AVReading

Much to the credit of our administration, the set up of our distance learning model this fall is much more workable than the one from last spring.  Having a more formalized structure to our day with synchronous online classes has made things a little less chaotic this time around.                    With that said, there is still a struggle (at least for me) to manage all of the moving parts of our schedule.  It probably makes sense. Since it took me the better part of 30 years to figure out how to manage things with students in real life, I can’t expect to have everything figured out in this new environment in less than a few months.                     One of the more challenging elements of this new model is how I schedule my day and allocate my time.  I have found...

  In Kylene Beers and Robert Probst’s 2013 book on strategies for close reading entitled Notice and Note, they suggest that our current method of teaching students to read is flawed.  They claim that the problem is we have made reading too much about comprehension, at the expense of many things that make texts more interesting and powerful.  We focus far too often on the “what” of the text, not the “why” and “how.”  They offer the process of noticing and noting.  For this month’s newsletter, I would like to discuss the strategy as one we can apply both to reading and to broader issues of justice.              To start with, “notice and note” is a framework where we teach students to interact more deeply with their texts.  Beers and Probst unfortunately limit their process largely to texts of fiction.  But it really does not take any imagination to apply these strategies to...

  Professor Eddie Glaude of Princeton recently stated in an interview that “America is not unique in its sins. . . we are not unique in our evils.  Where we may be singular is our refusal to acknowledge them.”  In speaking directly about race, he connects the dots between the ignored history of our country and the ever real violence and hatred that continues on today.   The idea is that when we refuse to acknowledge the devastation of the past, the way it was fueled by belief structures, and the way that it has evolved over time, we are less likely to acknowledge that the events of today-- a police shooting, mass incarceration, disparities in education, discriminatory lending practices, voter suppression-- are really just the latest manifestations of racial violence and injustice that have always been a part of our country.  Glaude says that we, as a community, have not been good at seeing the links between the past and the present....

Though my focus for this year’s newsletters have been on classroom strategies, I have decided to end the year by addressing the recent events of our community and how we can be more mindful and intentional in teaching critical literacy with our students.  As Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Friere writes in Pedagogy of the Oppressed , it is not enough just to teach our students to read words, sentences, and books.  We must teach them to read the world.  This month’s newsletter will focus on how we can better commit to doing this within our classrooms.                   To start with, teaching our students to read the world assumes that we, as teachers, are learning alongside them.  It is important that we are acknowledging the ways we have been socialized into racist assumptions and beliefs that have influenced the way we see other people.  We are reading. We are ref...

The factory model of education, which to a large degree still remains prevalent in our classroom practices today, focuses on finding the most efficient means to educate students on a large scale.  It’s about looking for that perfect lesson plan or the perfect classroom set-up that will finally work for all students. We spend a great amount of time and energy constructing those fool proof lessons that reach each of our students.  Too often, however, those plans fall far short of our hopeful goals. And that is why an adaptive lesson or approach, also known as differentiation, can be very effective.               The practice of differentiating our curriculum and lessons is not easy.  It’s time consuming, and potentially counter productive.  So, for this month’s newsletter, let’s examine some ways that differentiation can be used within our classrooms.  Let me begin by defining differentiation a...

Guidelines for Writing a Commencement Address The draft you write for consideration does not need to be a final version, but should give the panelists a clear idea of what you plan to say in your speech. The traditional commencement address has had content which reflects back on the class's experiences and also gives advice or guidance for the future. The tone should be one which inspires and motivates the listeners. Although the Commencement Address is directed at the graduating class, the message needs to be meaningful and appropriate for the adult audience present as well. Content, language, or style which parents or grandparents might find offensive is not suitable for a Commencement Address. Humor can be an effective minor element of a Commencement Address. The predominant message, and consequently the predominant writing style, should be serious, thoughtful and inspirational. Format: This might be helpful. It is an all purpose formula. It is not required. Feel free ...

Although our focus this year has been on instructional strategies, in light of our current E-Learning push, I’ve decided to change focus and offer some helpful strategies for assigning and assessing reading in those spaces.                   We’ve learned a lot recently about how to set-up our E-Learning spaces and the types of expectations, lessons, and assessments that we will need to construct as we move our curriculum over to the digital world.                    For struggling readers, this move can be daunting.  Research shows that the obstacles struggling readers face is more than just limited vocabulary and slow reading rates.  It’s also understanding the organization and flow of visual texts.   This could mean difficulties in “reading” the layout of non-traditional (...

As part of our year long focus on teaching strategies, I am going to focus my attention this month on reading.  Of course, it is not an extensive examination of good reading strategies to use in your class.   However, they are the strategies that I have more recently been using with students in response to data trends and things that I have noticed within classes.  Before getting into the strategies, let me start with some things that reading research has established as good practice.                    First, engagement and motivation matter with reading.  Since we are asking students to do something that is cognitively demanding and rigorous, we have to do what we can to engage them as best we can.  There are numerous ways to do this like giving more choice to readings, having really good pre-reading activities,   and using powerful and interes...

I believe that one of the most significant changes to my teaching through the years is the way that I think about student bodies within my classroom.  It was just never something that was ever discussed in my teacher training courses, and it certainly was not a regular feature of my own middle or high school years.  As a teacher, I conceived of students as these entities that merely showed up in the room, took a seat, participated in some writing, reading, and talking (along with a healthy dose of listening), and then they moved on to another class.               I sometimes forget what that must be like.  And then we will have one of those rare professional development days where we are asked to sit for long stretches of time, and suddenly I can get a feeling for what it must be like to move from class-to-class only to spend 48 minutes of seat time at each station. Of course, moveme...