Category Archives: Amy Rasmussen

5 Reasons Why Reading Conferences Matter — Especially in High School English

Amy Rasmussen, AP English, Conferring February 16, 2015 Comments: 15

The Attention. Every child needs one-on-one conversations with an adult as often as possible.  Adolescents, by nature of their age, struggle with identity, fairness, stress, and a slew of other issues that contribute to all kinds of problems. The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University. reports that “9 out of 10 Americans who meet the medical criteria for addiction started smoking, drinking, or using other drugs before age 18.” This is not surprising since according to this study, “75% of all high school students have used addictive substances, including tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, or cocaine.”

I know there are many reasons for teenagers to partake in these substances. I also know that many students think that adults do not care, or will not notice, if they are in class, participating in class, or lucid in class. One way to show our adolescent students that we care is to talk with them. And face-to-face conversations about books and reading is a pretty safe way to do so, not to mention that we model authentic conversations about reading when we do.

Try questions like:

  • How’s it going? (Thanks, Carl Anderson)
  • Why did you choose this book?
  • Do you know anyone else who has read this book? What’d she think?
  • How’d you find the time to read this week?
  • What’s standing in the way of your reading time?

The Relationship. Once students know they can trust us, they will tell us things about their lives, their struggles, and their hopes beyond high school. According to the Zur Institute, teen internet and video game addictions, violence in the media, online bullying, and violence in the home top the charts as some of the major influencers of teen behavior. On the Zur website, there’s a section titled “What You Can Do.” We find language that mirrors the words and phrases that lead to the most effective reading conferences, like “learn what [it] means to your children by talking with them about it,” and “be genuinely curious about what draws them to [whatever it is],” and “discuss balance,” and “keep the conversation active.”

We hear so much talk in education circles about engagement. Engagement comes as a result of relationships. When we talk to our students about their lives and the things that matter to them, and we help them see that somewhere in some book a character has experienced similar situations, conflicts, and heartaches, we show our students that literature is a living breathing source of hope. This Psychology Today post explains it clearly:  “Books are friends we can choose without restriction,” believed John Ruskin, an English art critic of the 19 Century who influenced Marcel Proust “who developed the idea of a novel that was not just a friend, but a friend who enables us to become intimate both with other minds and with our own.” Proust called readers of his own work “a sort of magnifying glass … by which I could give them the means to read within themselves.”

My students and I talk about windows and mirrors. This is why we read literature:  to learn what it means to be human. How do you see yourself in the characters, conflicts, situations, and how do you see out into a world that is very different from your own? The more we grow in empathy, the better relationship we’ll have with our friends, our families and all other people we associate with — at least the idealist in me will cling to that hope as I continue to talk to students about books and reading.

Try questions like:

  • What character reminds you of yourself or someone you know?
  • What part of the story is the most similar/different to your life?
  • Why do you think the author makes that happen in the book?
  • What does he want us to learn about life?
  • How does this story/character/conflict/event make you think about life differently?

The Learning. There are times when I’ve done a mini-lesson, I feel like I’ve talked to myself. I see little application of a skill I know I’ve taught. Sometimes students completely miss the point of the lesson. However, when I take the time to talk to each student individually, and reinforce the skill in a quick chat, the application of that skill some how seeps into their brains much deeper. And you know those students who are super apprehensive — the ones who have to ask “Is this right?” and show us a teeny bit of work before they will really produce any work? Holding a regular reading conference has solved this problem.

Students know they will get a chance to talk with me about their progress, and they are more willing to take risks than when we talk infrequently. Time for reading conferences, and conferences timed to meet the needs of each one of our learners solves many at-risk behaviors and promotes deeper learning.

Try questions like:

  • Tell me about _____ that we learned in class today. How does that relate to your book/character?
  • Remember when we learned _____, tell me how/where you see that in your book.
  • Think about when we practiced ___, where does the author do that in your book?
  • You’ve improved with ___, how could you use that skill for _______?

The Literacy. Sometimes I think we forget that the purpose of our instruction must be to develop the literate lives of our students. We must provide opportunities for our students to grow into confident and competent readers and writers in order to handle the rigor and complexity of post high school education and beyond. We must remember to focus on literacy not on the literature — just like we must focus on the reader not just on the reading. We must validate our readers, ask questions that spark confidence, avoid questions that demean or make the student defensive, and at the same time challenge our readers into more complex texts. We can learn if a child has read a book, or the assigned pages, with a few quick questions. Then we must turn the conversations to the why, the what, and the how that will get students to choose to take a step up the ladder of complexity.

When students know that we care more about them as the person than we care about what or how much they have read, they will trust us. And it’s trust between the adolescent and the adult that creates the most movement as a reader, a writer, a student, a young person emerging into adulthood. Students will read the rich literature we bless because they know we are leading them into literature that will in turn bless their lives.

Try questions like:

  • On a scale of 1 to 10 how complex is this book for you? Why?
  • What do you do when the reading gets difficult?
  • Of all the books you’ve read this year, which was the most challenging? Why?
  • How’s it going finding vocabulary for your personal dictionary?
  • Tell me how you are keeping track of the parallel storyline?

The Reward. We can experience powerful rewards as we meet with our students in regular reading conferences. (I wrote about one here.) Every year, after students get to know me a bit, they tell me things like: “We were scared of you at first. You seemed so strict,” and “You intimidated me, and I was afraid to talk to you.” I get how students see me. I’m tall for one thing. For another, I get right to the point and state the learning that will happen in my classroom. Structure and routine are important for the work we do here, and I explain what that looks like within the first twenty minutes of day one. We work bell to bell with very little down time. I get that many students are not used to such habits, especially in our 85 minute classes.

