Literacy Now

Time for a Pop Quiz. Question: What do you called kindergarten without art or music?

Answer: High school.

(All right, all right, if you said middle school, it’s worth half-credit.)

Now to some of us, the little Q & A above delivers a small chuckle. To others, it represents a brutal reality. The fact is schools are bludgeoning today’s kids with flavorless, sanitized, exuberant-less content nowadays—more so than we ever have ever done before—and too many classrooms are plagued by a contagion of joylessness in the pursuit of standardized, homogenized ideals.

If I ever get a chance to dictate our nation’s educational policy, I am going to bring back that extra-cheesy, covered in orange grease, stored under the heat lamp, pepperoni pizza I used to be able to scarf down at lunchtime (you know, the slices that got thrown under the bus by the politically correct helicopter moms who wanted their little angels to eat tree bark and locally grown organic berries for mid-day nutrition). And I will mandate that the first and foremost rule of educational policy—particularly when it comes to advancing literacy skills—is that KIDS MUST TASTE ACADEMIC FUN! That’s right, I believe in the power of joy to bring out the best in student work and learning.

Now, stay with me here, because no, I am not about to kick rigor to the curb. And no, I do not think that “fun” represents the penultimate aspiration for teaching and learning. And bzzp, my proposal does not warrant a lowering of scholarly expectations, either. In fact, I think the contrary. Extensive experience has shown me that students who enjoy their studies will learn more than students who don’t give a poop. (Note: I can back that up with hard research for all the data wonks out there.)

Indeed, it’s time we collectively go to bat more officially for the power of joy as it relates to learning. Why? Well, to paraphrase a semi-famous theater hack, “Let me count the ways.”

1) The vice grip approach of turning the screws on low-performing students through a drill-n-kill line of attack on elevating skills is contributing to America’s egregious drop out rate and exacerbating the Achievement Gap it actually aims to alleviate. That’s right, our current methodology is creating more of the problems we are supposedly purporting to solve. Really, who does that? (Note: Feel free to fill in your own snarky government/big corporation/family relative’s name here __________________ ).

2) Making learning a pleasurable experience requires no more cost than making it a tedious one… except that it learns the little ones a whole lot better. See, joy, smiles, and delight in school are free. (Not to mention highly effective.) This is key these days because when you look at how the budget cuts have decimated our classroom supplies, eviscerated our nation’s librarians, and levied a full frontal assault on every corner of education in our country, creatively solving problems with a sober recognition of the fact that “there ain’t no money” requires all of us to use the tools we do have instead of complaining about all of the tools we do not.

3) Have you done your professional reading? READICIDE, THE BOOK WHISPERER, THE READING ZONE, MAKING THE MATCH, WHAT'S THE BIG IDEA?, TEACHING LITERACY FOR LOVE AND WISDOM… I could go on and on.

4) Have we forgotten that the ultimate goal of education is not to be able to bubble in a correct A, B, C, or D answer choice on a standardized test? Sure, the loons who make policy may have lost their goofy minds by over-emphasizing the information which can be gleaned from bubble test scores and then making political hay with cherry-picked information to advance their own personal ambitions, but that doesn’t mean that those on the front lines need to forget that we are dealing with real kids. REAL PEOPLE. The kind who live, eat, breathe, and come to our classrooms starving for a meaningful human connection to their school work. In fact, this is why I became a YA author in the first place—to write books that reach real kids. Through humor. Through drama. Through the ageless art of telling salient, “Whoa, did I dig that” stories. And what’s my great “here’s how you, too, can learn to reach real kids” secret? Well, understanding that today’s kids are reachable is a good start. (Plus, caffeine helps as well, he added as his left eyelid twitched.)

