AVReading

            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 dys...

  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,...

  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 ...

  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 the...

  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 ...

            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 clas...

  Creating community in class is important.  Reaching out to families on a regular basis is perhaps just as important to that sense of community.  Considering our class sizes, this is not an easy or simple task.  Still, the advancement of communication systems has allowed us to more easily reach families.  It might mean a quick email to a parent or guardian or a mass message sent through the school’s course management system.  Letters home through snail mail, conferences, and parent / student orientation nights are also excellent ways to make connections with families.  With this said, it is still a struggle.  In theory, communicating with families makes a lot of sense.  In practice, it is not easy to do.  Our school days are so hectic and compressed that in some cases we simply forget to make the call home to touch base.  Or perhaps we are so busy putting out immediate fires that we just never really have a ch...

  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 a general map of graduation speeches.  It is not required. Feel ...

  As teachers, one of our favorite “go-to” activities for a fun day in class is playing games.  These can be a lot of fun.  I am always a little taken aback how a usually reserved or quiet class can be whipped up into a frenzy when the element of competition is introduced.  It is fun to see these people engaged and even passionate about winning the prize, even when that prize might be something insignificant, like a Jolly Rancher.   These games are great for review days, where actual test items can be converted into “trivia questions” that students try to answer for individual or team points.  It is an attractive choice for teachers, in part, because there are so many online resources and tools that make “gaming a lesson” quite easy—Kahoot and Gimkit to name a few.  These games are fun and dynamic and a good choice every once in a while. However, they can also create a tension within a community, especially if those games are...

  A good deal of teaching is about balancing.  We try to create a balance between a classroom that has too many rules and expectations and a classroom without enough of them.  We try to balance a classroom between having too much fun and not enough learning and too much content without much fun.  We try to balance between presenting ourselves as strong and confident figures who have everything perfectly planned and presenting ourselves as open and vulnerable beings willing to take risks.  It’s a lot easier to stick with the former.  If you are like me, you love control.  You cherish a lesson where you know exactly what is going to happen, where things move along exactly as you had orchestrated them, and where everybody does exactly what they had been instructed to do.               With that said, I must admit that some of my most transformative educational moments hav...