The Appendix of  Do I Really Have to Teach Reading?

There are some pretty neat little forms and sheets in the back of the book.  I am strongly considering photocopying them before I turn my book back into the library.  I don't have a scanner so I can't really scan them into this post, and I'm pretty sure that's a copyright violation anyway.  However, if you have been following my blog and think you might like to have copies of these forms for use in your own classroom, I could make a copy of mine and mail them to you.  Sound like a deal?  Leave me your address and full name in the comments if you're interested.

And with that, I am done with this book and ready to enjoy my weekend.

Please enjoy yours and be safe over the Fourth.

Chapter 9
"Did I Miss Anything?" 
"Did I Miss Everything?"  
 Last Thoughts

Tovani uses this final chapter to say that she has bad days as a teacher and that a lot happens in the classroom to distract the students and the teacher from actually getting down to learning.  She faces a lot of pressure to get kids up to speed reading-wise before state tests happen, and she knows in her heart that a lot of what she does may not affect those test scores.  But she believes in what she does and she does think it makes a difference overall in the education of her students, even if the state test doesn't.

She includes stanza from a poem by Tom Wayman called "Did I Miss Anything?":

Contained in this classroom

is a microcosm of human existence

assembled for you to query and examine and ponder

This is not the only place such an opportunity has been gathered

but it was one place

I like this stanza.  A lot.  I like that she included it.  And what she had to say about it:

    "Our classrooms aren't the only place where kids might learn to 'query and examine and ponder.' But they are one place, and it matters that we see how important it is to offer students the opportunity again and again to take us up on the chance to think hard about the world around them." (p. 120)

Isn't that what all of us hope to do? 

I liked this book because while it offered some tips and tools to help kids maneuver through reading and get something out of it, it didn't profess to have all the answers or a script to follow or some proscribed set of objectives to fulfill.  Tovani says she does not presume to know best how to run another teacher's classroom, but she does believe that good teachers are always looking for better ways to teach.  I agree with her.  

My mom taught school for 10 years (kindergarten) and then worked as her elementary school's counselor (read: damage control/diagnostician/surrogate parent/scapegoat) for fifteen more.  She said that she wished that there was some sort of mandatory retirement plan for teachers that no longer made any effort to update lesson plans or bring something new to the classroom.  She said when a teacher no longer cares if they are really reaching all the kids, then it's time to go.  She's right.  Why just sit there occupying the classroom if your heart isn't in it anymore?

When the microcosm you're in is no longer fascinating, it's time to move to a different one.

Basswood (stem) 4x objective (isn't it pretty?)

Chapter 8
"What Do I Do With All These Sticky Notes?"

Tovani really advocates for having students make notes on sticky notes as they proceed through text.  She even has them remove some sticky notes and turn them in on a sheet of notebook paper so she can see where they were connecting with the text by page number.  But she admits that's not enough to assess if they are thinking, remembering, or actually learning from what they read.  And she admits also that there is no single way to assess that.

Rather, she has multiple methods that she uses.  But before she does any of them, she has her students set goals.  They brainstorm them as a class and then revisit them individually and collectively throughout the year.  They can chart this as a class or have individual charts, and they revisit them every month or so to see if their goals have been met, need adjustment, or were unrealistic. 

One method she uses for assessment and to check in with students is through the use of what she calls "conversation calendars." Each sheet is divided into columns for five days of the week and two rows--one for the student to write and one for the teacher to answer the student's question or concern.  She feels this particular method is a great way to connect with her students, and that it can be adjusted for any content area.  She takes the time to respond to them daily and awards points in her class to keep students motivated to fill them out. 

Tovani also advocates for using reading response logs.  She shows samples of good ones to her class so they have an idea of how to go about using it.  She has them complete the logs for books that they select for themselves and she tries to give them a reasonable reading amount, such as 25 pages per week.  They are required to summarize what they read in a few sentences; then they respond to the reading with more sentences to show ways in which they connected to it.  Finally, they submit five sticky notes to show how they are using the particular reading strategy she has been showing them in class.  Tovani admits that while these logs are great for assessing how students are connecting to text with their own background information, as well as questioning it, making inferences, drawing conclusions and utilizing strategies for overcoming difficulties with it, they are also a grading nightmare that needs to be spread out over the week instead of lumped onto a weekend that is essentially hell for the teacher.

