Author Archives: Shana Karnes

Change is Good

Readers Writers Workshop, Shana Karnes November 25, 2016 Comments: 13

Last week, I filled up more pages in my notebook in four days than I did in the last six months combined.

What the heck were you writing about, you ask?

Why, #NCTE16, of course.  The annual Mecca of English teachers, where we get to speak, listen, read, and write all about what we’re passionate about: students and learning.

I wrote down amazing ideas.

Pressing questions.

Inspiring quotes.

Endless book recommendations.

img_6042

I wrote down a lot of beauty and hope and happiness, but I also heard some scary things, and I wrote those down too.

Things like teachers reading To Kill a Mockingbird–OUT LOUD! THE WHOLE THING OUT LOUD!–to their classes over the course of eight weeks.

Things like spending six weeks on a memoir unit only to produce–wait for it–six-word memoirs, and nothing more.

Things like hearing Harvey Daniels questioning whether to let students talk with one another for fear that they’ll be too hard to quiet down.

raw

Aaauuuurrrrrrrggggghhhhhh.

I just read Peter Johnston’s Opening Minds, which centers on the philosophy of getting students into a dynamic frame of thinking–a mindset in which all things are changeable, and that nothing is static.  So, maybe I heard some things that troubled me about what’s going on in education in America, but if I think like Johnston wants me to, then I know we’re just not where we need to be…yet.

img_5964I talked with my writing friends about this.  Amy, Lisa, and I spent so many lovely hours together squeezing in conversation wherever possible–escalators, restaurants, hotel rooms, Ubers, the NCTE exhibit hall.  We thought, talked, wondered, worried, questioned, and quested.  We wrote down many pages of ideas for Three Teachers Talk.

In our conversation about those cringe-worthy teaching practices I overheard, we wondered this:  why are so many teachers afraid to change?  Why are we so glued to the ‘way we do school’ historically?  Why, when we brainstorm ideas, do we wonder what can go wrong instead of wondering what can go right?

Change is good, people!

We wondered–to reframe the thinking about what secondary English classrooms look like, what do teachers need?

We examined our own practices to answer this question.  We found that we each relied on four things to make decisions about the learning in our classrooms:

  1. Research-based best practices.
  2. Examples of other classrooms that look like ours.
  3. Specific strategies and assignments to try out.
  4. Conversations with like-minded friends about our ideas.

And we asked ourselves:  is Three Teachers Talk answering these questions?

Perhaps, incidentally, we were, but we wanted to be more deliberate.  So, we’ve made it our goal to approach those themes more regularly.

On Mondays, we’ll share our responses to the research we read, the quotes we hear from educators, or the ideas we have in our notebooks.

On Tuesdays, we’ll continue to share specific strategies, mini-lessons, and quickwrite ideas we’ve tried out.

On Wednesdays, we’ll converse together in a #3TTworkshop format and share writing from our friends in the form of guest posts to show a variety of perspectives on common ideas.

On Thursdays, we’ll share examples of what’s going on in our classrooms–stories about students, successes, failures.

We hope you’ll find our freshly-framed writing helpful and thought-provoking, just as we found the things we heard at NCTE to be.  Please join the conversation in comments, on our Facebook page, on Twitter, or via guest post.  We’d love to hear your voice!

 

Designing a Unit in Workshop: Just Try It

Pedagogy, Readers Writers Workshop, Shana Karnes, Try It Tuesday November 15, 2016 Comments: 6

The NCTE Annual Convention begins this week, and as always, its onset has prompted me to try and synthesize a year’s worth of thinking around one pressing topic.  What I’ve been considering this year is the value of units of study within a workshop classroom–the hows and whys and what ifs of planning for complex, themed units.

So, we know that teachers who engage in a workshop classroom often have many of the same routines in their schedules:  time to read, time to write, time to talk.  They often have many of the same components:  mini-lessons, booktalks, mentor texts, conferring.

These are all good things.

They are all engaging practices on their own, but to take on real power, they need to be strung together, applied again and again, over the course of units of study and throughout the year.

When I work with teachers who are diving into the workshop model for the first time, I model as many of these components as I can.  Teachers are engaged–they write, they read, they look at the craft of poetry, they analyze articles.  They are energized and enthused to try these strategies with their students.

But every time, I see one smart teacher, her brow furrowed, her face concerned, in the back of the room.  She tells me, either in person or on her evaluation card:  I don’t see the rigor in this model.

