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Do It All and Do It Now

2023-02-08T18:10:10-05:00January 8th, 2019|Classroom Teaching, General, General Education, Reading Recovery Teaching, Reflections and Commentary, Teaching|

by LeeAnn Lewellen

As an instructional coach, I hear so many “buzzwords” when administrators and district personnel discuss teacher effectiveness after a brief classroom observation. Engagement, rigor, cultural responsiveness, high yield strategies, assessment… the list goes on. But as a teacher, how do I attack ALL of these things right now?! I feel the sense of urgency to improve in all areas right away, or I will witness the failure of the students and the demise of the education system. How can I attack ALL of these things right now? The answer – I can’t. It brings to mind the leader of the Roman Empire, Augustus, and his phrase, “Festina Lente…” – make haste, or go slow, to go fast.

What if, instead of fixing every little thing that needs attention in the classroom, I choose one area to improve?  Just one. What one thing could I change about my teaching to improve student learning? Isn’t that what I would do to help grow my students? As a Reading Recovery teacher, when I hear a struggling reader read a text, I make a mental note of all the problems I hear and see. In one reading, I might notice visual errors, lapses in meaning, incorrect structures, and more. But if I try to address ALL of those things, I will have confused my reader! I think about what will move the child forward in his or her processing, and I pick one thing to address.  As a teacher, I need to afford the same opportunity for learning to myself.

So that is what I will do. I will think of one way to improve my craft that could make a positive, lasting impact on my students. Does the day seem long and monotonous to me? Then I need to improve my engagement strategies! Could nearly every student finish every activity with 100% accuracy before I even began instruction? Then I need to improve the rigor of the activities. (or move on to a new topic!)

I will cease the practice of rushing through everything without mastering anything; I will go slow to go fast. I will develop a proper balance between urgency and diligence; I will go slow to go fast.

Join me, colleagues. Choose a path, work hard to improve, take a little at a time, and watch you AND your students flourish.

LeeAnn has 17 years of experience in the field of education. She is a Reading Recovery teacher and an instructional coach for her building. LeeAnn, along with Shawna Wilkins and Kelsey Wharton will present a session during the 2019 National Reading Recovery & K-6 Literacy Conference entitled “Deconstructing the Data: What Your Readers Need Now”.

Teaching and Cheerleading

2023-02-08T18:10:10-05:00October 30th, 2018|Classroom Teaching, General Education, Reading Recovery Teaching, Reflections and Commentary, Teaching|

by Johnny Downey

A month or so ago, I was racking my brain, over and over again to try and find a topic to explore for the wonderful opportunity to guest author on the RRCNA blog. This week, a great idea swept over me. I brainstormed some things I was passionate about, first jokingly, but after looking at my list I realized two of my great passions are great topics to blend into advice.

Some of you who know me know I am a teacher by day, cheerleading coach by evening. I am getting ready to begin years 11 and 15. It seems not nearly as long!  As I’ve illustrated below, there are many things teachers and cheerleaders have in common.

 

GREAT Teachers GREAT Cheerleaders
-On stage at ALL times

-Celebrate EVERY success even when you’re “losing”

-Encourage students to get excited about learning

-Adapt to many environments to meet needs of all students

 -On stage at ALL times

-Celebrate EVERY point, even when we’re losing.

-Encourage others to get excited about the event

-Adapt to many environments, rain, snow, wind, flying balls, etc.

 

Two lessons every Reading Recovery teacher-in-training learns are: (1) use simple language and (2) celebrate/praise the partially-correct in teaching situations. To help early readers, a Reading Recovery teacher learns early on that language is important to every lesson. Having a simple language that is easy to take on provides a child with the tools to internalize the wanted behaviors of learning to read. In cheerleading, we must remember that fans do not know exactly what we want them to say. We need to keep our cheers and chants short and easy to repeat. We introduce phrases, ask for fans to yell with us, and repeat several times in order to get the whole stadium yelling together toward a common goal.

The common goal of learning to read is where our simple language falls in the classroom. If we simplify our language around the reading process, our students can begin to internalize. Take for example my favorite thing in every Reading Recovery beginning lesson, the self-correction. Self-correcting is noticing something is wrong and attempting to do something about it. If our language is quick and simple, “try that again,” “something didn’t look right, sound right, etc.” the student can begin to internalize these simple phrases and metacognitively think about his/her reading.

