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

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

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!

Connecting to Make a Difference

Once each group generated separate lists, the time came to select this month's group of 30 words for direct instruction!

[caption id="attachment_157" align="aligncenter" width="128" caption="Music, art and reading joined together to generate their list of "should know" words."][/caption][caption id="attachment_156" align="alignleft" width="225" caption="Language arts teachers work together compiling their list of tier two words"][/caption]
I can’t believe how fast the time passes! I have been taking my camera to this month’s workshops, intending to capture the work teachers are doing, but on too many occasions, the workshop ends and I haven’t taken the camera out of the bag. During my visit to Johnston City, I did get some good shots. This is a “hands-on” vocabulary workshop. We began by learning about Isabel Beck’s three tiers of vocabulary and then formed departmental groups to generate lists of words from which we finally created a school wide vocabulary. Teachers in all content areas will teach and reinforce the learning of these thirty words for the next month.

Let me highlight some of what I have learned this month from working with teachers. You need practical applications of classroom practices that work. The extension of this goes into the classroom…kids need practical applications of academic content. For example, I have sometimes made references to my teacher groups about how to manage formative and summative assessment for differentiated instruction. This month, I provided real examples of how to take classroom practices and turn them into data collection models in a real workshop experience. I must say, I felt a sense of professional satisfaction when on my return visit, one of my teachers shared with me her own success in implementing one of my “best practices.” In having a concrete model of a theoretical practice, classroom application took place. That’s what kids need, real-life experience with concepts in order to process information into knowledge and applicable learning.

During a workshop at the Rock Island County Regional Office of Education, I shared an exhilarating time of learning with a new group of teachers. All but two had been teaching for three or fewer years; we were exuberant and the learning was rich. Another tip to take into classroom teaching: learning is best when it is emotionally engaging, passionate, and fun!! Learning is best when our brains are in the state of “flow”!

At two workshops this month, I was pleased to meet up with teachers who had been my own high school students! Both had given me a heads up to their attendance, and I looked forward to those workshops like none other.

Wikipedia: a teaching resource

I am enhancing a workshop that I share with teachers on the classroom use of Wikipedia. Now, you may be surprised at this, but I still encounter teachers who don’t even know what Wikipedia is!! That is shocking, but I value these teachers because anyone who takes the time to attend a workshop on a topic they know nothing about clearly is a learner! I will also note that more and more, when I ask who allows Wikipedia to be used by students for early stage research, more and more teachers are raising their hands.

Anyway, the point is, I found a blog entitled Traffic Statistics for Wikipedia Articles that links to a site, Wikipedia Traffic Statistics, showing the top 500 Wikipedia articles and the number of visits to each of those site by year. From that site, you can visit the actual site…then I suggest you go to the discussion tab and click on that tab to see how reputable the site itself is. Of course, you will see sites that a teacher would never take a student to…however, there are some excellent sites on the list…like Speed of Light which is rated as a “featured” article in Wikipedia which means it has been “peer reviewed” by an editorial board and found to be reputable and even valuable to the field of physics in the accuracy and importance of the information offered.

There is much to learn about Wikipedia and there are many ways that all content areas could be using it to engage their students and increase learning!!! I have been giving a two-hour workshop on using Wikipedia to teach the skills of Critical Literacy. There is so much there, that my workshop will be expanding to a full day to incorporate reading comprehension, Critical Literacy and writing….mulitple literacies using emerging technology!!! I almost put this baby to bed before further investigation. If you are interested in Wikipedia, check this blog out, right here on WordPress: The Way Things Work. And then go to Larry Sanger’s (founder of Wikipedia) new online encyclopedia, Citizendium. The plot thickens and my curiousity is peaked!!

 

 

High School Challenge: Challenging Schools to Challenge their Own Thinking!

Attended a two-day seminar in Bloomington, Illinois this week–the High School Challenge. The event was sponsored by Coalition for Illinois High Schools, a medley of twenty+ educational groups, among them the Illinois Principals Association. The keynote speakers were top-notch: Debra Pickering from Marzano’s think tank in Colorado and Dr. Douglas Reeves, founder of The Leadership and Learning Center. They were an interesting mix….Pickering provided practical examples and Dr. Reeves quoted research complete with citations. More than that, the topics they addressed are real concerns for teacher and administrators in Illinois and around the country.

The focus seemed to be on grading, though topics like vocabulary and gender gaps were part of the discussion. Both speakers addressed some of the minutie that teachers continue to preach and test, and both speakers addressed the challenge of meeting the needs of diverse audiences. Pickering and Reeves both drew on personal stories of their children and how different siblings can be and learn. Part of that discussion comes from Reeves research on 90/90/90 and the myths that low SES and minority kids are destined to perform at levels significanly lower than white middle class kids.

Both speakers offered workable solutions to the current A, B, C, Dilemma. Grades, as they are used today, demoralize some students while giving a false sense of intellectual security to others. Students who both 1) know how and 2) are willing to play the game of school can probably earn grades that will get them a diploma and maybe even garner them college entrance. But the fact of the matter is that most kids today are taking remedial classes in their freshman year either in English, math or both! What does that say about high school math and English?

