Matteson Illinois School District 162: Making a Difference

Reflective teachers consider individual consequences and deliberate ethical and moral implications

Last Monday and Tuesday, I worked with the Matteson District 162 teachers at Huth Middle School in Matteson, Illinois. Matteson is a large elementary with a sixty-percent low income demographic among an enrollment about 3200 students. However, the seven schools consistently make AYP, with more than 80% meeting and exceeding state standards in 2008.

Reflective teachers consider moral and ethical implications!

Teachers need time to talk and practice problem solving issues of buildings and classrooms

How do they do it? Being a newcomer to the district, I can’t say “for sure” but after meeting more than one-hundred of their teachers, I believe part of their success is grounded in an educational willingness to look through new eyes at what might seem to be recurring issues. One of the workshops I led was entitled “Becoming a Reflective Teacher.” More than 60 teachers signed up for the workshop and that says something about the willingness of an educational staff to see things in new ways. We had fun in the workshop solving the age old problem of which way to place toilet paper on the roll; the fun was an entryway into reflecting on classroom methods, building and facility considerations, and climate and culture: discipline issues. If you are interested in pursuing Reflective Teaching with your staff, in your building, or within your department, a practical text I recommend is Promoting Reflective Thinking in Teachers: 50 Action Strategies by Taggert and Wilson, published by Corwin Press.

At the end of every school  year, the teachers are offered a series of professional development workshops to attend over a period of five days.  The offerings range from technology to mentoring to professional reflection to differentiated instruction. Because the district is K-8, the sessions are also designed for specific grade-level teachers. The second day, I offered workshops in differentiated instruction: 12 Effective Differentiated Methods. For the most part, this a “bang! bang! bang!” workshop.  I quickly introduce the activity or method and the group practices how it plays out through some authentic text or mathematical problem.

Teachers practice the strategties for a real feel of engagement level.

Word sorts can also be used as a preassessment of background knowledge and a formative assessment for progress

All Brag….

My roses have never been so beautiful! Although I have been bemoaning  the cool rainy days of June, my roses, once silent, are shouting in bloom their pleasure with this year’s spring.

Even clippings from faded blooms arrange themselves for a portrait shoot!

Bummed About Gcast

I am a bit behind the announcement, but Gcast no longer provides a free podcasting service via your telephone. I don’t have the facts on why the April change in the way of business was made, but I do know that now, to use Gcast as your podcasting upload service via telephone interphase (like that language?), it will cost you about $100. Bummer for me and for kids. Of course, you can use Audacity or other open source audio recorders for free downloading of podcast capable text, but Gcast was so simple….I mourn its loss.

I’m still here: Writing Middle-School Reading Curriculum

 I know it may seem as though I’ve “gone away” but I’m still here. I have been busy updating my webpage (but my webmaster has gone on vacation), finishing the last couple of weeks in my stats class, and trying to keep up with the work my teachers create during weekly curricululm writing sessions. I’ve also presented for two Illinois state conferences: Illinois Reading Council and the Illinois Coalition for Educating At-Risk Youth (ICEAERY) over several days.  But all in all, life is just getting in the way of my blogging. And I’ve decided…I try to write too much. But I want my blogs to be worthy of your time, so I try to incorporate valuable information, visual images, and personal insights….wow! can that be draining….all grammatically correct! I am an English teacher!

Okay, so what are the insights here? Well, I’ve been working this spring in Southern Illinois with a sixth grade reading teacher who has not had her own materials. The literature series that the school uses is available, but no one seems to like it…perhaps because it’s dated and perhaps because the stories are canonical, have little relationship to the real lives of kids– dated also in the context of best practices. So, we started working on developing a 6th grade reading curriculum that was built around genre and comprehension strategy instruction using differentiated methodologies. Using the Backwards by Design approach, we built one unit…then we needed to find the texts and decide on differentiation methods.  My teacher saw that this process wasn’t going to be just a day or two and frustration began to set in.

Then Treasures fell into our laps. Now, I will tell you, I am not a great fan of textbooks–they suggest too much for a single lesson, both in content and skills and they offer too little. I avoided them like the plague when I taught, especially teacher editions. Treasures does that, too–suggests too much coverage of material, packs too many strategies into a single lesson, but on the other hand,  it comes through much of the time with some good supports for differentiating instruction. I wouldn’t buy the program in its entirety, another pitfall because some of what looks good needs this piece or that piece, but since it (like all textbooks) pushes too much in too little time, you can pick and choose. On the whole, if you, as a teacher want to differentiate reading instruction, have little time to plan a customize a curriculum for your school culture and intend to follow through by reading the work of differentiating gurus, like Carol Ann Tomlinson, Betty Hollas, Katherine McKnight, Rick Wormeli, then Treasure may be the series for you.