If our language is full of words, and drawn out, students won’t be able to pick up as quickly. For example, if a teacher said something like, “that wasn’t right,” or “right here you said ____ and this word sounds like ___ at the beginning. Make the ___ sound with your lips. Great! Now let’s make the next sound, and the next, and the next and now let’s put it together.” By this time, the student has totally forgotten about the page they’re reading, and the book! Simple is the way to go!

Celebration is the essence of positivity in the classroom. Reading Recovery teachers let some errors slide in order to build upon the strengths of their students. Cheerleaders will do the same thing. Think of a game where the home team is down by 14, the cheerleaders don’t give up and tell the team everything they are doing wrong (even though they might want to). They get pumped up and tell the team and the fans to keep going! They celebrate and stay positive. Teachers can do the same in their classrooms. There is no need to point out every little thing that is wrong and needs fixing. No one likes that, so why waste the time? Just like a big Friday night game – be the cheerleader for your students.

  • Celebrate when they first recognize they’ve made a mistake and they go back to try something.
  • Celebrate that they’ve noticed! (Worry about fixing it later.)
  • Celebrate when they first recognize the lowercase “b” or “d” correctly.
  • Celebrate when they’ve learned to write their name efficiently.
  • Celebrate if they simply do well on a running record.
  • Celebrate the partially correct, build their confidence, and you can’t go wrong!

Teachers and cheerleaders should remember to use simple language that can be picked up by the students and fans – something that can be the same and repeated when needed. They must also remain positive above all and celebrate even the partially-correct in all situations.

 

Johnny Downy is a Learning Design Specialist with the Forest Hills School in Cincinnati, Ohio.

 

Why Revisiting Shared Reading Texts Matters for Emergent and Early Learners

2023-02-08T18:10:11-05:00August 22nd, 2018|Classroom Teaching, General Education, Teaching|

by Debra Crouch

“Ms. Candia, Ms. Candia, did you know there’s ‘and’ in Jack and Jill? Do you hear it, Ms. Candia? Jack ‘and’ Jill—do you hear it?”

This exciting outburst from Cameron, a student in Trish Candia’s kindergarten classroom, came one day during early Spring in the midst of independent literacy time. Cameron was in the “Big Books and Charts” area, revisiting a chart of the nursery rhyme Jack and Jill, a text that had been used in multiple Shared Reading experiences throughout the school year. His teacher, meanwhile, was working with a Guided Reading group while the rest of the students were involved in various reading and writing experiences around the classroom. Cameron excitedly interrupted the Guided Reading group to share his discovery and his teacher recognized this moment of learning was important. She invited Cameron to share his learning with the entire group at the table with her. Cameron’s learning also became part of the whole-class reflections about learning that occurred at the end of the morning.

Shared Reading was a daily practice in this classroom, incorporating revisits to familiar texts and periodic introductions to new texts to begin the journey to familiarity. Some of the familiar texts used each day were selected by students, others by the teacher. Many of the texts incorporated rhyme, rhythm, and repetition; a variety of fiction, nonfiction, songs, and poetry were used across the school year. All texts provided contextualized examples of the various high frequency words being learned, opportunities to notice and name strategies being explored and applied, and a wealth of big ideas worthy of revisiting multiple times throughout the year’s reading and writing work.

For some teachers, the power of revisiting known texts may be discounted when thinking about student engagement. Engagement may be equated with entertainment, causing teachers to seek only new and unknown texts, thinking this is what holds kids’ attention and interest. Engagement for learning, however, is based on beliefs a learner holds about themselves and what’s being learned and the interactions and relationships they have with those around them in a learning setting.

Engagement for learning is more likely to occur if students see themselves as readers and writers; understand how reading and writing are important; feel they won’t be penalized for attempts and approximations; and have a caring and trusting relationship with the others in the classroom (Crouch & Cambourne, 2018) (https://www.teachingdecisions.com/teaching-decisions-that-bring-the-conditions-of-learning-to-life/.)  As students revisit known texts in Shared Reading with the whole class and then again in Independent Reading, either alone or with partners, their engagement increases as they confidently begin to make sense of text at both the idea and print level. As engagement increases, so do opportunities for increasing student’s awareness of something novel within the familiar text. Each rereading of the text offers emergent and early learners opportunities to self-regulate their ever-developing understandings of print concepts, language patterns, book dialects, and “tunes of the language” (Holdaway, 1979). For Cameron, revisiting a known text served as an opportunity to notice and solidify for himself understandings about sounds and print that the class had been thinking and talking about since the beginning of the year.

