Thompson Read 180

QUESTION:

Do You Know What All the Following Questions Have In Common?

• Do You Want to Know A Secret?

• Do You Know Where Your Mortgage Is?

• What Makes A School Great?

• Who Needs Marriage?

• Privacy:  How Safe Is Your Driveway?

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ANSWER: They all come from recent TIME Magazine Covers

QUESTION: Why do TIME –and other magazines– mostly frame their teasers as questions on their covers?

ANSWER: Ah, you know the answer to this one...because when you don’t, you want to find out. So you buy the Time issue.  Or sneak a peek.

So what’s this have to do with Read 180?  (I’m doing it again…)

In Mike Schmoker’s newest book, FOCUS:  Elevating the Essentials To Radically Improve Student Learning, he strongly reiterates in the chapter, “What We Teach,” how important it is for all students to acquire authentic literacy skills.  He includes this quote:

Think of literacy as a spine; it holds everything together.  The branches of learning connect to it, meaning that all core content teachers have a responsibility to teach literacy. ~Vicki Phillips and Carina Wong, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

Schmoker goes on to acknowledge and applaud the “convergence of thought” that resulted in embedding literacy teaching and learning into multiple contents, creating a “common academic core” of standards.  He quotes Vince Ferrandino and Gerald Tirozzi, the former and current presidents, respectively, of the National Association of Elementary School Principals and the National Association of Secondary School Principals, noting he cites them in every presentation he delivers:

Under-developed literacy skills are the number one reason why students are retained, assigned to special education, given long-term remedial services and why they fail to graduate from high school.  (2004, p. 29)

Read 180 teachers are in the trenches with these students.  They work with R180 materials, a specific instructional model, and small groups of students in a 90-minute daily model (mostly).  They work with students who because of their “under-developed literacy skills” are not successful in other academic classes, and have fallen short on standardized testing.  And they’ve learned a lot in recent years about how to work with them: collect and provide engaging short text, hook them with pictures and videos as well as to build their background knowledge, match their lexile level with a variety of books while offering opportunities for choice to build their confidence and reading level, provide them with immediate feedback and involve them in data discussions, use the Gradual Release of Responsibility model to move them toward increasing independence as readers and learners… and the list keeps growing.

What you don’t see in that list is the specific use of textbooks.  In fact, many tools and strategies strive to supplement or sidestep by providing “alternative text genres” to help students acquire information contained in content area textbooks.  Witness the popularity of “pairing” nonfiction and fiction books focused on an informational topic.  I’ve seen them ranging from tree frogs to the Vietnam War.  This is not a bad practice, not at all.  These types of texts can be very engaging for struggling readers.  The point is that using actual textbooks as an information resource has fallen into some disrepute among educators.  So I was taken by surprise when Schmoker wrote in his book, “Though it may sound hopelessly unfashionable, textbooks…are a greatly underestimated resource for learning essential content and acquiring literacy skills.”

Acquiring literacy skills?  Seriously?  Schmoker goes on:

In “Reading for Learning:  Literacy Supports for 21st Century Learning” (2007), Louis and Kimberly Gomez write that the new century will routinely require students to “critically analyze and synthesize information” gleaned from the kind of dense, complex prose found in textbooks.  They are so important that our current failure to make them a prominent part of schooling may be the primary reason for “poor student performance in the content areas” (p. 225).  Gomez and Gomez recommend that “broad-based efforts to make text more prominent should be redoubled” (p. 228).

Schmoker cites Kathleen Cushman’s contention in an Educational Leadership article from 2007 (p.47), in which she describes the “culture shock” most students are in for when they arrive at college.  Having rarely read and never been taught to read textbooks, they lack the “deeper reading, writing and inquiry that college requires.”  This is one of the main reasons they drop out in such large numbers.

In our new set of District Standards, the use of textbooks is firmly embedded in Standard 2, and seem to be recognized as one, though not the only,  information resource students should learn to master.  And, the Standards are intended to encompass and prepare ALL students for their postsecondary life:  college, workforce and/or technical training.   So the question for our Read 180 instruction is, are we teaching students how to use textbooks that may be a stumbling block for them in other academic classes?  Math?  History?  Science?  Perhaps some are.  The rBook Workshops do focus on building background knowledge and academic language for these students; but it follows they also need practice applying these skills outside the R180 workshops to the kinds of academic reading expectations in other content areas.  The new Social Studies standards also speak specifically to the use of primary and secondary sources, which also are often characterized by “dense, complex prose.”

I think it is essential we mount an investigation to determine exactly what textbooks, primary and secondary source materials, and reading our R180 students are being asked to access in their other classes.   Though every teacher is now expected, in the newly-minted Standards, to help their students access the type of literacy their respective content areas require, it would be enormously useful for us as R180 teachers, and for our students, to reinforce and support this work within our R180 classes.  Bring in the textbooks and add them to the arsenal we need to develop our students’ literacy skills.  Determine what sort of support your students might need with them.  Then consider Schmoker’s next question:

But how should students approach textbooks–or the literature, poems, or op-ed pieces we should be providing for them in abundance?  With questions. Nothing could be simpler.

When talking about the importance of questions to drive learning, a presenter once asked me what I would do with a telephone book if it were simply handed to me. Uh…nothing. Only when I know what I’m looking up does this book make sense.  I have to have a specific purpose for reading it–a specific question to answer.  “What’s the Rio’s phone number?” Think of textbooks like this.  How can we make one make sense?  Pose a question.  An interesting question, notes Schmoker:

“Much of a good education consists, as it always has, of a simple combination of one or more good texts matched with an interesting question.  We simply teach students to read deeply and purposefully to answer such questions–and to then discuss and write (even briefly) about the text and what they learned from it.  This is the essence of both learning and literacy.”

Inquiry is a part of our new Standards; yet it is not new.  But what caught my attention in Schmoker’s book was his reminder of the power of this practice–and the power is in its simplicity.  Content area teachers in Thompson are working to create essential questions for their units of study, and have been using them to drive student learning for some time.  Socratic Seminars integrate questioning and text effectively in a specific model which results in developing critical thinking skills, and, it has been found, increases reading comprehension–sometimes dramatically.  The Socratic model can be introduced as early as Kindergarten, used at all levels in all subjects, including reading intervention classes such as Read 180. Think whole-group, small-group, wrap-up time–maybe once a week, like a Wednesday routine, with a focus on the “dense, complex prose” of an article, op-ed piece,  or a textbook excerpt from a class a group of students have in common.

That’s just one “what-if,” but for much more on textbooks, reference what Jim Burke, author/researcher/teacher, says in his book,  Illuminating Texts:  How to Teach Students to Read the World  (2001). He devotes a large section to how teachers can help student better use these books in the classroom by clearly breaking down what he defines as “the Challenges of Textbooks” in this list:

• What the books consist of (e.g., elements, features, devices)

• How the books can be used as learning tools

• How the books are designed

• How students need to be able to read to use them well and make sense of their content

Burke springboards off the last bullet to make the following point about many modern textbooks:

Textbooks resemble one twelve hundred-page-long hit list of documents and details about,  for example, American history.  It’s as if each chapter or subheading were a hotlink in an online search in which the search engine was asked to find everything it could about American History. (parodied by the Bing ads on TV!) It then becomes the teacher’s job to help students learn to sift through the mountains of information from various sources to assess what is not there as well as the quality of what is there, and to determine how the information and material relates to their purpose.