Fifthly—if that’s even a word—kids like to learn. That’s not a misprint; that’s a fact. And if you don’t know this about today’s young people I’d suggest that you do not know much about today’s students at all. It’s like a great fisherman once said, “You don’t bait the hook with what the fisherman likes; you bait the hook with what the fish likes.” Kids will read. Kids will write. In fact, it could be argued that today’s students are actually doing more reading and writing than any generation prior. (But since we devalue the digital literacy component in the world of academia… okay, okay, I’ll save this tangent for another blog post.)

Now it’s time for points 6 through 2,867 which can best be summarized by connecting a few dots. Fun leads to joy. But fun is like sugar, the high quickly wears off and the need for something more substantive arises. This is where meaningfulness, relevance, accessibility, and challenge come into play. This is also where depth, breath, scope, and purpose come in. This is also where a sense of self-direction, self-discipline, and hard work factor in as well. Kids will do the hard work for objectives they find meaningful (can anyone say, “Boys who game?”) but they will not do so simply because the task has been legislated. Without a doubt today’s students are eager to grow, learn, give a great effort, and demonstrate their aptitudes in mind-blowing ways if they are internally motivated to do so. But if they’re not, they won’t.

Reality is a cold beast. Like it or not, smiles, fun, joy, and personal fulfillment matter.

BTW, if you require more reading on the subject, check out DRIVE, SWITCH, or the thoughts of Sir Ken Robinson. Indeed, they may have killed the orange-oiled pepperoni pizza in our halls of academia, but if we let them kill the fun, they will have ripped out our entire soul. And none of us will be the better for it.

Alan Sitomer was named California's 2007 Teacher of the Year. In addition to being an inner-city high school English teacher and former professor in the Graduate School of Education at Loyola Marymount University, Alan is a nationally renowned speaker specializing in engaging reluctant readers who received the 2004 award for Classroom Excellence from the Southern California Teachers of English, the 2003 Teacher of the Year honor from California Literacy, the 2007 Educator of the Year award by Loyola Marymount University and the 2008 Innovative Educator of the Year from The Insight Education Group. He’s the author of six young adult novels, three children's picture books, two teacher methodology books, and a classroom curriculum series for secondary English Language Arts instruction called THE ALAN SITOMER BOOK JAM.

BY MRS. MIMI
I love a good To-Do List. Most of the time, there is no better feeling than admiring my color-coded week and reveling in all that productivity. Just look at what I’m going to get done! It’s going to be amazing! I’m going to be amazing! Crossing items off my list is going to be amazing!

Usually, when I am feeling crazy and unbalanced, list making somehow calms my nerves and reassures me that everything will be okay, that it will all get done. (This last sentence implies that there are times when I am feeling balanced, which we all know is basically an impossible feat for a teacher save for perhaps the summer. But I think you get my point.) A good list gives me a clear plan and as a teacher, a clear plan is everything.

Friends, it pains me to type this next bit, but I have to admit it’s true. Lately, it feels as if my To-Do List has grown to such epic proportions that it has rendered me less effective and robbed me of the joy I used to feel in the classroom.

Is it just me, or did I hear gasps from the crowd? Yes, I think that was definitely a collective gasp.

As teachers, our plates are becoming so very full that they are more like troughs filled with responsibility, accountability and just-get-it-done-ability. Not only are we all pulling our hair out wondering how it is all going to get done, we are becoming robots. Programmed to make a dent in the Almighty To-Do List, I notice myself and others around me just getting through the day, unable to think about turning our classrooms into spaces filled with wonder, excitement, and joy.

Let’s use the read-aloud as our example. The read-aloud is what I consider to be one of the most important parts of the day. It’s what we all fantasized about when we were naïve education majors dreaming about our future classrooms. It’s what we all remember from our own days in the classroom. It’s pretty much one of the best parts of the day. And on more than one occasion, it has been my sanity.

Do I need to remind you how painful it can be to sit through a bad read-aloud? Just the other day, I listened to a teacher who was so determined to cross things off her list that it sounded like she was reading the instructions that come with a piece of DIY furniture rather than giving a rousing rendition of INTERRUPTING CHICKEN.