My students experience breakthroughs regularly.  It’s during our reading conferences that they tell me my instruction works. “Miss, I only read two books in all of 10th grade. I was so behind. This year I’ve read SO many. I can’t count. You’ve helped me so much. I wish I could go back in time and read this much in 10th grade,” one girl tells me. Another says,  “I never thought I would like to read. Now, look at me,” as she shows me the copy of Anna Karenina she bought over the weekend. (We’d done a mini-lesson on beautiful sentences, and I talked about the books our mentor sentences came from — not really expecting anyone would want to read that one. Oh, they can surprise us!)

I ask students about their confidence levels in our little chats, and they tell me they know they have grown as a readers. This is the best kind of reward.

Try questions like:

  • How has your confidence grown as you’ve read this year?
  • What do you think is the one thing we’ve done in class that’s helped you improve so much as a reader?
  • How will the habits you’ve created in class help you in the reading you’ll have to do in college?
  • Why do you think you’ve grown so much as a reader the past few weeks?
  • What’s different for you now in the way you learn than how you learned before?
  • Describe for me the characteristics you have that make you a reader.

What kinds of questions work for you in your reading conferences?

©Amy Rasmussen, 2011 – 2015

Aim Higher: A Case for Choice Reading and a Whole Lot More in AP English

Amy Rasmussen, AP English, Pedagogy, Readers Workshop February 9, 2015 Comments: 68

I’m going to just say this right up front:  I hope to challenge some thinking.

I asked some friends for feedback on this post and got opposing advice. I let it rest for half a week. I prayed about it. And then today I read this post by Donalyn Miller, author of The Book Whisperer and Reading in the Wild. I’m not positive, but I’m pretty sure she wrote it in a response to a comment on this post by Amanda Palmer, Secondary Language Arts Coordinator in Katy, TX. I’ve written about my own students and their experiences as they’ve grown as readers before at Nerdy Book Club and on this blog; and I’ve presented on how I advocate for choice in AP English at conferences.

I hope I can be a voice of reason and an inspiration for the good of all students. So, if you’ll hang with me here, I’ve got a case for choice reading in AP English.

“I wish my daughter was in your AP English class,” my friend told me. “She has to decorate Kleenex boxes in hers.”

We’d had this conversation before:  I am an advocate of self-selected reading, and I fully embrace readers and writers workshop in my AP English Language and Composition classroom; Sarah is an advanced reader in an AP English course where the teacher chooses all the texts and assigns “clever” ways for the students to show that they are reading. Anyone who knows Penny Kittle’s work, and Donalyn Miller’s work, and my work, which is so much about helping students develop as life-long readers, understands that Sarah is not having the kind of experience in her English class that we advocate and hope for all children.

Making the Move to Move Readers

Many teachers and administrators across the country have recognized that students in secondary classrooms are not reading. If students are not readers, they tend to struggle in all academic subjects — not just English. Schools adopt interdisciplinary practices, whole school vocabulary instruction and stop-everything-and-read programs in an attempt to improve reading scores on standardized tests. Many have moved to readers and writers workshop, where choice-independent reading is key, instead of the traditional secondary-English pedagogy where the teacher selects all the texts, usually classics, and all the writing topics a student is expected to write about for class. Those who have made the move will tell you that choice matters, along with time to read and write, when it comes to student engagement and real movement in our teenage readers and writers.

However, from what I’ve seen and heard, most of this choice is happening in general education classes — not honors and AP English. The teachers in most advanced classes I know of are still making all the choices. It’s like we do not trust our high-achieving students to move themselves into complex texts. We focus on the literature instead of the literacy. And we rob children who already have a grasp of language, who already have many of the study skills they need to pass English classes, with the opportunities to grow as much as they are able.

We make changes in our pedagogy that allow our reluctant and struggling learners to grow but not our proficient kids? Where is the sense it that?

Evidence that Readers and Writers Workshop Works

One day last week, I sat and listened to my district’s ELA director share our state re-tester data. I usually hate this kind of meeting, but our gains are huge — due in large part because of the redesign of tutorial lessons, many of which teachers have adopted into their mainstream instruction. The ELA director changed the model and worked closely with North Star of TX Writing Project to produce writing workshop lessons (most of which came out of my classroom and pedagogy) that broke the mold of Response to Intervention. The dramatic increase in re-tester scores (an average of 200+ point increase per student) proves the lessons are working to move student readers and writers. Workshop-style writing lessons and a campus-wide, district-wide commitment to independent reading is working.

Making the Move in Advanced English Classes — or Not

The next day I sat in a meeting with the AP English team on my home campus. (Important note:  The same day that in second period a young woman asked me to recommend her a book of classic literature because she wanted to read something more complex. She and I stood in front of my “Challenge Yourself” shelf, and in about six minutes while the rest of the class read silently, I taught a mini-lesson on Gothic literature and the Regency Era and book talked the Bronte sisters’ books and Jane Austen. Rebecca left class with Pride and Prejudice, a book she chose to read because she wanted a romance that sounded interesting.) In that vertical alignment meeting, the conversation bounced around to what students must know and returned a few times to the books “all students must read.” After a while, someone asked me what I thought.

“Is it really about the book, or is it about the reader?” I asked.

“Well, it’s both,” two teachers answered.

“Then why does the book matter as much as the students’ abilities to read the books?”

“Because they will never read these books on their own, and they have to read a storehouse of canonical texts in order to write on the AP Lit exam,” they said.

“So you’re basing the reading lives of all pre-AP students in 9th and 10th grade on one open-ended question on the AP exam their senior year?”

“Well, they also have to analyze a passage,” one teacher added.

“Yes, and that’s like studying lists of SAT words hoping students learn the few out of 5,000 that might be on the SAT exam. It’s a total crapshoot.

“Shouldn’t we be more concerned about students being able to read at complex levels than deciding which books they must read?”

Another teacher joined in “I want my students to be prepared for the kinds of reading they will be expected to know when they go into college classrooms. That is providing equity. If they know The Iliad, Beowulf, Dante, they will be on equal footing as those classmates who read those things at the affluent schools across town.”

