Literacy Now

We go out for dinner, and the waiter doesn’t greet us. We go to the grocery store, and the bagger doesn’t ask us if we want paper or plastic. We go to the drive-through, and the attendant doesn’t make eye contact when handing us our change.

What were once referred to as “manners” are now called “soft skills” and, if you didn’t know this already, many young people don’t have them.

We’re quick to blame society for these missing skills. Obviously, these individuals were never taught these basic, yet vital, behaviors. It’s someone else’s fault and someone else’s problem.

But it’s not someone else’s fault, and it’s not someone else’s problem.

As teachers, we have been entrusted with the education of our students, but the term “education” has taken on a new meaning. Today, education means the whole child, not just the academics.

Bill Daggett, author of “Five Trends That Are Transforming Education,” writes, “We know that there is more to life than the core subjects of math, science, English language arts, and social studies. Personal and interpersonal skills—such as responsibility, self-management, integrity, honesty, collaboration, and leadership—are critical for success in college, career, and life. Strong schools build these skills into their curricula and create educational cultures and relationships that value more than just academics.”

As Mr. Daggett suggests, it is imperative for all teachers to embed the soft skills into their daily lesson planning. Creating lesson plans where the skills are rooted in prereading, during reading and after reading strategies is no longer just a good idea. Rather, helping students navigate confidently in the world has become essential.

Implementing “leadership” in a typical literacy lesson may seem like a daunting task, but by scaffolding the concept and using cross-curricular literacy strategies, students, who usually tend to compartmentalize their learning, will be able to transfer the concept of leadership and the reading strategies to other disciplines.

Begin with the end in mind: What is it that you want students to learn about leadership? What is it about leadership that is so vital, so critical, that you are going to create, develop, and implement an entire lesson plan around this single notion? We want our young people to lead by example and inspire others to have the courage to defend their convictions. So let’s end the lesson asking students to write a reflection based on one of these ideas: Explain what it means to lead by example and ask students to offer an illustration in their own life, or ask students to explain what it means to inspire others and to highlight a situation where they have offered hope, or ask students to show how one can illustrate the courage to defend their convictions in their school or in their neighborhood. Make leadership the goal, but use reading strategies to make it happen.

Scaffolding this conceptual lesson into prereading, during reading, and after reading strategies helps students stay focused and engaged. Leadership brings all sorts of discussion and personal reflections to the table; let’s get students motivated about the idea!

Prereading strategies

Begin with Janet Allen’s Wordstorming to Anticipate Content reading strategy. Allen’s alphabet grid validates what students already know about leadership. Using an interactive whiteboard, ask students to give you one word that defines a leader. As they offer their examples, write the words under the correct letter. By activating their prior knowledge of leadership, you will soon realize what your students think about leadership and what they understand leadership to be. In this way, you can determine where you need to start—either with a basic definition of leadership using rather pedestrian examples or more abstract analysis and synthesis.

During reading strategies

Now that you have an idea as to your students’ understanding regarding leadership, you can develop your next step. How about giving your students a reading choice? As examples, they could read a brief article about Will Allen of Growing Power and his desire to bring healthy food to those less fortunate, or they might read about Fr. Greg Boyle’s work with gangs on Homeboy Industries, or students might read about Diane Latiker and her work with homeless youth on Kids Off the Block. When you give students the opportunity to choose their reading (digital or print), engagement and motivation will follow. As students read, ask them to annotate, thereby initiating questions and comments from their reading.

After reading strategies

Once the reading is complete, encourage students to share what they have read. Embolden students to use their questions from their annotation as starting points for discussion. Now go back to the beginning. Give students class time to demonstrate their thoughts in a reflective paper—showcasing what they’ve learned about leadership and asking them for evidence based on the articles they’ve read. In that way, students have had the opportunity to relate this conceptual topic to their own lives and, more important, they have used research-based best practice strategies to learn about a theoretical subject.