And she is right.  In one day’s work, students are only advancing incrementally.  If we just have fun every day playing with words in our notebooks, listening to podcasts to study their craft, or doing book passes ’til the cows come home, our students are not growing by leaps and bounds as readers or writers.

And that’s where designing strong units of instruction comes in.

Whether it’s reading or writing instruction, harnessing the daily moves of a workshop routine to build toward an authentic product is where rigor lives.

I like Kelly Gallagher’s words to sum up the idea of starting at the end when designing a unit:

Screen Shot 2016-11-14 at 9.53.49 AM.png

Begin by thinking about what you’d like your students to achieve.  Did you just hear an amazing commentary on NPR?  Wow, what a great writer that guy is–I want my students writing like that.

Start with your vision.  That’s where you begin.  Then you ask yourself:  what do my students need to know in order to write like that?

That’s where the workshop routines come in:  booktalk examples of strong nonfiction writing.  Teach mini-lessons that get at the craft of strong commentary writing.  Flood your students with mentor texts, both published pieces and each other’s work, so they can see both the process and the product.  Let them experiment with drafts in their writer’s notebooks–lots of ungraded, low-stakes practice should live there.

At the end of the unit, don’t destroy all of your hard work by trying to “grade” everything objectively with a rubric.  Our beautiful mentor Penny Kittle sums that up nicely:

Screen Shot 2016-11-14 at 10.06.44 AM.png

When best drafts land on your desk, ask:  how do I know students achieved what I wanted them to?  Utilize self-assessments, celebrate the writing, respond authentically.  Consider how each student advanced individually.

Our students deserve high quality instruction that offers them choice, volume, and authenticity.  They deserve units that will allow them to continue to build on their constantly-increasing mastery of their reading and writing skills.

I’ll be sharing more about planning units in an Ignite Session on Saturday morning, from 9:30-10:45, in room A412.  

And I’ll discuss how and why to build rigor into your workshop units in more depth on Sunday afternoon, from 1:30-2:45, in room B211.

Will you be at NCTE?  Please let us know in the comments.  We would love to meet you!

If you can’t make it to Atlanta, you won’t be missing out–tune in to Twitter using the hashtag #NCTE16 during our session times to join the conversation.

 

Three Good “Ninja” Books About Children of Alcoholic Parents by Amy Estersohn

Guest Post, Readers Workshop, Readers Writers Workshop November 9, 2016 1 Comment

downloadI’m always on the lookout for ninja books – the kinds of books that address tough issues directly, but are also swift and subtle in how they go about doing it.  These are books that have middle school-appropriate characters, plot points, and pacing with some high school-ish themes.  See also: author Kerry O’Malley Cerra’s #mggetsreal campaign.

Without further ado… here are three terrific ninja books about children of alcoholic parents:

Shug by Jenny Han

Shug (nickname for Sugar) is stuck between being a child and being a teen, and she’s in the unfortunate situation of having a huge-o crush on her male best friend, Mark.  While Shug is primarily an optimistic if awkward tween relationship novel, astute readers will pick up on Shug’s mother’s social withdrawal and her tendency to rely on wine to solve problems.  This novel reminds us that chemical dependency can affect anybody without regard to class or gender.

The Seventh Most Important Thing by Shelley Pearsall

This book is about a boy named Arthur Owens who throws a brick at an old man’s head, nearly killing an old man. Whenever I booktalk this book, there’s always a reader who says, “Surely it was an accident that Arthur threw the brick.”

To which I smile and say, “No, Arthur really meant to throw that brick.”

The Seventh Most Important Thing just might be my favorite book ever, if I really had to choose a favorite book.  It’s a book that transformed me; it’s also transformed some of the readers I’ve worked with, readers who have never felt compelled by any particular text until THIS ONE.  (Note that this book isn’t some magic cure-all, as some of my readers find it a little too character-driven and not cliffhangery enough.  But still.  This book.)  

I won’t give too much else away here, but I will say that Arthur’s father did his best to be a good dad to his children despite a struggle with alcohol.