“Shouldn’t the equity be in the skills our students possess? Can they read and understand complex texts like the students across town?”

 

How Do We Know If Students Are Reading

I know that many, if not most, of those students at other schools are not reading those books. Few high school students read the assigned texts in English classes. Ask them. I have student writing from the past five years that tells me in their own words about their reading habits in high school. And there are plenty of well-researched articles like this one from the English Journal that concur. It is true: few high school students read the assigned texts in English classes. Why doesn’t this matter to their teachers?

“How do you know they are reading the independent reading books you let them choose?” a teacher asked me.

“Because I talk to them about what they are reading,” I answered.

“I do that, too, about the books I assign,” she said, but I am pretty sure that her idea of talking about books with students and mine are very different. I call it conferences. She calls it lectures.

I felt disheartened and sad for the honor student at the outcome of that vertical alignment meeting:  AP teachers deciding what four books teachers in preAP 9th and 10th grade must teach in order to prepare students for Advanced Placement in 11th and 12th grade.*

I fear that students will be just as prepared as they have been, which in my one-semester at this campus is not much. At the most, they will read four books a year, and the only students who will read the assigned texts are the ones who are readers anyway, who are studious enough, or care about their grades enough, to do what the teacher says. Everyone else will read a little and Sparknotes a lot, listening in to class discussions, and learning enough to pass exams that cover the conflict, plot, symbolism, and theme of the assigned text. Few, if any, will grow as readers who fall in love with words and characters and the beauty and the texture of carefully crafted stories.  It happens over and over and over again.

We deprive the students who take advantage of the College Board’s open enrollment policy, the students who voluntarily agree to more rigor, and we allow them to make it through high school English without growing as readers. I would argue that in many cases, there is high probability that they regress as readers.

How does that make any sense?

 

Looks Like the College Board Advocates for Readers Writers Workshop

The College Board provides course descriptions for each of the 34 AP courses and exams it offers. The descriptions reflect the course material that might be taught in a comparable college course. This makes designing a curriculum relatively easy for many of the courses taught. Biology and World History, for example, have definite knowledge-based skills that must be covered throughout the course. AP English courses are another story. Since first-year college composition courses are so diverse and vary from college to college, the structure of these classes on high school campuses can be diverse as well. AP programs, and even individual teachers, may design their courses based on their own interests and desires. Of course, the AP classes must reflect and assess college-level expectations, but that’s pretty much the only requirement. There are no prescribed essays that students must write, although there are suggestions of form. There are no required novels to read, although there is a suggested list of authors. Suggested being a key word. Teachers have a great deal of freedom in how they design their courses and what they put on their syllabi. See

AP English Language and Composition Course Overview

AP English Literature and Composition Course Overview

We can still read texts spanning from the 1600’s to the 21 century. We can still read literature that we deem important to our literary canon. But do we have to make all the choices in our Advanced Classes?

We can foster literate lives if we will take the same approach to literacy that is working in thousands of classrooms across the country:  Readers and Writers Workshop where choice matters and time to read and write mean deep and lasting learning.

So What’s the Real Deal

After talking this over with several of my peers, I’ve decided on a few reasons why honors and AP English teachers refuse to “drink the Kool Aid” (Isn’t that a nice derogatory way of describing readers/writers workshop? I hear it often):

  • Some teachers loved the experience they had with literature in their high school English classes. This is the reason they chose to be English teachers. (I am one of these teachers.) They want to duplicate those positive experiences for their students. A worthy ambition. However, I wonder if they have considered how many of their classmates experienced the same excitement at reading (or not) the literature that the teacher mandated.
  • Some teachers are not readers themselves. They love the books they’ve chosen to use in their classes, but rarely do they read anything from a best-seller list, or an awards list. They want to stay with what is known and comfortable. Many times these teachers mistake their duty:  to teach the child and not the book.
  • Some teachers believe that certain pieces of literature must be read by every student on the planet. “If I don’t teach this book, then these students will never read it” is a statement I’ve heard many times. My answer is always “Yes, but many are still not reading it when you teach it.” We ruin the the taste of great literature for many students when we force books on them that they are not ready for. I’ve asked all of my students this year about their reading in 10th grade. Not one of them has said they love To Kill a Mockingbird, one of two books they had to read last year. Why would we want to turn students off of a much beloved book like TKMB?
  • Some teachers believe that 10 to 15 minutes of sustained silent reading at the beginning of class is the same as instruction with choice reading. Sure, this reading time, especially if students are reading books that they choose, is important. It is a step. But it is not the same as structuring instruction around readers workshop where students not only read books that they choose, they think about them, talk about them, learn within them. They confer with a teacher intent on moving the reader in the best differentiated instruction possible.
  • Some teachers are afraid of giving up control. They fear that if students are all reading different texts they won’t know how to manage the class or guide the learning. This is a valid concern, but it is also something they can learn how to do. Many of us are doing it. We are happy to share how.

I am sure there are other reasons, and really, I mean no disrespect. I know my colleagues are hardworking and loving educators. I like them a lot. I respect them for the work they do, and I am sure that their students are learning in their classes. I know this is true for many other teachers and classrooms across America, too. I just really want to challenge some thinking.

What if we can do more?

 

Let’s Allow all Students the Advantages of Choice

More than anything, I want all students to have opportunities to rise above the norm, and maybe, just

~Joseph, AP English Language and Composition Student

maybe, we will see many more students, not just our struggling ones, immersed in books they love, and thinking about their reading in ways we’ve never imagined. Their engagement will improve. Their growth will astound us. They will develop as critical thinkers, accomplished writers, and as empathetic individuals ready to take on the challenges of college and their world.

