Category Archives: Readers Writers Workshop

Why You Should Get Coached: Part 2. And, 20 Questions to Guide Conferring

Conferring, Kristin Jeschke, Readers Writers Workshop December 4, 2019 Leave a comment

I’m about to get coached. And I know it. It’s ahead of a planned observation of a PLC meeting I’ll facilitate. This coaching experience will be, well, different from those I experienced as a classroom teacher. Not only will I be netting my own thinking as my co-coach surfaces it, but also I’ll be observing the questions she casts. I’m hoping to catch more than ideas for how to best support the team of teachers I’ll serve. I’m hoping to hook on to more ways of listening, more ways of asking the right questions, more ways to perfect the timing of my casts.  Like many of you, I began this work through conferring with readers and writers. And, hence Part II of Why You Should Get Coached: to further build your conferring skills. 

When I attended Penny Kittle and Kelly Gallagher’s 180 Days Conference last October, they spoke to this, with urgency. In their eyes, conferring is the single most important strategy for an ELA teacher (I’d argue for ALL teachers but I’m still working on how to angle that for other content areas) AND it’s the one teachers need the most professional development around. In Katie Martin’s Learner Centered Innovation, she cites research from Joyce and Showers (2002) that demonstrates that “teachers who were coached in the classroom implemented 95% of skills over time compared with 5% of their peers that implemented instructional practices in their classroom without coaching.” When you invite a coach to be a part of your classroom story, you’re acquiring direct access to listening and questioning and reflecting skills. Imagine the outcome! When I invited my coach in to observe small group conferring and when I invited him in to observe video of my conferring, my tackle box of strategies swelled. So did my confidence. So did my trust in my coach and my students’ trust in me. This occurred for me because of talk that invited it.

Screen Shot 2019-12-03 at 11.01.01 PMKittle is right: “The language we use to invite talk begins with the questions we ask.” Because coaches’ learning centers around building rapport, trust, and reflective capacity, and because we are (or at least should be!) the most coached in a building, we’re uniquely centered to model questioning and listening and to coach on it.

Here are some of my new favorite questions you might toss out when you need to reel in student thinking. 

  1. What’s on your mind?Screen Shot 2019-12-03 at 11.00.36 PM
  2. And what else?
  3. What all have you tried?
  4. If you were someone else, what do you think you would try?
  5. If you did know the answer, what would you think?
  6. What have you tried in the past that might work here?
  7. On what past successes might you draw on as you do this work?
  8. So how do you feel about _____________?
  9. What’s the most important part of your work?
  10. What are you hoping to accomplish with _________?
  11. What skill or process are you looking to really strengthen with this?
  12. What will guide your decisions about _________?
  13. What might your classmates think (especially in terms of strengths) is important for you to focus on?
  14. Which of these is the biggest challenge right now?
  15. What’s keeping you up at night?
  16. It seems you might be feeling _________. Would you like to talk about that?
  17. Looking back, what would you do differently?
  18. What is most important to you?
  19. What do you think your next steps are?
  20. What was most helpful today?

Your coaches will lean into other, even better questions. And they’ll listen to you because they see your value. Why not toss out an invite?

Kristin Jeschke loves questions and really appreciates (in her new role as Instructional Coach) that she doesn’t have to have the answers. Follow Kristin on Twitter @kajeschke.

Author’s Chair

AP Language, Classroom Culture, Readers Writers Workshop, Sarah Morris, Strategies to Add Some Zip December 2, 2019 Leave a comment

 

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Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Every educator has the ‘moment.’ I wish I had a cute name for the ‘moment’ that would make it sound both adorable and relatable – but I don’t. I’ve never named it beyond just the description of it to loved ones and close teaching friends and confidants – but I’m betting you know the moment. That moment where you find yourself googling what other careers you can pursue with a degree in English or Education that isn’t teaching. 

You still love the kids. 

You still love the work. 

But, man, has the work felt like work recently. 

