Literacy Now

I’ll admit it. I’m the kind of teacher who actually enjoys going to meetings. I love finding out about what is going on in the school building and brainstorming ways to improve student achievement with my colleagues. But even though I love them, staff meetings are not my very favorite. My favorite kind of meeting is the individual kind that happens between teacher and student during your writing block: the individual student conference.

It’s the rare teacher who hasn’t sung the praises of writer’s workshop. We know the structure—mini lesson, writing time, conferencing. We understand that it’s all about choice—the students decide what they want to write about instead of teachers choosing for them. We’ve seen the grins of children who can’t wait to write about their last birthday party, their favorite athlete, or a series of school poems. But not every teacher has been able to truly harness the power of the individual conference. And while I would never claim to be an expert, I know the way I’ve honed my student conferencing has enhanced my teaching and allowed my students to make great gains in their writing.

p: World Bank via photopin

Each day, once I’ve taught my mini lesson on a topic of choice, I release my students to their independent writing time and I grab my conferencing binder. I quickly refer to my calendar and call over my first scheduled “appointment.” Making appointments with my students for their individual conferences not only means the students know when they will be meeting with me, but it ensures that I meet with every student, not just those who need the most support.

Writing conferences generally last about 3-5 minutes. I always begin by greeting the student warmly, then reviewing his or her writing goals. We then discuss what we accomplished during our previous meeting. This helps remind both of us where our focus was the last time we met. In most situations, the student has a small assignment I asked them to complete for me at the end of our previous conference. We look at that assignment and discuss ways the strategy worked or did not work for them. For example, a student who is working on adding descriptive details to her writing may be trying to include more figurative language to add detail. So she comes to our conference with a rough draft of a personal narrative that has at least 3 examples of figurative language highlighted.

A student who is working on beginning his writing with a strong lead will come to our conference with three possible leads written for his biography. We then discuss what the student has prepared and talk about what else needs to happen to continue working toward each writer’s goals. Sometimes this includes a brief “micro-mini” lesson about a particular writing topic (writing conclusions, sensory details, etc.) or it simply encourages the student to continue practicing a particular skill.

The conferences are brief but powerful. Because they are individual, the student gets my full attention (something that is rare in a class of 29!). Since each student is working toward his or her own personal goals that he or she helped set, they have a vested interest in what we are discussing. And since they are personal conferences, I can tailor my micro-mini lessons to each individual student, taking differentiation to the maximum degree.

Harnessing the power of the individual student conference has made a tremendous difference in my students’ writing abilities and in my relationships with those students. They are willing to work hard because they know I care about them and their education, and they know that the work they are doing is making them better writers! I love the feeling when I call a student to meet with me and I hear a quiet, “Yes!” as they grab their writing materials. Individual conferences are fairly easy to implement, yet pay great dividends. Here’s how you can make writing conferences work in your classroom.

5 Tips for Integrating Individual Conferencing into Your Writing Block:

1. Use a calendar!
   With 29 students in my class this year, there’s no way I would be able to keep track of which students I have met with, and which students I have not, if it weren’t for my calendar. I keep a calendar page for each month of the school year in my conferencing binder and I always schedule each student’s next conference on my calendar before our meeting concludes. You can print calendars or purchase one that helps you stay on track.
   
   
2. Find a data-tracking system that works for you and stick with it.
   I use a simple, two-columned chart for each student. It lists their writing goals at the top, has one column to note what we discussed during their conference, and another column to write what the student is going to do to practice the skill before their next conference. I also always give my students an appointment card before they leave the conference. It tells them three things: the next time we will meet, the strategy or skill on which they are working, and what they need to do before their next conference. This means they know what skill to practice (they can even tape it into their assignment notebook) and I can look back at my data and see what we talked about the last time we met. Everyone’s on the same page!
   
   Whatever system of data-tracking you decide to use, make sure you use it consistently. It will keep you organized and is a wonderful tool to use during parent-teacher conferences. My students’ parents love to see that I am teaching their child one-on-one for a portion of the school day and love to hear that their child helped to set his or her goals.
   