Burke’s last sentence is where the power of the “essential question” comes in:  it establishes purpose for reading. Not a new concept for reading teachers, but we ought to self-check in Read 180 classrooms as to whether we are making this essential tool primary and consistent–as in daily–in our classrooms.  Posing essential question(s), thus setting a purpose, should be connected to text we use, including teaching our kids how to tackle their textbooks, all learning activities, and assessment of and for reading–every single day.  Verbally and visibly–post it, display it, verbalize it, remind them of it, then help them connect it.

Questions + Text = Formula for Success.

Seriously.

It does not have to be this hard.  If we do our jobs right from the time boys are young, teaching reading and writing in ways that engage boys, it does not have to be a competition, and parents will not have to wring their hands wondering what went wrong, or feel their hearts break watching their sons fall short of dreams they are perfectly capable of achieving.       ~ Michelle Rhee, Former Chancellor, DC Public Schools

In a recent post, (Where the Boys Are) I recounted growing acknowledgment in our country of an alarming and widening gender gap in literacy which is recognized as a global issue.  Many theories abound as to why, and some have found their way into acceptance by educators, then taken the short but permanent hop into assumptions.  Richard Whitmire outlines these theories in a chapter titled “The Blame Game” in his book, Why Boys Fail (2010):

• “My Boy is Forever Lost to Video Games!”

• “It’s A Lack of Male Teachers”

• “It’s (Only) Minority Boys”

• “It’s A Medical Problem (ADD, ADHD, Autism)”

• “It’s That Homework Helps Girls, Hurts Boys”

• “It’s That Feminized Classrooms Turn Off Boys”

•”It’s That Too Much Testing Hurts Boys”

• “It’s The Toxic Culture”

• “It’s The Boy Code Morphing Into The Guy Code”

Whitmire rejects all these theories as primary causes for “why boys fail.” So does Nancie Atwell, quoted in the previous post, who concluded the same thing as Whitmire: if a teacher, or a school, or a district builds a culture that allows NO student to slip through the cracks, boys and girls, then boys will be carried along with the wave, and gender gaps evaporate. Both do acknowledge that all the above-listed observations have some truth to them, but they believe they are symptomatic, not causal, all linked by fundamental literacy problems.

So how do we teach reading and writing in ways that engage boys? With Whitmire’s findings in mind, and Atwell’s admonition to not distill boy readers from a solid formula for engaging ALL readers,  I think it’s a good time to revisit what we have learned about our own Read 180 Guiding Question in Thompson for this year:  How do we create readers? Some percolating principles:

1. Provide R180 students a literacy-rich classroom–having and displaying many genres, titles, and choices convey the implicit message that books and magazines are valued and essential in this classroom

2.  Know your students–their interests, their strengths, their passions, their vulnerabilities; this not only connects them to you and thereby your mission for them, but drives your search to find books they will read

3. Bestow the power of choice–guide students, make suggestions, and above all, provide a wide variety of print materials from which they can choose; support their choices, let them abandon books, knock yourself out to find others that capture their interest, make your quest be to put that one “book that hooks” in their hands to set them on a path to finding joy in reading

4. Make time for students to read independently in class every day a valued, protected component of the class structure and culture–Read 180 design provides 20 minutes.  If you have more than a 90-minute block, consider giving the extra minutes over to the independent reading zone.

5. Readers are not made on the computer–targeted and differentiated practice in fluency, phonics, vocabulary, and spelling all work to make the act of reading accessible and fill in decoding gaps–but it is not the endgame, and students deserve to understand this.

6. Reading broadly, widely, and consistently leads to reading deeply and significantly improves reading prowess over time more than any other instructional reading practice. Most important,  a heavy dose of independent reading grows the potential to make wanting to read a “habit of mind.”  Nancie Atwell refers to creating “skilled, passionate, habitual, critical” readers.

7. Make time to think, talk, and write about books and reading. This enhances, boosts, supports, provides scaffolding and substance for response–teacher to student, student to student, within small group, within large group.  Such structures grow thinking, build background knowledge, and give students the time, place, and freedom to try out ideas.  (Remember the Socratic Seminar model?)

Other principles will emerge, but these seem to be formulating an essential core by which to evaluate our instructional practice in R180. A cautionary note must accompany our list: one unfortunate corollary to good reading intervention intentions concerns time.

In some schools, R180 students have a 90-minute block–this is good. Then they also have 90 minutes for their grade-level Language Arts and Reading class (Literacy, English, etc.).  This sounds good–more time spent in literacy, logically should equal increased achievement.  But the data is spotty, at best, on this fix-it strategy. We can find schools and districts around the country where it’s worked, and many where it has not.  Researchers are split.  A cursory look at our own district data is inconclusive–at best.  Why is this?  I believe one thing we have to remember is that students are placed in Read 180 in the first place because they are not experiencing success in the “regular ed” or grade-level L.Arts classes.  So when in some schools, in addition to R180 they are re-seated in a literacy class–where they may not ever have experienced success–it’s incumbent on everyone to consider carefully this formula.  Very specific questions should be considered.

1.  Is the student missing out on electives such as art, music, PE? If a middle-schooler is deprived of one or all his elective opportunities, this might work against any increased success in the content areas.  Research abounds as to the positive effects on the brain and learning these activities have.  If the student is a 6th-grader, he has recently come from a day of 3 recesses, art, music, PE, computers, and maybe foreign language–a rich tapestry essential to, at the very least, liking school.

2.  Is he missing Science or Social Studies? This is the question:  would the instruction in either or both these classes support, enhance, or hinder a student struggling with reading and writing?  If the opportunity to learn how to access engaging content is found in these classes, that should be weighed against a double-dip of literacy per se.

And finally,

3.  Will there be the opportunity in L. Arts for this student to grow in reading and writing?

These are issues to ponder when making decisions about “double-dipping” Read 180 students.  Constraints in scheduling and FTE further complicate.  Middle school team schedules might have to be manipulated for individual students.  But underlying all these decisions, be assured that in the capable hands of committed teachers, the Read 180 instructional model is well able to stand in as a student’s literacy class; it works well in melding the new literacy standards with the individual needs of students.  And, the program has all the pieces and parts to ensure that reading and writing can be taught in ways that engage boys and girls.

By the time struggling youngsters get to middle school, this is hard.  But it is absolutely essential.

Me Talk Pretty One Day…

~David Sedaris

Ever mindful of the power a teacher wields to positively affect the growth in thinking and learning of the students in his classroom every day, I was struck this weekend by an article I ran across on “word fads”, or the annoying overuse of certain expressions.  You know, like, awesome, epic, and, well, you know…

But first, some background.

In 1975, Lake Superior State University PR Director Bill Rabe  was looking for ways to help gain publicity for little-known LSSU.  He and a group of friends dreamed up the first “List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-Use, Over-Use and General Uselessness” at a New Year’s Eve party in 1975.  The following day, he released the list, and the rest, as they say, is history.  Since then, nominations for words and expressions to be banished have been invited and accepted throughout the year…People
from around the world have nominated hundreds of words and phrases such as “you know,” “user-friendly,” “at this point in time,” and “have a nice day,” to be purged from the language.  In order to gain the most media coverage possible, the Banishment List is released each year on New Year’s Day.  This is attributed to former newsman Rabe’s knowledge of the press.  New Year’s Day is traditionally a slow news day.

