AVReading Newsletter January-- The Story of Words

            Because culture is so deeply embedded in language, it is often important that we spend a little time thinking very specifically about the words and phrases we choose to use, and under what circumstances.  While some might bristle at the thought of adapting our language to accommodate the latest trends and thinking, I see it differently.  For the change isn’t with our trends or thinking, but with a greater awareness of inequities that have always existed.  

Our goal isn’t to jump onto the next passing fad of buzz words or acceptable terminology, but rather to raise an awareness of language and how it can potentially perpetuate stereotypes or marginalize members of our community.  The idea is that we work harder to avoid the “but I didn’t know” category of mistakes.  And better yet, to help our students figure them out as well.  

Here is a case in point.  Not too long ago, some type of meme was circulating through social media that inspired some of our students to call one another “boy.”  Imitating the video, they would often say it as a jeer, which might seem relatively harmless.  However, the moniker of “boy” has a rather disturbing past.  It was a derogatory term used by the white community in interactions with Black men throughout the days of slavery and Jim Crow to establish their subordination within a given social exchange.  Many of our students have no idea of this history, and it is important that we help them to see how they need to be careful of the things they pull from pop culture and the things they see around them.  

There are many other examples, far too many to cover here, but I will offer a few that can be hurtful to people within our community.  If you do use some of these, but have never considered them to be hurtful, you might look them up and learn a little more about their origins and what they connote for some people.  

The G-Word.  You might hear someone say g-word (a derivative of the word gypsy) when they mean, “swindled” or “tricked”, but doing so ignores the ethnic culture of the Romany people and how they have often been targeted  and persecuted by the dominant culture throughout history.  

Cotton Pickin.  This phrase has been associated to a racial slur for African Americans who were referred to as “cotton pickers.”  

Monkey.  I had an incident not too long ago where a white student kept making references to a classmate (who was a student of color) as a monkey.  The white student claimed that he meant nothing by it, and once I explained a little of the racialized history behind the reference, he still did not want to acknowledge the impact of his choice.  

Again, we don’t need “language” police to tell us what words to use and not to use.  It’s more about becoming aware of what other people might be hearing when you use certain words and phrases. It can be a bit overwhelming.  I sometimes wonder, “Well, how can I possibly know or learn about every potential instance of words and phrases that might be hurtful.”  The answer is that I simply cannot know it all.  This does not mean that I should simply ignore the instances where it is brought to my attention, claiming that “people just need to be less sensitive.”  It means that I am ever vigilant, ever willing to own what I do not know and to change the word choice and promise to do better. 

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AVReading Newsletter December: Spelling, Reading, and Dyslexia

         Last week, one of my colleagues asked me if poor spelling meant that a student was dyslexic.  It’s a great question, and in light of our focus on dyslexia last month, I thought I would spend this month’s newsletter unpacking that question. 

The simple answer is “no”.  Poor spellers are not always dyslexic.  To understand this, let’s begin with a quick review.  Reading text involves the decoding process, while writing text involves encoding.  We will see a little later how the two coding processes do correlate and have strong relationships, but they do operate independently, and it is good to remember that the one is more than just the reverse engineering of the other. 

It is entirely possible to be a strong reader but a terrible speller.  In fact, there is a related disability more specific to orthography (spelling) known as dysgraphia.  While trouble spelling is certainly an indicator of dyslexia, poor spelling could also be connected to other causes like poor motor control, bad handwriting, ADHD, or even Selective Language Impairments.

With all of that said, poor spelling can be a helpful clue for reading specialists in diagnosing dyslexia.  If the other causes of dysgraphia can be accounted for-- in other words, if we can eliminate some of those other factors as a cause of the spelling mistakes-- then it is likely the result of a reading disorder.  

Again, to be sure that we are all using the same understanding of dyslexia, let’s review the most telling indicators: a lack of phonemic awareness (being able to recognize the different sounds that a word has in it), disfluent and error prone oral reading, reduced processing speed, limited knowledge of  orthography / spelling, deficits in working memory, and limits on vocabulary size. 