I mentioned at the beginning of this post that I shared a draft of it with my writing partners. This response from Shana is important:

“I was an AP Lit kid, and an Honors English kid.  I SparkNoted The Scarlet Letter, Beowulf, Iliad, Catcher in the Rye, and the rest.  I never read a bit of it.  In fact, I didn’t read ANYTHING that was assigned to me simply because of the fact that it had been ASSIGNED.  I was stubborn like that.  And I got A’s all the way through.  And a 5 on the AP test.  All the while tearing through John Grisham, Elizabeth Peters, and the entire Bestsellers section of my public library outside of class.

“Then, my freshman year of college, when I took a workshop class in which I was allowed to self-select what I read, I chose the Scarlet Letter and thought it was the most beautiful love story I’d ever read.  I finished it and read it again.  Since that day, when I realized that because I was one of those AP kids and I COULD read those works, I’ve discovered that I LOVE them.  But I never read a single one of them until after high school.  My well-known love for Jane Austen didn’t emerge until I wrote a paper on Pride and Prejudice and A Midsummer Night’s Dream for my Shakespeare capstone.  I just read Mockingbird last summer for the first time ever.  [Note: I read it when I was 40.]

“I was never allowed to choose for myself in AP or Honors English, but had I been allowed to…I would have read all of those books, and arrived at a deeper level of love and reverence for literature, much earlier in my reading life.

“One thing I might add — I totally disagree with that AP Lit teacher saying that students needed to draw from classic lit for the test.  Many of my AP kids who got 5s wrote about modern classics…Oscar Wao, Life of Pi, whatever.  You don’t have to know CLASSICS to ace the Lit exam…you just have to know how to write authentically about complex texts, and that’s what we do in workshop, and what kids should be doing in AP classes.”

I know there are others who have made the shift. I got this in an email message just today from Jeannine in CA. We had a nice chat at NCTE:  “Thank you for our November communication. I have altered much of my instruction to incorporate choice reading.  The students are soaring!!!”

Another AP English teacher trusting herself and her students enough to make a change and see where it takes them.

 

Why, Yes, There’s Research to Support This Pedagogy

I mentioned Donalyn’s post at the beginning of this long one. It is all about the research, the theory that outlines and supports what it takes to grow readers. Allington, Atwell, Krashen, Moss, Fisher, Ivey, and Kittle, and Gallagher and more.

I add another:  Last summer at the University of New Hampshire Literacy Institute Penny Kittle had us read Making Meaning with Texts, Selected Essays by Louise Rosenblatt. Rosenblatt’s research spans decades and is just as applicable today as when she wrote it years ago. I challenge every English educator to read the whole of Rosenblatt’s essay “The Acid Test for Literature Teaching, published in 1956. Or, at least to respond honestly to Rosenblatt’s conclusion. Odds are you will make the shift to choice, if you haven’t already:

“As we review our current high school programs in literature, we need to hold on to the essentials, or take the opportunity as re-adjustments come about, to create the practice that will meet the acid test:

Does this practice or approach hinder or foster a sense that literature exists as a form of personally meaningful experiences?

Is the pupil’s interaction with the literary work itself the center from which all else radiates?

Is the student being helped to grow into a relationship of integrity to language and literature?

Is he building a lifetime habit of significant reading?”

 

*In an email after I’d written this post, I received the notes from that meeting, and I am happy to say that there were no specific book titles listed, just the admonition that students in 9 and 10 grade preAP classes read 3-5 whole class texts of a complex nature. And students need to read 15-20 books a year to grow as readers. (Yes, I did throw in that bit of research while in that meeting.)

©Amy Rasmussen, 2011 – 2015

My Top 3 Tips on How to Find #MentorTexts

Amy Rasmussen, Writers Workshop February 4, 2015 1 Comment

Yesterday I met with a teacher-leader, and she said that one of her main concerns in implementing writer’s workshop into her classroom is finding the right mentor texts. I’ve heard other teachers say the same. Knowing what mentor text to use to teach which skill can be daunting for teachers just starting out using the workshop model.

Here’s my top three tips on how to find mentor texts to teach writing (and some reading):

1. Read. Read everything from novels to plays to news articles and food reviews. The more we read a variety of texts the more we will have little “aha!” moments when we realize how the whole text, or even a part of it, will work to teach our writers.

2. Tweet. Twitter is the place for educators. Join in, or just tune in, to an #engchat or an #elachat or a number of other chats on Twitter. See Cybrary Man’s Educational Chats Schedule. You are sure to find a chat suited to your needs. Educators use Twitter to share ideas:  mentor texts, strategies, links to blog posts that share mentor texts and strategies. If you need it, you can find it on Twitter. And if you cannot find it, tweet a question and someone is apt to find the answer for you.

3. Follow or favorite or sign up for RSS feeds. I find mentor texts in a variety of places. I watch for updates from Izzit.org, and Essay5W.com. I also visit MovingWriters.org Mentor Text Dropbox Project. On Twitter I follow @brainpickings and @voxdotcom and and @NewYorker and many other news sources.

(Bonus:  A source for texts, specifically to use for reading and practicing the Notice and Note signposts, is the Notice and Note Facebook Group when I found these links to video clips and short stories and poems that can be used to teach the signposts. Thanks @msetha23 for these docs.)

What about you, do you have any ideas or resources you are willing to share? Leave a comment.

©Amy Rasmussen, 2011 – 2015

Embedding Poetry in Core Literacy Instruction

Amy Rasmussen, AP English, Presentations, Strategies to Add Some Zip January 27, 2015 Comments: 7
TCTELA2015

Selfie at our session. –“The Sound of Sense: Putting Poetry at the Core of Literacy Instruction”

Saturday Heather and I presented a session on poetry at the Texas Council of Teachers of English Language Arts. When I wrote the proposal last year, I had been accepted but had not attended The Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching, and I had hope that my life would be transformed through poetry after my stay in Franconia at the end of June. I knew I’d have ideas to share with other teachers at this conference. I was right.