Have some fun with your Read 180 students, and at the same time, begin to drive home an important point about broadening their expressive language.  Perhaps challenge them–and yourself–in a discussion about spoken language, and explore other ways to say what they mean when they fall back on “awesome” and its cliched playmates.  For 8th graders and high school students, this is a good discussion to have relative to future experiences in the workplace. Maybe create a tally system on a whiteboard every time someone in the class notices a pop culture cliched expression used–even by you!

Here are a few excerpts from the LSSU 2011 List of Banished Words:

VIRAL

“Events, photographs, written pieces and even occasional videos that attracted a great deal of attention once were simply highly publicized, repeated in news broadcasts, and talked about for a few days. Now, however, it is no longer enough to give such offerings their 15 minutes of fame, but they must be declared to ‘go viral.’ As a result, any mindless stunt or vapid bit of writing is sent by its creators whirling around the Internet and, once whirled, its creators declare it (trumpets here) ‘viral!’ Enough already! If anything is to be declared worthy enough to ‘go viral,’ clearly it should be the LSSU Banished Words list for 2011!” Lawrence Mickel, Coventry, Conn.

“I didn’t mind much when ‘viral’ came to mean an under-handed tactic by advertising companies to make their ads look like pop culture. However, now anything that becomes popular on YouTube is suddenly ‘viral.’ I just don’t get it.” Kevin Wood, Wallacetown, Ont.

EPIC

More than one nominator says the use of ‘epic’ has become an epic annoyance.

“Over-use of the word ‘epic’ has reached epic proportions. Tim Blaney, Snoqualmie, Wash.

“Standards for using ‘epic’ are so low, even ‘awesome’ is embarrassed.” Mike of Kettering, Ohio.

“I’m sure that when the history books are written or updated and stories have been passed through the generations, the epic powder on the slopes during your last ski trip or your participation in last night’s epic flash mob will probably not be included. This may be the root of this epic problem, but it seems as if during the past two years, any idea that was not successful was considered an ‘epic-fail.’ This includes the PowerPoint presentation you tried to give during this morning’s meeting, but couldn’t because of technical problems. Also, the ice storm of ‘epic proportions’ that is blanketing the east coast this winter sure looks a lot like the storm that happened last winter.” DV, Seattle, Wash.

FAIL

One nominator says, “what originally may have been a term for a stockbroker’s default is now abused by today’s youth as virtually any kind of ‘failure.’ Whether it is someone tripping, a car accident, a costumed character scaring the living daylights out a kid, or just a poor choice in fashion, these people drive me crazy thinking that anything that is a mistake is a ‘fail.’ They fail proper language!”

“It has taken over blogs, photo captions, ‘status’ comments. Anytime someone does something less than perfect, we have to read ‘FAIL!’ The word has failed us all.” Aaron Yunker, Ishpeming, Mich.

WOW FACTOR

“This buzzword is served up with a heaping of cliché factor and a side order of irritation. But the lemmings from cable-TV cooking, whatever design and fashion shows keep dishing it out. I miss the old days when ‘factor’ was only on the math-and-science menu.” Dan Muldoon, Omaha, Neb.

“Done-to-death phrase to point out something with a somewhat significantly appealing appearance.” Ann Pepper, Knoxville, Tenn.

A-HA MOMENT

“All this means is a point at which you understand something or something becomes clearer. Why can’t you just say that?” Audrey Mayo, Killeen, Tex.

BACK STORY

“This should be on the list of words that don’t need to exist because a perfectly good word has been used for years. In this case, the word is ‘history,’ or, for those who must be weaned, ‘story.’” Jeff Williams, Sherwood, Ariz.

BFF

“These chicks call each other BFF (Best Friends Forever) and it lasts about 10 minutes. Now there’s BFFA (Best Friends For Awhile), which makes more sense.” Kate Rabe Forgach, Ft. Collins, Colo.

MAN UP

“A stupid phrase when directed at men. Even more stupid when directed at a woman, as in ‘Alexis, you need to man up and join that Pilates class!’” Sherry Edwards, Clarkston, Mich.

“Another case of ‘verbing’ a noun and ending with a preposition that goes nowhere. Not only that, the phrase is insulting, especially when voiced by a female, who’d never think to say, ‘Woman up!’” Aunt Shecky, East Greenbush, NY.

“Can a woman ‘man-up,’ or would she be expected to ‘woman-up?’” Jay Leslie, Portland, Maine.

I’M JUST SAYIN’

“‘A phrase used to diffuse any ill feelings caused by a preceded remark,’ according to the Urban Dictionary. Do we really need a qualifier at the end of every sentence? People feel uncomfortable with a comment that was made and then ‘just sayin” comes rolling off the tongue? It really doesn’t change what was said, I’m just sayin’.” Becky of Sault Ste. Marie, Mich.

“Obviously you are saying it…you just said it!” Catherine Wilson, Granger, Ind.

“And we would never have known if you hadn’t told us.” Bob Forrest, Tempe, Ariz.

FACEBOOK / GOOGLE as verbs

“Facebook is a great, addicting website. Google is a great search engine. However, their use as verbs causes some deep problems. As bad as they are, the trend can only get worse, i.e. ‘I’m going to Twitter a few people, then Yahoo the movie listings and maybe Amazon a book or two.” Jordan of Waterloo, Ont.

LIVE LIFE TO THE FULLEST

“It’s an absurdity followed by a redundancy. First, things are full or they’re not; there is no fullest. Second, ‘live life’ is redundant. Finally, the expression is nauseatingly overused. What’s wrong with enjoying life fully or completely? The phrase makes me gag. I’m surprised it hasn’t appeared on the list before.” Sylvia Hall, Williamsport, Penn.

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I have a nomination to add:   “At the end of the day…” This phrase leaks out of my TV screen multiple times every night during the news, no matter the channel.  I can only hope I’ve never used it.  But repeated and often-used expressions do have a way of worming themselves into our brains–so I might have.  Our default mechanisms are formulated by our schema, so at the end of the day, we have to employ self-awareness and will to create new verbal paths…

Oops.

It’s all in the data…

Have you seen the latest Harry Potter movie?  Read the books?  If you are a fan, you know in six years at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, the female character Hermoine was responsible for Harry and Ron’s academic survival.  She read the textbooks, wrote the papers, memorized the charms, incantations, and studied all the history of magic they ultimately draw upon in their battles with He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named…Harry embodies the physical prowess–talented Seeker and Quidditch Captain–as well as determination, courage, and often irrational go-for-it chutzpah behavior befitting his destiny.  Ron, Harry’s “best mate,” who was also more interested in everything but Hogwarts rigorous academic expectations, rounds out the threesome.

In her wildly popular series, it seems J.K. Rowling unwittingly–or maybe not–mirrored a  gender gap in educational outcomes that has led to numerous studies, a blizzard of articles, books, and blogs, and startling data that likely doesn’t surprise intervention teachers in the trenches–where the boys are.