This Side of Home by Renée Watson

Watson has written a book I can only describe as a gentrification romance.  Twins Maya (named after Maya Angelou) and Nikki (named after Nikki Giovanni) are watching their Northeast Portland neighborhood change before their eyes.  It’s becoming more white, the stores are changing, and their neighbor and best friend Essence’s landlord has started remodeling the bathroom and kitchen … before raising the rent on their apartment.   Maya wants to go to Spelman with Essence, while Essence isn’t sure she’ll be able to leave Portland and her alcoholic mother, who constantly needs her help.

Each of these three books gives a different lens into how different characters may cope with an alcoholic parent, and each of these titles could appeal to younger and older teens.

Amy Estersohn is a middle school English teacher in Westchester County, NY.   She also reviews comic books for http://www.noflyingnotights.com.   Follow her on Twitter at @HMX_MSE.

Mini-Lesson Monday: Great Sportswriting is Worth Two Reads

Readers Writers Workshop, Shana Karnes, Writers Workshop November 7, 2016 1 Comment

In fifth grade, I attended a writing workshop with sportswriter Paul Daugherty at the helm.  A columnist for the Cincinnati Enquirer, he encouraged we wee ten-year-olds to think about how we might revise more quickly and do our prewriting in our heads.  He spoke about his experiences writing half a story while watching a game unfold, sometimes being tempted to write the ending before the ending had even occurred.  At age ten, I found him eloquent, mysterious, and inspiring–I decided then that I wanted to be a journalist.

Although I dropped my journalism major after one year in college, I still enjoy Daughterty’s columns in the Enquirer and occasionally Sports Illustrated.  And as an adult, I see his process in his product.  The craft of Daugherty’s writing is one of the things that made me enjoy sportswriting, and now, strong pieces about America’s most-loved athletic pastimes are some of my favorite things to read.

So, when Tom Romano sent me this piece from the New York Times, I thought immediately of how students would love the “metaphorical, descriptive” writing “with quotes and assertions and a great final line.”

Screen Shot 2016-11-07 at 5.56.48 AM.png

Tom Romano’s great description of this piece in the Times.

Objectives: Identify patterns in the author’s writing to characterize his voice; find where the author cites evidence that supports his claims; infer the writer’s process; apply concepts of writer’s voice and strong argument writing to your own nonfiction pieces.

Lesson:  I’ll distribute copies of “Twitchy, Sweaty, but Triumphant” by Michael Powell for students to read, but I’ll also have the piece projected on the Smart Board so kids can see the great accompanying photography.

Because ’tis the season of moving past narrative and into nonfiction writing (in which we often harness the power of narrative, by the way) students will have already been immersed in a study of making claims supported by evidence, crafting a clear and purposeful structure, and maintaining a voice and style that defy the conventions of a five-paragraph you-know-what.  This article will serve as a mentor text that features all three, plus some insight into that long-ago lesson I learned from Paul Daugherty: the speed of a sportswriter’s process.

“We’ve been studying a variety of nonfiction pieces that have great style as well as strong claims–commentaries, columns, and speeches.  And here’s another example of those traits in this sports article.

“As you read it, look for the writer’s voice and the way the writer makes claims and supports them with evidence, as we’ve been doing throughout this unit,” I request.

We take ten minutes to read through the article, annotating quickly and noting writerly moves that jump out at us.  I model on the document camera, noting what I see–the unnamed players throughout the first paragraphs of the piece, creating a universal scene; the sheer entertainment of his vocabulary (words like gluttonous, beatnik, facsimile that you wouldn’t expect in a sports article); his unique turns of phrase.

I then ask students to share in table groups what they noticed about craft and claims.  After they share and we debrief, I return to the article.

“One of the things I find fascinating about sportswriting is how quickly it has to happen.  The turnaround is so quick–we spend a few weeks polishing pieces of this length, but these writers only have a few hours.”

(In keeping choice central to my curriculum, students always get to choose either their process, genre, or topic.  Because in this unit students are constrained to one genre–nonfiction–I will make an effort to help them choose their own topics and processes.  That’s wisdom I gleaned from Writing With Mentors.)

“I want to consider the writer’s process, and I found some good evidence of it:  let’s look at Powell’s tweets from during the game.”

I pull up Powell’s Twitter account and we scroll down to see his game-time tweets, many of which contain some of the same phrases  in the article: the Dead End Kids, the Lackawanna freight train rolling through, the pitchers being gassed.  Students notice these unique phrases immediately.

“What could you infer about Powell, given that this game ended at around 1:00 am and his piece ran at 9:00 am?”

