Kernel Essays and Source Documents: Tutoring D. - Part 2

In the month that I have been out of school, I have had five full days of professional development, including a day and a half of focused writing PD. I had the opportunity to attend a session with Stephen and Kayla Briseno, who work with Gretchen Bernabei, as they presented information from Text Structures from the Masters (you can find sample lessons here). 

I immediately knew that I was going to incorporate this information into my lessons for next year (I have attended a  Gretchen Bernabei before, and I love everything she creates). The lessons tie together writing with cross-curricular critical reading and analysis. Tutoring this summer has given me a guinea pig. Since D. has not been in public school for four years, he is the perfect learner to experiment with. 

Today we completed Lesson 17: Tour of an Unfamiliar Place.  We meet at one of our public library branches, a new place for D. to frequent. I had him take a tour of the library on his own, getting a feel for the environment. When he sat back down with me, we discussed the kernel essay. Taking a page from the Brisenos, we began by discussing what a kernel is. D. did have some confusion about colonel versus kernel, providing us with an opportunity to addressed frequently confused words.We then walked through each kernel, allowing D. to write a short essay: 

Our next step was to read the source document "Factory Life" from 1846:

• I am not a history teacher, but we discussed what source documents are and why they are important. 
• For our first read, I had D. read to me, as I am trying to help him find some confidence in his voice as he prepares to enter high school. 
• For our second read, I had D. identify words that he was unfamiliar with. Due to the age of the document, I was expecting him to identify far more words than he did. I was not expecting him to know the meaning of loom or din, but he had those down. Atrocious and retirement were a bit more of a struggle. 
• We walked through the passage line by line to paraphrase to show understanding (that's pretty easy when it's one-on-one). 
• Our last step was to go back to the kernel essay pieces and identify them within the passage.

 As a whole, I was quite pleased with the practice-round lesson. This August, we will have a back-to-school camp for incoming seventh graders at my school. I am going to use this same passage with them, as the middle school will be a new environment that we can tour and write about. I plan to modify my steps for partner work with the reading to include some collaboration and allow the students to start building some new relationships. I have also shared this with a new seventh grade English teacher and an eighth grade history teacher, both of whom see opportunities for reading and writing opportunities in their classrooms with these materials. 

If you have used these before, share your successes. If not, how can you use these in your classroom?  

Tutoring D. - Session 1

As I am working on my reading specialist certification, I have been given the opportunity to tutor a young man this summer. There are extreme circumstances as to how this has come about. In addition, this young man has been homeschooled for many years and is now preparing to enter public high school next year. He has missed most of the fiasco known as STAAR testing, yet he will be entering into its chaos. 

Today we met at the public library. I choose this location because of the availability of resources for all content areas. I know that background knowledge is an issue for kids who have been in public schools since the began their educational careers. How does one help bridge that gap with a student who has been out of that environment for years? My solution - books for kids! 

One of the reasons I participate in the Twitter #bookaday challenge is for the opportunity to learn news things in a simple format. Trade books and children's nonfiction provide lots of information to provide an introduction to events, history, cultures, information, and stories. 

We started our first session with discussing elements of characterization, protagonist, antagonist, and dialogue, using resources from Read Write Think regarding the use of picture books in teaching these elements. To this, I added a Tree Map (Thinking Map) to categorize elements of characterization. 

 

I read Ella Sarah Gets Dressed to D. Initially, he looked at me like I was crazy for pulling out a little kid book to teach to him, but he warmed up to the idea (although I did have to cover up the page where Ella is in her underwear). We went page by page, discussing the pictures in association with the text, the differences in repeated text (capitalization, punctuation), and how Ella was being characterized. D. was able to make inferences without much prompting, and he showed that he possesses a strong vocabulary with the words he used to describe Ella. He also started discussing theme without my even mentioning it, so we added it to the Thinking Map.

 As a follow-up, I had him choose another trade book to read to me, walking me through the same process. He ended up choosing a book written in verse, allowing us to continue our discussion, as well as discuss some elements of poetry (line, stanza).

Although the focus of our session today was reading comprehension with fiction, we also practiced a bit of grammar to feel out what D. does and does not know. [I taught him the importance of the Oxford comma, preaching not to listen to the naysayers who feel it is no longer necessary.] I followed this up by asking him to write a short passage for me to get a feel for his writing skills, and he automatically employed a few of the elements we had discussed. He truly impressed me by adding a nonrestrictive clause to explanation of why anime is more appealing to watch than other types of TV programming. 