Part of the discussion over the two day sessions dealt with methods classroom teachers can and should take to not only to more effectively evaluate, but to teach through engagement! Assessment should be a tool for engagement, not the dreaded testing situation that it has been made to be, not just because of NCLB, but through the epochs of testing as we knew it ourselves. Tell me, honestly, who ever looked forward to a test. The greatest concern I usually had was whether the teacher would test over the material that I had studied or would h/se pick some obscure fact or perhaps something not so obscure, but equally out of my reach because the information didn’t resonate with me. Twenty years later, that is my own children’s nightmare before testing. We just don’t learn. (kinda funny, isn’t it…we want our kids to learn what we think is important, but we don’t learn what research and past practice shows us is detrimental to achievement!)

In my last few years of teaching, I worked with a team of teachers on an “integrated curriculum.” We worked as a team incorporating literature, social studies, and science. Amidst that, we ensured that essential vocabulary was taught and that various ways of knowing were actively addressed. And get this…we had NO tests. All grades were based on projects and those projects offered choice both in their composition and in the lengths students chose to go in proving their mastery of content and skill. They were motivated…most of the time. And that, I must say was the finest hour of my teaching, partly due to the results but mostly due to the comradery of teachers and students. We were all learning and we were doing it together.

Back to the “High School Challenge…” One of the ideas I took to in grading was not to list grades in the book by test or quiz and the date, but by what the assessment measured…and that made me wonder why we couldn’t change our grading so that instead of having a composite score for an assessment, why couldn’t we write better assessments that truly measured what we had taught and break our grade books down into those goals rather than dates. Then, in any given assessment, we may be able to measure the students’ level of proficiency that way….once they were proficient in the skill or the knowledge, then move on…or at least they could. One way we lose kids is through repetition. They get tired of making the diorama or learning about the Battle of Gettysburg or defining a simile. Every content area is guilty of redundant malignancy.

Just a few thoughts….

 

 

Literacy on my Mind

I arrived in Atlanta yesterday to attend the IRA (International Reading Association) convention. From the first leg of my journey, good omens flew with me. Although initially ticketed to fly from my home town to Chicago and there catch a connecting flight to Atlanta, I became a benefactor of fate due to unscheduled maintenance on the initial flight. Because of that, I was put on a non-stop flight to Atlanta (good omen #1) and having safetly & swiflty arrived in Atlanta, I struck up conversation with an equally social gentleman (good omen #2) while patiently waiting for the downtown shuttlealongside twenty other reading pilgrims. I was blessed on Saturday afternoon to make the acquaintance of Richard Hodges, author of numerous articles, book chapters and books and cited by others in support of seemingly successful literacy programs, such as Sitton Spelling. My 2008 literacy pilgrimage was off to fine beginnings with stimulating and engaging conversation that included all the elements of a memorable exchange: personal connections, theoretical discussion, pedagogical implications, practitioner application and more personal connections!!

Today, serendipity again had its way, and if you’ve read some of my previous blogs, you know how I appreciate the role of serendipity in my life. I had registered for a Sunday seminar last fall, probably the first week of IRA convention registration and of course chosen a topic that was relevant to where i was in that moment (but frankly, I had forgotten what that “thoughtful” choice had been. I can’t overestimate how satisifed I was with decision months ago: “Students Have Rights, Too: Creating Literary Experiences that Place Learners” first was the title of my full day seminar. The speakers and the researchers that spoke told stories and shared findings that validated the research I have been conducintg since January on caring in the high schools and resonated with my pedagogy as practitioner in the selection of culturally relevant texts and activities for contemporary youth.

I have spent most of my teaching career creating relevant, engaging lessons that connect across curriculum and beyond the schoolhouse doors. And that means advocating for appropriate text selection that reaches beyond the cannon. Well, today, I had the opportunity to hear Alfred Tatum speak about that very topic. However, he put a great twist on those words: “Don’t advocate for texts; advocate for kids!” His point was that Shakespeard is dead; he needs no advocators; our kids are alive, but dropping out right and left; they need advoactors. However, Tatum does not want a “waterd down curriculum” so don’t get the idea he wants Shakespeare out of the schools–rather he urges teachers to make the text choices relevant to the audience–have a real reason you choose Shakespeare that goes beyond “that’s the way it has been done here.”  

You may ask, “Why the excitement” and “Where is the serendipity?” Over the last several years, I have been narrowing the focus of my research for the completion of my dissertation and in the course of that academic winnowing, I have used Dr. Tatum’s work as a resource. In the last two months, I have been part of a professional learning community (some people may call them a committee) in an Illinois school district that is studying Tatum’s latest book and reflecting/projecting ways his theoretical framework could be applied in their educational settings.

If you are interested in the happenings at IRA, keep me posted in your reading regimen. I am anxious to share what is happening here. I sense a shift from previous conventions as I look forward to sharing the evolving nature of effective and relevant teaching with you.