Read 180 teachers frequently have classes with significantly more boys than girls.  This anecdotal observation is borne out by voluminous data identifying alarming gender gaps in literacy as boys and girls move through school, and not just in the USA–Australia began tackling this problem long before we were acknowledging it as a nation.  Richard Whitmire, author of Why Boys Fail (2010), lays out some numbing statistics in his first chapter:

The growing majorities of women on college campuses may delight freshman guys, but they trigger worries among others nervously watching the trend…with average graduating classes at four-year colleges approaching 60 percent women…The U.S. Department of Labor estimated that 80 percent of the fastest growing jobs of the 21st century will require postsecondary education or training.  And yet of every one hundred ninth graders, only sixty-eight will graduate from high school on time, only forty will directly enter college, and only twenty-seven will still be enrolled their sophomore year.  Finally, among those one hundred, only eighteen will graduate within six years.  And if those figures were sorted by gender, boys would dominate each fallout point. Men need these degrees as much as women, and yet somehow only women are responding logically to the education demands of this new economy.  That leaves tens of thousands of otherwise talented boys stalled at the starting gates, unable to win entry-level jobs in the new economy.  If anything, the urgency for men to acquire more post-high school training has accelerated.  More than 80 percent of those laid off during the global recession that began in 2008 were men.  By the spring of 2009, as the recession deepened and the layoffs continued, women became the majority of the workforce.

How could a societal change as significant as boys falling so far behind girls in academic ambitions come about so quietly and quickly? Until that question gets answered, any school interventions drawn up to help boys will be based on little more than guesswork.

Whitmire devotes Chapter 6 of Why Boys Fail to “Solutions:  What Works for Boys?” In it, he explores specific schools in the country who have become success stories, changing students’ lives and expectations, producing achievement, pride, and success with reading and reading as a path to better lives.  He concludes:

Of all the schools described above, I find the Frankford story most compelling.  All the reforms at Frankford were designed to overcome the learning gaps found among the poor and minority students at Frankford–not gender gaps.  Brittingham and the other teachers who got caught up in the revolution just wanted their students to have a shot at jobs beyond chucking, plucking, or landscaping.  Amidst their improbable success they barely noticed they were producing equal outcomes in boys’ and girls’ performance.  That was never the goal…as with KIPP, there’s no boys’ strategy at Frankford, no sex-segregated classes, no special hands-on teaching techniques aimed at boys, no major recruitment drive to hire male teachers.  Frankford has only two male teachers.  So the question is, absent a boys’ strategy, how did it end up doing right by the boys? And the answer is…when you refuse to let even a single student slide by, you end up helping boys the most because the boys are the big sliders.

Interestingly, Whitmire’s analysis parallels Nancie Atwell’s in her book The Reading Zone (2007) in which she rails at the identification of a “boy” problem in literacy being rooted in popular educational stereotypes leading to solutions that target boys.  In her Chapter 8 titled, simply, “Boys” she notes:

As a teacher who writes about teaching, my topic for the past twenty-five years has been kids and how to help them, girls and boys, become skilled, passionate, habitual, critical readers and writers…In the arena of the language arts, the arguments and evidence for a boy crisis are rich in stereotypes, about boys in general and boy readers in particular, to wit:

•  Boys perceive books as isolating, unnatural, and antisocial.

•  Boys find it difficult to imagine fictional worlds.

•  Boys are unable to engage with writing that describes complex emotions and relationships.

•  Boys are drawn to nonfiction because it’s practical, while novels aren’t.

•  Boys need comics, magazines, sports pages, gaming guides, and The Guinness Book of World Records, because of their shorter attention spans.

•  Boy culture regards reading as a sissy thing.

•  Boys are born competitors and kinetic learners, so a passive experience such as reading a book thwarts their nature.

•  And even, get this one, boys’ brains have less neuron density in the temporal lobe cortex, which is associated with verbal ability, so genetic differences put males at a disadvantage when it comes to reading.

Atwell goes on:

I read the essays, articles, and books about the boy crisis, and I shake my head.  Who are these boys?  I cannot recognize a single one of the guys I teach in these stereotypes.  And I teach guys…my male students hunt with their fathers and uncles.  They play basketball, baseball, and soccer, domesticate rats and ferrets, play disgusting practical jokes, master Magic Cards, drive ATV’s illegally, bait and haul lobster traps, blow things up, play computer games for twelve hours straight, haunt the video arcade at the Portland mall, watch The Simpsons and South Park, live for hip-hop or heavy metal, and collect roadkill and freeze it for use in future “experiments.”  And they read books.  And they love books…Anyone’s achievement, male or female, is driven by interest.  Give boys stories and main characters that grip them, and they will read books with passion.  Give them a boring, inaccessible curriculum of assigned readings from textbook anthologies and the novels of the American secondary school canon, and they will dread reading just as much as I did when I was in middle and high school…When boys and girls choose their own books, when teachers make it our business to put the right story into every reader’s hand, and when we create quiet, comfortable spaces in kids’ lives for them to enjoy books on a regular and predictable basis, then every student can enter the reading zone, and no one ever thinks in terms of testosterone or neuron density.

At first blush, it seems Atwell’s views run counter to the statistics bearing witness to a growing and alarming gender gap in reading.  But not really–her caveat as to how to make readers out of both boys and girls echo Whitmire’s analysis of the Frankford School.  It’s what she terms as stereotypes about boys and books that raise her ire.

So what are the implications of this perceived and proven gender gap in literacy for Read 180 teachers? What do we do with this information?

Your thoughts?

There is a huge difference between assigning reading and teaching reading, and students need teachers who recognize the balance between chopping books to death and handing books to students without the proper level of support.  ~Kelly Gallagher in Readicide (2009)

Assigner?  Or teacher?  In his book, Gallagher lays out guidelines to demonstrate how critical it is for teachers of reading to find what he calls the “sweet spot of instruction” between overteaching and underteaching–both which he believes leads to “readicide.”  I was dope-slapped by the second part of this statement at the beginning of Chapter 4 in Readicide:

Underteaching can be as damaging as overteaching, and this chapter will explore what we, as teachers, can do to give our students the proper level of instructional support without abandoning them or without drowning them in a sea of sticky notes, double-entry journals, and worksheets.

“Underteaching” is something I think a lot about–I know for a student who is a “developing reader” (make that “struggling” in most of our jargon) in middle and high school to ever have a shot at becoming hooked on a book, there is a galaxy of things a reading teacher can and must do for him.

Gallagher defines his own list in Readicide:

•Recognize the Importance of framing the text

•Remember the value found in second-draft (and third-draft) reading

•Adopt a big chunk/little chunk philosophy

•Start with the guided tour, but ease students into the budget tour to find the sweet spot of instruction

But here is his key statement:  These suggestions about avoiding the perils of underteaching are really suggestions that prove valuable in reading difficult text.  But…a reminder of the 50/50 rule:  half the reading I want my students to do is recreational.  That means there is no framing, no second- and third-draft reading, no big chunk/little chunk approach, no guided tour, and no time examining metacognition.  No stop signs whatsoever. These approaches are valuable when reading academic texts, but let’s not forget in the shadow of all this testing that our primary goal is to help our students to become lifelong readers. This will not occur if they are only doing academic reading...Ignoring the recreational side of reading is a recipe for readicide.

Gallagher also warns that in avoiding the “perils of underteaching” we can go too far–overteach–when we apply the same levels of instructional support to kids’ recreational reading.  In so doing, we are missing that “sweet spot” of instruction, and worse, commiting “readicide.”

I remember Stephanie Harvey asking in a Thinking Strategy Institute I attended years ago, “When you curl up at night with a novel, then startle awake at 2 AM in the morning with your glasses crooked across your face, did you race downstairs to the dining room to create a diorama to help you understand it?”