And that’s the moment. When you’re drained and empty and tired and the best way forward is a little bit of fantasy: I could just start an Etsy business and live off of that – sure, I don’t really make anything people are interested in buying, but I could. I  could just take a year off and write the great American novel – sure, I don’t have any ideas for that novel, just some opening pages and some really, really vague outlines (in the vein of stuff happens to people and it’s awesome), but I could. I could just find a job doing data entry somewhere – sure the nine to five would be sooo boring and I hate numbers and data and I’m not sure I could fake even a little bit of joy for that process, but I could… maybe…

I found myself here in 2014, and a teacher friend suggested I apply for Summer Institute with my local Writing Project. This experience was and still is a literal life-changing event for me. Finding a group of like-minded teachers who wanted to deeply invest in a research based development of their practice through yearly inquiry projects was transformative. Finding opportunities to both learn from other teachers who were still in the classroom as well as opportunities to teach other teachers was and is encouraging and growth-inspiring. Five years later I’m still active with MTWP and still continuing to grow and learn from that community. 

Currently on maternity leave, I’ve found myself thinking about my practice a lot. I thought I would spend a portion of this time at home -in between feedings and diaper changes – worried about my students or the interim or how the class room was going without me. And, sure, those thoughts have crossed my mind a time or two, but mostly when I’ve thought about school at all I’ve found myself thinking about my practice in a macro-sense from the beginning of my career until now: what are my “greatest hits” if you will.

When I taught sophomores several years ago, I incorporated a game-changing strategy I learned at MTWP: author’s chair. Every two or three weeks, students would share their writing with the entire class. The process was simple.

Students would sign up to share their writing with the class at least once a nine weeks. Usually we would share every second or third Friday, and the sharing would take the entire 45 minutes. The sharing student would move to the front of the room and sit in my chair, stand behind the podium – whatever made them comfortable – and then share a piece of writing. They could share whatever they liked – a polished piece, something from their notebooks, something they wrote just for this occasion. The point wasn’t WHAT they shared but THAT they shared. After they read their piece, the class would simply, in unison, say, “Thank you for sharing.” And the next student would move to the front of the room to share. I would share as well – often sharing bits and pieces of my unfinished great American novel (eye-roll emoji here). It was powerful for me to remember how anxiety inducing it can be to share your writing with other people. Often I think teachers forget this part because we aren’t sharing our writing and don’t have to feel the nerves and/or we forget the painful part of this practice because we’re so focused on the gains that sharing can have for a student. 

This simple practice increased our classroom community: we were all in the writing process together – writing, revising, sharing, receiving and giving feedback. Students were motivated to write more and in addition to what I was asking them to write in class – they brought in songs, poetry, narratives, a choose your own adventure, comics, satires, op-eds. Together, we enjoyed a wonderful season of writing for the sake of writing and sharing, for the most part, because we were proud of what we had written. 

When I moved to teaching only AP Lang, I moved away from author’s chair, mostly for timing reasons. There seemed to be so much to cover in AP and I was still getting my feet wet with the curriculum that I felt like I needed the time. In this moment of reflection for me, I’m realizing -again- that ultimately students just need to write, to write and to share -even when it doesn’t feel like there’s enough time.

Sarah Morris teaches AP English Language & Composition, AP Seminar,  and Film as Literature in Murfreesboro, Tn. She is currently binging The Mandalorian with her three week old daughter – we’re both equally enthused. She tweets at @marahsorris_cms. 

 

 

 

Text Talk: Ink Knows No Borders

Maggie Lopez, Poetry, Readers Writers Workshop, Talk, Text Talk November 29, 2019 1 Comment

In American Literature this year, we are taking a “disrupted” look at the American Dream, noticing its failings and shortcomings through the literature we read as a class. 

After discussions over the summer reading titles and a gallery walk to generate our thinking around the American Dream, we watched an abbreviated version of Chimamanda Adichie’s TedTalk “The Danger of a Single Story” before identifying and discussing the “single stories” in our lives and our world.

We then dug into selections from Ink Knows No Borders: Poems of the Immigrant and Refugee Experience. The collection of poetry features a range of perspectives on adjusting to life as an immigrant as one tries to stay connected to their home culture while adapting to a new place. The poems are both heartbreaking and heartwarming tributes to the courage of the authors.

With a packet of assorted poems, students first processed one poem with their peers, spending time deciphering meaning and making connections.  We then created jigsawed groups where students taught and discussed their poems with a new set of peers. Together, the jigsawed groups began to track thematic connections across the differing, yet similar experiences of the authors.

