AVReading

  I’ve really struggled this fall.  There have been so many behaviors and experiences that I simply have not seen to this magnitude in the past.  Practices and approaches that have been my tried-and-true choices, simply didn’t seem to work, and I found myself becoming easily frustrated with students and situations that would not have normally phased me.               I have come to realize a few things in the last month or so of the trimester.  First, I let the outliers dictate my general perception of things.  For example, the two or three extreme resistors in each of my classes left me with the general sense that everyone was doing poorly, when in fact, that was not the case.  In fact, I discovered that based on the data my students did extremely well this trimester.  So while I felt like things were going terribly, the data suggests that generally speaking, people w...

  About a few years into my teaching career, I was given the opportunity to move into the honors and accelerated English classes.  It was an awesome experience, and I learned quite a bit about good and bad teaching through my experience with those very motivated and ambitious students.  After a number of years however, I knew it was time for a change, and I transitioned into the role of a reading specialist and began to work with students who really struggled both with reading and with school.  It was a dramatic shift.  In my honors classes, students would want to argue over a point they missed on their essays, papers, and tests.  In my reading intervention classes, students weren’t interested about how or why they lost a point here or there, they were more interested in why they had to do the assignment or activity in the first place.  I learned real quickly that before I could do anything to help them develop their academic literaci...

  We have done a lot of work the last two years with “healing circles”.  And I can’t recall whether our facilitators have pointed this out, but our school is actually  built around the concept of the 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 remodelling, 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 tradi...

  In their book Inspiring Reading Success (2008), Fink and Samuels state that within the field of reading and literacy, a tremendous amount of energy has been dedicated to the how of reading.  In other words, we focus on the mechanics of reading-- word strategies, fluency, expression – but we often   do this at the expense of the why .             In fact, motivation has proven to be a tremendously important indicator of how well a student does in school (Hulme 2015) .  For one reason, motivation and self regulation seem to be closely related.  Students who are willing to make an investment in their academic activities exert more energy to monitor and correct their own learning plans.  Additionally, they are able to sustain setbacks and difficulties without becoming defeated and disengaged.  According to Alderman (2008) the positive effects of motivation have been documented in...

  As we come to an end of our anti-racism sessions for this year, I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge a little both the process and the lessons we have learned along the way. In case you are confused, open space technology is the name for the process we employed this year for our anti-racism groupings. It basically consists of a creating a structure where a community designs its own learning groups and its own learning plan, but then periodically comes back together as a large group to share knowledge and understandings.  (The name “open space technology” is actually really misleading since it really has nothing to do with technology in its conventional sense.)               We will be collecting more formal data a little later, but in general we have found that people have appreciated the process.  Some have liked the flexibility of the system, allowing people to choose the topics o...

  Robert Burns captured the essence of lesson planning in his line, “Best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men” often go awry.  It is perhaps a little discouraging to think that we spend all of our time planning out these carefully detailed lessons, only to have an unscheduled fire drill at the start of the period, or to lose the computer lab or library space we were hoping to use, or to simply misjudge a 45 minute activity as something we could have done in 10.  Technology, for all its power and glory, usually is the culprit.  Some of my most grandiose plans have been built on some wonderful device or program or website, and in my moment of greatest vulnerability they have let me down.  I remember planning one fun activity with a website where students were asked to video record a short thirty second response to a poem I had posted.  The video recordings would surround the poem on the screen, and students could then view the responses of their ...

  When I set out to do a study in 2009, I was convinced that the affordances of digital texts was going to level the playing field in our schools.  My theory was that much of our inequity in education had to do with access.  Students who could readily access the textbooks and information of schools would succeed, while those who did not would struggle.  Therefore, we just needed to make these texts more accessible to more students and all students would have the means to do well.              I now realize that my thinking was, at best, a little incomplete.  The beauty of completing the study was that I began to realize the complexity of the situation.  Not only did I come to the conclusion that our educational problems reached much farther than access to text, but that even the wonderful affordances of digital texts were not really all that wonderful for a striving reader....

            In the closing weeks of winter trimester, my intervention class turns its attention to the future.  Students are in the process of generating a list of inquiry topics or questions and ultimately they will vote on the one they want to pursue at the start of the spring term.  In the fall, they voted on the topic of civil disobedience, and in winter, it was paranormal activity.  This system is not a guarantee of their engagement and investment, but it certainly improves the likelihood of getting them involved.  For this month’s newsletter, I’d like to devote a little time to this concept of engagement, and the ways that we might foster environments of curiosity and wonder to fuel the engine of learning.              Now I will admit that stirring up some level of energy and enthusiasm in today’s atmosphere is especially difficult.  And whil...

  Teaching remotely has really made me think long and hard about whether assigning books is still valuable.  Considering the many logistical obstacles required to get the book (digitally purchased or hard copy), I have to be really committed to it.  So, for this month’s newsletter, I would like to highlight some of the most important reasons for assigning books to our students.              For starters, it is perhaps good to explain that “assigning books” means something a little different today.  On occasion, we still choose one common text that the entire class will read, analyze, and discuss (e.g. Romeo and Juliet , Flight, Raisin in the Sun ).  However, most of the books assigned to students today allow for students to choose a title from a short list-- usually 5-7 books.  Each of these books will come at a given topic or theme from different angles, allowing students to ha...

  Perhaps one of my most frequent reading lessons is teaching students to annotate -- or mark-up-- a text.  No matter the format (book, article, digital text, pdf), I will spend time before the assignment reviewing how they will need to mark-up the text.  It’s a lesson that is quite useful for a number of reasons.  First, it is important to get students into the habit of marking up all of their texts.  The expectations are that the reading is just the first step in a larger lesson.  In other words, the assignment is not the reading itself, it’s the activity or project or assessment that usually follows that reading.  And to complete that activity or project or assessment, they will need to be able to refer back to important details, passages, and ideas from the text.  Marking up that text then is a means to that larger end.  Second, the mark-ups themselves offer a considerable amount of insight into what the student unde...