Response to Intervention: A Call for Educational Excellence

If you teach, you have heard of RtI: Response to Intervention, the most recent initiative or call to action on the educational front. Although a succinct acronym, the evolving concept of RtI is all encompassing. Initially, RtI was a practical response to the growing numbers of students placed in special education programs. Why? Prior to the 2004 reauthorization of NCLB, students receiving special education services had to demonstrate their need for specialized instruction by having failed in the classroom. That is not the legal-ease, but essentially that is what was happening. This approach, as antithetical as it seems, resulted in appropriate placement coming too late for some and inappropriate placement for others. Students really needing special services had fallen too far behind to catch up and students who were in need of additional learning support were placed in a program that labeled and limited their actual potential.

Anyway, let’s not dwell on things that were done…let’s talk about how the business of education is going to move forward. A long history of educational research informs teachers and administrators alike about the relationship between success and continuing academic motivation. Student failure undermines confidence and lack of confidence undermines motivation and performance. Surrounding that circumstance is a growing knowledge and skills gap between what struggling students know and can do and what successful students have been able to master. Such a gap only deepens the challenge of what struggling students need to learn.

And therein lay the opportunities of RtI. Instead of waiting for kids to fail, RtI implores us to look for kids flailing in educational waters and throw them a lifeline before the tide carries them out of the educational mainstream and into uncharted seas. RtI asks us to look for warnings of distress among all students and when finding kids who struggle to keep their heads above water, examine not only the student, but also the delivery system that seems to be failing their individual needs.

I will admit that early in my educational career, if most of my students failed a test or performed dismally, I blamed them: they didn’t study; they didn’t try hard enough; they hadn’t learned the prerequisite knowledge that would make them successful—I blamed the teacher that came before me. But none of that matters! If most kids can’t make achievement gains in a given classroom, the problem is not with the students, the problem lays in the teacher’s hands or head or attitude.

For regular education teachers, especially at the middle and high school levels, RtI is a hard pill to swallow. For many secondary educators, there is a tacit expectation that students arrive in our classrooms with a body of background knowledge acquired through their earlier years of schooling; however, the broadening gaps in student knowledge and skills

Danger Lurks in the Cold of Night

The lone survivors of a frosty, midnight attack...reunited.

Although all the birds are domesticated, the ducks can fly, albeit briefly, just above the trees.

 

Like everywhere else in the country, it has been cold here…downright frigid. We reached a low this month of -27, tying an all-time record. I’ve managed to stay warm with an electric heater in my office and a well-stoked fireplace. But my worry has been for my outdoor friends.

 We live on three acres of hilly, rural property bordered by a fresh water creek overgrown with bramble and wild flowering crab trees. Alongside the creek is an island sanctuary, created some twenty years ago by my father-in-law. The sanctuary is a small island surrounded by a moat, something like a little pond where birds, wild and domestic can safely nest or flee the terror of coyotes, plentiful here in the hog and corn country of the Midwest.

Canadian geese nest each year at the hatching place of the female.

We built our house on a hill just above the wild-life shelter ten years ago and enjoyed watching the Canadian Geese that flew in every March, nested as pairs, and disappeared shortly thereafter, following the creek north to a larger body of water, a lake, where their families grew through the summer. In the fall, they migrated south and we again awaited their spring return.

I so enjoyed the geese, that I bought White China Geese, domestic birds that cannot fly and so will never migrate from me. I order the geese through a catalog and they arrive on a scheduled plan through the mail. Once here, we nurture their growth in a cattle trough with a light bulb dangling overhead until they are strong enough to survive the elements on their own…a couple of weeks. When that day comes, they are put into the sanctuary to make friends with whomever else may come along, Canadian Geese and unknown ducks and herons that drop by for a visit. I usually have to teach them how to get into the water and hopefully learn to save themselves from the dangers of nature: raccoons, turtles, and other critters that crawl through the wild wire that banishes coyotes and other larger prey from the habitat.

