My latest Diigo links (weekly)

• Relationships First:What to Do in Week One? [from Educational Leadership]

  "For all humans—and especially teens and young teens—whatever enters our brains as we learn activates emotional responses, even before we process it cognitively. Even if teachers deliver curriculum content with an inert, unemotional lens, our students' internal monologue takes it to an emotional level—'This is so tight/wrong/bad/cool/radical/wild/dope/stupid/GOAT (Greatest of All Time)!'"

  tags: learnerConsiderations

• The Teacher Toolkit

  A collection of instructional strategies, i.e. "tools," and templates and videos for implementation of the tools. From the site homepage: "For every tool you'll find: An explanation of how and when to use it, a template students can use to implement the tool, a place to take notes about how you use each tool."

  tags: educ3210 educ4500 EDUC5630 strategies

• Teaching Strategy: Gallery Walk [from Facing History site]

  "During a Gallery Walk, students explore multiple texts or images that are placed around the room. Teachers often use this strategy as a way to have students share their work with peers, examine multiple historical documents, or respond to a collection of quotations. Because this strategy requires students to physically move around the room, it can be especially engaging to kinesthetic learners."

  tags: strategies

• Developing Youth Literacies, Loving the Disciplines [from the Gradgrind's site]

  A succinct introduction to what it means to apprentice youth in the disciplinary literacies

  tags: disciplinaryLiteracy educ3210 EDUC5630 video youth readIng red

• Improve retention, re-teach less with this learning technique [from Ditch That Textbook blog]

  An introduction to "retrieval practice" with links to research and related resources and advice for quick implementation. For example: "...[S]imply encourage it as a study strategy to students. Ask students to stop reading their books or notes and start pulling information from their brains. Have them retrieve what they’ve learned quietly in their minds, verbally out loud or written on paper. It makes sense — if we’re going to retrieve information from our brains during a test, why wouldn’t we rehearse that way beforehand?" Seems like thinking aloud, annotating, and comprehension coding, then, are all forms of "retrieval practice."

  tags: retrievalPractice assessment formativeAssessment metacognition strategies

• 650 Prompts for Narrative and Personal Writing [from NYTimes.com]

  "...[A] list that touches on everything from sports to travel, education, gender roles, video games, fashion, family, pop culture, social media and more. ...[E]ach links to a related Times article and includes a series of follow-up questions....So dive into this admittedly overwhelming list and pick the questions that most inspire you to tell an interesting story, describe a memorable event, observe the details in your world, imagine a possibility, or reflect on who you are and what you believe."

  tags: writing educ4500

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

My latest Diigo links (weekly)

My latest Diigo links (weekly)

• How to Easily Collaborate on Google Drive with Online Annotation

  A list of several annotators that integrate with Drive

  tags: annotating google collaboration comprehension readIng

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

My latest Diigo links (weekly)

A reading autobiography told in parts: Part II

About eight years ago, I watched my son, Henry, open a "big-brother" gift at the hospital just after his sister was born.

It was obvious to every adult in the room that a large picture book was concealed under the gift wrap, but that did not deter Henry from tearing into the paper with wide-eyed enthusiasm.

A favorite Richard Scarry book

When the cover of the book was revealed to him, his eyes further widened. He exclaimed, “A Richard Scarry book! A new Richard Scarry book! Look! Cars and trucks, my favorite.”

In those sentences, Henry identified himself as a reader, even though he was not quite a three-year-old at the time. He was a reader with a profile of likes, preferences, and affiliations. He was a reader among a community of readers that included both his parents and the doting grandma who had thoughtfully selected and gifted the book.

We are “readers” even before we know how to read. That is because reading is much more than simply matching sounds to symbols on a page. It’s a process of listening, speaking, and being in relationship with others. If we are fortunate enough, we are born into a community of readers, namely our families and closest loved ones and caregivers. The induction phase begins at (or before) birth, and books are integrated into the daily rituals of the household, as in my all-time favorite refrain of parenthood: “bath, books, bed.” 

This is how I remember my own process of becoming a reader.

I remember inheriting a library of books from my mother, who passed down such classics as A Child's Garden of Verses and Winnie the Pooh. Some of these same volumes now reside on my own children's bookshelves.

I remember the arrangement my mother made with a neighbor, an elementary school teacher, who taught me to read during my preschool years. For weeks, I toted Dick-and-Jane basals to and fro, between our house and hers. I was happy for the privilege and felt quite grown-up, not so much because I liked Dick and Jane, but because I was enchanted by her funky A-frame house bedecked with macrame planters and homemade God's eyes and her pup Rontu, named after the feral dog in Scott O'Dell's classic Island of the Blue Dolphins, which I later read based on her recommendation.

