Teacher-Mentors with Insights, Ideas, and Resources for Secondary Readers & Writers Workshop
Poetry makes no sense to many of today’s learners–many educators, too. We were lousy at teaching poetry so did something about it: spent a week at Frost’s Farm at the Conference on Poetry & Teaching. We’ll “Provide, provide” highlights on how to transform instruction with poetry at the core.
My “war” section continues to be one of the most popular areas in my classroom library, and while I do not naturally gravitate towards this subject, I have made a point to find hot titles that excite my students. One of my favorite war books is Brian Turner’s anthology of poems, Here, Bullet. This book is a different type of war story. Not only is this one of the only war books I have read cover-to-cover, but it is also one that breaks down the stereotypes of poetry by transforming what many of my students consider to be a fluffy form of writing into a stark, honest, and emotional portrayal of battle. Ultimately, Turner is a master of painting the pulsing images of war through poetry.
Turner’s poems, which are short and succinct, are also raw and relatable. He draws from his seven years of experience in the US Army where he was deployed to both Iraq and Bosnia-Herzegovina. I use this anthology to draw in the students who otherwise are resistant to reading or even studying poetry. While my copy is heavily annotated and marked up, I still make it available for my students as an independent reading book and even as a mentor text.
I read the following poem as an excerpt from the book during a book talk:
Here, Bullet (From Here, Bullet by Brian Turner)
If a body is what you want,
there here is bone and gristle and flesh.
Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,
the aorta’s opened valves, the leap
thought makes at the synaptic gap.
Here is the adrenaline rush you crave,
that inexorable flight, that insane puncture
into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish
what you’ve started. Because here, Bullet,
here is where I complete the word you bring
hissing through the air, here is where I moan
the barrel’s cold esophagus, triggering
my tongue’s explosives for the rifling I have
inside of me, each twist of the round
spun deeper, because here, Bullet,
here is where the word ends, every time.
I love how Turner intertwines the imagery of a gun with a human body. The juxtaposition between the hardness of weaponry against the softness of flesh is eerie and makes it as if the two become one: “Here is where I moan the barrel’s cold esophagus, triggering my tongue’s explosives for the rifling I have inside of me.” He is a wordsmith whose lines inch their way into your psyche, leaving you repetitively combing through each poem word by word.
“There are creative manners, there are creative actions, and creative words; manners, actions, words, that is, indicative of no custom or authority, but springing spontaneous from the mind’s own sense of good and fair.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar”
I’m thinking about the #NCTE15 proposal that I’ll submit this week with my TTT writer-friends, and I know my topic must be about conferences with students.
I used to be more cold than hot when it came to meeting with students regularly. I’m happy to say that I’ve learned how to manage my time and my focus. I’m getting closer to really really warm.
I know it’s the consistent one-on-one and sometimes small group chats that yield the most growth in my readers and writers. This might also be the hardest thing for me to do consistently. Good intentions and all that.
I love Emerson’s language and this idea of creative manners, actions, and words when considered through the lens of conferring with students. Sitting together writer to writer and/or reader to reader, I hear my students connect the dots. I see them reach inside for ways to improve. The more we meet together, the more I know these learning moments happen spontaneously. Students understand that they do not need me to help them think. They grow in confidence and competence. Their manners, actions, and words change as they believe in their abilities.
I want them to believe that they can grow as readers and writers.
Recently, I’ve been reading Reading Projects Reimagined by Dan Feigelson, and I know I can do more as I talk with my learners. Feigelson offers me advice when he outlines the steps for a successful reading conference that would lead to a student-selected project. I think it works for most of the reading conferences I conduct with my students, project or not, and it’s made me more intentional in having my students look for patterns in the literature they read. This will help with analysis, a skill most of my students struggle with — a lot.
These are Feigelson’s steps (a bit abbreviated) from p.30 of his book:
1. What are you thinking about this text?
2. Listen for the most interesting thing the reader says or does.
3. Ask the reader to say more about that thing. [Jot down words or phrases.]
4. Name what the reader is doing in a way that is about more than the current book…strategy for future reading. Teach him to go further…how it will help in future reading.
5. Come up with a project that allows the reader to follow his or her line of thinking by collecting evidence in the text.
6. Agree on a specific task.
7. Articulate the teaching point again.
“See? It doesn’t have to be complicated,” she reminds herself.
Yesterday, I read the transcript of a Choice Literacy podcast conducted by Franki Sibberson with Cris Tovani called Readers Workshop with High School Students. It’s worth the time to listen or read it. This is my favorite part:
Franki: You might have answered this one but what are the challenges of running a good reading workshop at the secondary level?
Cris: I think the challenges of running a good reading workshop at the secondary level is recognizing that you’ve got such a wide range of abilities as well as interest in that classroom and I think keeping in mind that every student deserves at least a year’s worth of growth whether it’s a struggling reader, on grade level reader or somebody who is an advanced reader. Each one of those kids we have to morally help them get smarter by at least a year.
And so I think it’s key to figuring out who your learners are, what they like, what their interests are, what their strengths and what their weaknesses are and then allowing for some differentiations.