The poetry offered alternative perspectives while being accessible and real. The poems about names and traditions resonated with my refugee students from Africa, while other students related to the burden of balancing two cultures, one at home and one at school. We Googled more information about the current situation at the Mexico-US border, and one student was brave enough to share his family’s story of obtaining citizenship while another student shared that she fears ICE will take away her parents every day. 

When we discussed the poetry as a full class, students came away with an understanding that often in our country, there is a single story told about immigrants. Students came to the insight that this was misguided and unfair because immigrants founded our country and the United States often promotes the promise that the dream is achievable to all. Students overwhelmingly agreed that we should be more understanding, welcoming, and helpful to people who want to make a better life because we all have stories and hardships.

This text worked well because students discovered new perspectives, connected to their lives and our world, and also gained low stakes poetry exposure, one of my goals for the year. Plus, our conversations made me so happy and hopeful to teach resilient, inclusive young people in this time of division.

Maggie Lopez is grateful for her digital colleagues and an incredibly rewarding profession.  You can find her on Twitter @meglopez0.

 

The Struggle is Real: simple tips for decreasing student stress and anxiety at the end of the semester

Readers Writers Workshop November 27, 2019 Leave a comment

It’s the end of November and my students, my co-teacher, and I have hit the hump. The structure and routines we have established in our English class are becoming monotonous and our students are pushing the limits with us.  Are you feeling this now too?

The end of the semester brings more stress, more anxiety, and more challenges for both students and teachers. For our freshmen, this uncertainty causes students to act in ways outside their norm.  Just the other day, the word “finals” was mentioned in class and that led to many panicked faces and questions about the end of the semester.  At that moment, I realized that my students have never taken finals before and have no idea what they are, why teachers keep stressing that they are coming up, and how they will affect their grades.

These moments remind me that we need to slow down.  Our content does not matter if the students aren’t in a place to perform. They need to know that we believe in them and that they can be successful in and outside of our class. We need to let them know we hear them and care.

Tips to get through the end of the semester struggle with your students:

Gather feedback from your students: Google Forms are my favorite tool for gathering quick feedback from students.  Keep them short and simple to get the best results.  We don’t use them often but when we do, we take their feedback and make changes right away.

 

End of Semester Survey
Anonymous Survey in October

Take time to answer their questions: When the bell rings at the beginning of class, we spend three to five minutes a few days a week just answering their questions.  As teachers we are used to the ever changing schedules in our schools; we know the content and how we want students to perform; we understand the routines like finals. But, our students don’t and we need to relieve their fears.

Talk individually with students:   Every day we meet with students during independent reading and writing workshop to talk to them.  Some talks are more academic like reading comprehension or fluency checks or standards checks. Others times we are pulling students aside to check on their mental health – noticing those moments when they are zoning off or are bouncing off the walls when they normally are focused. When we show we care about them more than our content, they do step up and give us their best effort.

Have students set goals:  Our standards based gradebook is complicated and not easy for students to navigate. These quick standards check-ins lead to goal setting.  We keep the bar high and constantly verbalize our belief that they all have the potential to earn an “A” in our class.  We ask them what their goal is for the end of the semester and what they are going to do to achieve that goal. Sometimes this an informal conversation and sometimes they write it down on a notecard or on paper and commit to achieving it.

Increase movement during class:  Our class structure is fairly simple:  they read, we do a mini-lesson, and they read or write some more.  They sit a lot and even during our first period class, we notice such a difference in attitudes and behaviors when they get brain breaks or we add movement to our normal lesson.  Even a simple thing like taking a 30 second stand and stretch break after independent reading and before writing workshop begins, wakes them up. Instead of having students just  turn and talk, we ask them to stand up and turn and talk with a neighbor to get them blood flowing as they share.

 

These are just a few ways we are fighting the end of the semester struggle and trying to relieve some of our students’ anxiety and stress.  How are you keeping students motivated these last few weeks of school?

Melissa Sethna has been a high school instructional coach in Mundelein, IL for the past ten years. While coaching is her passion, she missed the students and is so grateful to have the opportunity to co-teach one freshman English class this year.