Some practical ways to keep Shared Reading texts in play during the school year include:

  • Begin each Shared Reading experience with an “old favorite” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VLgVCZayMo), selected by either a student or the teacher. This routinely offers students opportunities to bring new learning to a familiar text, perhaps noticing something that didn’t get attention on previous readings, or reaffirming a previously-taught skill or strategy.
  • Include opportunities during Independent Reading time for students to revisit big books, charts, and songs previously used during Shared Reading. This learning experience offers increased practice in orchestrating reading behaviors, strategies, and skills.
  • Dramatize a text to offer students the opportunity to internalize a story’s sequence and language. Understanding characters’ feelings and motivation is strengthened as students work to interpret a text and deliver dialogue effectively.
  • Use shared reading extensions to support students to attend to details in the text. Creating an innovation on a text, where the class writes their own version of a text, supports students to notice the organizational structure of a text. Students also notice text language more closely as they work to emulate the text being recreated.
  • For nonfiction texts, students may add text features that an author didn’t include, such as labels or headings or a table of contents. As students add to texts in this way, they make decisions as writers that support readers.

Revisiting texts from Shared Reading increases engagement and provides multiple opportunities for extended learning. These experiences allow students time to savor, to experiment, and to, ultimately, make the story one’s own.

 

Additional resources:

Crouch, D. & Cambourne, B. (2018). Teaching Decisions That Bring the Conditions of Learning to Life. http://www.teachingdecisions.com/

Holdaway, D. (1979). The Foundations of Literacy. Sydney, Australia: Ashton Scholastic.

Parkes, B. (2000). Read It Again! Revisiting Shared Reading. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

 

Debra Crouch works nationally as an independent literacy consultant, collaborating with districts and schools in designing professional learning opportunities. Her website is teachingdecisions.com. She can be reached at .

Debra will be a speaker at the 2019 National Reading Recovery & K-6 Literacy Conference, February 9-12, in Columbus, OH. Her session is entitled: “Engagement, Expectations, and Response: Guided Reading that Nurtures Student Learning.”

Navigating in Reading Recovery

2023-02-08T18:10:11-05:00July 31st, 2018|Classroom Teaching, Reading Recovery Teaching, Teaching|

by Sandy Brumbaum

This past spring break, I met my daughter in Florence. Because she had been working in Greece for the past year, she had an EU data plan, so we used her phone to navigate our way around this walking city. I became the follower, passively letting her lead me from one place to another. I rarely knew where I was with the long narrow streets and the tall brown buildings looking much like the next one. I usually didn’t know we were back on our street until I saw the familiar scaffolding a block from our Airbnb apartment. I noticed this late in the week when I looked at a map and realized there were several significant plazas in Florence, and I didn’t have a clue which was which, even though I knew we’d been to each one. They all looked the same to me.

Our apartment on Via dei Pilastri                               Walking towards the Duomo

                           

Navigation is also an issue in teaching, and Reading Recovery, in particular. Reading Recovery teachers have prompts to give and procedures to teach, many of which look similar or appear to be interchangeable, especially if the purpose is not clear. As Noel Jones says in “What’s the Word?” (JRR 6.1, 2006): “Deciding what to say and when to say it is the hardest part of teaching.”

In their training classes, teacher leaders are often asked, “What should I do when…?” Or sometimes jokingly and often in frustration, a teacher says, “Why doesn’t the book just tell me what to do?” Teachers learn early on in the training year, “Children experiencing literacy difficulties do not follow predictable paths of progress. So each lesson sequence will be different for each child. If a teacher expects a child to learn this before that she is forcing a child to move through her notion of sequence in which change must occur. Reading and writing are too complex for that to happen.” (2016, 2)

Different paths
Teachers are like tour guides. They set their destination, where they want their students to be at the end of the year, and generally have an idea of how to guide the students there, assuming they all start in the same place. For the students who are behind or ahead of the starting point, teachers are less certain what to do, but they still try to keep the students on the same path as their classmates. Clay explicitly says that Reading Recovery students will need different paths. “The ideal lesson series will have activities individually selected to meet the needs of a particular child. A Reading Recovery teacher must be very familiar with possible teaching alternatives so that she is able to make good choices moment by moment during each lesson… She will have to free herself from set sequences and vary her teaching to meet the particular needs of children who are struggling.” (2016, 25)

How do teachers do it? Clay writes: “Using observation of what the child can already do and is at present trying to do, the sensitive teacher can interact with these activities taking the child towards the prescribed curriculum not via arbitrary exercises but through activities that are meaningful and enjoyable. This teacher must know all the possible routes to the end goal…”(2015a, 286) and “…must be bold in negotiating shortcuts.“(2016, 25)

With this directive, teachers know what to do: plot out their path, taking the route with the fewest bumps, even though it may not be the shortest or the quickest or the most traveled path to their destination.