   
3. Select a teacher’s assistant to handle questions while you are conferencing.
   This makes everything so much easier. Instead of students constantly coming up to ask you questions or get permission to use the restroom, they go to the teacher’s assistant. It frees you to devote your attention to the student with whom you are meeting and gives the teacher’s assistant a sense of ownership in the classroom. Win-win.
   
   
4. Truly listen to and interact with each student as you meet with them.
   Not only does this allow you to tailor your “micro-mini lesson” to each student, but it gives you a perfect opportunity to build relationships with your students. It isn’t very often that a student gets your full attention. Focus on them, and make that time worth it.
   
   
5. Individualize the student’s lesson and task.
   Each student has his or her own personal writing goals. When you meet with each one, you can pull from the writing lessons you taught earlier in the school year or lessons you know you won’t have time to teach to the whole class that fit with the student’s goals. You can also differentiate for your lower ability and gifted writers. While some students are working on spelling words correctly, others are working on including multiple perspectives in their writing. Every student gets what he or she needs to improve his or her writing in a brief period of time.
   
   Students should leave with some small task to practice between conferences. This way, you increase the likelihood that the student will transfer what you discussed in your conference to their actual writing.

It doesn’t take a great deal of preparation to start implementing individual conferencing into your writing block. Since students are fairly independent writers by this point in the school year, you can simply print out a calendar, jot down some names, grab a stack of writing, and get started! Your students (and their writing) will thank you for it.

For several years I’ve heard the debate as to what constitutes a book worthy of our students’ time. With the onslaught of prescriptive reading programs, for many students there seems to be a decline in a love of reading. Much to my frustration, I witnessed this in my own students. A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece called Finding a Love of Reading Faster Than a Speeding Bullet where I shared how comic books and graphic novels opened the door to reading for my students. They became enthusiastic readers.

At last year’s IRA conference, Rick Riordan said that as teachers it is our responsibility to get the right book in the hands of the right child. He went on to say that making these connections can change a child’s entire perspective on not just reading, but also the world.

I was reminded of both of these events this year when we had a student from China join us who spoke and read no English; we will call him Chao. For the first couple of weeks, we struggled to find ways he could participate in our reading and language arts class activities. Chao never complained, but it was evident that he was quickly reaching a frustration level where he would completely shut down.

One of the activities in which my students engage is blogging about what they are reading. I thought this might be a good place to begin. Using a digital translator, I discovered that Chao loved graphic novels. We went to the library together and he caught sight of Jeff Kinney’s “Diary of a Wimpy Kid.” The child who lived in constant frustration immediately lit up. With very broken English and the digital translator, Chao excitedly told me that he had read all of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books in Chinese.

He checked out the first book on that visit. When his peers were engaged in free reading, he would sit with an English copy and a Chinese copy of “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” and his digital translator. He would literally spend large chunks of reading and language arts block each day deciphering and reading the book. By the time he was on the second book, I noticed a change; Chao was no longer using the Chinese version of the book. He came to me and asked if he could try blogging about his favorite part of that book.

I watched as Chao tediously typed out his first reading blog. As soon as his blog went live, his peers immediately began commenting upon his post. They were so amazed at his ability to write in English. When they asked Chao how he learned English so quickly, he smiled a big smile and held up his copy of “Diary of a Wimpy Kid.” He told them how by using that book, he had learned how to read and write in English.

So in a world where there may debate about what books are suitable for the classroom and which are not, I stand steadfast in the power of finding that right book for each student. You just never know how one book can completely open up the world for that child. Thank you, Jeff Kinney for opening up the world for Chao. All of our lives are forever changed.

You can hear Jeff Kinney speak at the IRA 59th Annual Conference General Session on Saturday, May 10.

Come see Julie D. Ramsay present “The Global Read Aloud: One Book to Connect the World” at IRA’s 59th Annual Conference, May 9-12, 2014, in New Orleans, Louisiana. 