I remember regular Saturday morning trips to the library with my parents, and, later, when I learned how to ride a bicycle, anytime trips to the library.

Then came grade school and the beloved Scholastic book orders, every six or nine weeks. By second grade, I was selecting and purchasing my own books. (Mom wrote the check.)

It was the 1970s, and shopping malls sprung into vogue. In what seemed like an overnight development, we now enjoyed the convenience of mass booksellers like B. Dalton and Waldenbooks (and caramel corn and candles). Through numerous trips to the mall, I amassed quite a collection of tradebooks by YA standbys like Blume, Byars, and Danzinger.

All of this was well before the age of social media, Goodreads.com, and Amazon recommendations waiting in your email inbox. My mother helped me select books based on word-of-mouth recommendations from her friends. Eventually, I learned to scope out the publisher's recommendations, typically printed in the front or back matter of my paperbacks. In fact, this is how I discovered there was more to Beverly Cleary than Ramona, Henry, and Beezus.

I blame Cleary for indoctrinating me into the romance genre with her book, Fifteen. From there, I quickly advanced to reading excerpts of top-selling bodice-rippers, serialized in the back of my mother's Good Housekeeping magazines. This short-lived fascination culminated in me reading Shirley Conran's Lace: A Novel in its entirety, just ahead of the release of the made-for-TV miniseries.

The 80s had arrived. (Out of curiosity, I Googled Lace, only to discover its re-branding on Amazon.com, i.e. "Before FIFTY SHADES, there was...." Hee.)

 

A reading autobiography told in parts: Part II

Draft from the past: Whiteboard blues

So, sometimes I start blog posts and abandon them for some inexplicable reason. They sit on my Blogger dashboard.  Here is one from Summer 2009:

What does a summer-school lecturer (me) do at a major, state-funded, flagship university (the
University of Tennessee-Knoxville) when she wants to capture and concretize her classroom ramblings and has no effective medium through which to do so? Interactive whiteboard? Anyone?. . . Anyone??

Well, in the absence of an interactive whiteboard — and there is NOT A ONE in the entire UT college of education building, at least that I know of — I did the next best thing. I took a picture of my class notes with my phone, sent the image to myself, and then used a web-based visualization tool to smooth out the rough edges.

I transformed this:


Into this:



Not too shabby, huh?

Draft from the past: Whiteboard blues

A reading autobiography told in parts: Part I

I remember books, readily available, always plentiful: gifts of books, hand-me-down books, library books.

"Pretend" reading

I remember adults reading. Mom and Dad always reading.

I remember being read to and me reading to, which I now understand is “pretend" reading.

Later, in first and second grade, I continued to read to my parents, but this time it was “for real” reading.

This was the book!!

On one of these occasions, I recall reading aloud from one of my Scholastic chapter books (the kind you bought using the book order form passed out by your teacher), when my father, who was watching over my shoulder, stopped me in mid-sentence to show me how to read italics. He pointed to the italicized word and repeated it aloud, demonstrating how it should sound in the sentence. He said something like, “The author does that when the word is important. He wants you to say the word with feeling.”

My father's explanation opened up a whole new state of awareness for me: meaning is derived from more than the words themselves, but also how they are arranged and formatted on the page, as well as how I choose to say and interpret them.

This is but one of many interactions in which my parents transmitted their love of books and reading to me. They demonstrated that reading is much more than simply matching sounds to symbols. It’s a process of listening, speaking, and being in relationship with others.

A reading autobiography told in parts: Part I

Starting the conversation about connected reading

This semester in my undergraduate content-area literacy courses, I am piloting ideas from Turner and Hick’s (2015) Connected Reading: Teaching Adolescent Readers in a Digital World. 

Connected reading "is a model that situates individual readers within a broader reading community and acknowledges a variety of textual forms, both digital and print” (p. 5). Connected reading is NOT the same as online reading because the emphasis is on digital practices, not digital text. 

Turner and Hicks explained, “In short, we see that readers are connected to one another in increasingly useful ways and that they make meaning of what they read in various ways through their connections” (pp. 5-6). 

Turner and Hicks' book is based on research conducted in 2013 with 12 middle and high school teachers and several hundreds of students from across the country. At the end of their book, they summarize several implications for teaching and learning, beginning, of course, with teacher learning: “A shift in thinking about the nature of reading requires that educators talk with one another about the practices of real-world readers, not just the limited skills that are tested or the standards that can be linked to instruction” (p. 139).

I interpret this as further evidence that new literacies education must be integrated in teacher preparation programs. 

I already survey my students’ attitudes and predispositions toward digital technology, and I require them to sample several new digital tasks, texts, and tools each semester. What’s different this semester is I am trying to take a more deliberate and stepwise approach by implementing some of the same lessons and tasks that Turner and Hicks used with their participants, beginning with the “Who am I as a (digital) reader?” lesson (pp. 101-102).