That’s how faith works.

I shared the strategies that have shaped my teaching into fine points for skills acquisition since I learned them at the

Frost Place:

Dictation. When we dictate a poem, slowly, speaking each word and each line with care; when our students write each word, each phrase, each metaphor and simile, they take ownership of the language and see into the craft of the poet. In this ever-moving world, our students need to s-l-o-w-d-o-w-n and feel the beauty of the print on the page. Words become tangible and approachable. Comprehension improves. Analysis advances.

Arguing a Tone. My friend Margaret shared this strategy:  Choose a poem that begins with “how” or “why” or one that you know can be read in opposing tones. (Dickinson’s “How gentle is the little brook” works well.) Divide the class into two teams, and ask one side to read the poem with a tone of anger. Ask the other side to read the poem with a tone of happiness. Instruct students to find text evidence that supports their given tone then hold a debate. After discussing, students can then take their thinking to paper and write paragraphs that show analysis of the tone.

I Wonder for Revision. At the Frost Place, I loved being in the company of working poets. They inspired me with their thinking and their calm. I learned as I listened to their language. One afternoon we sat in a circle as a poet shared his work. We listened and offered feedback in the form of “I wonder…” He listened and took notes. And he left with a page of possibilities that he might have wanted to play with as he revised his poem. I’ve used this strategy with my students and had great success. I wrote about it here: A Feedback Protocol for Revision Workshop.

At the end of our session on Saturday, I read my poem I wrote modeled after Meg Kearney’s poem “Creed.” Just like at the Frost Place, I cried when I read about my mother. Poetry is emotion. And it’s an emotion that we need to help our students see and feel and play with. Sure, we can reserve a unit in our curricular year to devote to poetry, but our students will love it, understand it, and appreciate the wonders of language when we embed poetry in every unit throughout the year.

It is possible, I know, because I do it.

What are some of your ideas for embedding poetry in your core instruction? or, what are some of your favorite poems to share with students?

Dictation in AP English — It’s a Quiet Your Mind Kind of Thing

Amy Rasmussen, AP English January 20, 2015 Comments: 4

The sign on the door of my classroom

I asked my students to turn to a new page in their writers’ notebooks. I told them that I would read aloud a poem. Slowly. I would repeat each line twice. I would spell words that I thought were difficult. I’d tell them where the punctuation went. I’d tell them where the line breaks were. I’d give them time to write.

All they had to do was listen.

You would not believe the moaning.

I explained that to truly understand language they would need to listen to how language works. They needs to hear the words, the rhythm of the sentences, the length of the sentences. They needed to quiet their minds long enough to block everything out but the sounds of each and every word.

“The sound of sense, then. You get that. It is the abstract vitality of our speech. It is pure sound–pure form. One who concerns himself with it more than the subject is an artist. But remember we are still talking merely of the raw material of poetry. An ear and an appetite for these sounds of sense is the first qualification of a writer, be it of prose or verse.” ~Robert Frost

I didn’t expect students to understand so much Frost’s meaning, but I did realize the value of getting students to find a center and make the words their own as they write them down.

I’d experienced this first hand at the Conference on Poetry and Teaching at The Frost Place last summer. Every morning, we’d sit on metal chairs in the small barn behind Robert Frost’s house and listen and write what we heard.

The practice is called DICTATION. “It’s a slowing down and feeling the language in your bones,” says David Cappella, co-author with Baron Wormster of A Surge of Language — Teaching Poetry Day by Day. (Here is a sampling from Heinemann.) Wormster explains, “[Dictation] is a kind of reading aloud to think aloud so you can live out loud. Poetry is life in the slow lane. Poetry tells us to slow down and to pay attention. Poetry directs our attention.”

I have used dictation three times with my students so far this year, and three times we have experienced a calming of the mind that moved us to specific and powerful learning.

1. We focused on word choice, paying particular attention to words we found interesting and unique. This lead to better word choice in our Go World video stories.

2. We focused on sentence length and variety, paying particular attention to the rhythm in the poem. This lead to more purposeful syntax patterns in our next blog post. (All of my students manage their own blogs. See this post here to know more about our blogs.)

3. We focused on figurative language, paying particular attention to the sensory words that created the images. This lead to more colorful, intentional and moving language in our notebook play leading up to narratives.

My second semester starts today. Today I will dictate a poem to get us started, I think it will be this one by Anais Nin:

Screen Shot 2015-01-19 at 5.17.58 PM©Amy Rasmussen, 2011 – 2015

Thinking about my Reading Roots: a Response

Amy Rasmussen, AP English, Books, Readers Workshop January 16, 2015 Comments: 3

Sometimes others write my thoughts. Shana did that this week in her post about Reading Resolutions.

Well, not the part about traveling to England and visiting all the awe-inspiring places she mentions. (“Someday,” I tell my self daily.) But the part about losing her way as a reader, and the part about needing to “read my roots.” This is so me.

When we run a readers and writers workshop classroom, we read so we can encourage our students to read. Sure, we can book talk titles that we’ve only heard of — there is a little art to that though. Sure, we can have students book talk to one another — this works well when we’ve modeled talking books enough times. And while most of the YA literature I have read over the past several years has held my attention and given me insights into the minds and hearts of my students, it is still not my roots. (Honestly, I get a little tired of all the teen angst that my students love to read.)

Like Shana, my roots run deep into literature. I love the classics. I mean the real old classics — a little Homer, Greek tragedy, a comedy or two, definitely a book of Will’s plays, maybe some Milton, and more.

I teach none of it. And I’m okay with that.

In AP Language, our focus in non-fiction:  speeches, essays, op-ed pieces, arguments, and I have managed to include literature in our book clubs and poetry into our writing workshops. This works great for the purposes of my course design and my teaching. I just sometimes miss the me kind of reads.