Caution
However, this may be tricky. Just like the easy to confuse streets and plazas in Florence, teachers may misread a child’s behavior. “We need to be tentative and flexible because we could be wrong in our explanations from time to time, or from this child to that child.” (2016, 6) Clay explains why: “…What the observer ‘knows’ about reading and writing will determine what that observer is likely to observe in children’s literacy development. You bring to the observation what you already believe. Observers must be aware of this and try to correct for it.” (2013, 12) Even if teachers think they have a plan, “the teaching may have to go the child’s way to the teacher’s goals.” (2015a, 286)

When I mentioned to my daughter that I was thinking about this idea of navigation, she asked, “Should I have done a better job of telling you where we were going?”
Me: No, that was my job.
H: But if I were the teacher and you were the student?
Me: Yes, in that sense, then yeah.

Upon reflection, it isn’t just the teacher’s job. I should have participated more in the journey, at least if I wanted to be independent in getting around Florence. There is a tension between leading and guiding. Noel Jones’ suggestion in What’s the word? is to share the task: “Effective teacher decision-making depends upon careful and sensitive observation during teaching and also upon careful and thoughtful analysis of records after teaching. This is hard work; and what is hard is always easier if the task is shared with someone else… The discussion needs to center on how the child appears to be able to use information from all sources and how he seems to be changing over time in his ability to do this. These discussions can also help teachers improve their abilities in recording and interpreting lesson records and running records.” It is easy to go on autopilot in teaching, doing what has always been done. Instead, teachers may need to do a traffic check before working with the hardest to teach students, similar to driving during rush hour, by conferring with Reading Recovery’s Google maps, aka Literacy Lessons, or with colleagues to ensure that they’re accelerating along the fastest and smoothest route to their destination.

 

Sandy Brumbaum is a Reading Recovery teacher leader from San Francisco, California.

 

 

Any views or claims expressed in The Reading Recovery Connections Blog are those of individual authors, not RRCNA.

What’s the Power of Knowing a Word in a ‘Snap’?

2018-09-05T12:49:26-05:00July 3rd, 2018|Classroom Teaching, Teaching|

by Michal Taylor

Moving a sight word from new to fluent retrieval is a crucial part of learning to read. Then immediately having the opportunity to use these words in the cycle of continuous text provides for consolidation. This can be in a small group guided reading setting where the first read is a ‘private read’, then these texts are reread as familiar text over subsequent days. This may be alone or in pairs.

Spending 1-2 minutes writing these words at the beginning of any guided reading lesson can work wonders. (No more than 1-2 minutes, it’s quick)!  Select 2-3 high frequency words from the text to be read. Write each word quickly 2-3 times on a whiteboard, with good letter formation (so it looks like that word). Cover the word before writing it successive times to help build a visual memory of that word. The student checks on themselves as they write with teacher monitoring production, providing scaffolding (written model) if needed. This is a written task not flash cards. Writing really seems to help those having difficulty accumulating a cadre of easily known words by forging another neural pathway.

Consolidation of known words needs to continue up into 2nd grade and beyond. As I work with older readers struggling with becoming fluent processors, a common theme I notice is that they have a low core of ‘known’ high frequency words that ‘glue’ our language together. Far too much cognitive energy is going to working these words out resulting in slow reading with low or no understanding of what is being read. Starting this in Kindergarten, we are really noticing a big difference in the automaticity in reading and writing of emergent and early readers with attention freed up to work on other challenging parts of the book reading or writing of texts. Keep doing this as students read increasingly difficult text until they have ‘learned how to learn words’ and easily learn words with fewer exposures. The concept of analogy is predicated on having a core of known words from which to be generative. Very often I see children being asked to word-solve using an analogy and the ‘known’ is not known so the child has a shaky foundation from which to build.

 

Some additional resources on teaching high frequency words:

From RRCNA’s Members-only Resources:  He Knew it Yesterday – recorded conference session by Pam Grayson

From Clemson University’s Teacher Resources:  High Frequency Words Module

Nell Duke’s 2016 post: Teach Sight Words as You Would Other Words

 

Michal Taylor is a Reading Recovery teacher leader at South Lyon Reading Recovery Site, South Lyon, Michigan.

 

 

 

Any views or claims expressed in The Reading Recovery Connections Blog are those of individual authors, not RRCNA.

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