Nancie Atwell discusses this same issue in The Reading Zone (2007), making her case based on literary theorist Louise Rosenblatt’s work in Literature as Exploration (1938) (1983).  Atwell notes,

Rosenblatt defines two modes of reading:  efferent and aesthetic. She observes that these are parallel frames of mind, existing on a continuum, which any reader brings to bear during every act of reading in order to create meaning.  When we approach a text in an efferent frame of mind…we’re reading in order to acquire information.  We focus our attention on what we’ll learn.  The aesthetic stance parallels that of efferent reading; when a reader assumes it, he or she fuses affective and cognitive elements together into what Rosenblatt calls “a personally lived-through poem or story.”  We read aesthetically for its own sake, for the pleasures and rewards of living vicariously inside someone else’s literary world.  I think the aesthetic mode has a lot in common with the state that my students, as readers of stories, have named “the reading zone.”  In considering the reading of schoolchildren, Rosenblatt noted the difficulties that arise when teachers direct students to read from an efferent stance texts that kids are inclined to approach aesthetically–that is, to find and carry away information from a story.  She was concerned that teachers were asking students not to “live through” and love literature but to find facts:  main ideas, supporting details, causes and effects, plot events, settings, character motivations.

I was the grateful recipient of heavy doses of professional development through PEBC, mostly in my last 5 years of teaching, which focused on helping students make meaning in literacy and all other content areas with a list of defined and explicitly taught thinking strategies.  We made strategy posters for every classroom, held book studies, and organized classroom observation labs using the thinking strategies as the core driver of instruction.  A number of schools across the district have had similar experiences and as a result, we have a common language around these strategies which goes beyond individual schools.  This initiative was valuable and the dollars well-spent.  But as with all good things, sometimes there are unintended consequences. Gallagher and Atwell remind us we cannot overlook, forget, or miss an essential piece of the thinking strategy instructional credo:  teaching a youngster to be strategic in his reading does not mean ALL his reading experiences must be conducted with the same tools–sticky notes, double-entry journals, and highlighters.  Or worksheets.

Atwell goes on:

The problem is that when we tell kids they have to seek connections as readers, we’re teaching them to stop engaging in stories and start looking for distractions.  And no one can be engaged and distracted at the same time.  As Frank Smith observes, “When a book grabs us, we leave the everyday world around us and enter the world of the book.  We are caught up in it.  It is not possible to experience the world around us and the extended world of a book simultaneously.  One always interferes with the other.”

The caveat here is that a reader has to know, or be able to understand without too much effort, the meanings of about 90 percent of the words in a book, if comprehension is going to be possible (Carver, 2000).  Atwell points out that when kids can’t understand what they’re reading, the material is beyond them; they can’t figure out the meanings of enough of the words, NOT that they aren’t activating appropriate comprehension strategies.  Numerous researchers have identified the lack of background knowledge as the Number One deficit in the comprehension of a struggling reader.   So if it is  the job of the teacher to help students choose books that will hook them, it follows that those books must be “just right.”  The Read 180 program levels texts in its library that will help students self-select and comprehend within their identified lexile range so they can experience that “just right” niche independently.  If they want to read beyond their lexile range, then they will probably need support from their teacher, such as building background knowledge about the book, providing audio support, and allowing them to abandon that book if they get too frustrated.

The crux is finding that “sweet spot.”  Gallagher and Atwell both conclude that students need some support for recreational reading–Atwell does it with mini-lessons at the start of her reading workshops, focusing on many useful discussions about books, reading, and readers, often generated from what she gleans from the students during their reading time.  Gallagher has a very similar approach.  But the support students need for instructional and content reading is different than the support they need to get into the “reading zone,” and must be kept separate to be effective.   That zone is the place where reading becomes fun.  And if kids find reading is fun…

Then you’ve found a sweet spot. And hit a home run.

Immersion.

Dr. Brian Cambourne is one of Australia’s most eminent researchers of literacy and learning who has identified 8 factors that contribute to successful learning–he calls them Conditions for Learning. Number One on the list is Immersion. Teacher and author Donalyn Miller connects this factor to her work with her students:

Immersion:  Students need to be surrounded with books of all kinds and given the opportunity to read them every day.  Conversations about reading–what is being read and what students are getting from their books–need to be an ongoing event.  In my classroom, students have access to hundreds of books of all genres and reading levels and encouragement to read widely.

One issue Read 180 teachers face is how to add to and build up their classroom libraries in these times of stressed budgets and stretched resources.  Yet the Read 180 classroom  by definition should be a place that conveys an unmistakable  invitation to every student who walks through the door:  Welcome to a safe, literate place where you can immerse yourself every day in books and all manner of reading materials.

But how do we create that message?  Scholastic provides a neat and compact set of leveled libraries for each Read 180 stage, plus a catalog of leveled and engaging titles to add to your collection–if you have available budget money.  Even if you do not,  building a literate environment cannot end with those crates tucked into a bookshelf.  We need to provide volume and variety to offer choices for our kids–so how?  Here are a few ideas for accessing some resources around Loveland without spending many, and maybe any dollars.

1.  Your School Media Center is a good place to start–you may already have!  Determine if there are warehoused novels or novel sets that teachers no longer use  from which you can cherry-pick and provide a new home.  One teacher explains that many of her R180 kids are not allowed to check out books from the school library due to an old or present fine or lost books, or lost school ID’s–a common problem.  This is an obstacle, but if clearing the fines and fees or paying for a new ID will probably remain a problem, you can still accompany all your students to the library, guide them around potential choices, look through books together, chat with them about different books.  Then make a list with them of what they might like to check out which helps you get to know them better as readers.  Then mount a search to find those titles elsewhere. Read on…

2.  Loveland Public Library now offers Teachers’ Cards which allow you to check out books, though not media, from the youth services area for school use.  These books can be kept for 42 days with one renewal for 7 days.  These are in effect during the school year only, but if you save it, it can be reinstated each year you are teaching.  To get one, you only need provide some proof of employment in R2J–your Employee ID Card, a pay stub, etc. as well as a home address as shown on your driver’s license, utility bill, or the like.  Our library is undergoing a major renovation at the moment, so they have moved all YA literature into the “grown-up” area should you go down to look through their selections.

Another plus: they continue to increase their offerings of unabridged audiobooks on CD, which, like the audiobooks R180 provides, enhances the independent reading experience for developing readers. These can be checked out for 21 days with renewal unless there’s a request for it.  The key to effectiveness of audiobooks is that students keep their eyes following the printed text while listening to the audiobook. Of course, the R180 audiobooks also have an embedded Reading Coach, so those are good choices for your kids.  The library is an option to increase choices.