Julie D. Ramsay is a Nationally Board Certified educator and the author of “CAN WE SKIP LUNCH AND KEEP WRITING?”: COLLABORATING IN CLASS & ONLINE, GRADES 3-8 (Stenhouse, 2011). She teaches ELA to sixth graders at Rock Quarry Middle School in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. She also travels the country to speak, present, and facilitate workshops in applying technology to support authentic learning. Read her blog at juliedramsay.blogspot.com. 

What if you could give students an authentic audience on a daily basis?
What if you could introduce your class to learners who share their passion?
What if you could connect your students to some of the smartest thinkers in the world?
What if we can teach learning as a part of living?

In today’s digital classroom we have the opportunity to do all this and more with supervised social media!

Social media can serve as the conduit between what we do in the classroom and why we do it. Learning is social. Author Stephanie Harvey says it best, “We read, question, research and discuss because it is fun!” When we provide children new social media platforms to build knowledge, we reinforce to our students that their thinking matters! We celebrate thinking, learning, and sharing and teach digital citizenship along the way.

In the past five years one of the most significant things I’ve done is start a blog for my students. Kidblog.org is an easy-to-use, free site that has a number of privacy settings that control visibility and access to the blog. Initially, I planned for my students to blog as a way to write about reading. I quickly realized that the blog was a fantastic space to house all of our thinking, not just that which fell under the ELA umbrella. In a matter of weeks, my six-year-olds were sharing book reviews, inquiry movies, and math stories on their blog.

But sharing our learning wasn’t enough. My students needed an audience for their work. We invited parents, extended family, and classmates across the school to comment on the blogs. We joined Kristen Wideen’s Primary Blogging Community, where classrooms around the world signed up to read and comment on each other’s blogs several times a year.

Now that we had followers who provided meaningful feedback through comments, I saw a shift in thinking as students moved from posting as a means to share one-way communication, to more involved digital discourse as conversations became reciprocal, engaged, and ongoing. Students in Chicago developed partnerships with kids in Vancouver who had their same name or also played baseball.

Kids posted questions to their blog asking for reading recommendations or for information they needed for an inquiry project.
Posts like, “How much does an elephant weigh? If you know, can you please tell me?” demonstrated that students understood two-sided digital communication and viewed themselves as connected learners who use social media to find the answers to their questions.

Our use of Twitter in the classroom evolved in much the same way. Initially, we used Twitter as a reflection tool and shared our learning using the hashtag, #TweetsFromtheRug. Later, I connected my students with other classroom tweeters via my #1stchat community so they could engage in meaningful digital discourse with learners their age.

I continued to build our classroom Twitter network by hosting training events for my students’ families so that they could connect and follow along with our learning. As a result, 28 out of 33 families followed us on Twitter and reported they used it as a tool to spark dinnertime conversations. When our class tweeted, “Pippi is a funny girl but also very brave!” families followed up at home with, “What happened in (your read aloud) Pippi Longstocking today? Why was she so brave?”

As families became more aware of our learning via Twitter, they also became more involved. When we tweeted, “Our class is learning about bats. What do you know about bats?” Moms, dads, and grandparents responded with facts, photos and links to video clips and websites. Projecting these responses for all students to see in our classroom gave kids the concrete evidence that their questions mattered. Students could see that people were watching—and more importantly cared—about the smart thinking and learning that took place in our classroom.  

This understanding and recognition gave students new energy and motivation to “do the work.” At the young age of six, my students now had a viable, authentic audience for which to create. No longer was the teacher the only one who viewed, evaluated, or gave feedback on their work. They had a following—friends, family and people they didn’t even know—who read, responded, and learned from their work.

As a result, my students developed a mindset for connected learning. Instead of asking the teacher, “Is this what you want?” kids asked themselves, “What would my followers like to see?” Instead of looking to me to find information for them, they posted questions and regarded their digital feedback with esteem.