I elicit students to share:  “He was already writing a bit during the game.”  “He writes sports all the time so he can already pull up a lot of the jargon quickly.”  “He really loves his subject, since he’s up watching the game and tweeting and having fun with it.”  “He’s knowledgeable about the history of these teams–maybe he did a lot of research beforehand or maybe he just knows it from writing about it a lot.”

Now, students have painted a picture of the piece’s author.  We can go into the reading warm, not cold.

“So, let’s read again, and consider his process this time,” I ask.  “Look now to see how his tweets–evidence of his prewriting–are in the article and what that teaches you about his process.”

We read the article again, a fresh purpose for reading helping us see the writer’s process come to life.  Once we’ve finished, we talk in table groups and then debrief as a whole class about the evidence we see of Powell’s writing process based on his tweets and what we know about sportswriters as a group.

These two reads give us three things:  another example of writer’s craft, more examples of claims with supporting evidence, and an example of process.

BN-QP490_2PgCZ_M_20161103011549.jpg

I love this great photo of the Cubs’ moment of triumph from the Wall Street Journal. 

Follow-Up:  After students read this piece, there are many opportunities for follow-up.  One is to simply have them apply its writing lessons to their own nonfiction pieces.  Another is to have a lengthy conversation on writing processes, and how they can be short yet incredibly effective–students can see that prewriting doesn’t have to take the form of a web or an outline, but that it can be tweets, too.

Daugherty’s work, the now-defunct Grantland, and The New York Times sports section are some of my favorite places  to find great sportswriting.  What are some of your favorite resources for finding great nonfiction for your students? Please share in the comments!

11 Nonfiction Titles to Use Across the Curriculum

#FridayReads, Readers Writers Workshop, Shana Karnes November 4, 2016 Leave a comment

We’ve been saying it for years–teaching reading isn’t just the job of English teachers.  In an ideal world, it is a nationwide cultural endeavor to produce a literate citizenry who is both able to decode words and passionate about responding to their meanings.

The Common Core, for all its flaws, attempts to get students there–the standards say that kids should be reading 50% nonfiction altogether (that’s not just in English class; it’s across the curriculum).  In that vein, here are 11 nonfiction titles that could be used across the curriculum–or booktalked by any teacher in an English class.

img_5198Science –

The Double Helix, a fascinating biography by one of the discoverers of DNA, hooks me every time by bringing the textbook personas of Watson himself and his partner Francis Crick to life.  Many of my students interested in a career in the biological sciences were hooked by this text immediately.

Being Mortal forces the reader to ask some tough questions–should I really prolong my life as much as medicine enables me to, through decades of pain and suffering?  Or does that run counter to the human spirit?  Gawande uses all of his knowledge as a practicing surgeon to get the reader to question the industry that is medicine.

Into Thin Air, an oldie but a goodie, is Jon Krakauer’s harrowing first-person account of the deadliest season on Mt. Everest in history.  Its early promise that most of its characters would soon be dead grabs my students’ attention every time.

A Short History of Nearly Everything, aka the longest but most interesting book about science ever, explains everything I never understood about the subject from The Big Bang to the possibility of someday colonizing Mars.  Students are always wildly impressed when I flip through the list of Bryson’s references in the back.

Social Studies –

Hiroshima is John Hersey’s unflinching masterwork, a journalistic symphony of six survivors’ stories of the dropping of the first atomic bomb.  It is powerful and devastating and horrifying and beautiful all at once, and just reading the first page aloud to students gets them wide-eyed and entranced right away.

henrylouisgatesjr1Colored People, Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s biography of growing up black in rural West Virginia during the Civil Rights movement.  It’s a book that hooks my students because of its ties to our home state, but it’s universally appealing in that Gates creates a colorful cast of characters early on in the book, most of whom he defies in order to graduate summa cum laude from Yale University.

To Sell is Human is a favorite for students in Psychology class as it brings the social sciences to life in a very Malcolm Gladwell-esque way–short stories and then quick aphorisms make complex ideas simple to digest in this quick, fascinating read by Daniel Pink.

English –

137717Will in the World, written by everyone’s favorite long-winded Shakespearean scholar Stephen Greenblatt, brings William Shakespeare to life in this detailed biography of both the playwright and his Elizabethan London.  I love reading this book as a shameless English nerd and London-lover, but my students love it because it’s a classic tale of an average guy succeeding against all odds.

