Why on Earth am I doing this?
That's a good question!
This, of all years, should not have been the time to undertake a radical shift in thinking and practice.
This, of all years, when we embarked, as a staff, upon yet another administrative team change ... a brand new process of thinking in terms of our school culture and climate ... another clean slate.
The fourth clean slate in as many years.
Ahhh ... but, I would argue, when is there a better time?
As a naive first year teacher, I remember telling a colleague, "If I ever quit rethinking my craft, that is the time someone needs to hand me a box and tell me to start packing up my teacher stuff."
I would say that I still believe much the same thing today. Every year, as I reflect upon my teaching practice, I look to what I've done in my classroom to shape what I will do in the future.
Three years ago, during one of those reflective points in the year, I began questioning my pedagogy as it related to reading and writing. Perhaps, more specifically, I started questioning why my pedagogical philosophy had aligned itself to the wrong-headed thinking of many in my district at the time, rather than calibrate to what I knew intuitively was best practice. It wasn’t that I was becoming complacent. I knew what was appropriate, best practice. I think, I had just accepted my lot in life, as dramatic as that may sound, and I did what was expected of me. Accepted practice and best practice are often two completely different beasts, as we educators all inherently know.
What started the questioning? I was witnessing my students struggle to comprehend what they were reading, struggle to write something that made sense to them, struggle to meet standards, and then struggle with their failure when none of their work met the standards.
Most of my students have come from insurmountable challenges, or so the outside world would say. They have come from single parent homes, where education is looked upon, oftentimes, as an obligation not a privilege. Education takes a back seat to survival. Despite these odds, I was convinced that my kids could do this! I was convinced my students could read a text critically, analyze that text, speak about it in articulate terms, and demonstrate their understanding through writing.
A friend began helping me rework my thought process by pointing me in the direction of Dave Stuart, Jr., a teacher in Michigan, who was using what he knew to be good, solid, research-based teaching that likely flew in the face of what was accepted practice.
Reading what Stuart was doing in his classroom, a high school classroom, caused me to begin taking what I knew to be right and reshape it in terms of how it could fit into my elementary classroom. Reading Stuart caused me to also look to Kelly Gallagher, a major influence on Stuart’s classroom practice.
It's a good thing I did!
If anything has shaped my teaching in the last few years, it has been Kelly Gallagher's Readicide: How Schools are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About it.
Gallagher wrote, "In the quest to raise scores and make teachers and administrators look good, our students are paying the price. Simply, curriculum driven by multiple-choice assessments creates an oxymoron: many students are drowning in shallow 'water'. When instruction is driven by narrow assessment, instruction itself is narrowed."
In a nutshell, Gallagher summed up my struggle with my students. They didn't want to read past the surface; so, they didn't understand the past the surface. Therefore, they couldn't write past the surface. My students had been drowning in a shallow pool, in part, created by myself. This was the keystone to my journey.
Dr. Ron Chi, an administrator and liaison for Kentucky State University and Frankfort Independent, encouraged me to become a part of the Adolescent Literacy Project, sponsored by KSU, last summer. I'd been itching to read Beers' and Probst's collaborative text, Notice and Note, after a conversation with a friend about my study of close reading. Call it divine providence, but when I walked into the room that first day, what to my wondering eyes should appear? Only Notice and Note!
I'd heard much about Kyleen Beers and Robert Probst's work in schools dealing with Close Reading. They were getting kids, just like mine, to really dig deeply into a text in order to demonstrate their learning. I devoured that book!
As an added bonus, Beers and Probst were both slated to be keynote speakers at the Kentucky Reading Association's annual conference in Louisville, Kentucky -- and I got the privilege of attending KRA's conference! Not only were they the keynote speakers, Bears and Probst also held an extended break-out session wherein they took us through numerous strategies that they have kids do on a regular basis.
The entire conversation centered around getting kids from the shallow pool we have them wallowing in, to a deeper, richer place where student begin to, on their own, note items that cause them to question, that shock them, that anger them. The annotation strategies Beer and Probst guided us through during that conference were strategies they have guided countless students through -- they provided tangible evidence that students’ questions about the text held significance. While hanging on their every word during one particular extended session, I realized that I could do this with my students!
In the midst of all of that, I was also asked to be a part of CTEPS. This program was the vehicle to really focus on those teaching critical reading skills.
So what did I do?
- I had to start by just getting them used to reading a text more than once. This, alone, was a difficult task. I received a lot of push back on “having to read a text over and over again … how boring!” However, after we did this a few times, collectively, they realized just how valuable this practice could be. Many told me, as we worked through a text, that they had missed certain aspects in the first read through.
- I taught them how to annotate or mark those areas on the text to which they somehow reacted. That practice was fun to watch, because in doing so, they started having organic conversations about rich topics, none of which were guided by myself!
- I started asking questions that directed them into interesting conversations. I realized very quickly that they they needed to talk out their thoughts before they put them down on paper. To a certain extent, this was a form of graphic organization for each class.
- I guided them through the four types of writing and how we attack each type. We began formulating our written words after having lots of discussion.
It has been not an easy road. There are days I've wondered if it was even possible to achieve. However, reading my students' writing .... watching them attack a text with their notes that they scribble as they notice things as they read ... discussing with me and their peers concepts in a given text ... it's at those moments I realize that all the frustration is worth it.
Critical reading is absolutely necessary for critical thinking, and critical thinking is a must for critical writing!
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