Literacy Now

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Every semester, on the last day of the literacy methods course I teach, I ask my pre-service teachers to write a six-word memoir as a form of reflection. I show them the funny, moving, irreverent YouTube video created by SMITH Magazine and Harper Perennial called “Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure,” and, after watching, I give them some time to write. Their six-word memoirs run the gamut from funny to moving to irreverent, as you can see from the memoirs my created this semester.

Then we get to the point where we need to move beyond reflection and ask “So what? What does this have to do with teaching kids? How might we use this in a classroom?” This is an important question in a methods class, where the line between theory and practice shifts, and students start to own what it means to be teachers. Together, we came up with a list of how they might use six-word memoirs with the students they came to know and care about over the course of the semester, and how they imagine using six-word memoirs with students they have not yet encountered.

Here are our top five ways to use six-word memoirs in a classroom:

As a Form of Introduction. Students come to a class with different life experiences. Some have summers filled with camp, vacations, books, and wonder. Others have summers filled with taking care of younger siblings, staying indoors and watching television, angry adults, and unhealthy food. As teachers, regardless of where we teach, we never know who is joining our community or what they bring with them. Six-word memoirs offer students a safe way to share a small piece of who they are and what matters to them. Older students might want to watch the version of the six-word memoir project compiled by HarperTeen.com in order to find inspiration and mentor texts.

Writer’s workshop is a model emphasizing both structure and choice. The beauty of six-word memoirs is that structure is built into the fabric of this writing, but so is choice. When using six-word memoirs as a method of introduction, students can pick content and decide how much of themselves to share. They can share their favorite book, the number of siblings they have, or the fact they miss someone who is no longer here. The choice within the structure is theirs and theirs alone.

Write from a Character’s Point of View. While six-word memoirs and all of the applications are exciting, this is a particular favorite of mine. There are so many ways six-word memoirs might be used within the context of reader’s workshop! Thinking for a moment of a whole-class read-aloud, each student might be asked to write a six-word memoir from the perspective of a different character at the end of a book. Certainly, very few books would have enough characters to assign every student a different perspective (we’re not reading Game of Thrones in elementary school!), but it’s always interesting to see how students write the same character differently. As an example, let’s take a look at a current favorite of mine, Rump: The True Story of Rumpelstiltskin, by Liesl Shurtliff. In this book, students can write six-word memoirs from the perspectives of Rump, Red, Opal, King Barf, the aunts, the trolls, pixies, Frederick and Bruno, and the miller. They might even write six-word memoirs from these characters at different points in the story, showing their perspective as it changes (or doesn’t) over time.

This same idea can be repeated as an independent reading activity, a literature circle discussion prompt, or a way in to a partner reading conversation. Asking students to put themselves in the shoes of a book character is hard work, and writing a six-word memoir as if they were that character raises the bar just a little bit more.

Writing Across the Science or Social Studies Curriculum. While the 140-character limit of Twitter feels like an imposition of brevity on many older students, imagine what the limit of six words feels like! The six-word structure can be used as either a memoir or a structure for summary in the content areas. First, let’s explore the six-words as a memoir in content areas.

We often ask students to write biographies of those who are famous in the disciplines they study. Earlier this year, my son, a first grader, was asked to write a report on an “American hero” (he picked Paul Revere.) As I was getting ready to write this post, I asked him what he remembered about his “hero,” and he replied as I feared, “ummm… nothing?”

Over the course of a school career, students study any number of historical figures from around the world and across disciplines. They write long reports about these people, sometimes drawing pictures or presenting what they have learned (or memorized) to their class. What if we asked each of our students to write their figure’s memoir as well? These figures have an abundance of information associated with them, but six words would be something to take away, something these students might remember for the long haul.

The six-word structure can also be used as a method for summary of content areas. It is a useful tool when thinking about formative assessment, exit tickets, and helping students think about the big ideas of a concept or a unit of study. When looking across a class full of six-word summaries, it’s easier to see if they “get” the big idea than when looking at 27 full-page summaries.

To be fair, learning to summarize in six words takes some practice. Students will want to summarize in five words, or eight. Writing in six words takes skill, and as a method of formative assessment it might not seem like the point. There is a certain habit of mind, however, that comes with thinking of just the right words to say what you want to say. 

