Coveting Books

When I learn of book awards like NCTE’s Orbis Pictus Award and ALA’s Newbery and Caldecott Medals, immediately my list of books-to-read grows—as if that pile by my bed could get bigger without toppling over and burying me. I begin to anticipate opportunities with these books... maybe I could read this with my granddaughter or maybe I could use this book or part of it with my college freshmen. Maybe this is a book to recommend to one of my two book groups or maybe I could have one of those luscious Sunday afternoon reads of a book just for my pleasure much as Matthew Bucher describes in "The Book Club with Just One Member" (The New York Times,January 23, 2010).

A friend once told me that his younger brother would panic when he didn’t have a song in his head. I feel that way about books. I need to have book words playing around my brain both to anchor and challenge me. I can’t imagine how dreadful it would be not to feel that way, but unfortunately, many of our students have no such kinship with books.

Katie McKnight’s 2008 Annual Convention Session posting and subsequent discussion on the NCTE Ning, “Pedagogical Practices For Teaching The Classics To Struggling Readers,” features several tips and more booklists to help us help struggling readers. And Kylene Beers’ book When Kids Can't Read--What Teachers Can Do: A Guide for Teachers 6-12 provides a handbook of ideas for reaching those kids without “book words” in their heads. You might want to take the survey Kylene and Robert Probst have just put out for teachers of students grades 4-12 regarding novels for struggling readers. Note that the survey ends January 30.

Two of my favorite online resources about books for young people and teachers of books are Franki Sibberson and Mary Lee Hahn’s A Year of Reading and Teri Lesesne’s The Goddess of YA website.

And, if you’re thinking you’d never use those Orbis Pictus winners in your classroom, think again with the NCTE books The Power of Picture Books: Using Content Area Literature in Middle School and The Best in Children's Nonfiction: Reading, Writing, & Teaching Orbis Pictus Award Books.

Metaphor Makeovers: The Secret to Test Success

When students sit down to take a test, how do they think about themselves? It may seem like a silly question, but the answer probably matters more than you think.

Attitude Matters
“The Truth about Grit,” published last fall in The Boston Globe explains the significance of the way we think about ourselves and our effort. It turns out the way you see yourself can be the difference that makes one person succeed where an equally intelligent person fails. If you think of yourself as someone who is smart, you may do reasonably well. However, if you think of yourself as someone who works hard and tries to improve, you’re more likely to succeed according to the studies described in the Globe article. You have what researchers call grit.

It’s not just stubbornly sticking with something though. There’s more to it. People with grit believe that they have to work hard to succeed. They have an organic notion of how success is achieved. They believe it takes ongoing effort, with constant attention to thinking, changing, and evolving your abilities. As the article explains,

One of the most important elements is teaching kids that talent takes time to develop, and requires continuous effort. Carol S. Dweck, a psychologist at Stanford University, refers to this as a “growth mindset.” She compares this view with the “fixed mindset,” the belief that achievement results from abilities we are born with. “A child with the fixed mindset is much more likely to give up when they encounter a challenging obstacle, like algebra, since they assume that they’re just not up to the task,” says Dweck.

If you’re not yet sold, Dweck’s research may convince you. Dweck took a group of fifth graders and gave them various IQ tests. After the first test, half of the fifth graders were told that they must be very smart while the other half were told that they worked very hard. The fifth graders who were praised for hard work (for their grit) did better on subsequent IQ tests than students praised for being intelligent.

Testing Metaphors
Now consider how we currently talk about achievement tests and education. In her book Adolescent Literacy at Risk? The Impact of Standards, Rebecca Bowers Sipe describes the two predominant metaphors used to talk about education: an industrial, assembly line metaphor, and an agarian, organic metaphor.

Using the assembly line metaphor, education focuses on “breaking complicated literacy tasks down to their smallest parts, teaching and testing the parts, and eventually producing a shiny new high school graduate who would roll out of the school and into college or the workplace fully prepared for the challenges ahead” (p. 16, PDF of Chapter One).

