Digital Portfolios: Free Webinar by Kathy Cassidy (@kathycassidy)

Posted on May 15, 2013 by renwickme

There is a free webinar on digital portfolios tomorrow night at 6 P.M. CST. It is facilitated by a 1st grade teacher, Kathy Cassidy. Her students create digital portfolios through blogging. She is not tool-specific. Kathy speaks more about the importance of the students doing the work, and the impact that this type of formative assessment can have on student learning and parent communication. I have read her new book and wrote a post about it here. It is excellent. Her work is geared toward K-3, but very applicable to all grade levels and areas. I have encouraged my entire staff to participate in this webinar. You should too!

Connected from the Start

Top Ten Signs You Might Be an Avid Reader

Posted on May 4, 2013 by renwickme

This post is inspired by Peter Johnston when he spoke at the Wisconsin State Reading Association conference this year. He suggested we measure student reading engagement with questions that identify what happens when someone truly is a reader. I left the last three slots open. What would you ask?

Top Ten Signs You Might Be an Avid Reader

Do you get upset when a teacher or parent tells you to stop reading and go to another activity?
Have you ever accidentally walked into something while reading? (Johnston)
While reading, did a large amount of time pass without you realizing it? (Allington)
Have you purchased both the print and digital version of the same book, just in case you need to reference it at any time?
Are you reluctant to mark up the pages, for fear that the person you lend the book to will not appreciate it?
Do you sometimes refrain from reading before bed, because you may stay up too late?
Do you have at least two books on deck?

I Say Let Them Read

Posted on March 10, 2013 by renwickme

This post is actually a comment I left on Annie Murphy Paul’s blog, on her post titled “Teens Are Choosing Books That Are Too Easy For Them”.

Where I agree with the concerns of this report is that secondary students do need more guided instruction. By guided, I mean the teacher conferring with readers on a regular basis, asking them questions about the text and giving support in the form of strategy instruction. And I am not against reading the classics and being challenged as a reader from time to time. But the job of the teacher is to scaffold the students’ experiences with the text so they are successful, with strategies such as questioning and graphic organizers. It shouldn’t be left to the parents.

That said, this report fails to cite any research that would give any validity to these concerns. What research says about reading text that is “easy” for students is very clear:

- The most effective teachers provide text for students they could easily read (Allington and Johnston, 2002; Keene, 2002; Langer, 2001)
- High levels of reading accuracy produce the best reading growth (Ehri et al, 2007)
- Reading comprehension predicts reading volume and reading comprehension performance (Guthrie et al, 1999)

You can read more about this research in the excellent resource What Really Matters in Response to Intervention by Richard Allington. I also recommend his article Intervention All Day Long, found at http://goo.gl/lTWuH. In the article, Dr. Allington actually goes into a secondary school and concretely shows the fallacy of matching readers with text that is too difficult.

Where some seem to see a problem in students not selecting challenging texts, I see this issue as a success story. Students are reading! Who here reads books because they are challenging? I don’t. I choose to read text that is interesting, engaging, and meaningful to me as a reader and a person. Sounds like this is what these students are doing. For the most part, I say leave them alone and let them read.

Questions Readers Ask Other Readers

Posted on March 3, 2013 by renwickme

In my school, reading intervention for 4th and 5th graders very much resembles a book club. There are a) lots of books that the readers are interested in, b) not a lot of tests or assignments, and c) lots of time to read. In fact, we call it “Howe Book Club”. The word “intervention” is not in the students’ lexicon. It takes place both during the school day in the afternoon and after school twice a week. It was designed this year based on a post from the Stenhouse blog.

Now in full swing, we are tweaking things here and there to keep the kids reading. Example: Students were becoming less engaged in the paperbacks we had purchased for them. In response, we allocated some funds to purchased eReaders and allowed the students to choose the digital books to be downloaded on the devices.