Right now I need to think about me.

Here’s three things I’m doing to focus on the Reader who responded to Shana’s post with a “Yes, yes, yes, a thousand times yes”:

1. Participate in a Book Club.  We’ve only met twice, but we’ve read two interesting texts: State of Wonder by Ann Patchett and Unbroken by Laura Hildebrand, and our next book is Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. Grown up talk about books we read for pleasure. That’s about my favorite thing.

2. Challenge myself to read author’s I’ve never read: James Joyce, Kurt Vonnegut (ok, I read “Harris Bergeron”), J.K. Rowling. I have many more, but these are the first three that came to mind.

3. Attend an event at the Dallas Institute of Humanities. A new colleague filled me in on the offerings here. I had no idea. On-going classes, and then in the summer a Teacher’s Institute to study Tragedy/Comedy and Epic Tradition.

What are you doing to reach your roots?

©Amy Rasmussen, 2011 – 2015

What does Equality Mean when it Comes to Student Learning?

Amy Rasmussen, AP English January 9, 2015 1 Comment

“Children born into families that raise them with love and with care to see that they acquire knowledge, values and discipline that will make them valuable members of society have far more chances of economic and other success in adulthood than children raised in families that lack these qualities.

Studies show that children whose parents have professional careers speak nearly twice as many words per hour to them as children with working class parents — and several times as many words per hour as children in families on welfare. There is no way that children from these different backgrounds are going to have equal chances of economic or other success in adulthood.” -Thomas Sowell

Read the whole of “The ‘Equality’ Racket when you get a chance. I would love to know what other educators think in terms of how this argument relates to your experiences with your students.

I’m struggling and would love to have a conversation.

5 Ways to Meet Your Writing Goals

Amy Rasmussen, Readers Writers Workshop, Writers Workshop January 8, 2015 Comments: 4

Posted on the bookshelf behind my desk is this quote from Horace:

“Nulla Dies Sine Linea”

It means “Never a day without a line.” I learned it from Penny Kittle who I assume learned in from one of her mentors.

I thought if I posted the reminder, it would help me write more. It didn’t.

Sitting on my desk right behind where I place my laptop is this quote that I found in one of the many books on writing that pack my shelves:

“Write when you write.”

I thought if it stared at me everyday, it would help me avoid distractions. It didn’t.

I’ve learned.

The only way for me to write is to create some discipline. I almost said find discipline. Then develop discipline. Neither quite work. Knowing myself quite well. I know I have to carve out the time and cleverly create some. I can be tricky like that.

So, this is my five step plan to meet my writing goals this year. Maybe something similar can help you meet yours:

1. Get a part time job. That’s how I’m going to have to think about it — as a job. I’m committing to leaving the school an hour after the bell and going to my writing place: the public library just across the street, or the Starbucks around the corner, or the Barnes and Noble down the Interstate. I cannot stay in my classroom and write. I find a million other things to do — plan, grade, organize the books on my shelves in alphabetical order. I cannot go home and write. I find other things to do — cook or clean or lay on the couch or pet the dog.

2. Start a writing club. I started a book club with my friend, Tess, and some friends I used to work with in my prior district. The idea started as a way for us to stay connected because we know how hard it is to stay friends with folks we never see. Now, we meet once a month, late in the afternoon at a cute little restaurant not too far from where we all teach, and we talk about a book. We’ve only met once so far. Our next meeting is soon, but I’ve read two books I would not have read without these friends and this book club accountability. The same will work for a writing club. If I will really write and not just meet for scones and hot chocolate (like I did the last time I tried it).

3. Free the notebook. I have a perfectionist problem in all aspects of my life, except for my mess of a closet. The throw rug on the floor in my classroom has to be straight, the markers lined up in neat rows on the whiteboard rail, the anchor charts on the wall in absolute alignment. The blank page in a new notebook. Why is it so hard to just write? If my handwriting is weird or sloppy or whatever, even if it’s the pen’s fault (you know how your writing changes depending on the pen), I hate it. I have to stop hating it. Who cares? Absolutely, not a soul. My husband says that my parents put too much pressure on me as the first daughter after three son and then being followed by four younger sisters. Middle Child Syndrome with complications of being the oldest daughter. Really? That’s what makes me afraid to mess up on a page in my notebook? Whatever it is, I must set it loose. I have to free my mind and let my thoughts loose on the page.

4. Join a writing challenge. I found a welcoming group of writers called My 500 Words in a Facebook group. The encouragement and kindness is contagious. I found myself reading others’ posts and sincerely commenting. I also began following Poets & Writers. They have a “Tools for Teachers” page with prompts. I wrote my first poem of the year after reading one. It’s at the end of this post. I know that a lot of my problem with putting in writing time is the blank that envelopes my head at the end of a long day. While I have a love/hate relationship with prompts in my teaching life, I do think they are valuable tools to get stagnated thinking flowing.

5. Write as much as writing students. For several years I prided myself on writing every assignment that I gave my students. They wrote weekly blog posts. I wrote them, too. They wrote reflections on literature. I wrote them, too. They wrote analysis essays in preparation for the AP Lang exam. I wrote them, too. Everything my students wrote, I wrote, too. Then, I stopped. I don’t even know why, but it has made a difference — and not a good one. I know that if I want to be a credible writing teacher, I have to show my students that I am a writer. They must see me struggle through the thinking, the planning, the drafting, the revising. I used to be great at all this. I need to be great at it again. I saved a slip of paper that one student wrote at the end of the year on her last evaluation:  “I love it that Mrs. Rass writes everything she asks us to write. I’ve learned to love writing because of her. Thank you, Mrs. Rass.”

Anything else? Help me out here, dear reader, what are your suggestions for helping busy teachers meet our writing goals?