Compare that way of thinking with the agarian metaphor:

The farmer realizes that growing quality crops is a highly recursive process, one that requires careful and reflective practice across a career. Every crop is different. Crops in different fields vary in growth patterns. The strategies that work best with one set of circumstances may be less effective in another. The job of the farmer is to pay attention to the very complex and interconnected set of circumstances in play and to bring the very best professional expertise into practice day-by-day. (p. 16, PDF of Chapter One)

Given what we have learned about the way grit and a growth mindset affect success, it’s obvious which metaphor will better serve students. Standardized notions of education simply don’t work as well. When students take a test, their success may hinge on which educational metaphor is in play. If they have adopted the industrial metaphor, they see education as fixed, with a standard system and uniform parts and measures. The agarian model, on the other hand, is both figuratively and literally about a growth mindset—and research says that mindset is more likely to foster success.

Metaphor Makeovers
How can we help students move more toward a growth mindset? Changing the national conversation about education may be the best solution, but we have to be realistic. How can we help the kids we have in the classroom right this minute? I prescribe Metaphor Makeovers! Ask students to think about how they fit in the educational system, reflect on the way they describe themselves, and then change their thinking in ways that will make them more successful.

Begin by establishing how students feel about themselves. No matter what they feel now, there are ways you can help them change their process and thinking to support a growth mindset. I begin with a writing activity like this, taken from Designing Writing Assignments:

Describe yourself as a test writer by using an analogy. Begin by completing this sentence: “When I write a timed essay, I am like a _______.” For example, you might complete the sentence this way: “When I write a timed essay, I am like a gardener.” After you’ve come up with your analogy, explore your choice in a journal entry. If I were comparing myself to a gardener, I’d talk about the way that I get started on a paper and the way that I start work on a garden— gathering seeds and tools is like gathering ideas and basic information about the writing prompt. Your response should do two things: show how you write a timed essay and make comparisons that clarify for your readers the way that you write.

Students can work in journals, informal writing, or essays. Whatever format you want. Be sure the students understand they will share what they write with the class later. To scaffold the activity, brainstorm a list of metaphors as a class that students can draw from. You might even work through an analogy together to model the kind of thinking you want them to do.

Once they have established their metaphors, you have the “before” snapshot for your makeover project. Have students share their metaphors with the class or in small groups. Talk honestly about what works and what doesn’t. You can model the classroom discussion on whatever makeover show you and students are familiar with (e.g., Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, Tim Gunn's Guide to Style, or The Biggest Loser).

As you move to the makeover stage, students can try switching metaphors, trying on someone else’s practices, or tossing out an old practice. Make it clear students are just trying options. They can always return to the old way of doing things. Encourage trial and error. Your job is to provide feedback that encourages that growth mindset. Don’t just make suggestions though. Be sure to explain why you’re making them, just as someone on one of those television makeover shows explains suggestions.

At the end of the process, students can present “before” and “after” descriptions to the class, or you can have students write a short reflection piece on the process that the two of you discuss together. Just as they do on the shows, you might even return to the metaphors several weeks later to see how they are working—have they returned to the old ways, or sticking with the makeover?

Throughout the activity, remember to talk about how hard they are working. It’s not how smart student are that matters after all, but whether students are willing to work hard to be smarter.

From Potential to Power: Reading and Writing the National Gallery

As teachers of writing, we are acutely aware of how important the presence of an authentic audience can be for students' motivation to write. Though my state’s standards call for students to “write for real or potentially real situations” [emphasis mine], it’s a challenge to find such opportunities on a regular basis.

When I first heard about the National Gallery of Writing, I was naturally excited about the idea of NCTE launching a large-scale project to highlight the centrality of audience and publication in the writing process. I find that the Gallery has achieved that goal, and I’ve enjoyed my time spent browsing galleries that interest me and searching for entries by friends, colleagues, and community members.

It wasn’t until mid-November, though, that the real power of the Gallery became clear to me. I was at my Writing Project’s reunion dinner when a Teacher Consultant described a local gallery he curates. Knowing his students’ interest in giving voice to their ideas with a real audience, he had them submit pieces of creative writing, opinion pieces, poetry, and multi-modal compositions (many of which were about the power of language and writing in their own lives) to the Gallery. His students are incarcerated men.

I respect this colleague’s work generally, and I’m very interested in the intense social justice approach his work is taking, so I rushed home from the meeting to have a look at the submissions in the gallery, Education Justice Project: Voices from Prison. What I found there confirmed my sense of the importance of a National Gallery of Writing, as the authors represented in that gallery are truly among the most voiceless in America. Yet their writing is as poignant, thoughtful, and articulate as anything else I’ve read in the Gallery.