I have never tutored anyone before in this capacity, and I have to admit that I am also using him to try out some things to take back to my classroom next year. Ella Sarah Gets Dressed is most definitely coming back to class with me in the fall, and D. is definitely going to be rock star in high school with his knowledge of the Oxford Comma. 

Go Fund Me Campaign for Colleague

I have never used my blog for a purpose such as this, but as I am sure most educators can attest to, our colleagues are families. A woman I have worked with for thirteen years is dealing with a family emergency and is not on unpaid leave in order to deal with it. This is not a situation I would wish upon anyone. Please consider making a donation (even small one counts and giving up one frappe is not the end of the world).

Which questions are the right questions?

This semester, my campus leadership team has been studying what types of questions teachers ask in the classroom and how they ask them. Members of the leadership team, including teachers, instructional coaches, and administrators, were tasked with conducting ten to fifteen-minute observations, counting the number and type of questions being asked: level one, level two, and/or level three. Our purpose has been to determine if teachers are asking higher-level rigorous questions and, in turn, if they are teaching students how to ask their own higher-level questions. 

Based on the data collected, the leadership team determined that our campus is far too focused on lower-level questions and not making our lessons rigorous enough for our students. A committee was organized from within the team to create a professional development training on creating and asking higher-level questions. This session will kick off our 2016-2017 school year. 

Throughout this process, I was in full agreement. Yes, yes, yes. We need to create more rigorous questions. We need to ask better questions. We need! We need! We need! In the observations I conducted of my colleagues, I only heard lower-level questions being asked, predominantly focused on basic recall. 

For the past three years, I have been responsible for teaching our eighth grade reading Student Success Initiative intervention class for those students who fail the first administration of our state exam. This year, based on the work with our leadership team, I decided to look at how my co-teacher and I question the students in this particular student population. 

First, we had to determine our purpose with the students:

from "Classroom Questioning" by Kathleen Cotten

In our planning, I became concerned about how we were going to address higher-level questions with a population of struggling readers. Students who fail the test tend to have basic reading deficiencies. Is asking them higher-level questions beneficial in helping them prepare for a retest? Is asking them higher-level questions without filling in the gaps beneficial to helping them pass a multiple-choice exam?

Upon moving into the intervention class, my co-teacher and I have focused heavily on lower-level questions. If someone comes to observe and count, there will be very few higher-level questions marked on the tally sheet. According to Cotton, "Lower cognitive questions are more effective than higher level questions with young...children, particularly the disadvantaged." Although my students are young teenagers, I work at a Title I school and am dealing with many student who are labeled At Risk. We decided that deliberately asking lower-level questions and scaffolding to higher-level questions would benefit the student population more than focusing on solely higher-level questions. Cotton says that when a classroom setting is appropriate for a higher number of lower-level questions, a "greater frequency of questions is positively related to student achievement."

So we have been slowly climbing the ladder to get where we need to be. For example, we have been moving through the following steps to help students understand main idea and improve their basic comprehension:

• What is a main idea?
• Where do we find the main idea?
• What is the main idea in the paragraph?
• What is the main idea of the passage?
• How do we determine main idea in more complex text (ex., paragraphs that consist of one sentence)?

We are currently on day seven, and the kids have expressed that they feel like they are better understanding the texts they are reading. Although it has been a short period of time, we are seeing them contribute more to conversations and answer more questions correctly - while also explaining their thinking. Many are quickly becoming more confident on a daily basis, exclaiming that they are finding the correct answers much more quickly. 

In reading's Cotton's research, my thinking began to change about my school's focus on higher-level questions. "Higher cognitive questions are not categorically better than lower cognitive questions in eliciting higher level responses or in promoting learning gains." Yes, we need to move toward them, but if we skip from level one to level three questions without scaffolding along the way, how can we expect our struggling students to understand how to think about the higher-level questions when they are still stuck on the lower ones?

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Cotton, K. (1988, May). Classroom questioning. School Improvement Research Series SIRS. Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory. Retrieved September 16, 2008 from: http://www.nwrel.org/ scpd/sirs/3/cu5.html de Jesus, H. P., Almeida, P.,

The Official List of #ThingsMyStudentsSay

After conferring with Benjamin Lewis via Twitter, I have decided to keep a running list of all the gloriously goofy things my eighth graders. As much as I pretend some of it annoys me, I live to catch them saying completely offbeat things. 