Really, it all comes down to knowing our students and knowing their needs, and every student deserves an on-going conversation with a caring teacher. Every student deserves at least a year’s worth of growth as a reader — and a writer.
My spring semester starts in a week, and I know that I can improve my conferences. I’ve set some 
conferring goals for myself with the hope of doing a bit of research and improving student outcomes. I know that when I make goals public, I am more apt to meet them, so here goes:
Now, it would help me out if I knew you struggled, too. Not really, but I would like to know where you are at with student conferences. Please take this simple poll and let me know. You’ll help me with my research. Thanks!
©Amy Rasmussen, 2011 – 2015
Posted on the bookshelf behind my desk is this quote from Horace:
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:
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?
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.
While scrolling through my Twitter feed, I came across the following two tweets:
So in case you aren’t savvy in the language of professional basketball:
During warmups, Dirk, a player for the Dallas Mavericks, believed the rim on the goal to be slightly off from where it should be all because he felt that he was missing too many jumpsots. Upon close inspection, it was discovered that the rim was in fact off of where it should be.
This got me thinking, how many shots a day does one have to take to be able to realize the subtle nuance of a rim slightly off center. While I am not sure, I can only imagine that it would be a lot! Clearly, Dirk spends a significant amount of time practicing and honing his craft.
There are implications for educators and students alike here. As an educator, how much time do you spend practicing and honing your craft? How much time do you spend not just studying but actually practicing the nuances of both reading and writing? It’s one thing to know a lot about reading and writing because you have studied it, but it’s another thing to know about it because you yourself are a reader and writer.
Also, our students need the same kind of practice and exposure to the language. They need to physically feel the movement of the pen as it scrawls across the page. They also need the repetitive practice from reading story after story, book by book.
Dirk knew about the rim because of the countless hours he spends shooting. What about you? What about your students? How are you perfecting your craft and how are you creating opportunities for your students to do the same?
“I think parents should read this book — these kinds of books, too,” Monica said as we chatted about the book she just finished, Impulse by Ellen Hopkins. “They need to know what we go through and how we think about things. It would help so much.”
I listened as she shared her feelings. She needed me to hear her disappointment at the ending. The characters mattered to her, so I knew they needed to matter to me.
The relationship between student and teacher changed in that moment. We gave each other a gift in that brief conversation about a book.
When we consider our conferring moments with students, do we give enough gifts? Do we allow our students to?
Think about the origin of confer: Latin conferre to bring together, from com- + ferre to carry.
At the end of that three-minute conference with Monica, I carried a bit of the burden she had on her heart, and she carried the knowledge that one more adult cares about what she thinks. A conversation about a book brought us together.
I love that.
At NCTE I asked a room of teachers what part of their workshop classroom they struggle with the most. They all said student conferences.
Finding the time, being consistent, knowing how to prod students into thinking, allowing students to do most of the talking — these concerns all emerged as trouble spots that we’d like to overcome.
In a perfect classroom with perfect students it would be easy. What’s the big deal? Just talk to your students. Yeah, right.
I asked one colleague how she conducts her reading conferences. She replied quickly, “Oh, I don’t do those. I cannot talk to one kid without the other 35 talking.”
Yes, that can be a problem.
I don’t think we stop trying though.
One-on-one conversations with students create the heart of my workshop classroom. Our relationships grow and change as we gift one another with ideas and information. We learn and change together as individuals who are trying to make sense of our world. Regular conversations make this happen.
I’m reminded of a line I boxed in bold when reading Choice Words by Peter Johnston: “Talk is the central tool of their trade.” Their meaning teachers who create environments wherein through language they help students “make sense of learning, literacy, life, and themselves” (4).
That’s what I want as I create opportunities to confer with the students in my classroom. I want to help my students make sense of all it: what happens in the classroom, what they read in books, what they’ll face in the future, and what they see in themselves. That’s a tall order, and the only way I know how to do it is to talk to more of my kids more often.
My burning question now circles on student conferences. How can I improve the precious moments of time I have with each of my students?
I am paying a lot more attention to the gifts we give as we converse with one another.
What about you? What are your ideas, concerns, questions about student conferences?
©Amy Rasmussen, 2011 – 2015
My students are pretty good at noticing rhetorical devices in texts; they aren’t so good at analyzing what effect they have on meaning. Since we immerse ourselves in independent reading all year, and we read bookshelf after bookshelf of YA novels, I find that using bits from those books and then talking about why the author wrote the text that way helps when students need to analyze these devices in more complex texts. Somehow this practice takes their tentative and repetitive “for emphasis” away and makes their analysis so much richer. (Most of the time.)
Like this passage from Please Ignore Vera Dietz by A.S. King:
I wonder if I’d called the police back when I was ten or thirteen or fifteen, would Charlie be alive now. I regret it. I regret every minute I lived keeping that secret. I regret every time I didn’t talk to Charlie about it. I regret having parents who couldn’t try to help or seem to care. I regret not being reason enough to make them care more. I regret never saying what I was thinking, never saying, “But what if that was me? What if I marry some loser who hits me? Would you care then? Would you help?” And I regret not called the police that first day we met the pervert. Because I’m sure he had something to do with how Charlie was acting at the end. p264
Erika, Amy, Shana, and I are presenting at the NCTE conference today at 2:45pm! Penny Kittle is our Chair, so please join us to discuss the landscape of workshop. We are session J.44.