The Mother Tongue, the second book by the excellent Bill Bryson on this list, is a glorious history of the English language.  My students especially adore the chapter on swear words.

Math –

imgresMoneyball, one of Michael Lewis’ earliest books, hooks students often because it has a great movie adaptation to accompany it.  But when you sit down with the book itself, it blends both narrative and statistics, the least “mathy” part of math that I can understand.

The Hot Zone, a terrifying account of the origins of the Ebola virus, will give you actual nightmares if the ideas of biological warfare or global pandemics freak you out.  It’s a very detailed narrative of the virus’ structure, symptoms, and Hail Mary-type treatments that “proves that truth really is scarier than fiction.” (Tell that to Stephen King.)

What titles do you use to introduce your students to subjects across the curriculum? Please share in the comments!

Knowing Where to Look by Amy Estersohn

Guest Post, Readers Writers Workshop October 26, 2016 1 Comment

I’ve discovered a way to pack more reading conferences into my day.

No, I do not possess the ability to extend class time (though I wish I did!) and no, I am not able to talk to multiple students at once (though I’m sure my students wish I could!)  

4816266197_7805b15db2_z1However, I have been able to sharpen my powers of observation, and through these observations I’ve been able to deepen my sense of the readers I work with.

I begin observing before the Pledge of Allegiance.  Who is using the minutes before the bell to read?  Who comes to my classroom looking for a new book because he finished one on the way to school this morning?  Who approaches me in the hallway to ask if I have the sequel to a book finished long ago?  Who remembers that she owes me a book?  Who mumbles apologetically because he loaned the book that he borrowed to a younger sibling?

I continue observing the hallways.  Who is carrying a book?   Who brings comics to lunch?  Who brings books to a school assembly?  On a field trip?

student-147783_1280When students have an opportunity to read in class, I observe body language.  Different readers have different methods of getting physically “into” a book.  Some fold the book in half like a newspaper and bring the book inches from their eyes.  Others put their heads on their desks.   To the untrained eye, teen readers can look slouchy, lazy, or inches away from napping.  These are students who have entered what Nancie Atwell calls “the reading zone” — they are so immersed in a story that they are lost to the outside world and are unaware of how others are perceiving them in that moment.

The conclusion of independent reading time gives me another time to collect observations.  Who is eager to close the book?  Who is reading to the end of the page for a sense of closure before placing a bookmark?  Who doesn’t hear the first warning and needs additional cueing away from the reading zone?  Who softly moans, “Noooo”?

When students browse for a new book, how do they navigate your classroom library?  Is there a section that they zoom towards?  Do they pick up the first book in their field of vision, or do they spend time weighing and considering their next book choice?

The data to help us build better readers is all around us when we learn how to look.

Amy Estersohn is a middle school English teacher in Westchester County, NY.   She also reviews comic books for http://www.noflyingnotights.com.   Follow her on Twitter at @HMX_MSE.

Try It Tuesday: 7 Ways to Shake Up Notebooks

Readers Writers Workshop, Shana Karnes, Try It Tuesday October 25, 2016 Comments: 5

October is nearing its end, and you know what that means…’tis the season of needing inspiration! The back-to-school spark of fierce, creative lesson planning has ended, and now we’re all just praying Thanksgiving gets here ASAP.

So, if you’re getting a little worn out from reading the same-old same-old genres in your writer’s notebooks, try these seven ways to shake them up.

Write down the language you hear around you.  From quotes in independent reading books to funny things our friends say, the act of noticing language helps us think like writers and expand our linguistic repertoires.

img_5205

Annotate a booktalk.  Instead of a focused craft study, or a question-and-response to a booktalk, try just taping it into your notebook and noting what stands out.  This, too, helps build the skill of reading like writers.

img_5200

Write in someone else’s notebook.  Shake up page after page of your own handwriting by switching notebooks with someone else when responding to a prompt.  Here, my friend Bethany wrote in my notebook as we wrote about invoking wonder.

img_5211

Try beautiful note-taking.  Sometime, somewhere, everyone needs to just jot down some notes…whether it’s in for readings from a class or in a staff meeting, try to beautify those notes with some doodles or colors.

img_5203

Attempt some literary analysis.  I love the classics, and I bet many of you do too–but sometimes we beat their beauty to death when we spend hour after hour analyzing them with our students.  Try pasting in a page of whatever you’re reading and just responding to how amazing the writing is.