 

 

 

Book Club Kits

Angela Faulhaber, Book Clubs, Readers Writers Workshop November 25, 2019 Leave a comment

“The students are asking me if they’re going to get to do book clubs this year,” Julie told me last week. Her junior English students had participated in a few rounds of book clubs last year and it was encouraging to hear that the learning stuck. 

This was validating because last year, teachers worked hard to create experiences with book clubs that were engaging and meaningful (you can read more about that here or here). We noticed that, as Kate Roberts writes in her book A Novel Approach, “Book clubs, when done well, dance along the line of truly authentic student-driven reading and teacher-directed, curriculum-based literacy.” 

But, the fact remained that organizing book clubs was challenging. For many teachers, it felt like an insurmountable task. Even though we work with amazing librarians (shout out to Amanda and John!), if we wanted to use current, engaging titles, it was difficult to collect enough titles to give students choice and have enough copies for everyone. Teachers were hauling books in their trunk to school, then back to the library. The logistics became something that was holding teachers back from implementing a practice we knew was good for kids.

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Teachers Alex White and Kassidy Hammonds spend a few hours on a Friday sorting books for book clubs. Since nobody wants to do that, we had to find a better system.

So, this year, we decided to make book clubs more sustainable using Book Club Kits, an idea I first heard discussed while working with teachers at Anderson High School in Cincinnati, OH. 

What is a Book Club Kit? 

The idea is based off of book club kits at public libraries where librarians put together multiple copies of the same title along with questions and other resources. Put simply, a school Book Club Kit is a collection of multiple copies of multiple titles, along with a possible plan for implementation. 

How do we make a Book Club Kit?

Step one: Collect titles

Hopefully if you’re using book clubs, there’s a culture of literacy in place so students Screen Shot 2019-11-25 at 7.38.34 PMmight be able to help identify titles. If that is not yet part of the culture, there are lots of places you might go to look for ideas. You can visit websites like Nerdy Book Club and Pernille Ripp’s blog and the Disrupt Texts site and hashtag. NoveList Plus, a resource we can access through our public library, also has excellent recommendations. Additionally, there are lots of threads on Twitter where teachers and students share titles.

Identify what students might like. Conduct a survey. Do an inventory of your book room to see what you already have. Ask students for their recommendations. Scour the library. Talk to kids. 

Once we did this, I compiled titles into a document and sent to teachers for feedback. From there we were able to use department funds to purchase enough books for six kits (each kit has enough books for a class set). If you don’t have funds available, you might consider Donors Choose, or participate in the #clearthelist social media campaign.

It was also important that the titles could, as Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop outlines in her scholarly work, act as mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors for readers. Therefore, we were intentional about having a wide representation in both content and authors (to read more, read Amy’s post here).

Step Two: Cluster the texts

We didn’t want these books to just sit on shelves to be put into hodge-podge book club configurations. Instead, we decided to be intentional about the way we clustered the titles. For example, in freshman ELA, one of the kits is centered around the theme Coming of Age; 10th graders might participate in a book club around novels in verse, or maybe a genre study of mystery titles. In 11th grade, there’s a kit around memoir. A book club around literary non-fiction for 12th graders contains the most complex titles. You might think about these groupings in three main ways: 

  • Genre (novels in verse, mystery, literary non-fiction, etc)
  • Theme (coming of age, overcoming obstacles, etc.)
  • Author Study (Jason Reynolds, Nikki Grimes, K.A. Holt, Kwame Alexander, Sharon Draper are examples of authors whose writing is varied enough and would make great book club possibilities)

 

Step Three: 

Make it accessible. We put all the books in clear plastic bins. There’s a sign-out sheet to keep track of the kits. Each kit has a list of the titles and how many copies, along with a QR codes that link to a corresponding unit plan one might use with that set of titles. 

I finished organizing the kits last week and already two of them are out in classrooms. We’re getting ready to launch the Mystery Book Clubs once we get back from Thanksgiving and I’m excited to see the way a genre study will play out. 

Screen Shot 2019-11-25 at 7.33.04 PMNow that you have your Book Club Kits organized, I strongly encourage you to check out the book Breathing New Life Into Book Clubs by Sonja Cherry-Paul and Dana Johanssen (and if you use the code NCTE19 you get 30% off and free shipping!).