As a Connection to the Arts. It’s always interesting to hear from my pre-service teachers once they leave my class and carry on with their studies. I’m never sure what they will take with them, what will “stick.” One student of mine loved the idea of six-word memoirs, and decided to try it with kids she was working with in a summer camp setting. She was an art counselor working with all ages, and asked the kids to caption one painting project, a favorite setting, with six words.

Using the six-word structure as a connection to the arts is a natural fit, because this is an arts-based project in the first place. My student used it as a link to painting, but it could be used to caption a self-portrait (memoir plus self-portrait, oh my!), to describe an abstract work, as a placard for a sculpture, or the dedication on an artist’s nameplate. Moving out of the realm of visual art, the six-word structure could be used to describe what a song or piece of music makes you feel, or a dance, or any other performance. The brevity of the six-word structure makes it an ideal form for this type of review.

As a Form of Reflection. I began this post discussing how I use six-word memoirs with my own students as a form of reflection. I ask my pre-service teachers to reflect on our time together, on what they have learned, and how they have grown as teachers and students. I am a firm believer in the power of reflection, and I have seen the six-word structure help my students grow in their ability to reflect.

I think the power of this lies in the limits. It becomes easy to reflect over the course of pages, to talk about strengths and weaknesses, what you liked and didn’t like, where you excelled and where you will continue to grow. It is harder, of course, to be reflective in six words. It is harder to find voice in six words. You have to make a choice: do you want to be funny, or serious? How much do you want to share? You can be awfully honest in just six words, you can choose to put it all out there. Or you can find a cliché, string your words together, hide behind the limit.

This goes for young students, too. We can ask students in elementary school to reflect upon the type of readers they become over the course of a school year, or the type of mathematicians, or how they changed as writers or scientists or questioners. From our initial prompt, students can reflect in any number of ways. They can be silly or serious, thoughtful or rushed. They can use every word of their allotted six and think wisely about punctuation, or try to argue that “and” shouldn’t really count as a word.

And so, in the spirit of the six-word memoir, here are my six words (in addition, of course, to the title): “Six-word memoirs: powerful teaching tools.”

Jenny Rich is an adjunct instructor in the School of Education at Rider University in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, and a doctoral student at Rutgers University. You can find her on Twitter at @jdrich219.

Students come to us with a wide variety of background information and “knowns.” We can’t control what we get sent to us, but we can control what we do with it. There is no other grade responsible for the amount of growth that kindergartners are expected to make, there is also no other grade more misunderstood. Kindergarten is the best and worst of education today. To see a child make their first connection in a kindergarten classroom is unforgettable and “the best moment” can come in the form of writing their name, matching letters, determining rhymes or reading stories. It could also be a smile, an attempt, or a choice made carefully. Consequently, kindergarten is also littered with “the worst moments.” In today’s era of pacing guides and continuums developed to complete a set number of skills in a set number of meetings—regardless of developmental milestones—kindergarten teachers are faced with the ongoing internal debate of what is appropriate for 5-year-olds and what is expected. Regardless, we cannot use the excuse, “They can’t do it, they are just kindergartners.”

Seriously! Just kindergartners? What does that even mean? Are we just teachers? No, we are the most important people in the lives of school children and we can determine who they can become. Just kindergartners? Nothing makes me crazier than when teachers, administrators, and so-called specialists give the excuses for children not performing BEFORE they give the children the tools they need to achieve.

As a veteran kindergarten teacher, I presented a workshop on emergent writing at the Virginia State Reading Association Conference several years ago. The workshop offered attendees several methods for teaching writing, ideas for editing, lessons for mechanics, and rubrics for assessment. The key to teaching writing to emergent learners is the same as it is for teaching any other skill: strategic well-planned lessons with consistent modeling and ample practice. Using what they know (letters, letter/sound associations, word wall activities) takes away the fear of writing. They can be taught to rely on themselves and refrain from asking “how do you spell that?” Teaching the beginning basics of mechanics can be as easy as a song and practice. Using student friendly rubrics can provide students with the skills to self-correct and self-monitor their writing. I provided work samples and student products showing compositions of four, five, six sentences and more. I showed journals with concise stories containing a beginning, middle, and end and some even contained a surprise ending, demonstrated voice and used inspired word choices. After the presentation several attendees came up to talk about my ideas and see the student’s work samples up close. Many were taking pictures and asking questions. An administrator from a struggling school system came to me and started the conversation by saying, “I think you are lying.”