I watched as she encouraged the class to dig deeper! Turn and talk! Stop and jot! Chart your thinking! Mark that place with a Post-it! (Talk about an interrupting chicken.)

Despite her wonderful intentions and good instincts to actively engage her students, there wasn’t any joy left in that room. Not for the teacher and certainly not for the students. When I spoke to the teacher later, she looked at me with tears in her eyes and said simply, “Sometimes it’s all just too much.”

It is too much. There is too much on the list. The list is no longer our friend. But we can’t throw the list away because that would be unprofessional and we are better than that. We are teachers! We walk into our classrooms every day ready to work it! We strut our educational stuff, don our superhero capes, and do more work in a day than most people can fathom.

I may be pretty fabulous, but I can’t wave my wand and give you five extra hours in the day, or supply you with enough caffeine to put down a horse. (Besides, you probably do just fine with that last part on your own.) But I can tell you what I’ve been doing.

When I choose a read-aloud, I pull from books that I love because they make me laugh, or make me cry or make me want to scream from all that juicy picture book goodness. I take that book and perform the living you-know-what out of it. I use voices, dramatic gestures, and facial expressions my mother tells me are going to give me serious wrinkles. I work that book until we all feel the joy.

Then, in the true spirit of the teacher-who-must-get-it-all-done-and-do-it-the-best-way-she-knows-how, I come back to that same book another day and mark it, turn and talk it, and dig deeper. I will make sure we cross things off that list and I will relish the moment that I do just that. But first, always first, I make sure we feel the joy.

I know some of you are shaking your heads right now and thinking, “Wow, Mrs. Mimi has finally cracked. What’s with all this joy talk? What’s next, hemp necklaces and patchouli?”

I haven’t lost it, friends. I’ve just decided that the joy of reading and learning and investigating together needs to trump everything else. Because, honestly, all that other stuff on your To-Do List isn’t really going to get done very well in a classroom that feels like a factory.

So go buy yourself some new list-making pens in a rainbow of colors that puts a smile on your face. (Admit it, a good pen makes every teacher smile.) Uncap your favorite color and put “Feel the Joy” at the top of your list.

Cross that off and then we’ll worry about everything else. Because we can do it all.

Mrs. Mimi is a pseudonymous teacher who taught both first and second grades at a public elementary school in New York City. She's the author of IT'S NOT ALL FLOWERS AND SAUSAGES: MY ADVENTURES IN SECOND GRADE, which sprung from her popular blog of the same name. Mimi also has her doctorate in education from Teachers College, Columbia University.



QUIET! Teacher in Progress: Too Much of a Good Thing

QUIET! Teacher in Progress: Focus on the 'How'

“All of life, it turns out, is explained in the eighth-grade English list.”

I wish those were my words, but they’re not. I found them in The Washington Post, in a column by Michael Gerson, titled “Life Lessons in an Eighth-Grade Reading List.” In it, he discusses bullying, injustice, and the torment of outcasts, all to the following point: “Young adults learn big lessons—such as how to cultivate courage and sympathy—through the eighth-grade reading list.”

As Gerson points out, very few of us can read LORD OF THE FLIES and not be moved by the savagery; very few of us can read TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD and not feel a sense of awe and pride.

It’s an insightful article, and Gerson has a great point. Good fiction can give us hope, perspective, and understanding of the world and how it works; good books can not only change how we think, but how we feel. Literature can change lives. Here’s how literature changed mine.

It wasn’t eighth-grade for me—I have to say that middle-school was more a study in social survival than great literature. It was in my ninth-grade English class, during a section on Western mythology. I had a wonderful teacher named Rudolfo whose lessons have stuck with me, in more ways than I could have predicted.

Every myth, he taught us, has the following elements:

Challenge: What problem is being presented? What does the character want or need that he or she doesn’t currently have?

