AVReading

  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...

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....