Day Two at IRA

Georgia World Congress Center, the host of this year’s IRA Convention, is as expansive as the ideas about literacy that we are sharing with teachers, researchers, and educational publishers from around the country and the world. The message of this year’s workshops is not about the conventional teaching of reading with a focus on strategies or silent sustained reading or text based writing as in the past. Rather, this year’s focus is on conversations that engage thinking noting that only through thinking can students really acquire and retain knowledge, or learning.

So I thought that was pretty cool. I have always believed that kids need to be allowed to talk through their reading and share their reactions rather than complete worksheets that ask for regurgitation, superficial responses or literal text information. I spoke briefly with Kathy Collins Block about her work in setting two process goals to improve comprehension—this too is essential to active thinking. We are always multitasking, sometimes without even being cognizant of the complexities in the tasks we are processing. And today’s students are stimulated by the very act of multiprocessing.

It’s been a good day…learning and laughing with Harvey Daniels, Stephanie Harvey, and Anne Goudvis in their presentation, ”Active Learning through Inquiry and Investigation”; engaging in a new poetic genre, “Practical Poetry” and feeling hope for my latest passion: incorporating wikis and blogs in the improvement of reading comprehension and response! Harvey Daniels has a great sense of humor and a knack of pulling out the most apropos cartoons that simultaneously convey message and lighten moods. Though this is not one of the cartoons he used, I thought this was good. Where can you go to get cartoons to bring humor to classroom and faculty meetings? Just google: political cartoon, educational cartoons, and on and on. Some require permission and some don’t.

What else…raise the bar! Stephanie Harvey spoke of using nonfiction texts that are above your students’ reading levels to engage them in important issues. In order to get kids to question texts, there must be something controversial and / or interesting enough to question. That may require that teachers use topically current events—and those texts often scaffold the reader’s comprehension through pictures, captions, graphs, etc.

Frank Serafini, in a separate presentation, echoed the thoughts of Harvey Daniels and Stephanie Harvey. He, too, emphasized that the more controversial the text, the better it was for teaching. A point well made–when are we most engaged with any idea….when we are trying to convince people to see things our way. As Serafini said, “What is there to discuss in Brown Bear, Brown Bear? Where is the controversy or the surprise?” To engage kids in reading, there must be purpose for the reading and that purpose has to be more than a Friday quiz!

The emphasis is shifting from text to text talk and that talk includes connections through personal response, something teachers rarely have time to illicit in today’s high stakes testing environment. the message is, “Take the time. The learning payoff is greater than that of test prep!”

On a personal note, I made a number of new friends in the last twenty four hours: Melissa and Kevin with National Geographic; Jackie from Phoenix with Weekly Reader; Associate Professor Alice Klos from St. Cloud State University; Harriet and Taylor from Jackson Academy in Mississippi. Jackie and I talked at length about job satisfaction which I connected to another topic that in on the educational rise: caring. We must care about our students, but as teachers, we need to feel cared about ourselves. And that then goes to the community and administration. In order to make this whole educational structure nurture learning and humanness, we must begin to care about one another: students and teachers. It is not a one way street. Taylor and Harriet, reinforced this theme. They teach at what I infer to be a very caring school. They repeatedly credited administration as being supportive and that, let me tell you, is not something I always hear from teachers. We need to care more about one another, not only in the school setting but in the setting of life. And I found that all of those who have gone out of their way to strike up and engage in coversation with me over the last few days have had that sense of caring….humph, could I conclude caring is the nature of teachers?!