So what is it about leadership that is so vital, so critical, that you are have created, developed, and implemented an entire lesson plan around this one concept? Students began with their own thoughts on leadership, thereby validating what they already knew and giving them a chance to listen and learn from their classmates. Next, they chose to read about other leaders by interacting with the text, asking questions and making personal connections. Finally, with time and support, students were able to take all of the information gathered and craft their own ideas and philosophies about leadership.

Next time, let’s not blame society for these transgressions; rather, let’s focus on our own classroom and offer opportunities to assist our students in developing manners to be lauded and respected.

Peg Grafwallner is an instructional coach with Milwaukee Public Schools.

As a science nerd and lover of nonfiction, I’ve turned my reading attention recently to Albert Einstein while marking the 100th and 110th anniversaries of his theories of general and special relativity. Mulling over the oddities of space-time and quarks, my mind has drifted to teaching, and I have found that physics sheds some light on my educational endeavors. Leptons linked to literacy, you say? Yes.

When Einstein theorized that light exists as a particle (or quanta) a century ago, he laid the foundation for the fields of quantum mechanics and cosmology. Since then, scientists studying bosons, the Big Bang theory, and black holes have come to understand that certain aspects of our universe can be measured precisely, w other aspects are beyond exact calculation. On one hand, the circumference of a circle strictly determines its area. On the other, there is absolutely no way to know when the nucleus of a radium atom will decay. What can always be predicted and what will forever remain random coexist in a universe that is both determinate and indeterminate.  

In education, researchers have made great strides toward making the field more deterministic. Methods of assessment have been advanced and data have been disaggregated. Theories have been tested and refined through replicated experiments to the point where we can now say with confidence that a young child’s ability to master phoneme-grapheme association determines his or her early reading acquisition and the quality and expertise of a child’s teacher determines the degree to which she or he will learn.

Yet there are limits to the degree of determinacy education can reach. As the field travels the path of reductionism, striving to identify what is strictly quantifiable in reading development or determine which instructional methods lead to perfect learning every time, reflecting on these limits may be helpful. After all, associating sounds with symbols is not the only skill a young child brings to bear on reading, and although we may know that a student’s learning is determined by the quality of the teacher, we may never know what qualities are present in all highly effective teachers.

This is not to say I am an advocate of randomness in education. I am not. Determining through research which type of instruction works best, which materials lead to greater learning, and how best to formulate an effective program of teacher training are worthwhile and even necessary endeavors.  Education needs rigor, data, and quantitative analysis.

But we should be wary. Educational systems love the cutting edge and the paradigm shift, but neither necessarily involve rigor. And our love affair with everything new and different leads often to uncertainty and heartbreak. A multitiered system of support supplants Response to Intervention, heterogeneous grouping is swept away by mass customized learning, and the latest version of a core reading program flies in with more subroutines and monitoring systems than a space capsule, but are we really sure that any one of these complex systems definitely determines learning?

Think of this: Physicists postulate that the universe operates on levels of determinacy and indeterminacy simultaneously. Think of our universe as a layer cake. Each layer exists and operates on differing physical laws. On the bottom is the layer of quantum physics, where particles and waveforms arise, decay, and collapse at random. Upon this foundation of unpredictability are built atoms, rocks, and planets, which behave in predictable ways. Living on these very predictable rocks and planets are microbes and people, which evolve and behave in indeterminate, chaotic ways.

We can acknowledge that certain aspects of education—how to motivate a child, how to inspire a colleague, how to find the exact and perfect way to teach reading—lie beyond the purview of strict determinism, even as we strive to define scientifically what works and what does not work. And we can work towards rigor even when we know that science can never totally quantify which specific practices and materials determine complete learning. Our field is an indeterminate one, focused on millions of freethinking beings acting in unpredictable ways. First graders give a hug without notice, third graders fall out of their seats unexpectedly, sixth graders come to school frequently with more than close reading on their minds. The beauty of teaching, which is both a science and an art, is that through the skillful practice of what we know, through our quest to gain greater knowledge, and through a lot of inspired and hard work, we can create order from chaos and help determine outcomes for all our indeterminate and oh-so-interesting students.

Mark Weakland is an educator, consultant, and author of books for teachers and children, including Super Core! Turbocharging Your Basal Reading With More Reading, Writing, and Word Work.

