Teacher-Mentors with Insights, Ideas, and Resources for Secondary Readers & Writers Workshop
One of my favorite books is Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann. This book altered my thinking more than any single book I’ve read before or after. I am grateful for the insights this book gave me. I am a better person because of it.
When I saw Transatlantic, I knew that it belonged in my library.
This clip gives us a glimpse into the author’s thinking, and he reads a bit of the story.
(Oh, and I LOVE his chair.)
My AP English students are in the middle of an end-of-year book project. In groups of three, they chose a book from the Pulitzer Prize or the Man-Booker Prize lists. They are reading and discussing these books and trying to determine what makes them award winners. They will create most of the parts of an AP English exam, based on the books they’ve read and discussed together.
Students are reading and discussing these complex, rich texts–literature at the top of the literary food chain. There are few things that make me more excited.
Here’s a glimpse into one of the books students chose for this project:
I love @professornana, the Goddess of YA Literature, and I learn a lot from reading her posts. This one got me thinking, and I opened and read every link she embedded in it.
This whole exile thing is crazy. Like Teri suggests, go take this little lexile quiz yourself. Then read the article she references, Teachers are Supposed to Assign Harder Books, but They Aren’t Doing it Yet. You’ll see what I mean.
CRAZY.
The article got me (and not in a good way) at the title with the word “assign.”
My students are reading more than they ever have before because I am talking books, and suggesting books, and showing off books more than I ever have before.
I am not assigning them.
Choice works. Allowing students to read what they want, high or low lexile, works.
Do I sometimes steer students into genres, or most recently into Prize winners? Do I meet with kids and challenge them into more difficult books? Yes, but I’ve learned to always include some element of choice.
The past several days I’ve spent conferring with students during the first 10 minutes of class. Ten minutes that we devote to independent reading. I’ve met with 2/3 of my 145 students so far. Every student but two has read more this year than they did last. Most have exceeded the goal they set during our first reading conferences at the beginning of the year.
That kind of data speaks louder than any kind of lexile level. (I need to just say that my auto-correct changes lexile to exile every single time. Do you think that’s telling?)
Recently, a colleague visited my classroom. He watched my students engage with literature while I sat at a back table and listened. Later he asked how I conduct my readers/writers workshops. I told him “You saw it.”
My task is to get students reading and to teach them to talk about a texts: books, stories, articles, passages, poems. Once I do that, students can do most everything else when it comes to reading on their own.
There’s freedom here. Freedom for me and freedom for them.
Funny how my students learn more from each other than they do from me anyway. I wonder why it took me so long to realize that.
I’m reminded of a post Donalyn Miller wrote almost a year ago, and I echo her title:
P.S. Are you thinking about Summer Reading yet? It’s about to be a hot topic on my campus. To allow kids to choose or not to choose, that is the question.
P.S.S. I have to figure out how to allow student choice in AP Literature, which I am most likely teaching next year. Every experienced AP Lit teacher I’ve talked to “assigns” specific books. Still trying to think through this. Any suggestions?
My AP Language students are in the middle of this big book project. I had them choose an award winning book from the Pulitzer or the Man-Book Prize lists. They are reading and discussing these books in small groups. Then they will create an AP exam using passages from their books–we are working on thinking like test writers. I told them when they were selecting titles that if the book had been made into a movie they had to include a film study into their project and teach class for a day.
One group chose to read The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I look forward to their analysis of this movie.
A while back I had a problem. I had finally succeeded in getting some of my resistant sophomore boys to read. But they were stuck in the Ranger’s Apprentice series. Now, it’s not that I have a problem with those books. No, I love those stories– mostly because many boys who will not read another thing will read them, but. . . we are talking pre-AP 10th graders here. I knew I needed to get them moving up the ladder of complexity — at least a little bit.
I called on my PLN and tweeted out a plea for suggestions. The Chronicles of Imaginarium Geographica series lit up my screen.
Okay then.
I have no idea if this series is really more complex; I don’t care. If nothing else, my students have more choice.
Here There are Dragons by James A. Owen is the newest book for the fantasy shelf in my classroom library. I hope it never gets to sit there. Books are much more useful in a child’s hands.
This is a student-made trailer. I love that the description on Youtube says,
“This is the trailer for the best book I have ever read.”
We are making book trailers again. This is my students’ favorite project.
We’ve read more books in room A202 than the history of room A202, and our school has been around for 100 years. We have read tons of pages!
Now it’s time to make a trailer about our favorite books and add some persuasive techniques to convince our friends to read these books, too.