 Just before the weather went south, so to speak on the thermometer, I was commenting to my husband on how beautiful our geese looked on new-fallen snow. If it weren’t for their bright orange beaks and webbed feet, they would go unnoticed against the winter backdrop. How humanly naive I was!

 
The coldness of this winter weather and the beautiful blanket white have joined with the coyotes in a war against my birds! Hungry, the coyotes have become even more cunning in their search for food and last week, several were able to break into the sanctuary and challenge the safety of the China White Geese.  The Geese need open water for safety, but the bone-chilling cold had frozen the pond fully over.  In the morning, when I looked to the pond  could see where the geese tried to escape into the open water, but the water, no longer open, was no longer their refuge; instead the winter freeze and the yipping coyotes had united to destroy my birds, some of whom I had tended for six or seven years

Well, I won’t belabor the story. One of the geese survived and begged me to free it from the refuge that had now become a holding room for the condemned. I opened the gate and freed it to the creek and for hours, it honked (the truly honk!) for friends now gone. One lone surviving goose. I was equally heartbroken. I checked on it hourly, even as the temperatures hovered below the zero mark. Finally, it lost its voice!
 
The next day, a full forty-eight hours after the murderous blitz of the coyotes, I heard another honking…and I followed the call into the wooded area running between the cornfield and creek. There, I found a second survivor…a White China Goose, waddling through the bramble of multi-flower rose, weak but alive.

In -20 degree temperature, I coaxed my first found goose down the creek bed to reunite the pair of old friends. It wasn’t easy. The goose I had first discovered was scared and didn’t want to move upstream. The goose I had just found was weak, so weak, he limped and lumbered; he didn’t want to move, but somehow, he had survived while his friends were savagely killed and eaten. Some left for dead, their bodies mangled but not consumed. I literally crawled beneath the overgrown brambles, coaxing the birds to move and meet. My work was rewarded. They came together and happily so!
 
I have been worried, sure the coyotes would return. But nearly two weeks have passed and still the White China Geese float on the creek, now enjoying the corn we have placed along the banks to save them from venturing out for food.

New Year–New Approach for Assessment

Many educators feel under pressure to provide daily grades for students, but is that kind of pressure conducive to evaluation? I don’t think so…not for teachers and not for students. I don’t want to be measured or evaluated everyday, and neither do students; moreover, daily grades are, by the nature of their chronology, scores acquired prior to the achievement of learning. Too often, daily grades are formative assessments misused to inform final grades rather than inform ongoing instruction.

So what’s the answer? One very practical approach that I used was “Notebook Scoring Day.” Students keep all of their graphic organizers, quizzes, notes and journals in a well-organized learning source (notebook).  Each two weeks or ten days, we would score the learning source (notebook)as a peer activity led by me, the teacher. I provide overheads exemplifying graphic organizer completion; I provide guidance as to the evauluation of journal entries; I point out essential aspects of adequate note-taking and students evaluate one another’s learning source based on quick read scoring. Some of the pieces included in learning source evaluation have already been scored by me, the teacher, but students are offered a “second chance” by making suggested corrections or edits noted in their feedback. This sort of scoring validate revision and correction while reinforcingthe learning process as recursive rather than linear in nature. On the chart below, notebook scoring would be placed just before portfolio–it is a compilation of self-assessment, informal feedback and rubric scoring.  Moreover, the nature of the assessment validates every learner with responsibility while allowing them views into how others complete like assignments and demonstrate proficiency. 

 In edtech literature, the process is assisted with technonogy and labelled assessment management. Although the process is reminiscnet of the portfolio, assessment management is more about formative assessment of learning than expressions of self. Through this less threatening and scaffolded assessment process, confidence is built and learning is made more effective.

Formative assessment enables students to improve on their levels of achievement prior to summative evaluation or grading.

 

Assessment management is a combination of self-assessment and teacher facilitation. The process focuses on student identificatoin of strengths and learning needs. As units progress, artifacts of practice and assessments are kept ”on file” in the student’s source book as a baseline measure of individual achievement which illustrates intellectual and skill growth.

The point is…instead of putting a score in a grade book everyday as work is completed, credit for work comes later as that work evolves from information into knowledge through feedback and intellectual / emotional change. Assessment management, somewhat like portfolios, values the process of learning by retaining pieces illustrating that learning; however, unlike portfolios, assessment management assesses artifacts primarily selected by teachers based on unit and learning objectives as the element of value.

