Feeding My Brain

Reading books by other teachers feeds my brain, floods it with insights and ideas which I then must process, explore and question before the insights drift away and settle in that dusty cabinet in the back of my mind with all those other great ideas I was going to try.  This is my year to stop wasting what I've learned, to stop partially doing what I believe, and to jump into best practice with both feet.  This is the year that I have enough resources and enough ideas  to experiment, to question and to do.


I just finished Kelly Gallagher's latest book, In the Best Interest of Students, and it is a great place to start digesting and planning.  I'll  start with a tiny piece of my learning and reflect on how I will put it into action this year:

 I loved Gallagher's break-down of the CCSS reading objectives into three simple parts:

1.  What does the text say?
2.  What does the text do?
3.  What does the text mean?

As I reflect on this, I see that my struggling readers spend most of their reading time with number one. Reading, to these kids, is nothing more than getting what the text says, or guessing what the teachers want them to think it says.  Part of this is because my struggling readers are expected to read a lot of books across their day that are too hard for them.  Classroom books are often years above the reading abilities of my students, so they don't even try to read the books.  Instead some of them attempt to piece together the "what it's about" by listening to classmates and teachers talking. Others don't make this much effort; they simply stop doing anything.  They utter my least favorite line, "This is doin' too much," put their heads down, and turn up the volume on their music.

The other part of why kids only get what the text says is that teachers drop their expectations for struggling kids.  We think the kids can't do it, so we ask them to think less, and we tell them more.  We don't let them discover, explore and think.

I'm teaching summer school right now, and I see how wrong all this is.  My classes are very small right now so I have space to listen deeply to each student.  I have found kids who are smart, capable and who want to be seen for who they are.  Deep under those armor-clad exteriors are hidden readers.  They are eager to tell me about books they loved back in elementary school and those they secretly love now.  One asked me if I could get him the third book in James Patterson's Witches and Wizards series; another holed himself up in a corner for five days, lost in The Mark of Athena; and still another found Walter Dean Myers One Shot and eagerly asked if it was OK if he reread that because he read it a long time ago and remembered that it was good.  And their faces lit up when I said of course, they could take the books home and read them.  These are the kids who failed English.  I have to wonder how much more engaged these students would be if they had a voice in selecting the books they read during the school year, and if the discussions, writing, and thinking they did about books went beyond just what the book is about.  What would happen if we trusted the kids to explore the "moves" the author made in crafting such engaging stories? What if we had all kids thinking about the meaning of the text, the worthiness of reading it, the life-rehearsals it offers?  What if this deeper thinking is what our kids need to re-engage with reading?

Last year I offered my high school kids more choice, more time to read, and more drop-in conferences than I did the year before.  More, but not enough.  I still felt the "this is high school" pull of the question, "Is it rigorous enough that they're just reading books?"  And so I stuck in stuff:  notes, and assignments, and other teacher hoops that may not have been the best choices.  The independent reading was in the background.  What if I pull it to the foreground?  What if independent reading is the real, rigorous stuff we do? What if we dive deeper into the books students like, the books they are able to read, and then add the layers of author's craft and discovering meaning and life lessons?

So, what will this mean for my classroom next year?  Two things:
1.  Independent books will be the foundation of our reading, thinking and writing all year, not just in short chunks.
2.  I will stretch my students thinking beyond what the text says and spend more time helping them explore what the text does and what it means.

Now back to my mentors to explore more of the how, the vehicles I will set up to help structure our thinking.

This is what I love about writing.  It clarifies all I've taking into my head, allowing ideas and plans to float out of the muck.