Why My #onelittleword Will Work

Amy Rasmussen, AP English, Community, Conferring, Pedagogy January 7, 2015 Comments: 2

My friend Jackie sent me a link to this blog: Setting a Work Schedule to Make Us Better, Saner Teachers. Somehow she sees inside my head.

My teaching world grew when I changed my pedagogy to readers and writers workshop. Over time, I also became so passionate about helping my students move as readers and writers I kind of lost my love for what started this change in the first place. Sometimes I get so busy reading the next great YA novel, or searching for mentor texts, or inventing new ways to get my reluctant students to write that I forget that I really just love my students. I love them.

I need to let them know that.

With all my musings about resolutions, (If you haven’t seen my posts for the past three days…) I probably need to give it up and follow the trail of those leaving the #onelittleword hashtag.

My word is L-O-V-E. sunshine-wallpaper-6

Do you remember when you first learned to spell it? I do. I wrote it everywhere. On notebooks. On desks. On the wooden slat holding my sister’s bunk bed above my head. (Years later I would also write the names of every boy I ever crushed on. It’s quite a collection.)

I need to reclaim the feeling I felt when I first learned to spell love. I need to spread it like I spread the lead of those pencils so long ago. My students will respond to my urgings to read and to write with quality and care, if they know I love them — not as readers and writers, although that is true, but as humans who deserve it because all humans do.

So, I’m thinking about how. How do I show my students love?

I read this post by my friend Jennifer: Teach Like An Artist. I like this idea of minimalism. I need to clear the clutter and refocus on the things I know work. My values are similar to Jennifer’s, and it’s by focusing on these things that I will show greater love for the students in my care. [It only looks like I copied Jen’s values. We just hunk alike.]

The Core Values of My Classroom

1. Empathy. We talk about windows and mirrors in my class a lot. We read to know what it means to be human. Do you see yourself in this book? What do you learn about someone else in this one? Do we make connections with individuals and characters as we read. Do we try to learn where their thoughts and feelings are coming from?

My classes are more diverse than they’d been in years. We have an incredible opportunity to step inside another’s shoes — if we only will.

Also, I must learn about my students lives.

(from Empathy in Education) Empathy has long been an intrinsic part of the education system, “if schools are involved in intellectual development, they are inherently involved in emotional development” (Hinton, 2008, p. 90). A student’s emotions coming into the class affect the way, and how much they learn. Educators must be able to connect to, and understand their students in order to best serve those students’ needs “focused on nurturing learning rather than judging performance” (Hinton, 2008, p. 91). Teachers in the classroom face students from all different backgrounds, sometimes very different from their own.

I think about this at the start of every school year. I am glad I’m thinking about it again now. I can do more now.

2. Authenticity. I cannot keep touting choice when I sometimes forget that “Choice without boundaries is no choice at all,” per Don Graves. I need to make sure that students are able to explore what matters to them, but I must guide them in directions that truly help them explore. Too many are afraid of the struggle of research and evaluation. They take first pick or rely on me to share my opinion. I want them learning how to form their own. I believe this is where TALK in the classroom is so important. Students are free to be themselves because we’ve established a comfortable learning environment — it’s safe — so students know they can express and share their beliefs.

I mentioned in another post that I used to write every assignment I gave my students. I commit to doing that again. They need to see me struggle and grow and share as a writer just like I ask them to.

3. Quality.  Somewhere along their learning journey, many of my students missed the bit on producing and turning in quality work. They focus on completion instead of quality. So far this year, it’s been an uphill battle with students expecting to do well on work that is poorly done. I spoke with a colleague just today. She said that she’s noticed the same problem in the business world:  a bank telling a customer to go to a different branch because “I’ve never done this before,” instead of attempting to learn how to do a task. Imagine if doctors, mechanics, the engineers who build our roads just shirk their duties and look for the quick and easy way through tasks? We are in trouble. My students need to know the value of producing work they know represents their best selves. I will refuse to take anything less.

“If it’s not worth doing well, it’s not worth doing,” my mother often said (mostly about chores around the house, but still.) I must make sure my students see the value in the tasks I ask them to complete. The quality of these tasks will reflect the quality of the work students put into them.

photo

More talk, better conference, additional Harkness discussions. That is how I will show my love for my students, and how I will help them have an even better than the first second semester.

Penny Kittle taught me that “writing floats on a sea of talk.” Natalie Goldberg taught me “Talk is the exercise ground.” I believe that when students talk about their thinking, about their plans for writing, they write more — and they write better. I believe that when the classroom is lively with energetic voices we learn and grow together. We learn to listen and to care for the thoughts and feelings of others. It’s through our formal class discussions that my students have learned how to analyze a text. It’s through my one-on-one discussions that I’ve learned where they struggle and how to help them grow as individual readers, writers, thinkers, and contributors in our society.

I’ve started writing notes to my students. Here’s another thing I used to do that brought positive results. I bought nice cards (Half Price Books has a lovely selection as teacher-friendly prices.) Every day I write one or two notes per class period. I highlight traits that I admire. I encourage. I notice. Students respond with higher quality work, more participation in class, sometimes even happier faces. My handwritten message, signed “Warmly, Mrs. Rasmussen” often works better than any conference with a student face-to-face.

And tomorrow students think and explore and decide upon their own #onelittleword.

My Take on Your Resolution Tricks

Amy Rasmussen, Pedagogy, Readers Writers Workshop January 6, 2015 Leave a comment

Before I wrote anything down for 2015, I needed to think through this idea of resolutions. (If you read yesterday’s post, you already know that.) Maybe more importantly, I started reading posts about resolutions and how I might make mine actually come true this year.

I found this article “The Tricks Psychologists Say Make Resolutions Stick.” Okay, then.

(Of course, I get the gist of the article, but let’s look at it through the lens of an educator.)