Angela Faulhaber works as a literacy coach in Cincinnati, OH, where she gets to work with the best book nerds in all the land. She just finished reading Beartown by Frederick Backman and is in that sad phase of book-mourning where the next book can never live up. She welcomes your suggestions.

 

A #FridayReads Come back

#FridayReads, Amy Rasmussen, Books, Readers Writers Workshop November 22, 2019 Comments: 2

How could I forget?

I just remembered I used to celebrate #FridayReads with my students. Every week, after independent reading time, we’d talk about our books, maybe tweet a selfie with them, maybe imitate a favorite sentence. It was probably a Friday when we wrote book reviews in the form of haikus. It was a Friday when we became literary critics. That one was epic.

This year we’ve been having Friday discussions. Reading, talking, listening. That’s worked well — we’ve explored many interesting and important issues — but I completely forgot about doing more with our books. Dang it.

No wonder my students are not reading as much as they have in the past.

I won’t play the What/If game, but it’s staring at me in with weary eyes.

This morning I read about the 2019 National Book Award winners, and while I haven’t read any of them, yet; I gulped at the beauty of these lines, shared by one of the winners as she spoke of her mother–

“As a child, I watched her every move, seeing her eyes fall upon every word everywhere — encountered in the grocery store, on a bus, pamphlets, the package labels, my high school textbooks. She was always wolfing down words, insatiable — which is how I learned the ways in which words were a kind of sustenance, could be a beautiful relief or a greatest assault.”

Words. A beautiful relief or a greatest assault.

On this Friday, I think we will start here. We’ll write in response to this idea:  How are words both a relief or an assault?

Then, we’ll explore books — in anticipation, and hope, that just maybe one of my readers will fall in love with words.

 

Amy Rasmussen teaches senior English in a large high school in North Texas. She’s still working on building her classroom library to its former glory, and knows she needs to read more herself if she wants to get every student into a book they will love. Follow her on Twitter @amyrass

Co-creating Workshop-Based Units to Personalize Them

Readers Writers Workshop November 21, 2019 1 Comment

As my school district began to anchor itself in the world of personalized learning, I quickly realized that this was a nice fit for the workshop model since both valued voice and choice and both operated on a student-driven framework. One of the aspects of personalized learning that really appealed to me was the idea of students actually generating the learning topics, tasks, and assessments. It seemed like it was helping accomplish a key workshop goal, which is ownership. So as this school year began I resolved to give it a shot–I wanted to build the year in such a way that it was workshop-based but so that it also allowed for personalization through the co-creation of our units.

Getting started

To do that, I used a resource our district provided called “Orchestrating the Move to Personalized Learning” in which Allison Zmuda and Bena Kallick outline 7 areas that teachers can begin the shift to student ownership. They give practical examples of what co-creating looks like at different stages with the goal of moving from teacher-driven to student-driven learning. At a workshop this summer Zmuda pointed us to a couple of other practical co-creating resources, like this play-by-play for co-creating curriculum with students by Sam Nelson (video version here). In short, the progression through the standards stays the same (this is my background work) while there is flexibility in the content or how students access the standards.

How we’re trying to do it

This is a rough outline of the process we have followed in my junior level English III classes this semester to build our workshop units together:

  • Select the semester’s topics: At the beginning of the year we took a day as a class to give input and feedback about potential topics for the school year. I narrowed our list to 10 and students voted on three first semester units. They chose Friday night lights, school shootings, and perfectionism. Below left is what they saw; below right is part of the results.
  • Build the unit’s essential questions: We began each unit by generating the essential questions–what we would study.  I used a resource from Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe to help students understand the traits of good essential questions, then we used the PEM (philosophical, ethical, and moral) framework to build questions. Students did this in teams, then submitted their questions to me. I organized by combining like questions and eliminating stray or non-essential questions. We used these questions to guide our reading and writing times and to design the final tasks and discussions (including the Unit 2 Socratic seminar, comprised entirely of their questions). You can see what they built for Unit 2 and Unit 3. 
  • Choose a reading pathway: For the violence unit (Unit 3) I gave them a list comprised of my recs and their recs. They could choose beyond the list with prior approval. Having many reading pathways allows the unit to be personalized and allows reading workshop to keep the class discussions centered on skills rather than plot events. I also like that they can have choice but still participate in ongoing thematic discussions. Some chose books based on the unit’s essential questions, and some chose the book and then worked to determine which questions matched up to their book. Some chose academic non-fiction and some chose young adult novels. Students also set their own reading schedules based on a series of 3-4 deadlines.
  • Define the learning goals/outcomes: At this point in the year I am still doing most of this work. I envisioned students designing ways to demonstrate their learning and understanding, but there are so many moving pieces right now that I decided to find ways to give them some managed choice. They have set some independent goals for reading and writing, but I have controlled the end tasks (informal reading check-ins, design challenges, and seminars) with a goal of finding ways to bring their workshop reading into some meaningful collaborative discussion.
Unit 3 seminar discussions