Though I could point to any number of examples, I encourage you to read “On ‘Being pushed’ vs. ‘Being pushed around,’” a two-part piece that contains a foreword and a letter to the author’s son. Admittedly, being a father of a young son and a believer in the power of writing myself, I’m perhaps biased in my assessment. But I think you’ll agree that, with introductory material that describes the written journal he’s keeping for his son and that specifically identifies his ability to “pour [his] emotions onto the pages that [he] writes[s]”—to say nothing of the contents of the letter itself—this is writing that both profited from and richly deserves the potential to be read.

With this in mind, take some time in the weeks to come to help ensure that the audience for the writing in the National Gallery is real—not just potentially real. Search for pieces written by children the same age as your students by using the age range filter and share them with your classes. Have students look for writing on topics that interest them by using a title keyword search. Using other search tools, such as author’s state of residence, technology used, or media type, find a piece that is particularly inspiring to you and share it on Facebook, Twitter, or another social networking site.

However you go about it, capitalize on the rich potential of the National Gallery of Writing to help get the word out about the importance of writing in every aspect of our lives.

Reading Jane Eyre in the Bathtub

Nearly every time the Kindle or Nook comes up in conversation, someone will complain that it’s just too hard to read a 600-page novel on such a little screen, and just as surely, someone will lament that you can't take an e-book into the bathtub.

You may think I’m kidding, so look at the comments on Lynn Neary’s NPR article “How E-books Will Change Reading and Writing.” Right there in the comments, Leslie Thomas (Carrington) states:

You can't take a dogeared old copy of Jane Eyre—in an electronic gadget—to the tub to read in a bubble bath.

The answer to that little problem, by the way, is to put the so-called “electronic gadget” in a Ziploc bag. That’s a little beside the point though.

The real problem is that when many people hear the term e-book, they think almost exclusively of paper-based novels (typically very long ones) that are shifted onto an electronic contraption that seems wholly unsuitable. People conjure a sort of “fish out of water” image. Or I guess to be true to the bathtub reference maybe a “synchronized swimming kittens” image would be better.

This (mis)understanding of e-books is what we teachers need to talk about. Take a few minutes to read “How E-books Will Change Reading and Writing.” Neary is talking about Twitter books and cell phone novels, and she explores how the various ways of reading digital texts shape how those texts are written.

This reshaping of how people write for online readers isn’t really new at all. Digital hypertexts have been around for over two decades. Take a look at the work of Michael Joyce for example. Yet we’re still in a society where people reject e-books because you can’t take them in the bathtub. Our job is to get people past these dated notions of texts and reading.

As teachers, we need to help students, colleagues, family members, and administrators recognize that learning 21st century literacy skills is a much more complex then simply trading ink on paper for pixels on a screen. It’s not about reading that dog-eared copy of Jane Eyre on some electronic gadget. It’s about a completely re-thought notion of what we read and how we read.

The best place to start is to ask students to pay attention to their reading habits. By noticing all the different kinds of texts they read, students begin to consciously recognize the many literacy demands in contemporary society. With this start, they create a working definition of literacy that they refine and explore further—and which they can share with their families and their wider community.

I recommend three ReadWriteThink lesson plans to begin a discussion of reading in the classroom:

• Developing a Living Definition of Reading in the Elementary Classroom (K–5)
• Developing a Definition of Reading through Investigation in Middle School (6–8)
• Defining Literacy in a Digital World (9–College)

It’s unlikely that every student will have access to an e-book reader like the Kindle or Nook in today’s classroom. But every student can get beyond the notion that the only kind of book worth reading is dog-eared and bathtub-ready.

Top Blog Entries of 2009

Year-end summaries are checkpoints for teachers. While it may be the end of the calendar year, we’re at the midpoint of the school year. It’s the perfect moment to reflect on where we’ve been and adjust for the second half of the academic year.

Of the 49 entries published this year, these were the most popular with readers:

1. Five Ways to Learn about Students This Fall (August 18)
2. Three Simple Things You Can Do to Improve Writing (February 24)
3. Building Community in 15 Minutes a Day (August 4)
4. What's the Best Plagiarism Detector? (November 3)
5. Five Things I've Gained from Reading Literature (April 28)
6. Writing Poetry: Putting Chaos into Perspective (March 24)
7. What’s on Your Summer Writing List? (May 19)
8. 21 Great Library Links (with Related Classroom Activities!) (September 1)
9. Wordle and the Inauguration (January 27)
10. Daring to Disturb the Universe (April 7)

So what can we take away from 2009? What will matter as we go forward? What do these entries tell us? The top blog entries of 2009 show that we are interested in connecting with students, building lively literacy communities, and finding the best strategies to support readers and writers.