An initial list of differences between portfolios and assessment systems:
	Portfolio	Assessment Management System
Purpose	Multiple purposes: Learning, Assessment, Employment	Single purpose: Formative and Summative Assessment
Audience	Potential for employers, future classrooms and teachers, etc.	Current classroom peers and teacher
Type of Data	Primary type of data: qualitative	Primary type of data: qualitative and quantitative
Locus of control	Student-centered	Institution-centered
Selection of Contents	Artifacts selected by portfolio developer	Artifacts prescribed by institution
Skills required	More advanced skills required, including varietal examples of content mastery	State and district standards measured; skills demonstrating all levels of accomplishment
Competency demonstrated	Medium to high, depending on tools used to create portfolio	Minimal skills rewarded; aims at sophistication

Technology and Understanding

After developing a conceptual argument through a Foucauldean lens, I sorted the language through Wordle for motifs and themes.

 

Checkout Wordle! This website is an easy way to create a visual representation of words through “clouds.” I tripped over this website while reading Jan Hart’s blog, E-Learning Pick of the Day (check this blog out!). Once I had seen and used Wordle, I couldn’t stop thinking about where its place was in the reality of our classrooms and it seems to me that we can use it to engage students in applying reading comprehension stratagies.

How to do that? The Wordle cloud is concept map of recurring words within a text; recurring words are signals for main ideas. After reading, have students identify main ideas and then sort the text words through Wordle to monitor conclusions. The word cloud can be used before reading, too, as a tool to activate prior knowledge and establish connections. The cloud can even inflence how kids visualize connections as they develop inferences.

The image above is the result of Wordle’s sifting of the words from a recent paper I wrote. The process is simple–you just insert text and Wordle does the rest. I copied and pasted my entire paper into the Wordle service space and Wordle did the rest, sifting through my langauge to arrive at a cloud representation of the ideas. Look at the Wordle and draw some conclusions about my paper and then read through my blog to see if the message I send in paragraph form has any semblance of the graphic you see above.

The Wordle graphic above is a conceptual representation of a theoretical argument regarding the efficacy of RtI: Response to Intervention.  I have spent much time this fall researching Response to Intervention as part of a doctoral class: Moral and Political Foundations of Educational Policy. The goal of the course was to examine the role of social and cultural theory in contemporary education. As a result, I spent hours reading and analyzing how educational theory affects practical application of policy and eventually classroom methodology, especially in how such theory plays out in meeting today’s challenge of the growing achievement gap.

One of the scariest acronyms in public education today is RtI: Response to Intervention. Really, as with anything else, it’s not the acronym that frightens, but the simplicity of nominalizing a complex, permeating educational approach. Cloaked in terminology like “individualized” and “achievement,” RtI aims at conformity and mediocrity in its quest to bring learners into the mainstream of educational thought and expectations.

Although RtI is not new, the method is new to many classroom teachers who have been teaching whole class style for years. The method is theoretically positive but practically, requires retraining and practice for teachers. The positive part of RtI is the benefit it potentially offers for all learners: find a learner’s specific need/s and learning styles and then use that information to build the bridge of understanding and excellence.

 

However, if used merely to meet mandated levels of AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress), RtI becomes just another “and this too shall pass” bandage on a chronically diseased system. To be effective, RtI requires professional development for teachers as they learn to approach whole class instruction with an eye for the particular and individualized. It also demands support for these teachers in terms of time and encouragement as they reshape habituated methods into new “best practices.” In an absence of time and money, i.e. support, the concept of RtI intimidates classroom teachers, building administrators, and educational theorists.

Let’s Get Critical!

I have discovered my new favorite literacy workshop: Critical Literacy!! The idea of critical literacy is to read between the lines, to look for alternative points-of-view, to identify who is left out of text, to consider multiple perspectives; that kind of reading generates controversy and controversy engenders engagement and engagement raises the learning curve and the achievement bar!

A good article on the subject by Maureen McLaughlin and Glenn DeVoogd can be found in IRA’s Journal of Adult and Adolescent Literacy 48:1, September 2004 and an effective lesson on the subject is available at ReadWriteThink: Critical Literacy and Women in the 19th Century. Another website that has both information and lessons comes from Tasmania, The English Learning Area. And finally, a more academic article: “A Tale of Differences: Comparing the Traditions, Perspectives, and Educational Goals of Critical Reading and Critical Litercy” by Gina Cervetti, Michael Pardales, and James Damico.