Another area identified for growth is to encourage better conversations between the students about what they are reading. In her book The Reading Zone (2007), Nancie Atwell provides some excellent openers kids can respond to as well as questions they can ask each other. On page 83 in Chapter 7 (One-to-One), she suggests some of the following prompts:

I liked the way the author…

This book remind me of…

I’d say a theme of this book is…

I couldn’t understand…

Why did…?

She also shares many questions she asks her students as she “roams among readers” (92). I think many of these would be just as applicable when students talk to their peers about what they are reading:

What page are you on?

What do you think so far?

How is it so far, compared to his or her other books?

What genre is this one?

Why did you decide to read this one?

Where did you find this book?

Is this one worthy of a book talk?

What are you planning to read next?

The plan is to put some of these questions and prompts on a handy reference card and on a poster in our library where the intervention takes place. This skill will first need to be modeled by the interventionists, which consist of current and retired teachers. They could do this at the beginning of each session, where time is set aside for the adult to read aloud a favorite book to the group.

Once the students get the hang of speaking like readers, they can facilitate conversations both in person and online. There is time built in for each student to share something that resonated with them from what they are reading in their small group. We will also have them set up in a class on Edmodo. This will allow students to continue their conversations beyond the official intervention time.

These activities we are facilitating for our students are authentic and engaging. They are doing what real readers do – read books, write and share about what they read, listen to others talk about their experiences, and then find more books to read.

When Less is More

Posted on February 19, 2013 by renwickme

I am sharing this with my staff tonight on our blog, possibly the last one for a while…

I failed last week to get a Friday Focus out. I see the world is still spinning. To be honest, now that there is a Friday Focus and a Monday Musings, I am struggling to find the time and the content to do both well. My initial purpose for starting this staff blog was two fold: To share more information, and to model how you might use a 21st century tool with your students.

I hope I have accomplished both. However, the last couple of weeks I have noticed on the statistics that there are less people viewing the blog. That could be because I was embedding the posts in the emails. But I am also seeing a pattern: The only times when people view the blog are on the days they are published. Blogs are meant to be come back to, kind of a home base for information. Maybe it is redundant with our Howe Google Site.

With that, I would like you to check out the poll to the right. Please answer it honestly. I will continue the Friday Focus regardless. There is something about having a piece of paper in your hands that makes our ideas in writing permanent and real. For instance, although I have stopped printing my emails out quite a while ago, I still find myself preferring to read the news on actual paper.

If you would like to take a crack at posting your own thoughts online in a safe environment, maybe our Google Site is where this could take place. The audience is limited to us. For example, you could post a video tutorial you and/or your students created, explaining an academic concept or showing how to use a tool on the iPad. I will ask PTC if they would support your extra efforts with the iTunes cards again. I appreciate your willingness to continue innovating with me on behalf of student learning.

A Takeaway from the Wisconsin State Reading Association Convention

Posted on February 11, 2013 by renwickme

This is part of a post I shared with my teachers this week on our staff blog. It is a summary of what I took away from the excellent WSRA Convention in Milwaukee on February 7-9, 2013.

The Wisconsin State Reading Association conference was an excellent experience. I attended very informative sessions and had great conversations with other educators. You can read all of the tweets associated with five of the keynotes and sessions on my Storify page. I plan to share more both formally and informally.

One of the common threads during the conference was the Common Core. But not in the way I expected. Instead of hearing how schools should be addressing these standards in everything we do, the presenters encouraged us to take it slow. Focus on the students. Consider what engages them. If we can continue to make school a place of joy and allow students to achieve their personal learning goals, the Common Core will take care of itself.

Not to say that the CCSS should be relegated to the sidelines. Many well known educators and researchers such as Jeff Wilhelm and Regie Routman encouraged everyone to use what is laid out in the Common Core, but as a resource instead of a focus. These standards are not what students come to school for every day. They attend to our instruction and their learning because they want to become better readers and writers, and they believe you can help them along the way. Let’s stay the course and not get too excited about what is coming. What we know to be best practices will carry us through.