There may have been some chaos. There have certainly been challenges. But we teachers are always willing to look for something better, a new way, or a more effective solution. Most importantly, we dare to disturb the universe. We push students into those dissonant places where learning happens—and we provide them the support and encouragement they need to grow as readers and writers. Here’s to an even more daring 2010!

A Look Back at 2009: Meeting Professional Learning Goals

‘Tis the season for year-end best-of retrospectives, and though I’m not a film critic or Amazon editor, I’ve got a list of my own to share. I’m fortunate that this year has brought me enough positive professional development experiences that I’m able to recommend three of them in this, my last INBOX blog of 2009.

Certainly each of these recommended NCTE resources is of exceptional quality in its own right, and I’m confident you’ll find something of value in them. But what makes these three my top NCTE resources for the year is the way in which they met specific professional development needs and goals I’d set for myself: assisting my district’s efforts to reform English curriculum, learning about Young Adult literature to share with my struggling readers, and promoting a building-wide culture of literacy and learning.

In order corresponding to those goals, then, here are three 2009 NCTE resources worth checking out:

Bruce Penniman’s book Building the English Classroom: Foundations, Support, Success
Yes, I blogged about this one last month, but I still contend it’s the best professional book I read in 2009. At once both comprehensive in scope and specific in examples and explanations, Penniman’s discussion of designing a writing program, designing a literature curriculum, and creating an assessment system reinforced what I believed I was doing well, challenged some practices I may want to change, and gave me new insights to approaches I hadn’t even considered. Valuable for new and veteran English teachers alike, this book is one that secondary methods teachers should consider adopting as well.

Jennifer Buehler’s podcast “A Conversation with Matt de la Peña”
Jennifer recommended de la Peña’s second book, Mexican WhiteBoy, in her ReadWriteThink.org Text Messages podcast back in 2008, but it wasn’t until I listened to this October 2009 conversation with the author that I took her for her word and read one of his novels, Ball Don’t Lie. In this episode, she and Matt talk about his writing process and the characters from his newest book, We Were Here, which is on my reading list for winter break—if I can get my copy back from the student who’s already reading it first.

Doug Fisher (and team)’s web seminar “On Teaching Content: Building a Schoolwide Culture”
I’ve mentioned this resource before, too, but like Penniman’s book, it merits a second recommendation. You can access the archived version of this hour-long learning experience to see teachers across subject areas discuss the ways in which instructional routines develop students understanding about content. You’ll also see and hear from students in these teachers’ classrooms who can attest to the benefits of these approaches to building vocabulary and background knowledge and promoting learning through writing.

With your learning goals for 2010 in mind, I encourage you to check out the resources I’ve recommended and peruse the NCTE and ReadWriteThink.org websites for other professional learning materials that can help you help students succeed!

How to Move Closer to School 2.0

William Kist’s “From Web 2.0 to School 2.0: Tales from the Field” includes vignettes of teachers across the United States using digital technologies to connect students to one another and to the texts that they explore.

The remarkable thing about the activities Kist describes is not the technology the teachers use. The social networking tools he discusses are widely available to anyone with a computer and an Internet connection. Sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Wikipedia are part of everyday conversations. They’re mentioned on television and radio regularly, seen in newspaper ads and on billboards, and even plastered on the sides of products you pick up in department and grocery stores.

It’s not availability that makes these social networks a significant tool in the classroom. Simply adding digital technologies doesn't guarantee an empowering, student-centered pedagogy. Read the recent Edutopia article “Skip the Sub and Teach with Twitter” to see what I mean. The teacher in the article functions as the traditional sage-on-stage. She’s just controlling the class from a distance, even down to the point of telling a student to stop talking. Twitter could easily be replaced with a telephone and the same teaching would have resulted.

To move closer to School 2.0, teachers and students need to rethink the classroom. I recently watched the GRITtv interview Clay Shirky: The Social Media Revolution, which colleague Chris Boese blogged about. GRITtv Interviewer Laura Flanders captures the challenge of building School 2.0 when she asks Shirky, “How do we help new tools really be voices for new ideas and new populations and new ways of looking at things and not the same old power struggles?”