“Excuse me?” I was stunned and even confused.

“I don’t think these are kindergarten samples,” she continued.

“Excuse me,” I repeated. “Who are you?” I asked.

“I am ABC from XYZ Schools and kindergartners can’t do that. Writing isn’t tested in this state until fifth grade, so why would you start ‘teaching’ (she said with air quotes) kindergarten students to write. They can’t do it.”

Well, as you can imagine, I was taken aback. First, she had questioned my honesty, but most importantly, she had questioned my students. Not a good plan.

“You don’t know me and you don’t know my students, but these are, in fact, their products from good teaching. Don’t tell me kindergartners can’t do that! You may not have faith in kindergarten students, but if you teach them, they will write.”

This was the most blatant assault on my integrity I have ever encountered. But more importantly, she had doubted my students and that hurt. My students work hard every day and don’t doubt their ability. In fact, they don’t know failure is an option, because it isn’t. Lessons are carefully crafted with success in mind.

I offered the administrator an open invitation to my classroom. She was welcome any day and any time. She declined. When the conference was over, I emailed this administrator, again inviting her to my classroom. I told her I would put her name on the guest list through the end of school and I asked her to come unannounced. She did not return my email and she never visited.

 

Don’t tell me kindergartners can’t do that!

Giving kindergartners the tools, the practice, and the confidence to write will open their eyes to a new avenue of exploration. They will want to write stories. They will want to edit their writing to make it better. They will want to write to entertain, inform or persuade their audience. It is an achievable goal for everyone.

I tried to conduct myself as professionally as I could with her. But my internal conversation wasn’t so professional. I truly believe one of the biggest struggles of her school system is her. She didn’t believe in her teachers or the students in her system. How can students be expected to be successful on any writing test if they aren’t taught strategically and consistently from the earliest stages of learning? You can tell me the teachers aren’t educated on how to teach kindergarten students. You can tell me the school system isn’t providing adequate professional development on how to teach kindergarten students. You can even tell me your expectations for kindergarten students are set too low. But don’t tell me kindergartners can’t do that!

 

Cathy Collier is a reading specialist at Great Bridge Primary School in Chesapeake, Virginia with an additional 15 years as a kindergarten teacher. She has her B.S. in Special Education, a master’s degree in Special Education and a certified reading specialist. She is the immediate past president of the Virginia State Reading Association

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Each semester, when I announce to my students that they will be in writing groups, I see the same fearful eyes and frustrated faces.

I know that many of them have worked in writing groups in infrequent, sporadic ways and received feedback limited to grammar and surface-level comments. Because of this, they view peer editing only as a proofreading exercise and often do not trust their peers to provide meaningful feedback. Needless to say, writing groups are not always an easy sell to my students.

They were not always an easy sell to me either. In my secondary classroom, I had students “partner up” to read final drafts. Then, when I enrolled in an English education doctoral program, I was introduced to semester-long writing groups of three to four students in a pedagogy course required of first year composition instructors at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

This pedagogy course taught me how to value the insight of fellow writers who have vastly different backgrounds and interests. As the semester progressed, I realized the ways in which their feedback improved my work. The “partner up” activities I had my students do could have never led to the substantive revisions that the sustained, semester-long writing group did.

Through participating in a meaningful writing group in my pedagogy course and facilitating them in my own first year composition courses, I have come to value the power of writing groups and believe they can work from the primary to the secondary to the college writing classroom.

One aspect a lot of teachers question is how writers with different ability levels can help one another. But the truth is, writers can learn from both effective writers and ineffective writers. In addition, writers who do not have substantive content knowledge can still offer meaningful feedback. Lastly, writing groups emphasize the social aspect of writing.