At the high school level, reading disorders can be even trickier to diagnose because there are many more factors that could be at play.  For example, it could be a matter of neuro-divergence, where the brain simply doesn’t fire the same way for some people.  In those cases, the neuro pathways fundamental to reading need to be explicitly taught to readers.  For others, trauma and / or interrupted schooling could be the cause.  In other words, their brains fire in more conventional ways, but they just didn’t get that explicit instruction necessary to decode text. Finally, some just didn’t have adequate access to quality instruction. 

An important part of the equation at the high school level is getting the necessary buy-in from the reader.  After years of little (or very slow) growth, older students begin to internalize the beliefs that they simply cannot do it or that reading isn’t worth the effort.  By employing a number of adaptive approaches, readers who struggle find other ways to either access the information or avoid the work all together.  

So what does this mean for our classrooms and how can we help our students access the help they need?

Writing:  Track student writing, especially on occasions when they do it by hand.  Do you notice substantial mistakes in their spelling. More than just your common misspellings, misspelled words by students with dysgraphia and / or dyslexia will be virtually unrecognizable.  Again, poor spelling alone is not a guarantee that the student has a reading problem, but it is a good superficial indicator. 

Read Aloud:  If you worry about whether a student’s reading difficulties might be severe, find an opportunity to have them privately read a paragraph aloud to you. Ideally, it should be something from one of your assigned texts. This gives you a more authentic indicator of their capabilities within your content area.  A young person with substantial reading problems will be noticeable.  They will read very slowly or their reading with be really disfluent, and they will either skip over difficult words or struggle to decode them. 

Dialogue:  Ask the student how the readings have been going.  Ask them if they have been doing the readings, or if they find them difficult or hard to understand.  You might tell them some of your observations and how you wonder if they might benefit from a little extra help with the readings.  Depending on the circumstances, you might want to follow-up with the family and / or the student’s counselor to indicate your concerns.  And, of course, contact me.  These are delicate conversations.  Yet, they are also quite necessary.  There are many different resources available to students and families and just letting them know of these options helps them to make informed decisions.

 

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AVReading Newsletter November: Student Read Alounds

 

I must admit that my thinking around having students read aloud for me has evolved over time.  Asking some of these vulnerable students to read aloud can truly be an intimidating experience for them, and so for the longest time, I have been hesitant to have them do so.  I also know that for older students, gathering data from their read alouds can be misleading.  In other words, in some cases their oral reading skills are substantially lower their silent reading skills.  

However, my recent studies of reading intervention and assessments has changed my thinking.  As I have begun to learn more about reading difficulties, I realized that to truly get a “read” on what the problem might be, we really need to hear the student read aloud.  

Let me back up.  Reading research indicates that there are five important pillars of reading instruction that hold up the roof of good reading practices: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Standardized tests can help us get some data, but too often those tests are measuring apathy, and disengagement more than comprehension or reading.  This does not mean that our standardized tests are ineffective.  It just suggests that they can’t tell us everything we need to know.  (As a sidenote, standardized tests offer us all sorts of indicators like engagement and motivation.  But they also indicate attention.  So more and more, I suspect that these standardized tests tell us something about a student’s ability or inability to maintain attention for extended periods of time.)

Student read alouds afford us other critical information. Miscues can tell us that a student might be struggling with decoding, and that they might need either a phonics brush up or a more intensive phonics intervention.  But miscues can also indicate other problems, like an inability to attack multisyllabic words, or even a lack of vocabulary.  Additionally, read alouds can give us information about things like automaticity.  In other words, some readers are doing the early pillars well (phonemics, phonics), but simply haven’t read enough words over time.  They can decode, but they aren’t at the place where they recognize words by sight. They aren’t automatic with their decoding.  

Finally, read alouds help us to determine their fluency and expression. Fluency helps us to figure out how smoothly they can read, while expression (or the appropriate use of pausing and inflection) give us a good feeling for a student’s understanding of a text. 