As supervised social media provides students access from any wifi location, we lived a life where the thinking and learning never stopped. When the bell rang at 3:00, we didn’t have to save our ideas until the following day. With social media, kids could login to their blog accounts from home and post a wonder. With help from a parent, students could tweet a photo of something that connected to an inquiry project. We lived a life that was immersed in “always on” learning.

Over time, my students began to think differently about how they could use these tools to think, share, and access information. A few examples:

One student was visiting New York City when Hurricane Sandy made landfall. Back in Chicago, my class was very concerned about their friend and his safety, so we tweeted his family to see if they were ok. My student responded that he was safe in Brooklyn and offered to provide students information and updates “live” from the storm. 

For the next several days, students asked questions from the safety of our classroom and got information via tweets, photos, and video from their peer. This was transformative as it was the first time my kids experienced a dramatic event where the facts were curated and filtered by a student—a six-year-old was reporting a national story! My students weren’t getting the information from the local news or from an adult; they were hearing it from their buddy—and that somehow made the event a little less scary.

On a non-attendance day for students, several colleagues and I invited a few kids to present with us at a conference. My students could not wait to “teach the teachers.” In fact, one child was child so anxious to teach that she posted a blog from home telling her followers about the event! Not only did she use her blog to share her excitement, she embedded an audio clip in the blog that showed others how to use her tool for learning, Croak.it. By the end of the week she had comments from kids and teachers around the country thanking her for introducing them to Croak.it. The feedback this student received showed my students that kids really can teach adults.

Throughout the year, kids connected with authors they love on Twitter, asked questions of local museums and zoos, got feedback from organizations they respected and had regular opportunities to connect with more knowledgeable people. As an adult, I recognize the importance of my PLN—I am the product of what so many others have graciously shared, introduced, and invested in me. My colleagues across the hall, those I learn from at conferences and my online social network provide me access to many of the best thinkers in the world. As educators, it is our responsibility to create the same conditions for our students.

When we provide new avenues for questioning and thinking we help kids build their Student Learning Network, or their SLN. We give kids new ways to think, access, and understand. We set the tone that each child’s contribution matters and that kids have resources and colleagues worldwide. We instill the belief that anything is possible and build upon what Peter H. Johnson has so thoughtfully described as a “sense of agency.” The mindset shifts and students are empowered: I’m the kind of kid who can connect on a blog. I’m the kind of kid who can ask questions of experts around the globe. I’m the kind of kid who has a network. I’m the kind of kid who ______. Fill in the blank. When we build a sense of agency, our kids believe that anything is possible.

Over time my students leveraged social media to find new opportunities. One student in my classroom posted this blog about his dog:

In this post we can identify this child understands audience and is thrilled to be getting a pet. But what does he really do? Here, a seven-year old crowdsources a name for his dog. He could’ve surveyed his classmates using a clipboard and markers, but instead he amplifies his thinking and uses his blog to collect global data on what he should name his dog. This is thinking. This is agency. This is passion.

It’s not the technology alone that changes learning, but what we do with it that matters. Social media has invited my kids to write more than they ever have before. Through comments and interactions kids know that their followers care about what they have to say. The authentic audience motivates them to live curiously and inspires them to seek and build new knowledge. Students understand that they have a voice and that their voice matters. They share from their hearts and use these new tools to transform how they interact with the world.

Italian economist Leonardo Boncinelli shares a mindset that I hope to embody in my instruction every day: “When kids are curious & INTERACTING with the world they are not thinking about the learning goals they have to achieve. They are living.”

Learning is social. We now have even more opportunities to amplify student thinking. Let’s do it.

Come see Kristin Ziemke present “Student Learning Networks: Building Digital Learning Communities that Ignite Powerful Learning” at IRA’s 59th Annual Convention, May 9-12, 2014, in New Orleans, Louisiana. 

Kristin Ziemke is the co-author of “Connecting Comprehension and Technology.” She teaches in Chicago, works with districts around the country, and hosts webinars regularly for Heinemann on literacy, inquiry and technology. Educators can connect with her on Twitter @KristinZiemke and follow her students @ourkidsteach. Her website is KristinZiemke.com.