3.  Downloadable Audiobooks are available free at the Loveland Public Library through its subscription to the Front Range Downloadable Library. Dependent upon which title you choose, these can be downloaded on to a PC, Mac, MP3 Player, WMA, iPod, or burned to a CD.  The one requirement is that a student must have a library card which is free.  (Students do have to go to the library to get one and a parent or guardian must accompany them and sign for it.) If you are interested in this option, you could talk with your school’s media specialist and building technologist to explore the Library’s website explanation of how the program can be downloaded at your school.  Once all the specs and hoops are cleared, Downloadable Books is very simple to use, and would be another tool as well as reading support for you to provide your kids on their (your?) quest to get them to read!  Following is the link to the Library’s website: Pull it up with your building technologist and/or media specialist and peruse the blue menu of information about use and tech specs on the side of the page.  This is a great free resource if you are willing to explore whether your school computer can support the technology, you can help your kids acquire library cards,  and if they have access to an MP3 player, iPod, or WMA -platformed player.  Or if your school does…the library link is:

http://frontrange.lib.overdrive.com/7DACCF23-B560-443B-AF77-8E3845403528/10/358/en/Default.htm

4.  Anthology Bookstore at 422 E. 4th in downtown Loveland will give teachers a 20% discount on any new or used book.  If your school can provide you with even minimal monies to spend on books–even $25, Anthology is a good place to stretch those bucks for books.  Also,  if you take used books to them, they will give you credit on any they accept which can accrue to give you 50% off  used books you may find to buy.  They have a wonderful YA section, many multiple copies, as well as a children’s room at the back with some selections they label as being for younger readers, but are entirely suitable for many 6th-8th grade readers in your R180 classes.  For teachers, they will also add another 10% to that 50% discount I mentioned.  So a good habit to start is to sweep your books up from home that you do not want, take them to Anthology, and start building up credit.  Any books they do not accept they will offer to donate to the Friends of the Library sale for you, or you can have them back.  Finally, if you want to check to see if they have specific new or used titles in stock without going down there, call them at 667-0118. They are very supportive of teachers!

5.  Friends of the Library Book Sale The Spring Book Sale will be April 30 and May 1, 2011 with a Preview on Friday, April 29th for members–memberships can be purchased at the door.  They also have a fall sale, which one of our R180 teachers attended and brought bags of books to her R180 room!  It has already passed, so mark your calendar for the Spring sale as another way to “fill the well” for next year.

6.  Scholastic Book Clubs offer a great way to acquire free new books by building up points with online and mail-in book orders from students.  Following is the link for more information on this resource:

http://teacher.scholastic.com/clubs/routing.asp

I will keep researching, and if any of you have further suggestions for acquiring good, potentially engaging books for our kids cheaply and/or freely, we all welcome your responses to this post.  Share your knowledge so we can immerse our students in books–not drown them in the deep end without support, but immerse them safely in a literate and welcoming environment.

“The reader writes the story.”

~E. Annie Proulx, Pulitzer Prize Winner for Fiction

I’ve been dipping into two wells of excellent writing on literacy instruction recently:  Thomas Newkirk’s 2009 book Holding On To Good Ideas In A Time of Bad Ones:  Six Literacy Principles Worth Fighting For, and Readicide:  How Schools Are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About It by Kelly Gallagher (foreword by Richard Allington).  If we are serious about turning around our youngsters in our Read 180 program, we need to continue to grow our own knowledge and understanding of literacy learning and instruction.  But remembering how hard it can be to stuff professional reading into your days–and nights–I’ve lifted one discussion from Gallagher’s book this week to demonstrate how the Read 180 program design does measure up in avoiding Gallagher’s “Readicide.”

Gallagher quotes Maryanne Wolf (2007) in her book Proust and the Squid:  The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. She notes that “in some environments the average young middle-class child hears 32 million more spoken words than the young underprivileged child by age five.”  A gap that forms before students even start school snowballs once school begins.  Wolf:

It is not simply a matter of the number of words unheard and unlearned.  When words are not heard, concepts are not learned.  When syntactic forms are never encountered, there is less knowledge about the relationship of events in a story.  When story forms are never known, there is less ability to infer and predict.  When cultural traditions and the feelings of others are never experienced, there is less understanding of what other people feel. (2007, 102)

Gallagher points out that just as people who are undernourished need good food, readers who are undernourished need good books.  Lots of them.  But he believes that what many undernourished readers get are “remedial classes where the pace is slowed and where the reading focus moves away from books to a steady diet of small chunks of reading…Rather than lift up struggling readers, this approach contributes to widening the achievement gap.”  Considering the 5-part instructional design of Read 180, four of those parts do allow us the professional autonomy to focus our students on books:  whole-group, small-group, independent/modeled reading rotation, and wrap-up.  The rBook’s design builds background knowledge through the Workshops.  And therein is a crucial point, which Gallagher terms, “The Importance of Knowledge Capital.”  He writes,

…reading (comprehension) consists of two factors:  (1) being able to decode words on the page and (2) being able to connect the words you are reading with the prior knowledge you bring to the page. When schools narrow reading to “help” students prepare for tests, or cut social studies, science, or electives to raise reading scores, they are removing invaluable opportunities for students to widen and deepen knowledge that is foundational to developing readers.  Without a broad knowledge base, our students stand no chance of being excellent readers.

Gallagher goes on to quote E.D. Hirsch (2006) in The Knowledge Deficit:  Closing the Shocking Education Gap for American Children:

Most current reading programs talk about activating the reader’s background knowledge so she can comprehend a text.  But in practice, they are only paying lip service to the well-known scientific finding that background knowledge is essential to reading comprehension.  Little attempt is made to enlarge the child’s background knowledge. (Hirsch 2006, 72)

Gallagher believes that “if schools opt for practice tests instead of time for reading books, drown students in test prep, they are ensuring students will not become excellent readers.  Instead of enlarging the background knowledge, quite the opposite occurs.  This approach shrinks our students’ understanding of the world.  Students may pass the tests, but they’re being robbed of perhaps the only opportunity they may ever have of building that wide knowledge base that is foundational if they are to develop into critical readers of the world.”

Strong words.  Gallagher cites two studies that show a strong correlation between time spent reading and performance on standardized tests:  A famous study of fifth graders by Anderson, Wilson, and Fielding (1998), and in 2007, a study conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts, To Read or Not to Read. Researchers reached the same conclusion in both studies:  students who read the most for fun scored the highest on standardized reading tests. Gallagher notes, “…these studies demonstrate that students who have the broadest reading experiences score the highest on standardized tests.  Conversely, those students with the narrowest reading experiences scored the lowest.”

So…what?  I’ve lobbied in previous posts for giving student in our Read 180 classes time to read books, free choice of what to read with teacher “nudges,” booktalks, providing a wide variety of books from which to choose, and advocated for the Reader’s Bill of Rights.  We know that volume and quantity of books read will ultimately lead to more quality in students’ choices–they evolve.  But volume has to come first. I’m adding to this list now:  consistently weave the critical element of building background knowledge into your instruction.  If a student avoids a book his social studies teacher suggests because it fits with the historical period or concept the class is currently studying, do your own homework–and set up the book for your Read 180 student, which you can do during small-group and individual reading conference time.  Same is true of a book a student might choose, but you suspect might abandon unless you do some “frontloading” or probe for questions a student might have before he starts it.  Use small-group for reading checkpoints–”how’s it going?” conferences on students’ individual book choices.  Remember the example of the novel To Kill A Mockingbird?  It is lexiled around 850, which would seem to put it well within the reach of many younger, and certainly older readers.  Yet no student of today will draw meaning from that novel without some prior discussion of  societal structure in the South during the 1930′s, what it meant pre-Civil Rights to be a black person in the South, politics of the time, and some understanding of the effects of poverty on every level of society during the Depression–and the list can go on.  As Read 180 teachers, we have to remember that a lexile of a text measures two things only:  sentence length/complexity, and familiarity with vocabulary (a child may know alligator, but not “caiman”).  Lexiles do not measure background knowledge a reader brings to the text. That’s why you are so critical in each child’s reading journey.