Have you ever finished modeling a lesson, crossed your fingers, and hoped some of the students actually go back and use what you taught? We have all been there, no matter what grade level we teach. Once we have been a model and shown students new ways of reading, we hope they begin to try the strategies when needed in their own books. But we can do more than hope; we can coach readers and help them get started.

When we become a mentor to readers, we sit by them and guide them as they go about deeper thinking, but we don’t take over their books or do the work for them. I see being a mentor as being a coach on the sideline of the field.

As a former soccer player, I noticed two types of coaches I had over the years—“sideline” coaches and “on-the-field” coaches—and the two are quite distinct. Sideline coaches would stay off the field, where they would watch practice, pause the play, give us more instruction, and then set us back to scrimmage. While we were playing, the sideline coaches would comment and suggest—and sometimes even yell—but all of it was aimed at helping us players who were on the field make wise choices.

On-the-field coaches would literally step on the field with us in practice and play with us. They would pass us beautiful balls and set us up to score, but most of the time our level of play was elevated because they were out on the field doing much of the work for us. I learned from both types of coaches, but I developed much more independence from the sideline coaches. Our team’s performance in practice and in games was similar with sideline coaches, but our team’s performance was much less successful in games when we had on-the-field coaches. We were so used to the coach doing a lot of the work for us we never learned to do it on our own.

What kind of reading coach are you? If you are not sure, consider how much work you do in the students’ books and how often you pick up their books to get them started. Consider where you sit in relation to students when coaching. Be on the sideline by sitting next to a student. Consider how much you say as they try a strategy. Are you telling them every step or calling out “plays” in the moment and then watching to see what they need next?

If you are choosing to be in the book with your students like an on-the-field coach, remember to eventually step back and coach from the sidelines.

Here are a few qualities I notice about the coach who sets up independence and transfer:

• Names one step at a time
• Tells students what they can try (not asking a lot questions for them to think through while reading)
• Focuses on what to do (not what to avoid)
• Keeps language and prompts clear
• Does less over time and expects students to take on more

The chart in this post from Mindsets and Moves: Strategies That Help Readers Take Charge shows how you might do less over time.

Gravity Goldberg is a literacy consultant and author of Mindsets and Moves: Strategies That Help Readers Take Charge (Corwin, 2015) and coauthor of Conferring With Readers: Supporting Each Student’s Growth and Independence(Heinemann, 2007) in addition to managing her blog. This post is one in a series on how teachers can create more independence in the classroom by embracing new roles. She also can be reached via Twitter. 

I love a good cooking show. The host finds ways to bring me into the kitchen and make something that seemed so daunting when reading the recipe now seem within reach. When I teach my students a new or complicated way of reading, I think of myself like the host of my own show—only I am not taking them into my kitchen, I am taking them into my reading mind and into my book. When I show students what I am reading and how I go about reading, I am acting as a model.

Think about your favorite cooking show or take a few minutes to watch a clip online. You will notice the steps the host is taking when modeling how to make a dish. These steps are like what effective reading teachers take when teaching students—they don’t just give the “recipe,” they show the process. The three steps I notice are actions we can all take on no matter what grade or skill we are teaching.

The first action is to set the context for students by explaining what you are about to model. When I begin modeling before telling students what I hope they will see and notice, they tend to focus on aspects of the modeling that are not always important. For example, if I don’t say, “I am going to show you how I…” before modeling, some students explain they paid attention to the color of the character’s shirt or the small fact at the bottom of the page. By my setting up the modeling, they know what is worth paying attention to.

The second action is to show the steps by demonstrating each one and thinking aloud as I perform them. Showing the steps seems obvious, but just telling the steps is much easier and we forget to show them. I often see teachers begin by showing the first part of a strategy, and by the midway point they are no longer showing and just telling instead. I think many of us do this because it can sound awkward to think aloud in front of students; it sounds like we are talking to ourselves. I keep my cooking show analogy in mind when demonstrating the steps and remind myself that students need to see my steps just like I need to see the cooking show host cook in front of me.