Journey: What will the character have to do to change the situation or get what he/she wants or needs? How does the character plan to do that? What is the quest?

Obstacle(s): What thing(s)—both direct and indirect—come up to complicate the quest?

Battle with Obstacle: How does the character react to the obstacle?

Reward: The term is used very loosely, and doesn’t always mean a glory moment or a blatant victory, or even a happy ending. Rather, what has changed or been affected as a result of the above?

It was enlightening; when we applied it to the myths we were reading, a pattern definitely emerged. But then he had us take it a little further. Go home, he told us, and watch something on TV. It can be a sitcom, a drama, a movie. Dissect it. And see what you find. Sure enough, each of us found the parallels—whether it was an episode of FAMILY TIES, or KNIGHT RIDER, or a storyline in GENERAL HOSPITAL. I think someone even found the elements in a toilet-bowl cleaner commercial.

It was fascinating. I felt like I had been given a secret decoder ring to understanding the elements of a story. Rudolfo had demystified it all—from mythology to modern screenplays— he’d made it accessible, relateable, even fun.

But it was during a classroom discussion that he really made us think. Where were the stories in our own lives? What were the challenges each one of us had faced, and how had we managed the journey? What obstacles had come up, and how did we deal with the obstacles? What was the reward, and did it come in a different form than expected?

You may not think a bunch of awkward, ill-complexioned, gum-snapping fourteen-year-olds would have been able to pull all the elements of classical literature out of their own life experiences. But we did. I’m not going to claim to remember everything that was brought up, but I do remember the experiences ran the gamut from seemingly ordinary (trying out for a soccer team, for example) to slightly heroic (standing up to a bully) to pretty tragic (losing a pet).

At the time, I was still recovering from the very “character-forming” years of middle school and had the self-esteem and confidence of a sand gnat. My brother had been put into a drug rehab a thousand miles away—I missed him. I was scared and full of angst. But Rudolfo gave me a different perspective. Maybe life was like an intricate myth, full of average monsters and everyday titans and little wars and nearly invisible victories, and maybe I just hadn’t gotten to the reward yet.

I know it’s not always so simplistic—in fact, my brother’s struggles with addiction have become a long-strung series of obstacles, perhaps more of an epic odyssey than a myth. But his journey isn’t over. Sometimes it’s a matter of keeping up the fight.

But Rudolfo made us more interesting. He not only taught us how to read a story, and even craft one, but he empowered us. He gave us a way to look at our young lives and our moments of turmoil—bullies, injustices, tragedies of varying degrees—and find real meaning. To this day, when I’m going through something tough, I see the value in what I learned from him. It helps to remind myself that maybe I’ve just come up against a new challenge. Or maybe I’ve hit the battle phase. Maybe there will be some reward—if I can just get through the journey.

Sometimes I like to think we’re all just modern, ordinary, unromanticized, perhaps even Cheeto-eating versions of those gods and goddesses themselves. Sure, none of us wakes up every day feeling like some sort of glorious Greek deity, but it helps to know that if we don’t shy away from the uncomfortable, inevitable obstacles, we’re channeling a little bit of our own inner hero.

Kiera Stewart is a writer for teens and tweens. Her qualifications include never having gotten wisdom teeth. She’s been writing since she was five, but with titles such as “Mixed Feelings,” “Old Monster, the Bees, and Karen” and the self-congratulory, “The Amazing Story!” it’s no wonder FETCHING (Disney-Hyperion, releasing November 8, 2011) is her first published novel. She considers the publication of FETCHING her reward for surviving all the obstacles of middle school. For more information on Kiera or FETCHING, please check out www.kierastewart.com.

© 2011 Kiera Stewart. Please do not reproduce in any form, electronic or otherwise.

I first heard about the Common Core State Standards at the North Carolina Reading Association conference. Then an editor said that it behooved me, as a nonfiction writer, to pay attention. Ever since, I’ve been trying to grasp them.