Here are some simple strategies for how to incorporate writing groups into your writing classroom:

Start small. Don’t feel that you have to create year-long writing groups from the get-go. Try them out for a unit or one writing assignment that will go through many drafts. Solicit responses from your students and reflect on how it went. Make changes as you go forward.

Be random. One question that often arises is how to organize students into writing groups. Some instructors take inventories of their students and observe students during the first few class meetings so as to make writing group decisions. My writing group placements are mostly random, and I generally have three to four students in a group.

Model what soliciting effective feedback looks like. Effective feedback leads to substantive revision. Writers who ask meaningful questions to their peers often receive better feedback, which improves the quality of their writing. Not preparing students to solicit effective peer feedback minimizes the effects of feedback and often results in students doing simple grammar edits of each other’s papers. Ask students to create 2–3 specific questions before engaging in the peer editing sessions. These questions should not be “yes” or “no” questions.

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Model what effective feedback looks like. To prevent students from just providing comma edits, they need to be taught how to give effective, substantive feedback that will lead to revisions. After students are arranged in their writing groups, select a model paper and model how to answer a writer’s questions. Help students see how you provide solutions to problems in the writer’s piece so as to help the writer make more meaningful revisions. Participate in your students’ writing groups sometimes so as to model the types of conversations peers should be having with one another.  

Help students understand they do not need to take all feedback. Writers need ownership of their writing. Help students understand that they do not have to take all of the feedback that you or their peers provide. Design a minilesson around helping student writers find a balance between maintaining their own voices and ideas as writers and incorporating peers’ feedback.

Have students reflect on their feedback. Ask students to reflect on whose feedback they used and what kind of feedback was most helpful. Use these comments anonymously during a minilesson to help your students understand the kind of feedback that helps your community of writers.

Do not assess students’ drafts Even though I often provide students feedback in addition to their writing group members’ feedback, every once in a while I have the students peer edit their drafts without me looking at the drafts. Students are still tempted to take only what you say about their writing. So step aside during some writing workshops so as to help your students value their peers’ feedback and to show them that you value the feedback they provide to one another.
But perhaps the best ways to answer the whys and hows of writing groups is to participate in a writing group yourself. It was not until I participated in a sustained writing group that my own anxieties about the practice began to fade. Sharing your experiences in writing groups with your students will also give you credibility as you facilitate your students’ writing groups.

Kathryn Caprino (kcaprino@live.unc.edu) is a Ph.D. candidate in Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research interests are English education, writing pedagogy, technology in the secondary English classroom, and young adult literature. She teaches an English methods course and has taught first year composition. She has also been a teaching assistant in a children's/young adult literature and middle grades methods course. She supervises student teachers and is the social media coordinator for the Adolescent Literacy Alliance adolescentliteracyalliance.ning.com.

After recently finishing another round of standardized testing, as well as too many district-required assessments that mimic the standardized tests, I am inclined to look for additional ways to make assessments more meaningful and engaging for my students. Why? Because I struggle to watch some of my students sit through a multiple-choice test. Some of my students come to school after witnessing horrific crimes, after not eating breakfast, after engaging in fights (at home or on the street), and I have to get them to concentrate on—let’s just say it—a boring test that lasts way too long.

I never cared about those tests growing up. I specifically remember putting effort into maybe the first five questions on standardized tests and then bubbling in whatever because I just didn’t care. It wasn’t relevant to me.

Zoning out didn’t mean I didn’t understand what I learned or read—it just meant I didn’t care enough to pay attention. Daydreaming was just so much better. That being said, if I was assigned a project in grade school, I couldn’t STOP thinking about how I was going to make my project the best. Most of us can remember those projects where we pretended to be a president, or designed a commercial (basically what we would now call “performance tasks” minus a few of the critical elements).

Performance tasks seem to present problems for multiple reasons, including the time it takes to create one as well as design a rubric to match. There are also a lot of rules to designing performance tasks. And engaging performance tasks seem even harder to design for reading. I also need buy-in from my grade-level team so that we can look at the data and use it to guide further instruction.

Yet, even with all these obstacles, we must push on in order to gain meaningful data from our students.