All of this is to say that having students read for you (especially privately) can give you lots of information.  In fact, having them read for you can often be an eye opening experience because you realize that your original expectations were either way too high or (just as often) too low.  

Here are some ways you can set up read alouds with students. 

Work Time Visits:  If you are giving the class 20 minutes to work on or read a given assignment, pull two or three students aside (one at a time) to have them read to you for a moment.  I usually set it up like this.  “Jayden, I’m going to have you do a little reading for me.  Tell me, what have you read so far from this passage? Or what do you know about what will be in this passage?”  Then, I say, “Okay, thanks.  Show me where you were in this reading. . . Good!  Now I want you to read the next paragraph (or two depending on size) for me.” When they are done, I will ask them one question, just to see if they had a general idea of what they read.  

Taking Notes:  As they leave the interview, I take a few, simple notes.  They don’t have to be real detailed (e.g.- Jayden reads slowly or I noticed that Jayden doesn’t fix mistakes as he goes, or Jayden reads very fast without expression).  

Applying the Data:  Once you have listened to some of your students, it is good to take a moment to develop a plan.  You might adjust some of the readings (e.g. shorten or reduce) for the student who is reading really slowly.  You might offer more scaffolds (graphic organizers or reading guides) that can help student focus in on the most important details of a text.  Do more to frontload readings.  Or even choose to read parts of the text aloud to students so that it is accessible.  You could also contact me for further evaluation.  

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AVReading Newsletter October: Growing Our Understanding of Dyslexia

 

As mentioned in the September newsletter, we will focus our attention this year on some of the earlier pillars of reading instruction to help understand the current interventions being employed within our curriculum and to potentially play with some of their elements in our own classrooms. 

To establish some common language, I am going to begin by defining three important terms of reading: dyslexia, phonemic awareness, and phonics.  

The first, dyslexia, is an often used, and largely misused term.  Depending on who you ask, you are likely to get a different answer.  In a general sense, people use it to indicate someone struggling with reading.  Perhaps they have observed that the reader or writer transposes letters backwards or flips the order of the letters as they decode.  Perhaps the reader struggles with multisyllabic or unique words.  Or perhaps they read very slowly and deliberately.  While all of these are characteristics of dyslexia, many times people confuse one or two of these symptoms as concrete evidence of a formal diagnosis, when the severity and frequency of these symptoms probably do not rise to the level of that label.  Technically speaking, dyslexia can only be diagnosed by a trained licensed psychologist or neurologist.  Its most telling indicators include a lack of phonemic awareness (being able to recognize the different sounds that a word has in it), disfluent and error prone oral reading, reduced processing speed, limited knowledge of  orthography / spelling, deficits in working memory, and limits on vocabulary size.   Using the word dyslexia casually can-- like any false positive-- create a number of problems.  Not only would a misdiagnosis lead to unnecessary or even harmful remediations, but it can have a detrimental impact on a reader's sense of efficacy.  Depending on which definition you accept, researchers put dyslexia rates from a small proportion of the population to as many as 15 to 20 percent.  Generally speaking, I am less concerned with the specific label as I am diagnosing where the breakdown is occurring: phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, or comprehension.  

This brings us to the term of phonemic awareness.  By and large, as readers, we have not given much thought to the actual sounds that comprise a given word.  Once we mastered the concept as young children, it became almost involuntary.  Phonemic awareness is the first step in the reading journey.  We came to some sort of understanding that words like “cat” have three different sounds in them /c/ /a/ /t/.  There is no print text involved in learning phonemic awareness.  It comes even before we start playing with the alphabet.  

Once people master the principles of phonemic awareness, they begin to learn the alphabet and eventually begin to explore the combinations of letters to create sounds and ultimately words.  Phonics is the study of how these printed letters operate under a system of rules and patterns that we use to decode for meaning.  We learn things like the letters c-a-t indicate three sounds /c/ /a/ /t/ which can be blended together to make the word “cat”. It is learning that words that end with a vowel, consonant, and “e” indicate that the vowel will have a long vowel sound to it and the “e” is silent, along with many other patterns and rules of letters and sounds that enable us to quickly piece together the code of reading.  