I approach Critical Literacy is through a three-step process, moving from images, to engaging text and finally to content print materials. I suggest this method because words don’t get in the way…students are forced to make meaning with only visual clues…well, and of course, schema! That approach levels the playing field for students who are able to think and analyze beyond their reading levels. Most students and adults seem at greater ease when they are able to try out various meanings and points-of-view with images than they are with print text.

I start with a cartoon or caricature related to the content area or theme or lesson and get students to engage in careful and scrutinizing questions about the visual representation as the foundation of meaning making:

· Whose point-of-view is at work in the image?

· What emboldens an artist to portray this type of image?

· What does the artist expect others to see?

· How are expectations and actual responses different from one another?

Of course, this is not a complete list of questions…this is only fodder for kids to get started and begin to discuss who is left out of the joke or who is the brunt of the satire. Then the discussion goes on to why this happens and how or what we should do about it…political and social activism.

From there, I move to a print medium, but an engaging texts…a fractured fairytale like the True Story of the Three Little Pigs, a poem or short story that has a grabber at the end…if not the beginning. Get them using the same questioning strategy to explore print text: whose point-of-view is at work? How doe varying points-of-view change the story? Whose point-of-view is more valuable” Whose point-of-view is easier to hear or listen to? Why? Again, not an all inclusive list, but a start. An activity that extends that reading can be the creation of a new point-of-view…using the initial genre as a model or developing the new point-of-view in a new genre–use the poem to generate a fractured fairy-tale…

Finally, content text…and now the process is a skill or at least near skill and kids can begin to really question text and in their questioning make information knowledge…accessible and useable!

NCTE San Anotonio–Shift Happens

The river was one reason the Alamo was located amidst what is now modern San Antonio...

Saturday morning at NCTE was a tough one for me.  I was exhausted and as a result, I missed the 8:000 am presentation by Karl Fish–a major regret because I use his youtube.video (posted at the bottom of today’s blog) as a wake-up call to teacher and others who just don’t get the power of technology in a rapidly changing world. By the way, the posted video is an update of the original, so don’t assume you’ve already seen it! Which causes me to reflect again…where was Vicki Davis? I wonder if the NCTE organizers approached her about representing the practitioners’ view of edtech pedagogy as it intersects the field of English studies: reading and writing in the vast and uncharted territories of Web 2.0?

Saturday’s highlight came late in the day at the 10th Annual Middle School Mosaic. Sara Kajder shared some marvelous edtech ideas and though the crowd was rather despondent (evidently exhaustion was not a unique experience), everyone valued her sharing. There were no roundtable discussions, atypical of the middle school mosaic, but those who voiced their absence also expressed their satisfaction with the session as a whole. Kylene Beers addressed us with the frankness and sincerity that is her hallmark as she voiced her passion and pledged her dedication to work towards change in the social inequities of education and learning opportunities.

Especially poignant were the student multimedia presentations from the 2007 California Teacher of the Year’s Hispanic students. I am not surprised by the quality and the depth of their creativity and emotional sensitivity. You see, I have seen this before; I have taught this way for years, even before the widespread availability of technology. We can do it teachers… but we must make the attempt. Enthusiasm and well-placed intentions will not get the job done. You, yes you, must dig your heels in and give it a try, even when it feels uncomfortable….and it will. Admit to your students this is a trial run and lighten the constraints of fore-knowledge on your teaching. Get into the “flow” of learning beside and among your students rather than in front of them.

And there was more…Sara Holbrook who not only writes for kids, but actually visits classrooms and teaches kids how to become writers themselves. Always uplifting, her poetry is at the same time physical and emotional….just what kids need. And let’s see…Robert Probst who I have never seen in a more amusing state. Of course I don’t know Robert except as a speaker (or rather sage) on the stage or the writer of respected texts…but this evening he was amusing as he poked fun at his age through the evolution of technology. I think I could pass his PowerPoint off as my own…I too began with pen and paper, only later to welcome the technologic advance of a weighty and stiff machine that looked like a minature upright piano and we called a typewriter. I feel so blessed to no longer compose by hand!!

I am far too long and haven’t mentioned everyone who was there…but some I’ve already blogged about…like my among my favorites, Teri Lesesne who must be reading in her sleep to keep up with all of the YA literature she critiques for those of us in the field!