So do you have to reinvent the wheel? No! Use the resources you have and think outside the box! Think of all the activities you create in the classroom and tweak them. For example, I recently read “Brain Powered Strategies to Engage All Learners” by LaVonna Roth. This book is full of strategies designed to engage the learner by reinforcing connections between the student and the subject matter without a worksheet.

After utilizing these strategies in my classroom, I began to adapt some of the activities into assessments. One strategy in particular I love to use as a form of assessment is called “That’s a Wrap.” In this strategy, students create their own study guide through a process that mimics an interview. My students were given an article from Scholastic’s about the new water slide opening in Kansas City, called Verrückt (German for “crazy”). After reading the article, students had to write down questions they had about the waterslide.

Little did they know they all had very similar questions, validating that their questions were probably important ones: Is this ride safe? What if the riders fall out? Can they go down without a raft? How tall is it? Even crazier is that all of the questions they asked were answered in the text but after one read they weren’t picking up on those important details.

I typed up all of the students’ questions and told them their task. Students were going to pretend to work at this park and be interviewed by the local media regarding the opening of this new water slide. They had to be prepared to answer the reporter’s open-ended questions. They needed supporting details to justifythe important points they were going to make. Where would the answers come from? The text, of course.

The possibilities here are really endless. You can tie in criteria for research and technology and encourage students to find videos and more articles related to the topic. This task could include speaking and listening standards as well as be used for almost any topic in all content areas. Imagine interviewing a hurricane for science! Another option: rather than have students create or fill in a timeline of someone’s life, they could be interviewed and discuss those moments in chronological order with an interviewer.

Here are some additional ideas for using performance tasks in the classroom:

• Ask students to create a restaurant menu for pets based on information they read in an article related to pet food. Have them create menu items based on a specific animal’s diet.This will show you that students are able to compare and contrast the diet of certain animals through the organization of their menu and whether or not they understood what they read.
• Invite students to create a Facebook page (using a template—there are tons of free options online!) for a book character, well-known historical figure, or a person in current events. Students could be required to read multiple sources of text and even watch videos.Depending on your teaching focus, examples of the criteria could be the following.
  • Include four written status updates that represent how the character’s feelings change throughout the story.
  • Include the character’s hometown.
  • Include two status updates for setting changes.
  • Include four friends of the character.List two people who were declined a friend request. (A writing piece could be added by having students provide a rationale for their friend choices and those who were denied.)

Wiggins and McTighe offer a great tool to assist in the creation of performance tasks in their book, “Understanding By Design,” using the acronym GRASPS (Goal, Role, Audience, Situation, Performance and Standards.) Here are some important things to remember as we design performance tasks:

• A performance task usually involves presenting students with a real life problem, where they develop a product or perform for an identified audience (real or simulated).
• Tasks should be relevant, relatable, and developmentally appropriate to the grade level and student.
• Engaging does NOT always mean it is effective.
• Teachers must set the learning outcomes first and be clear about the intended performance results!
• Think: what is the evidence we need to measure a student’s understanding?
• Collaborate with other teachers! We learn most from each other, so open up those doors and start talking to one another.
• Use the Internet to take advantage of so many great ideas already online. Check out Pinterest, TeachersPayTeachers, Facebook pages, and blogs.You may just find an idea you want to tweak.

In order for anyone to want to do anything, it has to hold value. Assessments must be meaningful as well. It’s hard for students to find little, if any, value in our standardized tests these days because the meaning lies within comparing schools, districts and states, as well as holding teachers accountable. But where is the value for the student? Where is the connection for the students? We want them to be creative, collaborative, and able to communicate. Bubbling in answers doesn’t allow for any of that.It’s not the content of these traditional tests that is bad; it’s the form and authenticity of them.

This is something we can change in our classrooms. As teachers, we have the power to make our students’ faces light up. We have the power to make their creativity come alive. We have the power to help them understand what real learning and problem solving looks like in the real world.

We are teachers. We not only have the power to make these changes, we have the tremendous responsibility to do so—and fast.

Karen Jackson is a third grade teacher in Tampa, Florida. She has been a classroom teacher for over 12 years. She holds a Master’s Degree in curriculum, instruction and assessment. She is a professional development writer and trainer and owns an educational resource company that supplies resources and professional development for teachers around the country. You can find Karen at www.sharpenyoungminds.org.