For the vast majority of our high school students, they have mastered both phonemic awareness and phonics instruction.  A very small number of students, either because of a neurological condition, a profound trauma, or a significant disruption to their schooling, will need help with phonemic awareness, but the vast majority of our reading impaired students at the high school level struggle with fluency (the ability to read smoothly in phrases), vocabulary (the knowledge of words), and comprehension (the ability to employ strategies to make meaning of sentences, paragraphs, and chunks of text). 

Here are some things you can do to play with rules of phonics in your classrooms:

Word Patterns: Maximize the impact of vocabulary work in your class by choosing to center words that have patterns.  To avoid an elementary feel, I choose words that belong to the pattern but that students might not know.  For example, “irate” might be the focal word. I revisit the pattern -VCE (vowel, consonant, silent e), and then have them repeat and guess words like migrate, elaborate, elucidate, emancipate, reprobate.  

Prefix Patterns: While a number of prefixes are more commonly known (eg pre-, in-, un-), there are a few others that are worth introducing or reviewing:  con- (“with”), sub- (“underneath”, “lower”) , af- (“to”, “towards”).

Suffix Patterns: Unlike prefixes, I like to put up a number of words with the same suffix to simply get students to determine the word type (eg - noun, adjective, verb etc).  For example, I’ll put up five words with the suffix -al (equal, jovial, dismal, brutal, formal), and ask students if they can determine what part of speech they all belong to. 

 

 

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AVReading Newsletter September-- READ ACT AV Edition

 

Welcome back to those of you returning! Welcome to those of you who are new.  I am the school’s reading coordinator, and as part of my work here, I publish a monthly newsletter to highlight important literacy and reading topics and practices.  I also administer reading assessments to students when teachers suspect that there might be a reading problem involved.  Additionally, I work with teachers in both full staff sessions and one-on-one appointments to design literacy rich curriculum, develop better assessments, promote reading strategies, and finally to foster environments of engagement.  I also am available to visit classrooms to teach comprehension strategies and open up my own classroom for observations if you are interested in seeing a particular strategy employed in real life.  Please feel free to come to me with questions or concerns you have related to literacy, reading, and / or engagement.  I am here to help!

Each year, I identify a theme or topic as an area of focus for the monthly newsletters.  Last year, the central focus was on building community within the classroom.  This year, I am hoping to take on a few important topics.  For starters, I would like to update everyone on the pending changes to our reading intervention that are the result of the newly passed READ Act.  While this will not mean a significant alteration to most of your classrooms, it will be good to have an understanding of what these changes are and how you might be able to add or  modify a few of your own practices to compliment what is being taught in the intervention courses.  

The READ Act was signed into law in the spring of 2023, and it states that the goal of the legislation is to have every student at every grade (K-12) to be at or above grade level in reading.  It specifically states that districts and schools must now exclusively use evidence-based reading instruction, which is code for moving away from balanced and whole language programs that have been traditionally used as part of reading instruction.  The READ Act mandates a screening / assessment procedure for every student up until third grade, and for all students not at grade level after that using specific tools that have been approved by the state.  The READ Act also mandates that all reading teachers and specialists will need to participate in Minnesota  Department of Education approved professional development that centers reading instruction on six pillars of reading:  phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension, and cultural and linguistic diversity.  

At the high school level, this will have an impact on reading interventions, special education, and EL curriculum and classes.  But it will not likely impact content area classes in significant ways-- especially here at AVHS where we already have systems in place to help on-level and co-taught teachers implement literacy and comprehension strategies.  

Still, you will see a shift in some of the reading strategies that I will promote moving ahead.  Previously, much of our emphasis at the high school level has been on the last two pillars:  comprehension and cultural and linguistic diversity.  However, as our data indicates, we have greater need now to address some of the earlier pillars like phonics, vocabulary and fluency.   