• I really wanted to go the Justin Beiber concert last night, but I couldn't. I was about to have a mid-life crisis. (4/11/16)
• The Holocaust was in Star Wars. (4/11/16)
• It wasn't me. It was accidentally my computer. (4/8/16)
• What does it mean when it says purpose? (It actually says porpoise.)
• My leg fell asleep, and now that thing on my butt is missing. 
• Miss, did you know back in the day, like 20 years ago...
• Miss, when you were younger did people throw paper airplanes in class to send notes to one another?
• Best student response to "How will you be successful on the STAAR test next week?": Highlight harder.
• "Are you sure it's mine?" - while looking at his document, on my computer, under his name, in our online classroom
• China IS in Chinese.
• Miss, we found a pack of gum in the recycling bin! And we ate it! YUH!
• Alaska is a continent.
• S: I like your haircut, Miss. You look nicer. Me: (evil glare) S: No, no, no! That's not what I meant!
• London IS in Paris, Miss.
• Why don't they celebrate Thanksgiving in England?
• My boys are discussing their future children: "We gonna put them in box or in the attic. They gonna learn."
• S: Do old people get bruises out of nowhere? Me:...Why are you asking me?
• From a writing assignment: I was like Curious George but less curious.
• When I flip the paper over, which side is the top?
• Miss, who is the school's internet provider? It just shut down on me and then restarted.

Sentence BINGO

A few nights ago, my ninth grade daughter came downstairs with English homework. Her teacher had given her sample editing and revising passages from previous state exams, along with a BINGO card with words, phrases, and sentence types to find. My daughter needed help understanding some of what she was looking for, so we spent some quality time together discussing grammar. 

Being a connoisseur of interesting lesson ideas, I emailed said teacher and asked if I could steal from her. My students took their state reading exam this week, and we are ready for more formal writing instruction. I looked at the BINGO card as an opportunity to review information my students have been working on since kindergarten. So with the high school teacher's blessing, I revised the BINGO card to fit the needs of my students:

Students were mixed into random partnerships and given two editing and revising passages from a previous English I (ninth grade) state exam. They had to look through the passages to identify sentences that would match the descriptions on the BINGO card. To challenge them even more, not every square on the card had a matching sentence in the readings. They were also not allowed to ask me questions about the information they were looking for; they had to look up everything online to assist them in finding what they needed. 

Once the partners felt that they had a BINGO, they had to come to me and confirm their choices. Every time they had a correct square, I marked it with a dot. If they made a mistake, they were sent back to try again. After my first class, I told all of the others that the high score was four BINGOs on one card, and that made the rest of my classes a bit more competitive. 

Although I was not sure how this was going to work, most of my kids were engaged in the activity, determined to get a BINGO. Many were not able to complete a row today and make BINGO today, so they asked for more time to work on the assignment. I don't think there is a better lesson than the one the kids ask to continue. 

Writing and Researching with Fact Sheets: Part I

Sometimes someone passes along a piece of information that sends my brain into immediate teacher planning mode. With a change in our district professional learning this year, I have not had many of these moments as of late. But then my professor (I am part of master's reading specialist cohort) brought something to our last class that sent my mind a-spinnin'!

From Coaching Writing in Content Areas: Write-for-Insight Strategies (a book I am not familiar with), I was giving a fact sheet about whales. The page includes a list of information about whales, followed by student ability writing levels: 

My first thought: I can totally turn this into a game!

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Writing Challenge Game 1: The Most Superior Writer of the English Class 

• Each student will receive a copy of the fact sheet. 
• Each student will attempt to write the bestest, most wonderfulest, superiorest paragraph about whales. 

I certainly don't expect perfection with their sentences, but I want to get them thinking before we move into more formal writing instruction. My secret superhero plan is to sneak into their documents from my computer while they are working, and tell each student that someone else's paragraph is better. It will drive my Pre-AP students nutty. 

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Writing Challenge Game 2: Create a Stupefying Fact Sheet

• Students will work in partnerships to create a fact sheet about an assigned topic. Look at me sneaking a mini-research assignment into class. 
• I made the topics (but I can also see doing this with student-generated topics). 
• Topics include endangered animals, planets, television shows, countries, authors, foods, universities, and... John Cena. 

• The student-created fact sheets will be used to go through another round of Game 1. 

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After this, I am going to do grammar and sentence structure lessons that we use to revise and edit the writing challenge paragraphs. This is one of those lessons that I feel giddy about, and I am hoping it goes as planned in my head. I may have to get some pom-poms or a coaching whistle. 

Stay tuned for the follow-up.