Think back to your first day of teaching on your first year of teaching. What were you feeling? Happy, nervous, excited, afraid?
Fear. Fear was the first thing I experienced when I stood in my classroom on the first day of school. That and enthusiasm, excitement, eagerness, and hope, but ultimately, I was afraid, knee shaking, stomach churning nervous as I stood in front of my new class. Fear comes with the unknown, which is why my nerves of being a new teacher were compounded by my entry into the workshop model. The concept of the workshop model is simple, yet it’s a structure that so few of us grew up with. In turn, as I transitioned my classroom, I found my nerves could be categorized into the fear of breaking tradition, the fear of parents, the fear of students not reading, and the fear of proving rigor. I was not alone though. Interns and teachers who were new to workshop model faced many of the same fears. In turn, I created a reader’s workshop starter kit to provide my colleagues with concrete documents that helped them establish the workshop model in their classroom. The starter kit includes the following documents:
Whether you are a new teacher or simply new to the reader’s workshop, I hope this starter kit will make your journey a bit easier. Enjoy every step and savor even the smallest successes. If you have any questions or comments about starter kit, please feel free to contact me at Jackie.catcher@gmail.com.
Click Here to Download the Reader’s Workshop Starter Kit
Nine years in. I know what certain murmuring really means. We all do. The murmuring of students when they are conferring about their writing. The kind that surfaces when boredom is creeping into our classrooms. The murmuring of confusion and frustration. The one that starts to get louder and louder as passion starts taking shape. Today, is that kind of murmuring day.
Christian: Why? No, really. Why? Why is it that all we do is read and write in here allllll day, Ms. Bogdany? Ev-er-y-day. (Yes, with that level of emphasis.)
Swallowing my smirk, I calmly start explaining the reasons, rationales, and importance again to Christian. Yes, we’ve had this conversation many–a-time. And clearly others’ patience with this subject has become depleted.
Norris: Man, why are you even asking that? We’re in English! It’s what we do!
Christian: No, but I mean seriously. It’s all we do. In my previous high school we used to watch movies and relax. This is crazy.
Norris: That’s why you’re not there anymore! You chose to be educated here. We’re at a transfer school. Here it’s more focused and we’re learning.
Deja: Oh, listen to you, Norris. Telling Christian all about what’s right…you always think you’re better than everyone! We breathe the same air you breathe!
Hakeem: Norris, you haven’t walked in my shoes! You don’t know! Last period, you were the one that lied and got caught! Now you’re acting like Christian’s father.
Here, in my Writer’s Notebook, I capture voices speaking their truth.
Here is where I sit back and start listening; very intently. I am becoming quieter and quieter as the room gets more and more animated. (I was hoping to become invisible, truth be told.) Because, this is what happens when students are invested. They challenge each other. They hold each other accountable. They start discussing their level of comfort or lack there of. They express their inner feelings. They question motives. And yes, sometimes their word choices can be a bit crass, but isn’t that authenticity at its best?
They give me exactly what I need as their educator.
I need to understand who they are, what fuels their fire, how they feel about injustice. How safe are they feeling in our learning community? Well, I can’t always answer all of the questions swirling around in my mind, but today I was able to answer this one confidently: students are feeling wildly comfortable in our shared space. Because when students are brave enough to confront their peers (those that are their roughest critics) I know we’ve arrived. We’ve arrived as an evolving community of learners; as a team not willing to silence our voices when they need to be heard; and we are most definitely letting our guards down as we are emerging ourselves even more deeply in the work of the Reading Writing Workshop (RWW).
I also know that while Christian is literally shifting around in his seat, stretching all of his 5 feet 9 inches; he is moving – physically and as a writer. He doesn’t necessarily see or appreciate it just yet, but it’s there. I see it. I know. And, just like the murmuring that propelled this dialogue in room 382, Christian is pushing boundaries and uncomfortable. Yet, I believe Christian is more resilient than he even recognizes. And that resiliency pushes me to continually find ways to engage Christian in this work. Even, if it means having the same conversation again — because it will resurface.
As I head down to the nation’s capitol to be reunited with my PLN – my nationwide pedagogical lifeline – I take this experience with me. Regardless of how much traffic I may encounter on the trip from Brooklyn, this tipping point (as Malcolm Gladwell would argue) is buckled tightly in my back seat and promising to remind me what I am bringing with me to #NCTE14 – the moments that the RWW affords us when we listen to our learners, their needs, and previously dormant desires.
I cannot wait to further this conversation on Saturday at J.44 starting at 2:45pm. I hope you join us for an hour full of deep thinking, classroom anecdotals, and the energy that attendees from across the country bring to the conversation. See you there!
Three Teachers Talk 