stuck. Getting unstuck:

• Dare to be dreadful.
• Let loose.
  Let go of rules & expectations
• Start with how you feel THIS SECOND
• Make it personal

Kate Messner:

Structure:

The structure needs to serve the story.

The structure of a story can be used over and over to create a series!

Amy Ludwig VanDerwater:

In order to write, you have to do things. What are you doing that gives you something to write about?

Take pictures of things that just strike you. When you need it, go back onto your ipad, find a picture, and help yourself think of what to write.

Keep a notebook. Think about the importance of keeping a writer’s notebook.

Turning Writing about Reading into More Than Writing for School: Instilling Curiosity, Logic, and Beauty in This Genre

[Notes from a session with Lucy Calkins, Carl Anderson, and Katie Clements]

Lucy:

Writing as a Tool for Lifting the Level of Reading

• Imagine a giant net that collects all the writing about reading kids are doing in school. If asked to sort for kids’ reading and bad for kids’ reading. How much would go in each pile?
• Kids need to read. They need to read more.

Why isn’t writing about reading helping?

Is the writing about reading taking up time for reading?

Kids need to, above all, love reading.

Example article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/06/well/live/a-letter-to-the-doctors-and-nurses-who-cared-for-my-wife.html?_r=0

After reading this, does it seem appropriate to find text evidence and place it in a T-chart?

Nobody in this room would want to write a summary after each chapter of a book they read.

There should be much less writing about reading, not more.

The writing that occurs during reading must have magical power to lift the level of reading.

There are a lot of things we know to help make writing better. Yet, most of this doesn’t occur in writing about reading (WAR). Like writing workshop, WAR should also include:

• Choice
• Mentor text
• Growth over time
• Feedback
• Explicit instruction
• Revision
• Opportunities for publication

Draw on what we know about teaching writing

Teach the writer, not the writing

We teacher writerly consciousness (noticing something in the park and writing about it).

As readers, they should be able to do the same thing.

“Reading is not longer reading if you control my mind as I read. Kids should make their own meanings.” - Lucy Calkins

Choice Matters.

What should it be like?

• Give clear images of good work.
• “Writing to think” is more like a good book talk.
• Explicitly teach qualities of good writing about reading.
• Think about the writing/talking you do when you have something in you for which it isn’t easy to find the right words. Writing about reading is thinking: We want to reach the precision of language that represents something that doesn’t fit easily into language.
• Think about parts in relationship to the whole. Character traits with theme; Theme with setting; etc.
• Give kids models of good writing about reading. Admire them. Annotate them. What do you notice?
• Then have students look at their writing about reading. Annotate them. What do you notice?
• Bring what we do in writing workshop into the reading workshop.

Katie Clements:

We need to give kids more work with logical thinking. The fastest way to do this is through talk. If we coach into their talk, we can support this work early on in a unit of study.

To grow meaningful ideas….

→ Read with a writerly wide awakeness, noticing details others pass by

→ Study times when characters face trouble

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jU4oA3kkAWU

How might we describe the main characters?

• Determined
• Joyful
• Kind
• Resilient

Can you make your claim more nuanced?

When kids only know a little bit about a topic, they will share an idea, then give details about that idea. (Saying “because” when they really mean “for example”).

They need to start to think bigger.

Best writing (and writing about reading) go back and forth between tiny details and big ideas and themes.

Support Your Thesis:

• Reasons why
• Times when
• Ways your idea could be true
• Craft moves
• Characters
• I used to think… but now I think…

Try out your reasons and evidence in a different order. Think about the power of sequence.

Explain why these details are significant. How do they support your ideas?

-These details are significant because…

Carl Anderson:

Mentor Texts that Show Students How to Instill Beauty When They Write About Reading

@conferringcarl

Inquiry: What does it mean to write beautifully and passionately about reading?

Criteria:

• Texts written by gifted writers
• Texts published in places that are known to value beautiful writing and people actually read (Ex: The New Yorker)
• Texts that are genuinely ones i want to read
• That inspire me to write about reading

Example of a beautiful Literary Essay:

http://sensiblenonsense.us/post/78865552345/goodnight-moon-by-margaret-wise-brown-when-i

What he found:
1. Literacy essay writers are very present in the text.

2. The writer makes meaning both by referring to the text, but also to her own personal experience and knowledge.

3. Like writers of memoir or literary non-fiction, writers who write about reading craft their writing in beautiful ways.

Kid Writing: Getting Started on the Road to Literacy

[Notes from a session with Michele Walden-Bell, Dina Portnoy, Diane Waff (Philadelphia Writing Project)]

Website: https://kidwriting.homestead.com/

Reading and writing are interconnected. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/raising-readers-writers-and-spellers/201703/landmark-study-finds-better-path-reading-success

Program Research Questions

• What are the effects of integrating KW literacy practices and professional development on teacher practice and student writing and literacy learning?
• What are the achievement gains made by children in KW classrooms?
  WHat lessons are learned about engaging parents with KW? WHat supports do parents need to become engaged?
• What lessons are learned about coaching teachers in KW and about school practices to support KW?
• What lessons do we learn about sustaining the program beyond the treatment years?

KidWriting fits within a balanced literacy approach.

Main Components

Step 1: Kids draw their story. Teachers talk

Step 2: Kid writing. Children write on their own

Strategies that are employed:

1. The magic line
2. Stretching through
3. Kid crowns

Step 3: Adult writing (Adult might pick a word or two to teach into conventional spelling, and write the word under the invented spelling) {{Not editing. Not fixing. Teaching.}}

Step 4: Mini lesson and share

Content: Kindergarteners focus on adding problem to their story. Focus on craft and content, in addition to foundational skills.

Kindergarten: (45-60 minutes every day)

1. Phonics/word work as a warmup.
2. Kids start drawing
3. Kids engage in writing
4. Come back at the end for a mini lesson based upon the writing that occurred during the workshop. (Literature craft lessons based on reading literature)
1. Select 3 students to share (author’s chair)
2. Praise, praise, push (Two things that celebrate a kid’s work, AND offer a teaching point)
1. Example: Push could be adding a word to the word wall.

Marking Guidelines from Philadelphia schools:

https://www.philasd.org/curriculum/curriculum-and-instruction/marking-guidelines/

*NWP is collecting anchor papers to help provide a way to think deeper about the “scoring” of writing at these levels.

Program Research Findings:

• Children applied their KW skills to other subject areas.
• KW increased teachers’ expectations of students and students’ writing capabilities.
• KW enabled teachers to address the needs of all students in their classrooms, including ELL and lower level students.
• Parents were eager to learn ways of supporting students learning at home.

Idea: Family literacy mornings (6 times a year): Breakfast with parents:

We’ll provide breakfast and share ways you can help your child.

First thing in the morning on a school day.

Building New Pathways to Leadership: Badges

[Notes from a session at the National Writing Project Annual Meeting]
http://budtheteacher.com/newpathways

Working on a badging initiative:

• Open a network-wide conversation about the mission
• Open a network-wide inquiry into teacher leadership
• An exploration of new approaches and new designs for engaging educators

Social Practices Framework:

• Write
• Lead
• Learn
• Advocate
• Collaborate
• Go Public