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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.

 

Teaching as a Team Sport

2023-02-08T18:10:11-05:00September 4th, 2018|General, General Education, Reading Recovery Teaching, Reflections and Commentary, Teaching|

by Susan Vincent

This past summer, I watched the Tour de France bicycle race on TV, as I do every summer. I loved waking up every morning to the incredible scenic views of quaint French towns, the majestic Alps, and the spirited fans who lined the narrow streets to cheer on the bicyclists.

What I did not really understand for many years is that bicycling is a team sport. I always viewed cycling as an individual effort, because that’s the only way I’d ever experienced riding a bike. I’ve come to find out, however, these bicycle teams are actually intricate networks of support for the cyclists.

The cyclists group themselves in a clump called a peloton. The peloton helps cyclists ride more efficiently by cutting wind drag. The other riders “draft” for each other in turns, blocking the wind and making it easier to ride. The riders also have outside support. Supporters ride along in cars, handing off water and snacks, or changing flat tires. Communication is also a big part of success, I learned. Riders wear earpieces to get information about road conditions and to get advice about strategy.

Of course, no cyclist would get very far in the Tour de France alone. A network of support is absolutely necessary. It occurs to me that teaching is the same.

When Marie Clay, in all her genius, developed Reading Recovery, she made it a team sport. She established a required professional network for teachers. The network provides teachers “continuing contact” with each other (as we used to call professional learning meetings.) Groups of teachers meet regularly to watch each other teach and to learn with and from each other. Even during the “alone” times of teaching, at the first sign of stagnated learning, a colleague or teacher leader is at the ready to sit beside you, observe a lesson, teach your child, and problem solve with you. You are never really alone in Reading Recovery. You are in a peloton, sometimes drafting for your colleagues, sometimes being drafted by them. Your earpiece is always in place with your professional readings and colleagues to guide you. And of course, the children are always the winners when teachers operate in this kind of team.

My fondest professional wish is that this type of Reading Recovery learning network could grow even larger and more intricate.  Reading Recovery professionals have a wealth of knowledge that could support literacy teachers everywhere. The teaching peloton no longer needs to be bound by geography. We have tools today that didn’t exist in Reading Recovery’s early days. Thousands of teachers meet on Twitter and share educational ideas. Over 4 million posts per day are on education-related topics. Shouldn’t Reading Recovery be a major voice? I think so.

Perhaps Reading Recovery professionals can “draft” for the field of literacy professionals, who have been bombarded in recent years by all kinds of craziness, from NCLB to high stakes tests, to scripted programs. Teachers could use some expert literacy “drafting,” taking us in the right direction, helping us understand how children learn to read and write. If you are a Reading Recovery professional or if you support Reading Recovery, I think you can help the team.

If you haven’t joined Twitter, join. Check out Reading Recovery’s monthly chat by following the hashtag #rrchat. Participate and bring a friend.  If you are a teacher leader, spend some time getting your teachers signed up and encourage them to participate. If you are unsure and in new territory, all the better! You can learn together. There is help available through Reading Recovery.  Soon, Reading Recovery could be a very noticeable voice in a very public forum. It’s important because more children are waiting to be literacy winners! (Let’s wear some yellow jerseys!)

 

Susan Vincent is a faculty member in early childhood education at Miami University Regionals in Ohio. She taught Reading Recovery for 19 years as a teacher and teacher leader. Follow her on Twitter, @ssvincent. Susan will be a speaker at the 2019 National Reading Recovery & K-6 Literacy Conference, February 9-12, in Columbus, OH. Her session is titled: “Accelerating Progress with ALL Readers Through Classroom Instruction”.

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.”

Beyond the Reef: Reading Recovery Teachers as Literacy Leaders

2023-02-08T18:10:11-05:00August 6th, 2018|Reading Recovery Teaching|

by Jamie Lipp

My daughter recently turned three. It’s safe to say I’ve watched more than my share of Disney princess movies over the last three years. These films offer powerful messages. One in particular, stands out to me in relation to the work we do as Reading Recovery professionals. In the words of my daughter’s beloved Moana, “There’s more beyond the reef.” Teaching students is our reef.   

As a former Reading Recovery teacher and now a university trainer, I am continually reflecting on the power and promise of the work we do as Reading Recovery professionals and all the ways in which we support student learning.  The numbers cannot be ignored.

With the overwhelming success of students, there is another key piece of Reading Recovery implementation that needs explored more deeply. Throughout my time as a Reading Recovery teacher I very much enjoyed supporting classroom teachers, specialists and principals to further their understanding of literacy processing and ways to support struggling readers.  In short, I quickly positioned myself (through an eager and willing desire to share and collaborate) as a literacy leader within my building and district. This year’s Teacher Leader Institute (TLI) provided the opportunity to look closely at how Reading Recovery teachers are already serving as literacy leaders in their schools, as well as ways to support and extend these practices.  TLI confirmed for me that Reading Recovery professionals not only support student learning, but should be seen and utilized as literacy leaders, with a focus on building literacy capacity within their schools.