The lesson follows the administration of a “Digital Reading Survey.” I took several of the questions from the Turner and Hicks survey and combined them with my pre-existing Interest Inventory and Literacy Diagnostic created with Google Forms. 

I like Google Forms because A) it aggregates the data into easy-to-read representations, B) it allows me to send a link to the teacher-learners so they can complete the inventory on their own time outside of class, and C) FREE.

Once the data is assembled in one place, the teacher-learners are prompted to study the data and make some observations. The idea is to develop a critical and reflexive stance toward “texts, contexts, and attributes that influence reader choices” (p. 100).

We did this on Day 1 of the Fall 2016 semester.

I sent out the link to the form about five days in advance of our first class meeting. Then, on the first day of class, I performed an adaptation of the lesson described on pp. 101-102 of Connected Reading. I taught the same lesson to teacher-learners across two different sections of my content-area literacy course.

Two interesting observations were shared as a result of this exercise.

First, several teacher-learners noticed that a majority of their peers preferred reading on paper over reading on a screen, while an inverse proportion reported going online “several times a day.” If they don’t like screen-reading, what are they doing online several times a day? Presumably some of that time online involves reading, which underscores the idea that I have long advocated that personal preference is not the only “attribute” that mediates our reading choices. We live in a hyper-connected 21st-century context that demands a fair amount of flexibility on our part to move with ease (if not always with pleasure) between mediums.

Next, we noticed that approximately the same number of respondents (an identical percentage, in fact, in one section) said A) they read less because of electronic devices and B) these tools should not be used in reading instruction. This prompted one student to wonder if the same students who read less on devices are the ones who don’t believe digital tools can be used to improve reading skills. Similarly, of those students who said they read more because of digital/mobile devices, how many of those same students agree they should be used to teach reading?

Lots of ideas for item analysis and data disaggregation!

There are some things I will do differently next time to improve this lesson: 

• I like the idea of prompting a reflection from students about “the ways they read each day” before they actually complete the form. After the form, the students are prompted to reflect again on “what I realized about myself as a reader as I answered the survey questions” (p. 101). The pre- and post-reflections can then be compared. However, I am not sure how to elicit the pre-reflection when I am already asking students to complete the form before the first day of class.
•  I need to be more intentional about presenting the data set as “text” and modeling, by way of a teacher-directed think-aloud, my process of meaning-making through close reading of text. This is my first opportunity to reinforce key concepts presented in the NCTE policy brief Reading Instruction for All Students, which is mandatory first-day reading. The brief provides a nice overview of the highly contested terms “text complexity” and “close reading,” which were brought to the reading education foreground by the Core Standards. My students, many of whom were in high school when the standards were first being adopted and implemented, often come into the teacher education program with vague and misguided understandings of these terms. 
•  I can further scaffold the teacher-learners by providing prompts and cues similar to  the “Looking at Data” protocols used in school reform initiatives.

Starting the conversation about connected reading

An early memory of learning to write

In the eighth grade I learned how to really write.

Mrs. Dean was our middle school newspaper adviser and journalism teacher. I generally excelled at writing, often turning in first drafts and receiving high marks. Mrs. Dean challenged all that by holding me accountable for real revision and thinking on paper.

I can’t remember the exact topic, but I remember one occasion in which I really struggled with a particular reporting assignment. I had conducted several interviews and had cobbled together a long rambling mess of a news story that was unsuitable for publication. At Mrs. Dean’s behest I had attempted multiple rewrites, but I just wasn’t “getting it.”

Finally, a few days before deadline, Mrs. Dean greeted me one afternoon with a copy of my article, which she had enlarged on the school photocopier. I then watched as she cut up my writing, sentence by sentence, until all that lay before me on the desk was a pile of strips.

She said, “They have computers now that will do this for you [it was 1984], but we’re going to be our own word processor.” We then commenced to moving the strips around, adding new sentences and transitions where needed, and deleting other sentences altogether.

In retrospect, I think Mrs. Dean was referring to one of the earliest word processing programs that ran on the old Apple IIe computers, which were just coming out on the market. At the time, I had no idea what she was talking about, but her words came rushing back to me when, as a freshman in college, I sat for the first time in an Apple computer lab and wrote my first-ever essay with word-processing software.

Mrs. Dean’s hands-on exercise made the abstract concept of revision plainly visible to me. This experience not only changed my attitude toward writing, but I believe it served as an essential metaphor that prepared me to take up computer literacies later in life. The memory of moving those strips of paper around on the desktop in Mrs. Dean’s classroom bridged my eventual transition from traditional pencil-and-paper composing to the new world of digital word processing.

An early memory of learning to write