Hello, IT... Have you tried turning it off and on again?

These words, spoken repeatedly by one of the main characters on the British sitcom “The IT Crowd,” have become something of an inside joke for a group of thirty seventh- and eighth-graders at my school. This team, the RQMS Student Tech Leaders, is the first of its kind in our district and helps to facilitate current technology integration efforts in our school. Moreover, they are building their own literacy skills and lending their collective voice to the discussion as the system implements a more widespread digital transformation that blends new technology resources with innovative instructional practice.

What Tech Leaders Do

Though their slogan implies a purely tech-support role, students bring a variety of talents and interests to the table. Therefore, student tech leaders need not be limited to troubleshooting hardware and software. In addition to traditional support, our tech leaders provide a variety of services for their school: manning a video team to film school events and produce short digital pieces, running daily announcements via intercom and Google Hangouts on Air, supporting teachers and students with tech-embedded projects and activities, and helping to facilitate technology use at school events.

The student tech leaders do not in any way replace the IT professionals employed by the school system. However, they do provide an additional support system for teachers and students that can help our school move forward with technology integration efforts.

Developing Communicators and Question-Askers

In creating our tech leader team, we set the following goals:

• to develop students’ critical thinking skills through troubleshooting technology problems and evaluating current and emerging technologies for use in teaching and learning
• to hone students’ communication skills through one-on-one interactions with teachers and students, small-group presentations, and written evaluations of resources
• to build students’ leadership abilities by serving as technology ambassadors who speak for their peers on technology issues and model appropriate technology use and safe, thoughtful online behavior

At the beginning of this school year, many of our tech leaders had an interest in technology and knowledge about personal use of tech tools, but few had any formal training. Our primary focus for in-class training sessions during those early weeks and throughout the year has been on building their ability to question.

Developing a foundation based on seeking out, evaluating, and synthesizing information has served our students well, both in their tech leader roles and elsewhere. To support this effort, we began with the Google Apps Ninja Program. This site takes students through a series of modules and tests on Google tools. However, the program’s overall objective is not to build a set body of knowledge but rather, as its creator says, “It’s about searching and finding information.”

Additionally, students participate in “on-the-job” training, learning skills as needed to make their projects successful. Some also participate in job shadowing, partnering with our school’s computer technician as he responds to work orders from faculty members. This experience in particular provides students with valuable knowledge about the system’s infrastructure and effective methods of providing service.
 
Sharing What They Know

Referring to these students as leaders, not aides or assistants or helpers, is a deliberate choice. This may seem like an issue of semantics; however, it underscores the desire for students to take an active role in the ongoing conversation about how schools can leverage technology to ensure that classroom learning is meaningful, engaging, and relevant to students who have grown up in and will continue to learn and work in a digital world.

We have sought opportunities for students to speak out about the role of technology in their learning. Within our school, students have shared insights with community members at our school’s Tweet-In in the fall, an event in which parents, teachers, and students participated in a hashtagged Twitter chat about instructional practices.

Tech leader representatives have also participated in a technology professional learning group comprised of faculty members from area schools in order to discuss the work they do and engage in a discussion with teachers about instructional technology. Finally, this summer tech leaders will share their work during a session at the International Society for Technology in Education’s (ISTE) conference in Atlanta.  

These opportunities to participate in conversations about their learning are vital, both for students and for the educational professionals making decisions about instructional practice. In the words of one tech leader, “It’s our learning. Let us take the lead.”   

Laren Hammonds teaches 8th grade language arts at Rock Quarry Middle School in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Her interests include media literacy, cross-curricular collaboration, and the design of learning spaces. Connect with her on Twitter where she goes by @_clayr_, or read more at her blog, Game to Learn.