Making deposits into students’ “Knowledge Capital” is well-illustrated in a program Val Downing and Nan Barron created to enhance their Read 180 instruction at LHS several years ago; they called it “Take Your Teacher Home.”  Specifically to build a broader base of background knowledge for the rBook workshops and other readings, Val loaded podcasts, videos, and other web-based free resources related to content kids were exposed to in class onto ipods they took home to watch and listen to before the next class.  This grew their curiosity, interest, and of course, “knowledge capital.”   Val is now the District Technology Integration TOSA, and is willing to work with any R180 teacher who would like to explore this resource.

One final story about the truth of E. Annie Proulx’ quote at the top of this post.  From Gallagher:

The importance of what a reader brings to the page is also highlighted in a study discussed by Hirsch in The Knowledge Deficit (2006).  This study consisted of two groups of students who were asked to read a passage about baseball.  The first group was made up of strong readers who knew little about baseball.  The second group was composed of struggling readers who were knowledgeable about baseball.  After reading the passage, students in each group had their comprehension tested.  Guess which group scored higher?  The struggling readers.  Having strong reading skills was not enough for the students who came to the page with a knowledge deficit about the topic.  Though the second group of readers were not strong readers, the prior knowledge they brought to the page enabled them to outscore readers with far better abilities.  Prior knowledge, or in the case of the good readers, the lack of prior knowledge, was the x-factor.

Gallagher concludes:  “If we are serious about building strong readers, we need to be serious about building strong knowledge foundations in our students.  With this in mind, we should be mindful of the large wealth of knowledge capital that comes from the voluminous reading of books, newspapers, blogs, and magazines.  These are the sources that build the critical foundations of serious readers…”

Next post will be devoted to resources to support “voluminous reading” in your Read 180 classroom without access to deep pockets.  Stay tuned!

The book which you read from a sense of duty, or because for any reason you must, does not commonly make friends with you. ~William Dean Howells

How do we create readers?

We posed this Essential Question to drive our thinking and conversations this year when we meet together in our Read 180 teacher cadre or talk in school.  It’s a big one.  It’s essential. By the time we have youngsters enter our Read 180 classrooms in middle or high school, they have a host of hidden and not-so-hidden beliefs about what readers are, and how they themselves therefore are not.  So one of the most important early-on things to do is have that dialogue with your students, if you have not already, to break down the walls  and challenge them with questions they might not expect a teacher to ask.  “Who has chosen a book because it is short?  Who has chosen a book to read by checking how long it is? ” The crux of such a discussion is to bring to light what these youngsters may have come to believe through years of classroom experiences are cheating reading, or not really reading. Then revel together in the realities of what all readers actually do!  Donalyn Miller (The Book Whisperer) charts book selection techniques with her students, digging until they are finally convinced it’s OK to be honest, and not parrot answers they think a teacher expects.  Some examples of what her students say when the discussion finally turns real:

I like to read some books over and over.

I read the ending first, and then if I like it, I read the whole book.

I read the first paragraph, and if it doesn’t grab me, I put it down.

I read books that are easy.

I read fantasy books.  My mom tries to get me to read something else, but I just don’t like her books.

And so on.  As teacher, you are modeling in this discussion, honestly sharing your own reading life, habits, and preferences.  This is where I used to reveal to my students that I  still have a hard time with any book where an animal dies (because of Old Yeller when I was very young), so avoided  the best-seller Marley & Me but will read Where the Red Fern Grows with my grandson because I know him well and know he’ll love it.  If I had students now, I would tell them I tried to read one of the popular vampire series books, but couldn’t get past the first page, so abandoned it.  I’d share I’m currently rereading the last Harry Potter book because two movies on it will hit the theaters over the next few months, and I like to have the book clear in my mind just before I see the movie.  I just finished reading To Kill A Mockingbird for the third time because it made an indelible impression on me when I read it in high school–and this is its 50th anniversary of publication (!)  If you belong to a book club, share that experience with your kids.   It is essential to be a model for your students, and help them see that all readers “cheat.” And…it’s really reading.

Nancie Atwell, well-known author and teacher, talks about Daniel Pennac’s book, Better Than Life (1992), calling it his “paean to reading.”  Both she and Donalyn Miller use the frontispiece of the book to reinforce the conversation about book choice with their students.  Atwell notes,

The frontispiece of the book is Pennac’s list of what skilled, passionate, habitual, critical readers know but that teachers and parents can forget, don’t understand, or do appreciate for themselves but withhold from children.  My students and I read and debate it the first week of school:

The Reader’s Bill of Rights

1. The right not to read something

2.  The right to skip pages

3.  The right not to finish

4.  The right to reread

5.  The right to read anything

6.  The right to escapism

7.  The right to read anywhere

8.  The right to browse

9.  The right to read out loud

10.  The right to not defend your tastes.

This list is also available on the Web as a downloadable poster with appealing and colorful Quentin Blake illustrations at:

http://www.walker.co.uk/bookshelf/the-rights-of-the-reader-poster.aspx

Donalyn Miller subtitles her book The Book Whisperer, “Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child,” in which she lays out chapters of solid practice based on this core belief that every child has the ability to be a reader, and can become a joyous, prolific, habitual reader.  Nancie Atwell  subtitles her book The Reading Zone, “How to Help Kids Become Skilled, Passionate, Habitual, Critical Readers.”  Sometimes I worry that we attend so much in our classrooms and in the Standards to those first and the last adjectives Atwell lists, that we overlook the research-based fact that “passionate and habitual” readers will also become skilled and critical.  Sheer quantities of books, no matter the quality, in your opinion, will, over time, lead to evolving and maturing tastes in kids’ choices.  Richard McKenna says, “Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.” Does it go too far, when talking about turning struggling readers around, to remember that quantity leads to quality?  Explore your own literary histories.  I remember reading all the Nancy Drew books, then all the Hardy Boys, then all the Oz series–all chosen by me myself from the little children’s library tucked in the basement of the Public Library in Helena, Montana.  Several years later, I ventured upstairs into the “big” library and discovered a whole new world, first finding displayed on a little bookshelf,  Angel Unaware by Dale Evans Rogers.  This poignant and loving memoir of the birth–and death–of their Down Syndrome daughter, Robin Elizabeth Rogers, had a powerful effect on my reading journey.  About the same time,  my English teacher at school handed me a biography about Albert Schweitzer and his work with the lepers in Africa. At home my mother hooked me on The Secret Garden, Little Women, and Brighty of the Grand Canyon.  Variety and choice.  My early “series” reading grew my reading confidence and ability and love of reading, nurturing me into new places to go,  bolstered by adults who provided books they thought I’d like.  But always I chose the books from many offered.  (I did refuse Anne of Green Gables and The Bobbsey Twins.)

You, the teacher,  are also essential and instrumental in this process, by providing them with great quantities of books from which to make choices: getting to know them so you can match them with suggested books, build their background knowledge, share websites of booklists (links to follow), take them to the library, and talk, talk, talk about books and–not their reading deficits–but reading as pleasure. Choice is the key.  Nancie Atwell says,

In the classrooms at CTL (Center for Teaching and Learning), choice is a given:  kids choose what they read because children who choose books are more likely to grow up to become adults who read books.  Students who read only a steady diet of assigned titles don’t get to answer for themselves the single most important question about book reading:  why does anyone want to?  I could no more pick the book that would invite a whole class to make friends with reading than I could decide who my students should grow up and marry.  It’s that personal, that chemical, that idiosyncratic, and, yes, to me anyway, that important.  For students of every ability and background, it’s the simple, miraculous act of reading a good book that turns them into readers, because even for the least experienced, most reluctant reader, it’s the one good book that changes everything.  The job of adults who care about reading is to move heaven and earth to put that book into a child’s hands.