Takeaway

As we are beginning the final push to finish this semester, I’ve been really encouraged by the learning experiences we’ve had and I think it’s because of the investment in personalizing the course’s structure. In the past my focus was on helping students to read tough material (Emerson, Thoreau, etc.) that I had selected or to discuss open-ended questions I had designed. Now, students are digging into the nuances of research on gun violence in a much more organic way. Because they had generated the topic, chosen the book, and generated the questions, our Socratic seminar was really authentic and full of meaningful dialogue. It’s far from perfect, but I’m excited about the effects of the small shifts in ownership that we’re making.

Nathan Coates teaches junior English at Mason High School, a large suburban district near Cincinnati, Ohio. He’s currently learning to be a good passenger while his baby girl learns to drive. Follow Nathan @MHSCoates. 

Organizing Classroom Libraries — One Teacher’s Answers

AP English, AP Language, Books, Classroom Library, Julie Swinehart, Logistics, Readers Workshop, Readers Writers Workshop November 20, 2019 Comments: 3

My job as an English teacher is to empower my students to discover, identify, locate, rediscover, find, and fall in love with the books that speak to their souls and their hearts.

In order to make that happen, I have to have a dynamic classroom library. A year and a half ago, I didn’t have anything on my shelves in my classroom, but because my school, my family, and my colleagues are on board with the vision of robust classroom libraries, my library looks a whole lot better than it did then.

My shelves when I first saw my current classroom
My shelves after a week or two of procuring books
My current shelves

We’ve raided the school book room, collected our main library’s discards, purchased books off of facebook and other “garage” sale type of venues, and we bring back hundreds of pounds of second hand books in our suitcases at every opportunity. (I live in Nicaragua, which complicates the book buying at times.) We spent our entire English department budget on classroom libraries last year, so this fall we felt like kids in a candy store when we were setting up our new classroom libraries.

Each time we are blessed a new influx of books, we have to think about storage, and more importantly, organization. It’s essential that we store and organize our books so that students will be drawn to the shelves and compelled to read new books.

nonfiction corner

I haven’t had any experience that tells me that labeling and micro-leveling books is what makes my students want to read. Quite the opposite. What I read also tells me that labels aren’t for public display on the spines of books or on the front of organizational book baskets. They are tools for teachers to use, which may help them with a cursory understanding of texts before they can get to know them better.

My job as an English teacher is to empower my students to discover, identify, locate, rediscover, find, and fall in love with the books that speak to their souls and their hearts.

My experience and observations tell me that organizing my books by general level and genre is what works best for my classroom library. That rotating book displays pique student interest in titles they might not have noticed or cared about in the past. That topic, passion, and enthusiasm can sell a book to a student a whole lot more convincingly than a level or a label can.

My classroom library is split into four basic sections:

  1. middle school fiction
  2. young adult fiction
  3. contemporary fiction
  4. nonfiction

I do this out of necessity: I teach three sections of seventh grade English and two sections of AP Language and Composition. It’s important to have some distinct sections for these students so they at least have a starting place when they browse for books. They do tend to meet each other in the young adult fiction shelves, and there isn’t much that stops them from “shopping” on all of the shelves.

Within those four sections I have subsections, however.

I have grouped some middle school fiction into some general categories: magic/fantasy, mystery/scary, realistic fiction, historical fiction, books in a series, sports, and shorter/easy reads.

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In the young adult fiction section I caved to a student who really wanted a romance section (why not? I thought). I’ve also grouped some of these books into a “books in a series” section, a mystery/horror section, dystopian, and a sci-fi/fantasy section. The section on World War Two shelf was created because I have a number of students who are gravitating towards that topic right now. It’s not comprehensive, and it mixes middle level, young adult, contemporary fiction, and nonfiction, but it is what’s working for my students right now, so it will stay for at least a while.