If you're a fan of Reading Today Online, you will recognize this name. Barbara Ward has been coordinating the weekly K-12 book reviews from the International Reading Association's Children's Literature and Reading Special Interest Group (CL/R SIG) for about three years. In this Member of the Month interview, we learn about Barbara's path from a journalist to a middle grades educator to a professor, from Tennessee to New Orleans to Washington State, all the time reading and sharing a love of literacy with those around her. 

You're quite a bibliophile. Describe your relationship to reading. 

I’m an avid, passionate, daily reader. If I’m not reading something for pleasure each day, I actually start to feel grouchy. My eyes and brain crave that form of mental and physical exercise.

How did you begin your career, and what led you to your current position?

I have been a reader, writer, and actress pretty much all of my life. Since I grew up on a farm in East Tennessee, I didn’t have a lot of playmates other than my younger brother, Mike, during my formative years. I loved where I lived with all those woods and pine trees, and my parents encouraged me to fill my time doing the things I enjoyed. I discovered characters that were similar to me in the books I read while also learning about experiences foreign to me. Reading and writing took me to different places, places far beyond those lovely mountains that surrounded me, and I dreamed of seeing what was on the other side of them once I grew up. I always knew that I would be a writer someday, and my first career in journalism allowed me to accomplish that dream. My second career as a middle grades language arts teacher in New Orleans gave me the opportunity to share my passion for literacy with youngsters who had no idea that they could get lost—or found—in a book. Teaching, whether as an eighth grade teacher or as a university professor, lets me build community, and rekindle the love for reading and writing in my students. I affectionately call them “born-again readers” because that is exactly what they are—readers who have lost the way and no longer enjoy reading. I blame the current focus on high-stakes testing and the use of reading programs that require students to regurgitate trivial facts rather than encouraging deep discussion and exploration of those important ideas and big questions that good books can raise. I also think that there are many purposes for reading. Reading for enjoyment or relaxation is usually a different experience than reading for information or for test items.

Although I loved teaching middle grades and high school in New Orleans, I always knew that I wanted to teach at a university at some point. I thought that the methods and passion for literacy that I shared with my students might transfer well to a university setting. When Hurricane Katrina destroyed my home and all my possessions in August 2005, Dr. April Whatley Bedford, one of my doctoral committee members, shared my dramatic survival story with Dr. Terrell Young at Washington State University, and he helped bring me to Washington State University to teach literacy courses in Tri-Cities, the branch campus, and later, in Pullman, the main campus. It’s interesting how connections influence where we end up working.

What are you reading (personal, professional, or even children's/YA)?

As you know, I’m always reading. My list of books from last year consisted of 1,476 titles. It was a great reading year. I like to read several books at the same time since I feel rather depressed when a book comes to the end, and the characters I have come to care about are no longer part of my life. If I have several reading relationships going on at the same time, I can stave off the depression. I’m reading Lies My Girlfriend Told Me by Julie Ann Peters and Reign of Error by Diane Ravitch, and I’m wading through a nice stack of picture books. I just finished Peter Brown’s My Teacher Is a Monster! and hooted all the way through. My passion is young adult literature, probably because I relate so strongly to the characters and their experiences. I jokingly tell my students that I am probably thirteen emotionally.

You have been the CL/R SIG president for several years. How did your interest in children's literature develop?

Books have always provided me with the answers I seek about life’s mysteries and offer me hope. Children’s literature is simply amazing because today’s writers are tackling tough and important issues and telling stories that have often been left out of history books. To be succinct, these are the books that speak most powerfully to me and provide an accessible way to raise questions about important issues or themes that matter to me. For instance, Eve Bunting’s Fly Away Home and Barbara O’Connor’s How to Steal a Dog challenge assumptions about homelessness. I can’t think of an issue that can’t be addressed in some way through a picture book or chapter book.

What is your favorite theme for the CL/R SIG's book reviews on Reading Today Online?