Don’t Have a Back up Plan

Evidently, “having a plan B at the back of the mind or simply using the wrong language to frame our resolution can end up scuppering the best intentions.” I’m not sure I buy it for every goal we set, but I really like the word scuppering.

I get that we can sabotage our best intentions when we frame our goal-setting around failure, but imagine if we never have a back up plan in the classroom? Many a day I conduct my first period, thinking I’ve got a good plan, all is well, students will learn, and BAM! it doesn’t work and slams right into the hardwood door. I have to do some fast thinking to create a better learning opportunity for my second period.

A teacher’s job is all about alternatives, especially in a readers and writers workshop classroom. We reflect on our practices. We rewrite lessons. We revision our classrooms.

So, really, when it comes to setting goals, we have to use language that allows us the freedom to change our minds without feeling like we’ve failed. It is okay if I set the goal to read 101 books this year, and I only read 58. Really, 58 books is a lot. And every one of them I can talk about with knowledge and passion and place in a young reader’s hand.

Sleep on It

This is a hard one. Every teacher I know is sleep deprived. If this is true, every school in the nation is in big trouble: “New research from the University of Hertfordshire found that lack of sleep can reduce self-control.” Of 1,000 people, “Sixty percent of people who slept well said they were able to achieve their resolutions, compared to just 44 per cent of those who slept poorly.” Teachers, we get an F.

Wouldn’t it be great if sleep were a talking point in ed reform conversations?

I could engage more students if I had more sleep. I could teach them how to have grit. I could create better assessments. I could prepare more kids for mandated tests.

Not really.

I lose sleep because I have a student whose mom has cancer. How can she focus on school work when she might lose her mom?

I lose sleep because I have students who read far below grade level. They want to go to college, but they are far from college ready.

I lose sleep because I’ve had students who were abused by uncles and fathers and strangers. They are still hurting deep within their beautiful souls.

I lose sleep because I am always learning, trying to find new ways to reach my hardest-to-reach kids. They are happy and out-going, but they are not ready for the challenges of 21 C literacy.

Don’t Say Don’t

We know we must use positive framing as we teach. We must be encouragers, facilitators, even hand-holders sometimes. Yet is a powerful word when students try to turn to the negative. “I am not a reader” so many of them say. “Yet” I interject, and they usually smile and repeat me. “I am not a reader yet.”

There is a time and place for the word don’t in education though — I’ve said it plenty when it comes to testing. I imagine you have, too.

Chop it Up

“Why give yourself one tick when you you can have 20? It’s more gratifying to work towards lots of smaller goals than one enormous (and potentially overwhelming) one,” the article says, and I know this strategy works, especially with students who do not identify themselves as readers.

We set small reading goals. Sometimes they are for overnight, sometimes a week, sometimes a semester. And we celebrate achieving them. Often in my conferences with students who’ve been stuck in a book for a long time, or they’ve been fake-reading way too long, I will challenge them to finish a book in a certain number of days. They come tell me when they reach our goal, and this usually turns into a happy dance (usually mine, not theirs).

Of course, short writing goals work, too. That’s what a focus on process in writing workshop is all about. We use mentors to show us how to frame our thinking. We practice writing leads and using supporting evidence, or whatever skills we need. We provide mini-lessons that target these specific skills. And we write and confer and write some more. Chopped up, little bits of effective and powerful instruction.

The large goal:  “My students will be prepared to write all three of the essays on the AP English Language exam in May” can only be reached in tiny bite-size writing instruction in one workshop after another.

Try ‘temptation bundling’

“This idea is to bundle ‘should’ activities with ones we have a strong desire to do.” I do this all the time. When I work out on the elliptical machine, I read. When I run, instead of listening to music, I listen to audio books. I read right before I go to sleep. This calms my mind much quicker than scanning my Twitter or Facebook feed.

I share these ideas with students, too. A few of them told me that they now read on the bus to and from school, or on the way to extracurricular activities. One student told me that she loves to read when she is babysitting her siblings. “They don’t bother me as much,” she said. (Of course, I want here reading, I hope she still pays attention to the children!)

One of the biggest problems I face with reluctant readers is what they perceive as a time factor. “I don’t have time to read,” they like to whine. In conferences, we often chart our time, hour by hour. Teaching students to not only monitor their time — few really know what that means — we have to teach students how to value their time. The cell phone in their hands is a mean master when it comes to the value of our young people’s time.

Raise the Stakes

Here’s a new take on high stakes:  money-losing incentives to help us reach our goals. Seriously, there are companies out there where we can bet against ourselves. StickK.com is one of them.

“The site asks users to sign a commitment contract, which they say helps define the goal. Users then decide how much money they’ll put on the line and where the money will go if they don’t fulfill that contract. (For extra motivation they can even designate an ‘anti-charity’, a cause you don’t believe in, to receive their funds.)”

Who’s in?

I did play along with something similar at my former campus. We’d have Hollywood Weight Loss Challenges. Choose the name of a celebrity, so you are incognito on the weight chart. (I always chose the pseudonym of Queen Latifah because she’s so beautiful.) Pay $20 to the pot. Weigh in weekly, and at the end of say three months, the biggest loser gets the cash. I did this challenge four times. Four times I gave my money, just gifted it really, to the biggest loser and didn’t lose a thing.

Obviously, $20 didn’t cause enough pain. High-stakes testing does.

It will be interesting to see how Texas Education deals with the huge number of seniors this year who have not passed their state mandated exams needed for graduation. They are seniors, credits earned and all, but they will not graduate according the House bill if they do not get qualifying scores on all five of their exams. Many of these kids have taken this test six times now. Failure after failure after failure.

Raising the stakes does not work when it comes to the benefit of a young person about to take her place in the world. Somehow there has to be a better way to see our students off into their futures.

Personal goals not withstanding, I wish the psychologists quoted in this study would conduct a study on the yearly goals of educators and how we put it all on the line to honor and serve and teach our students, year after year after year.