Reading Recovery professionals are often equated as expert teachers.  Nancy Anderson reminded us at TLI that the term expert can signal that our learning is complete, which we know to be false.  We are in a state of continual learning as Reading Recovery professionals, with reflection and refinement being integral to our practice.  Being an expert teacher without sharing this expertise and without supporting the learning of others allows for a limited reach.  When one functions as a literacy leader, this reach is extended and multiplied exponentially. I’m no mathematician, but it was powerful for me personally to see that if I positively influenced the practice of just one teacher, that teacher could positively impact 26+ students EACH YEAR.  When I worked with groups of teachers, I could see and feel my impact spreading rapidly, and it felt AMAZING. Way back when, my former district contributed a large amount of resources to provide me the training and experiences needed to become an expert teacher. It was both a financially smart and educationally sound decision for them to encourage, support and value me as a literacy leader.

So, how can Reading Recovery teachers serve as literacy leaders?  We have only begun to capture all the ways in which this is possible and may already be happening in our schools.  I was excited to read the recent blog post by Reading Recovery Teachers Rhonda Precourt and Gen Arcovio addressing how to Spread the Word about the effectiveness of Reading Recovery.  Many of their ideas relating to the power of Reading Recovery for students relate to the power of Reading Recovery for teachers. Likewise, I’ve gathered some ideas about literacy leadership based on my experiences as a Reading Recovery professional and beyond:

  • Open the door.  Literally.  Sometimes we find ourselves in our tiny rooms with our Reading Recovery students and we inadvertently shut the door to the rest of the school and what is happening on the outside of our four walls.  Keep your door open. Let others hear what a Reading Recovery lesson sounds like and allow them to catch a glimpse when they pass by.  Invite classroom teachers, principals, specialists, parents and anyone else interested to watch a Reading Recovery lesson and help them to see and understand your instructional decisions within and beyond the lesson.  Let’s speak the same language.
  • Advocate.  Work with your principal to advocate for Reading Recovery within your school and district.  Help your PTA and school board understand the effectiveness of what you do and how it supports your school’s comprehensive literacy plan.  Help to safeguard the schedule of Reading Recovery teachers and work with your principal to identify what your key roles will be within your school. Be an advocate for students in general.  We must advocate for shared beliefs about teaching, learning and efficacy.
  • Collaborate.  Work with the other professionals who also support your Reading Recovery students to share data and problem solve ways to best approach your students and their learning paths.  Work together as a team to determine clear roles and responsibilities for each person involved in this student’s literacy journey. This should be ongoing, not just during the selection process. Meet formally and informally to discuss progress and next steps.  Use and share the data you have collected to help support the intervention efforts, not only for those selected students, but for all students who are struggling readers and writers. Work together to seek solutions for these students and help the team see these students as more than just the numbers produced by standardized, computerized assessments.  Help literacy teams identify student strengths and support their efforts to teach accordingly.
  • Provide professional development to deepen literacy understandings.  This professional development can be large or small in nature.  It can take on the form of coaching, demonstration lessons, conversations, or formal professional development.  Conducting whole group mini-lessons, modeling guided reading lessons/ writing lessons, supporting teachers to more effectively analyze and use assessment data to set goals for students and teach according to these specific goals are a few ideas of how this may occur.  Professional development can happen anywhere; one-on-one, small group, large group. It may be as broad as a district wide literacy session or staff meeting based on the current needs of the teachers/students or as focused as a 30 minute meeting with a teacher or small group of teachers.  The possibilities are truly endless and differ according to the strengths and needs of both the students and your colleagues.
  • Be a valuable resource. Be available when your colleagues have questions and work collaboratively to arrive at the answers. Share the articles and research you are currently reading and include personal insight as to how this information applies to the students in your school. Help your colleagues connect the dots between research and practice. Send brief email updates sharing any new learning you’ve discovered. Help to take complex ideas and simplify them into meaningful classroom implications.  

Perhaps one of my favorite understandings of being a leader is found in the text,  Becoming a Literacy Leader (Allen, 2016), when she describes this process as “rowing in the same direction.” (p.6) Isn’t that exactly what we want to do as Reading Recovery professionals?  We want our principals, classroom teachers and specialists to share the same beliefs and values about literacy and student learning, and we want their teaching practices to embody these beliefs and values.  We want them to be with us on the boat that is sailing toward understanding how to best support literacy learning and we want them to grab an oar and row rapidly to our shared destination.

Reading Recovery professionals ARE literacy leaders and it is within our role to promote just how powerful Reading Recovery is FOR the students and BEYOND the students. In order for Reading Recovery to continue to grow and prosper, we have to demonstrate the power and benefit of utilizing Reading Recovery as an investment in students, teachers, and the overall growth in literacy capacity within our schools.  This is non-negotiable. It is simply not enough to limit our ties to effectiveness to only the students we serve.

Moana will tell you, “we were voyagers.”  We still are. Now, go beyond the reef.

Let’s keep talking about going beyond the reef.  Join me for the Twitter chat, “ Reading Recovery professionals as Literacy Leaders” on Sunday, August 19th at 7 pm EST.   

 

Jamie Lipp is a Reading Recovery trainer at The Ohio State University. Follow her on Twitter @Jamie_Lipp.

Jamie Lipp will be a speaker at the 2019 National Reading Recovery & K-6 Literacy Conference, February 9-12, in Columbus, OH. Her sessions are titled: “Build Literacy Expertise in your School Through Intentional Coaching Experiences” and “The Composing Conversation – Avoiding Roadblocks on the Path to Writing”.

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

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.

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