That’s the whole point. Our classroom library organization is based on what works for my students. It wasn’t prescribed by any “experts” or mandated by anyone outside of my classroom. It’s authentic, preserves student emotions and privacy, and the shelves are open to whomever would like to browse them.

There is a tiny bit of leveling – three levels plus nonfiction, but this leveling is more about maturity and content than text leveling.  It’s certainly not the microlevels of Lexiles, A-Z, or AR that some libraries employ. It’s helpful rather than restrictive.

Because the books are organized into these smaller topic or genre sections, students have a helpful place to start looking that isn’t rigid. I feel like it’s the best of both worlds because it gives students a direction and a guide, but not rules or rails they have to live between.

Simply because of the space and shelves that I have in my room, I’ve added a subgroup of poetry, plays, and picture books section in the nonfiction corner.

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This is a corner that needs some work. As I add titles to my classroom library, I will deliberately look for poetry and drama, as well as relevant picture books to add to these shelves.

While I have these semi-permanent organizational ideas, I also have some rotating book displays.

Right now, my AP Lang class is starting a research project. One of their sources needs to be a book with either endnotes or footnotes, so I’ve collected many of my classroom library books that meet that requirement and put them on display.

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This display changes about every week or so, sometime with deliberate purpose like this one, and other times it’s just whatever comes to mind. Some recent displays have been around the topics of time travel, aviation, The Great Depression, and sports. Anything goes when it comes to displaying a collection of books.

Another way of displaying and organizing books is by what is popular with students, what the teacher is currently reading, and what’s been book talked in the last day or so.

These are all examples of rotating book displays, and they rotate between every other day, and every couple of weeks. It’s a matter of doing what makes sense for the type of display it is, and what the current needs of the classes are.

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So once the books are organized and on display, students actually start to look at them! It’s a miracle, and a wonderful feeling when they get interested and excited when they haven’t been in the past.

At that point, a check out and return system becomes key.

Mine is old-fashioned and easy to navigate. It’s a spiral bound notebook and a pen. Pretty simple.

Just because it’s low-tech doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. Quite the opposite. Students know to check out books and put them in the return basket when they are done. Sometimes they cross out the original entry of their  returned book, but mostly all they have to do is put the book in the return basket and I’ll find their name and cross it off and then re-shelve the book.

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The return basket is right next to the check out notebook and this sign which reminds students that the honor system is what makes this whole thing work.

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The classroom libraries in our hall are open to all of our students, so often students from other classes wander in to my classroom looking for books. The system is the same for them as it is for the students I currently have in my classes. All of the students at our school are our students; all of the students have access to all of our classroom libraries.

If some students have books out for a long time, and we don’t see those students on the regular because they aren’t in our own classes, we rely on each other to ask those students about those titles, which means we often get books returned promptly with that simple system. Our department has a shared google doc and we list the students’ names and titles that are checked out, so we all have that information at our fingertips.

Our organizational and check-out systems are thoughtful and simple, and can be adopted by almost anyone. There may be other better, different, or more complicated ideas and systems out there that work for people, but I wanted to share ours because of its simplicity and effectiveness.

How do you organize your classroom library, and what philosophical beliefs to you hold that are behind these practices? I’d love to read your thoughts in the comments.

Julie has been teaching secondary language arts for more than twenty years, spending the first fifteen in rural Central Oregon,  four in Amman, Jordan, and the most recent school years in Managua, Nicaragua. 

Follow her on twitter @SwinehartJulie

What Does It Mean to Be a Writer?

Classroom Culture, Readers Writers Workshop, Shana Karnes, Try It Tuesday, Writers Workshop November 19, 2019 1 Comment

A nonnegotiable in my classroom is that everyone is a writer. We work from day one of class to establish identities as writers: we create writer’s notebooks, we discuss writing routines, we practice writing every day.

But many of my students struggle to see themselves as writers because their definition of “a writer” is so narrow. They are beholden to culturally-entrenched images of Hemingway, Faulkner, Dickens–studious, quill-wielding, miserable, alcohol-fumed, slaves of the pen.