Ours is a wondrously flexible language. Not only does it have more than a million words, with new ones added/created each day, but we don’t frown on such additions or creations. Consider by comparison Papiamento, the native tongue of Aruba. It has fewer than a thousand words. Or consider those countries with ministries that determine if certain “outside” words can be considered an official part of a given country’s language.

p: jovike via photopin

Perhaps American English speakers are so tolerant of outside words because our own government is creating new ones all the time. When federal employees, for example, want to put papers in a folder, they “folderize” them. And when they wish to assemble numbers in a column, they “columnize” them.

Vocabulary Expansion

After leaving the high school (English) classroom, I spent the next quarter-century teaching working adults. I discovered that when students heard certain words, they seemed confused. Though, in actuality, they knew these words, or at least the roots on which the cognates were based.

Moving among the various parts of speech should have been an easy transition. And yet, they stumbled. To illustrate, if I referred to “autumnal” treasures, many people didn’t make the easy leap from the noun “autumn” to its adjectival cognate. The same is true for “societal” and “society” or “tornadic” and “tornado.”

Teachers can help students expand their vocabulary and gain confidence in reading, listening, writing, and speaking by increasing their familiarity with the various forms of words.

Neologism or Dictionary-validated?

The following activity is designed with teams in mind. A soupçon of competition makes it all more fun, and as Alfred Mercier asserted, “What we learn with pleasure, we never forget.”

As students begin to discover linguistic pleasures and to love their self-created linguistic treasures, they will come to agree, if only in adulthood-reflection, that Einstein was right to regard love as the best teacher.

PREPARATION

Step 1: Begin collecting words that end in “ize.” Here are a few to get you started. Once you have 25, type the list in a column, using the noun form or adjective form as shown in the starter-list below.

Step 2: In the second column, the parts of speech for the 25 words will be listed by the teams.

The third and fourth columns will be used by teams to write the verb ending in “ize.” Next, they will decide if the “ize” word really exists or is newly created. They will write a “D” or an “N” in the last column. The finished worksheet will look like this:

ACTIVITY DIRECTIONS

Step 1: Allow five minutes (longer, for younger students) for teams to discuss the parts of speech for each word and to write the answer (“noun” or “adjective”) on the line. Once the teams have finished determining the parts of speech, provide the answers. The team(s) that has the highest number of correct identifications for the parts of speech is given a certificate commending them and a five-point bonus.

Step 2: Teams must next determine what the verb form is and if that verb-form is a legitimate word that can be found in the dictionary or if it is a neologism, a new word created in your class, at this time.

Allow ten minutes for team discussion and for the students to write the “ize” verb forms and the letter “D” to designate that this is a real word—one that can be found in the dictionary—or the letter “N,” meaning that it is a neologism or recent coinage. Then give the answers and five points to the team with the highest number of correct “D” or “N” answers.

If two or more teams have earned the same number of points, you can continue the exercise with these tie-breaking exercises:

1. Ask students to turn to a book that they are using in the classroom. Ask them to find and list as many “ize” words as they can find in the pages of that book within a five-minute period. This activity will increase their speed-reading and skimming abilities. It will also allow teams to earn an extra seven points if they have the longest list.
   
   
2. Tell the class that, working in the same teams, they can make a list of neologisms from the worlds of sports, celebrities, animals, movies, or superheroes.
   
   They should be prepared to define their newly created words, all of which should end in “ize.” Award eight points to the team that has the longest list of neologisms created in a five-minute period. (An example might be “to LeBronize,” meaning “to skip a step in the normal progression.” LeBron James, also known as King James, went directly from high school to the NBA.)
   
   
3. Spend a few minutes discussing the Greek origin of neologisms—“neo” meaning “new” and “logos” meaning “word” or “the study of.” Then give an example of another word with Greek origins—“biology,” the study of life; or “etymology,” the study of the origin of words themselves. Award nine points to the team that can come up with the longest list of such words. (Be prepared to offer definitions such as “psychology,” the study of the mind.)

If teams are still hopelessly tied, give the grand prize to the team that has the most syllables in their Correlative Activity #3.