So for this year especially, we will focus our attention on some of this terminology and ways we might be able to complement the instruction across the school day.  As the year continues, I will grow the area of focus to include some of the cultural and racial elements that come to play out in our classrooms.  It will be a year where we focus on both reading the word and the world!  Each month, I like to include three, tangible practices that teachers can bring back to their classrooms.  For this month, I’ll offer a few exercises that serve as “word play” and can compliment phonics instruction happening elsewhere. 

Word Chunks: Our content areas introduce lots of interesting and complex words to our students.  They provide an excellent opportunity to play with the phonics of the words without making it feel as though they are children.  Put the focal word on the board and ask students to identify the chunks or syllables.  Say the word and snap or clap on the syllables and have them tally them up.  For example, the word “paradox” has three chunks: /par/ /a/ /dox/. 

Word Parts:  Next, ask them if they recognize any parts or words within the word.  Linguistically, many of our words have a root plus an affix (which can either be a prefix at the beginning or a suffix at the end).  In the case of paradox, they likely will not be able to pick out any word parts, but the word “paradoxical” is easily identifiable as an adjective because it ends in the suffix -al.  

Origins: Words have amazing histories.  A quick glance at etymoline.com will offer you lots of good information.  It’s easy to see the interconnection of words once we see where they came from.  For example, the word paradox comes from the Greek words of para-- “contrary to, beyond, alongside” and doxa-- “opinion”.   It shares a root with other words like paralegal, paramount, paranoid, paranormal, and parable.

See the full newsletter here. 

AVReading Newsletter June 2024-- Honoring the Outlier

 For as much as a sense of community is needed for a rich, transformative educational environment, I am aware that there will always be resisters.  These are students who, despite our best efforts, simply refuse to join the community.  There may be many different reasons for their resistance.  And the truth is, discovering the reason is not always necessary or important.  And despite our own wishes to have everyone included, community does not happen when it is forced upon people.  On a certain level, I understand the nature of a classroom will always include a type of involuntary participation in community and that it will always feel a little contrived, maybe even forced.  Yet there is a distinction between a classroom where conditions are created for students to more willingly join into community, and one where students are coerced into group action.

            For those who resist, careful consideration is needed to engage the students and help them to be successful in whatever ways we can. As we speak, I have two sections of Co-Taught English 9 classes where we have a higher percentage of students on IEPs.  Between the two sections, I have three firm resisters.  These are students who will generally opt out of all large and small group activities.  One will just as likely choose to sit on the floor along the outside wall, as she is to sit in her seat.  One will not return to class after lunch on most days. And one escapes into her phone, refusing to put it away, or when told to do so, will tell us that she will put her phone away but will not do anything beyond that.  

            In my younger days, these instances would generally escalate, if not on a daily basis then slowly over the course of a term when my patience would grow ever thinner with their choices.  

            While I still worry about these students, my approach has definitely changed over time.  The “my-way-or-the-highway” approach will not work.  Resistors will either double down on their original choice, or become ever more resentful of your intrusion.  This is not to say that I am a push over.  Again, my goal is, as Ed Moore suggests, to become a warm demander.  Here are a few thoughts to help navigate resistors.

            Pulling in the Dissenter.  Working with strong willed students requires creativity and time.  For starters, I will often do what I can to establish a relationship with the individual outside of class.  This might mean a visit to their study hall or a walk-n-talk between classes or even a letter or email where we can connect.  I am always surprised by how willingly many of these students will enter into a conversation with me in the hopes that things might improve.  In some cases, I will actually make a point to visit the student once a week.  It sets a precedence where they know I am coming to check in on them, to give them both praise and correction.  

            Take What They Can Give.  This can be a dangerous mindset for me.  Teachers who lower their expectations too much run the risk of never challenging students at all.  This is where I have to work especially hard with other people in the students’ lives who can better gauge what is an acceptable expectation versus one that might be too easy or too difficult.  From case managers to co-teachers to parents and guardians, I am constantly triangulating the data I collect in my personal interactions with information I am getting from these other supportive adults.  