Now there’s a job description for a reading teacher.

Useful Websites for choosing books: (from Donalyn Miller, The Book Whisperer)

• Goodreads www.goodreads.com  Goodreads is a free social networking site for readers.  Members create bookshelves of books they have read, are reading, or plan to read, and share lists with their invited friends.

• teenreads.com www.teenreads.com  This Website is not meant for teachers; it is meant for students.  The futuristic layout and features like “Videos/Podcasts,” “Cool & New” and the monthly poll skillfully integrate the latest networking tools to create a fun, modern site about reading for today’s teen readers.  Check out the up-to-date “Ultimate Teen Reading” list for over 250 books that were voted perfect reading choices by readers of the site.

• Jen Robinson’s Book Page http://jkrbooks.typepad.com/  “Prolific blog and web postings filled with detailed reviews and personal reflections about the world of children’s books, their authors, and children’s book publishing.”

An Inconvenient Truth…

“Why do developing readers continue to struggle in spite of every intervention effort?” Author and reading teacher Donalyn Miller asks this question in her book, The Book Whisperer:  Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child.  Teachers and interventionists continue to wrestle with this issue as they explore school and district assessment data and find many of the same student names emerging year to year.  Where in the RTI structure can these kids find the best fit, and most importantly, have a chance to progress significantly?

Miller puts forth one answer:  “…the key might be in the amount of reading these students actually do.  Reading policy expert Richard Allington explains in What Really Matters for Struggling Readers that when he examined the reading requirements of Title I and special education programs, he discovered that students in remedial settings read roughly 75% less than their peers in regular reading classes.  No matter how much instruction students receive in how to decode vocabulary, improve comprehension, or increase fluency, if they seldom apply what they have learned in the context of real reading experiences, they will fail to improve as much as they could.

The fact that students in intervention programs don’t read much has serious consequences for what Miller prefers to call “developing” rather than “struggling” readers.  Students who do not read regularly become weaker readers with each subsequent year.  Meanwhile, their peers who read more become stronger readers, creating an ever-widening achievement gap–exactly the opposite of what we are trying to do through RTI intervention! So we are seemingly back to Square One–unless we ensure that part of the intervention recipe includes substantial instructional time actually reading. Miller says,

Here is why I have hope for children who have fallen behind and why I call them developing readers instead of struggling ones;  these students have the ability to become strong readers.  They may lag behind their peers on the reading-development continuum, but they are still on the same path.  What they need is support for where they are in their development and the chance to feel success as readers instead of experiencing reading failure.  They also need to read and read. Time and time again, I have seen a heavy dose of independent reading, paired with explicit instruction in reading strategies, transform nonreaders into readers.

We have this recipe.  The instructional model of the Read 180 program includes a daily dose of independent reading, and opportunity through the whole group and small group time for each teacher to provide support and ensure success for every reader.  So–how do we hook these “developing” readers into books so they read and read? That can be a big challenge, but it is critical that we devote time and energy to this piece of the Read 180 design.  A place to start might be to view and review how we ourselves think about that independent reading time, and how we are projecting our own attitude about it to our Read 180 students.  Some things to think about:

• if a student “forgets” his book in the locker or can’t find it in the classroom, what is your remedy to make that 20 minutes productive reading time for that student?

• do you set deadlines for a number of books to be read by everybody by a certain date?  Is that working?  If not, why not?

• How is reading viewed in your classroom? As a punitive act–if you don’t settle down, you’re  going to have to read longer! or a time everybody looks forward to?

What are your thoughts about how to get your kids into that reading place Ellin Keene refers to as “dwelling in the text”?

The spelling gene…

One thing I noticed while teaching English through the years to 7th graders was they were either good spellers or poor spellers; few were in the middle.  I tried to design fixes based on prevailing research, but often privately wondered if maybe some kids were just born with a gene for spelling effortlessly.  I’d never struggled with it, loved spelling bees as a kid, but my husband has to use me or the computer to spell anything from street names to grocery lists.  Conversely, I can’t decipher nor visualize a blueprint into a coherent image of a finished house.  Studies tell us spelling prowess doesn’t seem to be an indicator of native intelligence, whatever that is.

I never indulged in the gene fantasy about the youngsters who came to us with reading holes, however.  That seemed far more serious than spelling issues, and way less fixable, given the one-size-fits-all curriculum guide-that-didn’t of my early teaching years.  I learned to follow my gut but “differentiation” wasn’t in the jargon nor the practice yet, and daily class teaching assignments numbered 6 at 45 minutes each, with at least 30 students each, and no teams to share the load.  Every day was a “rush to cover.”   In the ensuing years knowledge increased,  professional development ruled, and materials vendors prospered, but one constant remained:  for whatever reasons, some kids were still showing up in 7th grade with serious reading deficits.

With the advent of Scholastic’s Read 180 program into our intervention repertoire a few years ago, we saw the possibility of turning some of these youngsters around,  the premise of the hopeful title.  Read 180 has an impressive research base, its embryonic stages coming out of Florida’s Vanderbilt University, with many subsequent studies buoying its claim:  if implemented consistently on model with appropriately placed students and dedicated teachers, those students will make significant reading gains.

We have this tool, and we are learning and working to use it more effectively every year in our secondary schools.  But just as a hammer doesn’t build a house, this tool, even with all its marvelous components, by itself cannot turn a kid into a reader.  It can bring about gains in scores.  But is the student a reader?  What is that?  What does that look like?  How does that happen?  As we implement this valuable tool,  strive to get on model, and work with our kids, I am convinced we must keep one Essential Question as the compass for all our Read 180 planning, dialogue, and data analysis:

How do we create readers?

Recently, I re-read Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, because it’s the 50th anniversary of this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel as well as my forever favorite book. Set in a small town in the deep South during the Depression, one passage relates how Scout got into trouble her first day of school of 1st grade:

I mumbled that I was sorry and retired meditating upon my crime.  I never deliberately learned to read, but somehow I had been wallowing illicitly in the daily papers.  In the long hours of church–was it then I learned?  I could not remember not being able to read hymns.  Now that I was compelled to think about it, reading was something that just came to me, as learning to fasten the seat of my union suit without looking around, or achieving two bows from a snarl of shoelaces.  I could not remember when the lines above Atticus’s moving finger separated into words but I had stared at them all the evenings in my memory, listening to the news of the day, Bills to Be Enacted into Laws, the diaries of Lorenzo Dow–anything Atticus happened to be reading when I crawled into his lap every night.  Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read.  One does not love breathing.

How do we turn our students into Scout-like readers?  Does her explanation of how she says she learned to read hold any insights for us as Read 180 teachers in 2010?

Questions drive research, and,  borrowing from 21st century pop culture terms–isearch.  To Read 180 teachers:  think, read,  find evidence from your experiences and your reading to build upon our Essential Question.  Journal or share  your thoughts and findings in the name of ah, wesearch.  (!)