img_5201

Jot down fun vocabulary words.  I love to note down both words that I don’t know and words that I just love, with no pressure to define them or use them in a sentence.  It helps me notice wordplay and attempt it myself.

img_5206

Paste in things you’d like to remember.  It’s too easy to throw keepsakes in boxes or delete emails that flatter us…so glue them into your notebook and flip back through when you need a lift.

img_5199

Shaking up notebooks in these seven ways will help your students curate a scrapbook of sorts–a place to return to and look back at long after it’s been filled up and the year has ended.  A notebook is a wonderful place to practice reading and writing skills, but it becomes most effective when it’s an authentic placeholder for growth, play, and memory.

How do you shake up notebook time with unconventional genres and prompts? Please share in the comments!

Mini-Lesson Monday: Developing Social Imagination by Making Connections

Readers Workshop, Readers Writers Workshop, Shana Karnes, Strategies to Add Some Zip October 17, 2016 1 Comment

imgresI’ve been reading Peter Johnston’s excellent Opening Minds with my preservice teachers, and it’s a must-read.  One of the skills Johnston says the most open-minded students possess is that of social imagination, or being able to understand “what others are feeling, to read people’s faces and expressions, to imagine different perspectives, to make sense of abstract ideas, and to reason through this.”  In other words–empathy on all levels.  It strikes me that this is both a reading skill and a life skill.

To have your students practice social imagination, as well as grapple with a complex issue, try the following mini-lesson–which I believe I’d stretch out over two class periods.

Objectives: Distinguish the differences between meaningfulness and happiness according to the article; Connect the concepts of meaningfulness and happiness to yourself, the characters in your independent reading books, and people in the world.

Lesson: First, I’ll emphatically booktalk Viktor Frankl’s 1946 classic, Man’s Search for Meaning.  This book, written in just seven days while Frankl was imprisoned in Auschwitz, argues that life is always worth living as long as one feels they have a purpose.

Next, I’ll distribute copies of The Atlantic‘s article “There’s More to Life than Happiness,” which pairs Frankl’s book with current research on happiness vs. meaningfulness.  To give students a purpose for reading, I’ll ask them to read the article with a pen in hand, noting the differences between a happy life and a meaningful life.  

To get kids synthesizing the information, I’ll ask, “Once you’ve finished the article, answer this in your notebook for a quickwrite: which do you think is more valuable–a happy life or a meaningful life?”

The article is lengthy, and I’ll allot 30 minutes for students to read and respond in writing before we debrief.  As a whole class, we’ll have a discussion in which we focus on what the article argues, what the students believe, and how culture may have nudged us to believe those things.

imgres-1The next day in class, we’ll refer back to the article before beginning independent reading time.  “As you read today, pay attention to the characters in your book–are their lives more happy, or more meaningful?”

When we wrap up silent reading time, I’ll ask students to turn to a neighbor and tell about the characters in their book, and whether they’re happier or more purpose-driven.  This time will double as peer book recommendations as well as a quick assessment of the text-to-text connection.

After asking students to share out any really great characters they heard about (to give the class more reading recommendations), I’ll ask students to open their notebooks and quickwrite about a text-to-self connection–“is your life right now filled with happiness or meaning?  Or both?  What do you want for the future–happiness or meaningfulness?  Freewrite about this issue in general.  These responses will stay private.”

After writing, I’ll ask students to grab a post-it note and make a text-to-world connection–from their parents to friends to public figures to entire communities, countries, or cultures.  I’ll collect the post-its for a quick assessment.

Follow-Up: I’d like to return to the idea of meaningfulness vs. happiness with a reading or writing unit on the issue.  We could collaboratively study almost any novel, poem, story, or article in reading workshop through the lens of identifying purpose vs. happiness, or explore the issue further in a writing workshop geared toward either narrative, informative, or argumentative pieces.

How might you have your students consider the issue of meaningfulness vs. happiness?

 

Using a “Traffic Light” System to Explore Readers’ Interests and Sensitivities by Amy Estersohn

Books, Guest Post, Readers Workshop, Readers Writers Workshop October 12, 2016 Leave a comment

9kThis summer my social media has been clamoring about content warnings and safe(r) spaces within an academic community.  To what extent do we as educators bear responsibility for how our students respond to the material we may present to them?