That’s the question we need to ask in the classroom: How can we use social networking tools, or Web 2.0, to bring out new voices and ideas, rather than repeat the same old power struggles and pedagogy? What steps can we take to bring the social media revolution to the classroom (and not simply digitize the sage-on-stage tradition)?

There are three important things we can do in response that will help us rethink the classroom and move closer to School 2.0.

1. Ask Students for Suggestions

When we look at the classroom, we often see only what’s obvious. We need to see the wider range of possibilities. The solution is simple. Just ask students to list the social networking tools and technology they have access to and then ask them what they could do with these tools in the classroom.

We need to ask students to help us see the classroom in new ways, ways we have never thought of. This kind of rethinking and re-envisioning is the crux of the social media revolution. To show you what I mean, let me borrow a quotation from Boese’s blog, related to how Twitter works:

The simplicity of Twitter, of course, is its genius. It has the power to do so much by doing so little. But that’s not the only thing that’s simple about Twitter. The service itself was only intended to share 140-character messages with the world. Its significance is its evolution. Everything from @replying and retweeting to using hashes and symbols can be attributed to the users. It has brilliantly allowed users to define it – almost entirely. As Shirky points out, “Most of the uses of Twitter were not imagined by the designers of the service – they were managed by the users of the service.”

When we ask students how they would use social networking tools in the classroom, we encourage them to take the step that Twitter users took. We ask them to imagine ways of communicating that we haven't thought of—and we encourage them to take the steps necessarily to make that communication happen.

2. Look for Roadmaps

New directions require new roadmaps. Don’t panic when you find you don’t know how to do all the things students want to try in the classroom. Look to the work of other teachers already on the way to School 2.0.

Kist links to a number of tools you can use in his article. You may pursue your own dedicated Ning or contribute to an existing resource like Wikipedia. Either way, consider Kist’s descriptions of how these tools have been used can serve as potential models for the classes you teach.

Additionally, check out resources on the ReadWriteThink site:

• Try the Naming in a Digital World: Creating a Safe Persona on the Internet lesson plan to work through online safety concerns.
• Use the Modern-Day Interpretation Projects from the Star-Crossed Lovers Online  lesson to encourage students to rethink the texts they read. The handout is general and can be used with any text (not just with Romeo and Juliet).
• Build class wikis with A Collaboration of Sites and Sounds: Using Wikis to Catalog Protest Songs.
• Invite students to tell stories in podcasts with the Audio Broadcasts and Podcasts: Oral Storytelling and Dramatization lesson plan.
• Create persuasive podcasts with Campaigning for Fair Use: Public Service Announcements on Copyright Awareness.
• Get started with blogs by asking students to keep Weekly Writer’s Blogs.

Finally, look for support among other teachers. Join the NCTE Ning and ask your questions (or share your fears). Chances are someone will be able to help you!

3. Encourage and Support Trial and Error

There’s no one right way to do things when you’re working with social networks. What works for one person (or class), may not work at all for another. You will only find the best fit if you are willing to try, retry, rearrange, modify, and customize the ways that you use Web 2.0 tools in the classroom.

Look back to that quotation from Boese’s blog. What has made Twitter an active social networking tool isn’t its original design, but Twitter’s evolution in the hands of its users. Twitter users try out new tools and new ways of encoding their messages all the time. The techniques that work best stick. Ways that don’t work are dropped. When something better comes along, people switch and begin using it instead.

It’s the same for those of us moving toward School 2.0. We’ll only find the best ways to use social networking in the classroom if we are willing to evolve. We have to help students develop, test, and rethink their use of digital technologies, and we have to remind them constantly that there is no one right way to use social networks. School 2.0 is one place where it has to be okay to fail. Indeed, it’s a place where failure is actually a sign of progress.

Rethink. Evolve. School 2.0.

Kist tells us that ”In this new media age, it seems we are all not only constantly recipients of messages but creators of them as well.” That simple truth is also secret of School 2.0. Once we invite students to help us rethink and evolve the ways we communicate in the classroom, we can move closer to School 2.0. And when that happens, students are no longer simply “recipients” of educational messages and literacy instruction. They are, in fact, “creators” of education and literacy as well. That shift is ultimately what moves us all closer to School 2.0.