It takes some time to convince kids that despite the intrigue that persona presents, that it’s not true.

I recently encountered a strategy for defining authorship that I continue to return to for its simple brilliance. This school year, I’ve been visiting classrooms of practicing teachers, and one of my favorite places to visit is Gloria Kok’s classroom.

One of the first things that struck me upon entering her room was an entire wall devoted to writers. As I visited over multiple weeks, I realized that her students had created the five points of their working definition of what it means to be a writer. They had also brainstormed personal heroes who fit their definitions. The wall is covered with the likes of everyone from Ta-Nehisi Coates to Oprah Winfrey to Langston Hughes to Tupac.

Frequently, Gloria asks students to use these points to frame their own writing reflections or goal statements. I’ve begun to do this myself, as I’ve visited her classroom so frequently–so much so that I’ve found myself seeking out definitions of what a writer is in my reading and work.

A favorite writing mentor of mine is Donald Murray, whose books I pick up anywhere I find them. I recently acquired Write to Learn, and one of my favorite and most personally relatable definitions of what it means to be a writer comes from his second chapter:

“Not knowing what I will write, or even if I can write, means I will not write what I have written before. I have begun a voyage of discovery. The initial satisfaction from writing is surprise: we say what we do not expect to say in a way we do not expect to say it.”

This approach to writing–that it is an inexpert art full of magic and whimsy, but helped along by the discipline of practice and study–is my personal favorite. The post-it notes papering my desk with quotes by Donald Murray attest to the similarities of our beliefs: these definitions help encourage, refocus, and discipline me on mornings when I do not want to sit down and write.

I encourage you to do the same thing with your students, writers, and even yourself: create a definition of what it means to be a writer. Put it down on paper, hang it on the walls, shout it from the rooftops–whatever works to teach yourself that your belief in yourself as a writer is what matters.

Shana Karnes is a writer who lives in Madison, Wisconsin. Her desk is covered with quotes about writing, pens, poems, abandoned coffee cups, and discarded crayons, stickers, and paint from her children. Connect with Shana on Twitter at @litreader.

Integrating Sketchnotes into Annotations

Maggie Lopez, Readers Writers Workshop, Strategies to Add Some Zip, thinking November 18, 2019 Leave a comment

When any unit is designed, I intentionally consider what important academic skills I can either teach students or reinforce to support critical thinking in preparation for academic endeavors after high school.  While the majority of my juniors and seniors are familiar with annotating, we still practice making our internal thinking and interactions with the text visible on paper no matter what we are reading.

An idea presented at NCTE last year was sketchnoting, which is the practice of creating visual annotations to develop meaning.  Students are encouraged to draw pictures and symbols or icons instead of writing their thinking in the margins, like a visual poem write around or visual 1 Pager.  While I am certainly no artist, just stick figures over here, sketching annotations adds a different dimension to meaning-making.

I love that sketchnotes provide an opportunity for more creative interactions with a text and provide an opportunity to use the right side of the brain.  Sketchnoting simply offers another mode for students to create meaning and retain information (You can watch a great overview from Verbal to Visual and utilize the free resources, too).

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As we dig into our first full class novel, students are assigned pages to annotate or sketchnote as we read, these pages then prompt our TQE (thoughts, questions, epiphanies) discussions.  I started out with a think aloud model for students with the first (rather dry) pages of The Great Gatsby.

While most students begin with traditional annotations, highlighting and marginalia, because that is what they’re more comfortable with, many slowly branch out into adding pictures or visual notations with more practice and after seeing their peer’s examples.  

Aside from having students intentionally interact with a text and build their annotation skills, the annotations and sketchnotes provide scaffolding for the final project, a visual 1 Pager or a “graffiti wall” that encourages students to display their learning visually.  I did this project two years ago with juniors who read –I may challenge this year’s crew to use fewer words.

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Visual notetaking can be a more compelling way to lure students into making meaning with a text or other content.  I am hoping more sketchnotes start popping up on the pages of students’ notebooks and other assignments, in my classroom or others.

 

Maggie Lopez is awaiting the snow and start of ski season in Salt Lake City, but wishing she was attending NCTE 2019 this month.  She is currently reading Into the Water. Follow her @meg_lopez0.