I’m sure some educators probably feel that such gestures are a product of an over-coddled generation at best or somehow reduce literature to mere plot points at its worst (spoiler alert: Johnny dies), but I decided that I wanted some way of understanding my students’ emotional lives and some understanding of what topics upset them or get them excited.

On the first day of school this year, I introduced and modeled a traffic light system in response to independent reading:

Green — topics I like to read about and topics that interest me.

Yellow — sometimes I like to read about these topics, and sometimes I don’t

Red — topics that upset me.  If I come across this topic in an independent reading book, I stop reading.

I modeled a response for my seventh graders, using touchy subjects that often come up in middle grade fiction.  I described divorce as a red topic for me, autism as a yellow topic, and illness as a green topic.  

Reader responses were fascinating.  Death and illness books were by far the most divisive, with some readers describing death as a green topic and others as a red topic.  Holocaust books were similarly divisive.  Many readers described enjoying books that were “sad, but not too sad.”  Some readers identified red topics that I would have never identified on my own as a potential tough topic (e.g. car accidents, physical disfigurement.)

imgresAlso interesting was that what I know about my readers’ personal lives didn’t always square with what they wrote about their reading topics.  Some of my readers seem to want to read books that mirror their real-life struggles.  Others want to veer far away from those topics.

Based on these responses, I adjusted some of my lesson plans slightly.  I had been planning to use parts of Lisa Graff’s phenomenal Lost in the Sun as a whole-class model for character, but based on these responses, I’m not sure all of my readers would appreciate reading about survivor’s guilt as much as I did.  Instead, I’ll use parts of Jason Reynolds’s As Brave As You to teach the same concepts.

I don’t see myself swooping in to warn a student before starting a book as lovely and potentially upsetting as Ms. Bixby’s Last Day by John David Anderson or The Seventh Wish by Kate Messner.  However, I want to continue the conversation about red, yellow, and green topics. As independent readers, we have a right to establish limits, and when we read a part of a book that approaches or goes over our limits, we have a right to put it down and talk to somebody about what’s upsetting us.

Amy Estersohn is a middle school English teacher in Westchester County, NY.   She also reviews comic books for http://www.noflyingnotights.com.   Follow her on Twitter at @HMX_MSE.

Booktalking Awards: Letting Students In On the Buzz by Amy Estersohn

Books, Guest Post, Readers Workshop, Readers Writers Workshop October 5, 2016 Leave a comment

downloadIf your readers have ever played fantasy sports or filled out a March Madness bracket, they’ve experienced the same feelings that book lovers do over awards announcements.   And just the way sports fans are making predictions about championship winners all season, readers spend all year making predictions about which books will win which awards.

The recently announced longlist for the National Book Awards’ Young People’s Literature category gives readers a lot to talk about.  When I introduced the list, I did a brief book talk on each title and added some color commentary as well.

Obvious picks: Pax by Sara Pennypacker, Raymie Nightingale by Kate DiCamillo, and Burn Baby Burn by Meg Medina are three of the best books I’ve read this year.  All three books have received heaps of critical praise from a variety of sources, including from Book Whisperer Donalyn Miller.   

download-1Pleasant Surprises:  March: Volume 3 by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell, Booked by Kwame Alexander, and GHOST by Jason Reynolds.  These three books have tremendous teen reader appeal, and I was concerned that reviewers wouldn’t find them distinguished on their own merits.   

Unknown Quantities: When the Moon Was Ours by Anna-Marie McLemore, Sachiko: A Nagasaki Bomb Survivor’s Story by Caren Stelson, The Sun is Also A Star by Nicola Yoon, and When the Sea Turned to Silver by Grace Lin haven’t been released in bookstores and libraries yet, so it’s hard for me to weigh in right now.

Introducing these books to my readers was an effective way for books to gain exposure without my being the primary endorser.  I had five readers yelping for my two copies of Pax, I encouraged my graphic novel readers to check out March, and my World War II buffs are now deeply interested in reading about the United States’s aggressions in Japan.

I’ll continue to monitor the National Book Awards announcements for their finalist and winning books.  By then, I hope more readers will have a chance to read these books and chime in on how they feel about the results.

__

Amy Estersohn is a middle school English teacher in Westchester County, New York.  She  reviews comic books for http://www.noflyingnotights.com and is a judge for the CYBILS book awards this year.   Follow her on twitter at @HMX_MSE