In the past I’ve always asked students to use Animoto as their creation tool. This year I’d like to offer students more choices, so I’ve been doing a little research.
My homework is to play with a few new tools:
EZvid — Automatic slideshow maker for YouTube
If anyone knows of a good tech tool to use for making typography videos (You know, where the letters and words drop onto the screen?) please let me know. I cannot find a free version of anything.
Any ideas on other video creation tools?
I will post student made book trailers soon.
This week, the first of the fourth quarter, has flown by for me–has it for you all? Perhaps I’m feeling the passage of time because of making end-of-year lesson plans. Maybe it’s because of the spring sunshine and storms. Or, it could be because I’m looking into summer course offerings at UNH, the NWP, and our nearest university, WVU. Whatever the case may be, I am acutely aware that I don’t have much time left with my fabulous students this school year.
Since that is the case, I want to give them opportunities to showcase what they have learned and how they have grown. Of course, I want a unique, rigorous way for them to show me this, so I’ve been designing some workshop-appropriate final assessments for my students. The abilities I am curious about are their independent reading, their informal writing, their reading of difficult literature critically and deeply, and their crafting of excellent, time-intensive writing.
My goal at the end of the year is that students can read a variety of texts independently, can think and speak critically about those texts, and can choose and recommend a variety of books for themselves and others. To see whether they can do this, students will complete an independent reading project that includes a craft analysis of the writing itself, a creative portion in which students show their comprehension of deep layers of the text, and a presentation of the project overall in which other students and I ask questions about the book. Additionally, students will do their own booktalks, in which they recommend a text to the class, perform a fluent read of a short bit of the book, and discuss their own reading experience with it.
In terms of quickwrites, or the informal, fluency-building writing we do at the beginning of every class, I want students to be able to understand and show their own growth with this type of writing over the course of the year. I do this by having them do a final “Journal Harvest,” an excellent idea I got from NWP mentor Sally Lundgren, which we’ve also done once or twice a quarter thus far. In this harvest, they read over all of their writing from the year and write a formal reflection about its growth, content, and style. Additionally, they choose three pieces to revise and draft into formal, typed pieces. Lastly, they share their notebooks, reflections, and revised final pieces with their writing groups in order to give and get feedback.
We’ve read two class novels so far this year, and for the final part of the year, students have chosen from a variety of books to read in literature circles. Being American Literature, I booktalked the standards Fahrenheit 451, Huck Finn, The Scarlet Letter, and A Separate Peace. Students chose which of those they wanted to read and have been collaboratively discussing, interpreting, and completing tasks related to their reading in groups. To share their understanding with the class and me, they will complete creative projects in groups, as well as write a formal book review they’ll publish on the wonderful GoodReads.
Finally, the Multigenre Project will show off my students’ abilities to write, revise, and refine formal, coherent writing. I have already discussed the way I teach the MGP extensively elsewhere, so I’ll be brief here. The MGP allows for student choice, curiosity- and question-driven research, frequent talk in writing groups and through final presentations, and rigor. To my mind, it’s a perfect culmination to a year of workshop, and I can’t wait to see what my students produce with it.
In true teacher-participant form, I will be doing all of this beside my students, and I am quite looking forward to the reflection time this quarter’s modeling will allow. I’ve already begun the process we all go through at the end of the year, in which we start to wonder what we’ll change in the future and what worked wonderfully that we’ll hang onto. In reflecting, I find my thoughts and writing returning again and again to the power of talk. Its deliberate addition into my curriculum this year has been the biggest change from previous years, in which student talk used to be in a space reserved for group work, presentations, etc. This year, though, student talk is at the center of my teaching, and I think it’s made an incredible difference in my students’ ability and willingness to learn. I’ve consciously included it in all of my final assessments as a result, as it’s been where I’ve learned the most from my students.
As you can see, there is a lot of grading, planning, and facilitating in my future, but I think it will be well worth the effort…and enjoyable to boot! Here’s hoping that my students will learn as much from each other in these final weeks as I’ve learned from them all year. Cheers to the fourth quarter, all!
I am not sure how the book Twelve Mighty Orphans walked into my house, but it fit right in. All four of my sons played Texas football, and for many years we lived at one football stadium or another. One year we attended three games a week with three sons on two different middle school teams, and our oldest son playing on varsity at the high school. It was either that year or the next that Tanner’s team won the state championship. It’s all a blur of blue and white.
Everything you have heard about Texas football is true. It’s big, and it consumes your life.
Maybe that’s why this book by Jim Dent had such a voice at my house. My husband read it. My sons read it. How could I not?