The third action is for students to summarize what was modeled by naming what I just showed. I know I told students what they would be seeing and then I showed them. Telling them again what they just saw can feel redundant, but many students benefit from the repetition. I think of it like this: The setup is the future tense (“I will show you how I...”), the demonstration is the present tense (“Hm. I wonder why the…”) and the summary is the past tense (“You noticed that I just did…”). By modeling and explaining as you demonstrate, students experience the learning in a few ways by listening, observing, and noticing.

Want to refine your ability to be a model? Go watch a cooking show and notice these same three actions. In the final post of this series, I will explain how to coach readers as a mentor when they are trying new strategies in their own books.

Gravity Goldberg is a literacy consultant and author of Mindsets and Moves: Strategies That Help Readers Take Charge(Corwin, 2015) and coauthor of Conferring With Readers: Supporting Each Student’s Growth and Independence(Heinemann, 2007) in addition to managing her blog. This post is one in a series on how teachers can create more independence in the classroom by embracing new roles. She also can be reached via Twitter. 

One possible reason why some students progress more rapidly than others is their mindset. By mindset, I mean what Carol Dweck refers to as "the beliefs they carry about their own abilities.” When students develop a growth mindset about their reading ability, they believe that their hard work, struggle, and opportunities for problem solving are all important and valuable parts of the learning process. When students develop a fixed mindset about their ability, they believe their reading level, skill level, and proficiency are static and not much can be done to change them. With a fixed mindset comes resistance to working hard and putting extra effort in because there is really no point. When it comes to developing ownership and independence, having a growth mindset is imperative in the learning process.

The good news is that Dweck and her colleagues have shown that mindsets are malleable and we can help shape them with the kinds of feedback we offer. Regardless of whether a student first enters our classrooms with a growth mindset, we can take on a role that fosters a view of reading with a growth-based lens. When we offer feedback in this way, I call it “being a mirror.”

In my previous post, I wrote about being a “miner” and uncovering how a student reads. Once we have gained important information about a student reader, we can give feedback that shows students what they are doing and the results of that work. Focusing our feedback on the effort and the results emphasizes more growth mindset qualities. I call this role a “mirror” because a mirror’s job is to reflect back what is there without judgment. Our feedback can do the same.

There are five qualities of feedback that foster a growth mindset with readers. First, be specific. When we describe for students how they are reading, we can name the specific steps they took and name them one at a time. For example, instead of saying “You predicted,” which is a bit too general to be helpful, I might say, “You looked at the cover and title, thought about what you would learn, and then went page by page in your book seeing if what you predicted was actually in the book.”

A second quality is to focus on what the reader is doing (not on what is missing). A mirror cannot reflect back what is not there.

A third quality is to focus on the process and the work the reader put in. When we focus on the process, we show students that their efforts are valued and important.

The fourth quality is to make sure it can transfer. Although I do want to be specific with my feedback, I also want to name what the reader is doing in a way that he or she can use it in a different book and context. Instead of saying, “When you thought about why Jonas lied to his dad, it helped you understand why he left,” I might say, “When you thought about the character’s choices, it helped you understand his motivation.”

The final—and often most difficult—quality is to take yourself out of the feedback. This means not saying, “I like how you…” or “I think…” because this sort of feedback makes it about pleasing us adults. Instead of starting with first person pronouns, I start with the reader’s name or simply say, “When you…” and keep the focus on the reader. After all, a mirror stays focused on what is in front of it.

Try being a mirror with your students and notice how not only their reading habits change, but also their mindsets. This is so important because, as sociology scholar Brene Brown explains, “Without feedback there can be no transformative change.” In my next post, I will explain how to be a model and teach in ways that students can really understand.

Gravity Goldberg is a literacy consultant and author of Mindsets and Moves: Strategies That Help Readers Take Charge(Corwin, 2015) and coauthor of Conferring With Readers: Supporting Each Student’s Growth and Independence(Heinemann, 2007) in addition to managing her blog. This post is one in a series on how teachers can create more independence in the classroom by embracing new roles. She also can be reached via Twitter.