Leave the Door Open.  Part of our jobs as teachers is to have hope even when the student may not.  This can be exceedingly difficult in week ten of the term, when you can see nothing but “zeros” in the gradebook and carry a long list of offenses and insults that have been directly aimed at you.  Leaving the door open requires a considerable amount of fortitude, maybe as much fortitude as it takes students who regularly experience trauma to come to school each day.  I am constantly trying to find ways to let individuals know that they are still a part of our community, even if they spend a lot of energy trying to resist it.  It is a gentle “hello” as they enter the room.  Or it might be a little post it note that I drop off.  It could be a nod of the head.  It’s a willingness to both be firm, and to give them space, but to always let them know that they have a place in your class. 

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AVReading Newsletter May 2024-- The Circle

 

          AVHS was built around the idea of a circle.  It began as a quirky, architectural choice in the building’s original design with these massive circular windows that span the height of both floors and look out from the building’s front facade.  In the last wave of remodeling, the circular theme has become infused throughout the building.  Our marquee at the front incorporates the circle, our expansive commons area uses the design in the carpet, massive circles hang from the ceiling, and the newly painted walls are decorated with them.  Even the exterior walls of our theatre follow the curve of a circle, defying the usual square corners of large rooms and buildings.

            It is a different feel from the traditional spaces of schools, where we have become accustomed to hard angles, straight lines, and clean, tidy box-like classrooms.  The choice was intentional.  A circle has a different power and connotation than a line or a set of rows.  Energy flows differently, and there is a stronger sense of connection and community when we enter into circles.  

            It was not until I entered my PhD program-- where class sizes were much smaller-- that I experienced the power of the circle on a regular basis within the classroom.  Many of my courses were set up so that we sat in a circle, shoulder to shoulder.  We came together, joined in the common pursuit of knowledge, sharing and debating our thoughts and beliefs around an invisible axis.  It is much harder to hide in a circle, to duck down and rest your eyes for a little, to check your phone or participate in side conversations without notice.  In that sense, circles are much more transparent.  Throughout so much of my schooling, students would prefer rows and move to the seats at the back of the room, some place where you might have a little more freedom to do what you please, to tune out and move more independently. Circles bring different energy and a different sense of community.

At the secondary level, this is not always feasible.  Packing 30-35 students in a room does not allow many options for rearranging the furniture, or forming circles.  And while it might not be practical to come together in circles everyday, I do make an effort to circle everyone up at least three or four times a trimester.  

Here are a few classroom, circular ideas.

Snap Around.  The Snap Around is a great, low risk class activity, even when you have large numbers.  I use them sometimes for class openings and sometimes for closings.  As an opener, they simply serve as a team builder or ice breaker.  I will bring them to the circle, give them a prompt and have them “snap around” the circle with their responses as quickly as they can.  It might be as light hearted as, “Name your favorite part of fall” or something a little more topical like, “What is the hardest part of reading?”  I also like to do Snap Arounds as a type of formative assessment at the end of the hour.  “Give the title of your book and state the general setting of the story.” This is data!  I learn a lot.  Is the student willing to come to the circle?  Has the student been reading?  Does the student know what “setting” is?  

Name Olympics.  I got this activity from an online resource.  It is perfect for Day One.  And again, it is a low risk but high value ice breaker.  For this, students just need to know their own name!  Form a circle with you in the middle of it.  Tell them that the goal is to say their names one by one moving , clockwise around the circle, as quickly as they can. Time them.  Challenge them to do better on the second, or if you think they can do better, third time.  Then do it again moving counter clockwise.  Then challenge them to do it as fast as they can skipping every third person.  Then have a contest where you start two lines at once-- one moving counter clockwise, one moving clockwise-- and see which line comes back around to start first.  Again, it is fun.  Folks can not  help but hear the names of their peers multiple times, and hopefully there is some laughter. 

Ball Activity.  For this, you need one of those cheap plastic balls (perhaps even a beach ball would do).  On the ball, you will write about 10 different questions related to the day.  Students stand in a circle and toss the ball to someone.  When they catch the ball, they must answer the nearest question they see on the ball.  If need be, I might have two balls and two circles for this as well. 

 

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