Not much compares to talking with your teenage athlete sons about a book.
This non-fiction book chronicles the efforts of one man to make a difference in the lives of orphan boys. He teaches them to play football, but he teaches them much more than that. This trailer introduces the storyline with beautiful images:
My hope for all educators is that we never, ever lose a student. And while that is my hope, life has it that sometimes a student’s passing becomes a reality. In 2010, that’s exactly what happened. Francis Gittens departed our school community leaving behind his energy, electric personality, and smile that only those lucky enough to have had the opportunity to know (and work with) him experienced.
A long time colleague and friend asked me, “Erika, how are you going to continue Francis’s legacy?” At the time, I was overcome with grief and emotion and couldn’t possibly consider this very tall task. However, as I started to work with my new over-aged and under-credited student population, their thirst and desire to obtain information in order to quench their ongoing curiosities provided me the answer.
A library.
Not just any old library, but the Francis Gittens Lending Library. A library filled with rich pieces that have impacted other book lovers from all over the country. I’m talking all genres. I’m talking too many books for the amount of shelving we currently had. I’m talking opportunity.
Out went the email chronicling my mission. The recruiting had begun to wrap the two-hundred plus books that continued to be delivered and dropped off at my classroom door. Ms. Vasquez (Francis’s mother) had agreed to be present for the post-holiday surprise. Food had been ordered. Students had no idea how their lives were about to change. Full of emotion; I was ready.
What has happened in the two and a half years since must still be a figment of my imagination. Students are reading feigns who request piece after piece. Students and their families are continually donating to our class library. Not to mention all of the other generous donors who continue to surprise us with their favorites. Students have created Next-To-Read Lists because they can’t possibly read all the pieces they are intrigued by simultaneously, although many of them are juggling a couple at a time. Educators swing by to see what’s new on the shelves for their own reading enjoyment. And I have become quite the book connoisseur while perusing book store after book store seeking out unique pieces to book talk the very next day.
Just recently, after I reorganized our theme-based library, I sat back and found myself in awe. The growth of the library, now two-thousand plus books, stopped me in my tracks. I realized that as a collective, we have figured out a way to support our (sometimes struggling) readers and found a way for them to have all the access they want (and need) to the world beyond their own. Astounding.
I immediately phoned Ms. Vasquez inclined to show her what’s been taking shape in room 382. To no surprise her response was, “What day works best?” We both felt the urgency. She found her way to Brooklyn Bridge Academy without hesitation that very next Monday. As she entered the room, student conversations quieted and a hush fell over our shared space humbling us all.
As we all regained composure, conversations started to bubble and students were excited to share the literature they are (and have been) reading. Ms. Vasquez took her time scaling the length of the library and, overcome with emotion, she cried.
Ms. Vasquez pointing out an inscription to Francis from his Grammy in Sidney Poitier’s Measure of a Man.
She took the opportunity to talk to students about their lives and the decisions they are making. As we sometimes say, “She went there.” She focused on the young men, their appearance, and the injustices they are ultimately always going to face. She spoke directly to the females and advised them in believing in themselves, taking care of their bodies, and their intelligence. She focused on the vast literature lining the shelves and how this (education) is their key to the lives they deserve to live.
A tender moment with a male student.
As educators, it’s these ‘full circle’ moments that make us truly feel full with love, hope, motivation, and connection. Students are reading more now than ever before.
Our read literature this year. 180 plus books! Beautiful collection from the FGLL.
A proud student adding Quiet by Susan Cain to the other side of the door.
They are embracing their inquiries and willing to do the work to find answers. They are supporting me in my own reading journey and I them. We are collectively always looking for pieces of literature to add to our library and relishing in the ones that we can’t believe we actually found.
Each donated book receives a FGLL Placard (Donors, location, date)
We have shared humorous moments. Tears have been shed. In-depth thinking has…and continues to take place.
From an incredibly tragic loss to a beauty hard to put into words, we are all so very thankful. But most of all, humanity came together for those sixty minutes on a random day in March that none of us will ever forget. We are in this together, as a whole, as one.
Our ‘serious’ class photo. (My favorite!)
How will you continue to build and support literacy initiatives in your classroom?
Many of my female students love her Delirium series, and I am happy to say that maybe even some of my guys will take on Panic, Lauren Oliver’s newest title.
The topic is FEAR.
I haven’t read very far, but I have read enough to know I like this narrative voice. I especially like that I can share it with my students by using this video where Lauren Oliver reads them the first chapter.
Cannot get any cooler than that.
Three Teachers Talk 