As you probably know, the Common Core Standards are a rigorous set of skills for grades K-12 in language arts and math, with additional subject areas possibly to come. Instead of a state-by-state hodgepodge of standards, the CC unifies all students—”no matter where they live”—to prepare them “for success in postsecondary education and the workforce.” It’s fascinating stuff; a fifth-grade unit on Exploration: Real and Imagined, for example, looked like a lot of fun. And CC puts a much firmer focus on nonfiction than we’ve ever had before.

But I’m far from expert in this area, so I have questions, big and small—and I’m guessing you do, too.

One thing I’m not going to question is the Common Core’s whole new emphasis on using nonfiction trade books, with literary nonfiction to include essays, speeches, opinion pieces, biographies, journalism, historical and scientific documents.

Get this: By the fourth grade, according to the Common Core, students should be reading equal amounts from “literary” and “informational” texts. In the eighth grade, 45 percent should be literary and 55 percent informational. And by 12th grade, the split should be 30/70.

This is huge news for advocates of more nonfiction in the classroom, and much more realistic about what kids will encounter in real life. Previous fiction/nonfiction splits were vague. According to the IRA/NCTE English Language Arts Standards, “Students read a wide range of print and non-print texts.... Among these texts are fiction and nonfiction, classic and contemporary works.” The generally accepted ratio was 80% literature and 20% informational texts. I would bet, though, that in reality, the ratio has been even less.

As Marc Aronson, prominent nonfiction author and blogger at School Library Journal’s Nonfiction Matters puts it, “The slant of the children’s book reviewing and library world is towards fiction.” Or as I would put it, nonfiction doesn’t get enough love. Even educational consultant Donna Knoell, a passionate advocate for nonfiction, titled her October 5 SLJ webinar Nonfiction Can Be Fun. Fun Can Be Informative, having to do a hard sell: “Who says nonfiction has to be boring?”

Too many are unaware of or uninterested in the wealth of interesting nonfiction texts that read like literature. According to Marc, “Many language arts teachers don't have an emotional connection to nonfiction as pleasure reading. They associate NF with textbooks, a passive absorption of facts, and their only criteria is factual accuracy. They need to seek out librarians, who actually have the experience with exciting, inquiry-based NF trade books.”

For his Washington Post column, Jay Mathews wrote a helpful piece called “Help pick non-fiction for schools.” In it, he laments the fiction bias of high school teachers, with just two NF titles showing up much (A CHILD CALLED ‘IT,’ by Dave Pelzer, NIGHT by Elie Wiesel). Mathews points out that nonfiction requires skills students don’t have, creating a vicious cycle: “Students don’t know enough about the real world because they don’t read non-fiction and they can’t read non-fiction because they don’t know enough about the real world.” But scroll down to the comments for tons of excellent NF recommendations.

[Need more recommendations? A kingdom of nonfiction authors awaits you at Interesting Nonfiction for Kids, and there are many other outstanding authors who may have too many deadlines to be blogging.]

Over at Nonfiction Matters, a search for “Common Core” will unveil considerable wisdom, from three experts in particular. The way to develop skill with nonfiction? According to Marc Aronson, it’s for “students to read real NF by real authors who have real arguments and views. That is the simple slam dunk answer. And it means that authors, editors, reviewers, librarians, teachers, parents need to recognize that opening books up to point of view, opinion, speculation, judgment, argument is precisely what young people need from us.”

According to Mary Ann Cappiello, professor at Lesley University and part of the team that created state standards in Massachusetts: “The implications for the new balance between nonfiction and literature is a paradigm shift that many schools have yet to face.... Schools pay millions of dollars for cumbersome text books that don’t mirror the kind of real-world reading of literary nonfiction and informational text that the new standards demand.”