I love many of the themes used in our weekly book reviews, but my favorite one has to be “Books That Make Us Linger.” There are thousands of books published each year, and while each one of them has someone who enjoys reading it, I am drawn to those rare books that stay with me long after I reach the final page. It could be that I want to linger with a book because of how it ends or because I have fallen in love with a character or because the author has raised issues that I know I will need to continue to explore. As a writer, I relish the idea that something I have written stays with a reader for a while, maybe even returning to haunt him/her days, weeks or years later. I prefer books that make me think and don’t offer me all the answers. If an author leaves me pondering questions or wondering about what I might do or trying to resolve complicated issues, then I am happy.

Are there any stellar new books that you'd recommend to students (and teachers) who don't like the "classics" traditionally used in classrooms?

My list of favorites would be far too long for this column. The CL/R SIG provides weekly reviews centered around one theme each week that offer recently-published titles that teachers may want to read and/or share with their students. While I love much of the classic children’s literature that I read as a child and know it has a place in today’s classrooms, I would encourage teachers to branch out and read books that are hot off the press as well. I once thought that everyone needed to read the same books for class discussions, but now I like to choose a theme and offer my students several choices of books dealing with that theme. For instance, we may explore through reading “What Are the Many Ways to Love?” or “How Is Disability Explored in Children’s Books?” and my students choose from six or seven books for that week. When they come to class having read different books, their definitions of disability or culture, for instance, have expanded greatly, and the subsequent class discussion allows their definitions to expand even more. That’s a powerful, life-changing experience.

What are your favorite lessons to connect literature with reading and writing skills?

I love to use mentor texts so that my students learn to read like writers. By examining the craft of writing through published books, they learn to recognize good writing and try similar writing techniques for themselves. I also love to use what my colleague and former CL/R SIG president Carolyn Angus calls “Perfect Pairs.” I like to identify two books dealing with the same theme or topic and have my students read both books and then critique them. What do they notice about each book or how the author approaches the topic? What does one book include or omit that the other one does not?

What do you consider to be your proudest career moment?

I’ve had many great moments—and hope to have a few more. Receiving my doctorate was a great achievement since I went back to school for that advanced degree late in life. I loved every moment of my doctoral journey and worked with some terrific professors, including Dr. Patricia Austin and Dr. Wilma Longstreet of the University of New Orleans. I am proud to have received the Celebrate Literacy Award from the Washington Organization for Reading Development as recognition of my passion for literacy. I was honored to receive the Excellence in Teaching Award from the WSU College of Education and have a lovely plaque attesting to that award on my office wall. Finally, I am thrilled whenever I receive a card or email from one of my students thanking me for teaching them and helping them fall in love with reading again. Just the other day I had an email from a student that I taught fifteen years ago when I was in New Orleans. She thanked me for teaching lessons that mattered to her, lessons that are still with her, and relying on class discussions to tackle issues. I was blown away—and you can bet that I kept that email. My office door at WSU is covered with cards, letters, and photos that attest to how I have made a difference in my students’ lives. It is very humbling. 

What do you believe is the biggest challenge in literacy education today?

I worry that for many students today reading as a chore and not something that can be pleasurable. Reading really should be the love of a lifetime, and I hope that more individuals will come to realize that the romance between readers and the texts they choose need never wane.

How long have you been a member of IRA? How has membership influenced your career?

I’ve been an IRA member for 13 years. Being a member keeps me aware of current research and teaching practices, and it has given me the chance to expand my intellectual horizons. I love the publications and enjoy the conferences. In fact, I’ve met many dear friends through IRA, including Dr. Deanna Day, Dr. Nancy Hadaway, and Karen Hildebrand.

What do you like to do when you're not wearing your educator hat?

I think I’m always wearing that educator hat and suggesting books and teaching strategies to everyone I meet. But I love to travel and chat with friends. I waste a lot of time online too, searching for stories about strange happenings.

What's the best advice you could offer someone new to the profession?

You may find your “tribe” or the group of individuals with whom you connect most strongly through professional organizations such as IRA. Make the most of those opportunities, and don’t be afraid to share what matters to you with others. Make reading a daily habit. Becoming a reader is not negotiable, and we teachers must be reading and writing models for our own students. Above all, develop a sense of humor, and don’t take yourself so seriously all the time.