Myra Zarnowski, Queens College professor and author of an excellent and most relevant book, HISTORY MAKERS: A QUESTIONING APPROACH TO READING & WRITING BIOGRAPHIES (Heinemann), points out, “It seems that the CC standards are calling for what many of us have known (and practiced) for many years: In depth learning with authentic materials promotes learning and develops interest in further learning....The challenge remaining is for us to show how nonfiction literature fits within school programs and how it should be read, thought about, and discussed. This is not a simple matter, for as many educational researchers have noted, it’s hard to teach in a way you were never taught. Where are teachers supposed to learn about how to respond and critique nonfiction and how to encourage children to do so?”

Marc, Mary Ann, and Myra are making it their business to help. With a series of YouTube videos about current nonfiction books, they will be trying to bridge that gap between language arts teachers and librarians. The videos are being filmed and edited right this minute, and will be announced on a new blog, The Uncommon Corps, which will be seeking as many comments from teachers as possible.

Just as I seek comments now: What are your thoughts on informational texts and the Common Core? What things have I got right? What did I get wrong?

Kathleen Krull and is the winner of the 2011 Children's Book Guild Nonfiction Award for her body of work. Her many nonfiction books include the "Lives of" series (Harcourt). You can find more about her and her books on her website, www.kathleenkrull.com.



The Common Core State Standards for Literacy: How Do We Make Them Work?

The Common Core State Standards are facilitating a lot of conversations about what students should know and be able to do. One of the more interesting aspects of these standards, for me, is the focus on providing evidence from the texts students read.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about how to teach students to justify their responses. As I reflect on this, I have to admit that I have accepted a lot of student responses that do not provide justification and evidence. I know that the student is right, or I know where the student is coming from in terms of the response, so I allow the conversation to continue. I'm not saying that is always bad, but I am thinking about how I might push students thinking deeper and deeper into the text so that they learn to read closely.

Of course, not all texts require a deep reading, but some do. And I wonder if my students have develop the skills necessary to read texts closely that need that type of reading.

This has got me thinking about modeling again. Effective teachers model their comprehension as well as word solving strategies, their use of text structures to follow the author, and analyze the text features provided in the text. These are all well documented approaches for reading, and ones that comprise the modeling behaviors of many teachers.

I am thinking about my own modeling and how I can incorporate greater attention to justification and evidence as I read and think aloud. I know that is part of the category of comprehension, but I'm now thinking that it deserve more attention. I wonder if adding more attention to evidence, through teacher modeling, will help students integrate this habit into their own practices. I know this has worked with word solving, for example, as students learn to look inside words (using morphology and word arts) and outside of words (using context clues and other resources), so it make sense that this would help with justification and evidence.

I've also been thinking about the relative lack of attention to text features in most teacher modeling events. A close read of an informational text would require that teachers notice things like figures, diagrams, charts, illustrations, captions, italicized words, and so on. Attending to those text features may allow students to think more deeply about what they are reading and gain a better understanding of the text and what they can do with the information contained within the text.

I'm not suggesting that teacher modeling is the answer to everything, but I am thinking that we should try to model the things we expect from students. As such, we should probably pay increased attention to justification we use to frame our answers and the evidence we would provide in a discussion about what we were reading. In doing so, we might be able to prepare students for the collaborative work they need to do to move deeply into the text as they discuss their readings with others.


Douglas Fisher, Ph.D., is Professor of Language and Literacy Education in the Department of Teacher Education at San Diego State University and a classroom teacher at Health Sciences High & Middle College. He is a member of the California Reading Hall of Fame and is the recipient of an International Reading Association Celebrate Literacy Award, the Farmer award for excellence in writing from the National Council of Teachers of English, as well as a Christa McAuliffe award for excellence in teacher education. He has published numerous articles on improving student achievement as well as books such as In a Reading State of Mind: Brain Research, Teacher Modeling, and Comprehension Instruction (with Nancy Frey and Diane Lapp).



Members Only: Engaging the Adolescent Reader [member login required]