Tovani also uses file folders to keep writing samples for each student throughout the year to monitor progress and tries to find time to have quick conferences with students one-on-one during class. She tries to find students who are on the right track so she can point out their behaviors to the rest of the class as an example of what works for successful readers.  Her conferences also allow her to give a little extra help to struggling students so that they don't fall too far behind the rest of the class.

At the end of the chapter, Tovani makes a case for using assessment to let students show what they are thinking when they read and how they connect to what they take in.  She says tying grades to the effort they put into thinking and participating in class and in reading assignments makes more sense than simply relying on a test at the end of the unit that has a set of "right" answers.  I agree with this wholeheartedly.  If the test at the end and the grade it garners are all that a class boils down to, the effort you put in feels sort of hollow and useless.  I would like to believe we can find better ways to determine if our students are really getting something out of what we try to teach them.

Chapter 7
Group Work That Grows Understanding

OK, I promise to keep the drama to a minimum tonight.

I found this chapter especially interesting, since I personally find small group work to be painful and less than gratifying.  Tovani is a fan of it, and I can understand why:  according to her book, the students in her classes that are divided into small groups get a lot out of the experience and work well together.  When I read this, I immediately thought, "Yeah, right.  In what alternate universe is this occurring?"  But I tried to keep an open mind and read the rest of the chapter.

Turns out, Tovani didn't have this type of success with her students right away, and although she had read about the many benefits of small group work for students (stimulates higher levels of thinking, develops social and listening skills, encourages articulation of learning and helps students make connections), her students didn't just do this off the bat.  She first asked them what bugged them about small group sessions.  She then honored those complaints by having a class discussion about them and how to work around the difficulties of not being assigned to a group with friends or being in a group where some people slack off and other people dominate the discussion.  She and the class discussed and agreed upon "norms" that would set parameters for how everyone was expected to participate and how to navigate problems when people took over or didn't engage.

She and another instructor modeled for the class how to be a good group member versus a rude group member and had the class give feedback about what they observed.  She then had them engage in small groups many, many times throughout the school year.  With practice, they got comfortable with the set-up, mostly adhered to the norms, and in general, seemed to enjoy the experience.

Sounds like a ton of work, right?  I thought so, too.  But I do have to say, no teacher I have ever had, in the many, many years of school I have attended, ever tried to lay the groundwork like that for a successful small group experience.  So to be fair, I don't really think I can judge Tovani for touting it as a good way to teach, because I don't really know what it would be like to be a group where everyone pulled their weight and interacted in a way that was conducive to all members learning something.  Maybe it is a lot of work to get there.  But maybe it is also a great opportunity to teach some life-skills, like working well with others in an effort to benefit the group more than the individual.  I think a lot of us have made it to adulthood and more or less figured that issue out through trial and error.  But it would have been nice to have some "norms," especially considering that a lot of other people have made it to adulthood without figuring out how to work well cooperatively in a group.  And if the benefits are truly what she cites for having the small group experience, then all that work might be worth it after all.

Group Huddle

Chapter 6
Holding Thinking to Remember and Reuse

Tovani talks more about the tools she gives students for "holding thinking" while they read.  She starts off by having them analyze a provocative photo, and they have a lot to say about it.  The next day, she has them read a provocative article and notate in the margins their thoughts about it.  This is "holding thinking"--writing down a thought evoked by the reading.  But she says that when students have done this, they are more likely to return to the text.  The notes they have made or words they have highlighted gives them a way to review, whether it is for a test, a discussion with other students, or to start a related writing assignment.  But she discourages them from copying from the text or just underlining--they need to respond to it in some way, and there is no right or wrong way to respond.

She carries her story a bit further to describe a very antagonistic kid that told her at the beginning of the year that no one makes him read and he wasn't going to do it.  She managed to engage this kid accidentally by including his refusal to annotate text in some of her examples she used to show the class how their fellow students were doing it.  She pointed out that she thought he did read it but that by refusing to write anything down, she could never know how he felt about it.  He decided to try again, and she reflected on his progress throughout the year.  She said that struggling readers can refuse to engage and make themselves "invisible."  But her question is:  if students make themselves invisible, are we still responsible for teaching them?

This struck me as a real question for educators everywhere.  Tovani advocates tools--highlighters, sticky notes to use on text that you can't write on directly, double-entry diaries, comprehension constructors (basically "think sheets").... I think these are all great, especially on paper, with some lovely answers added.  But I don't think she ever really answers her question.  I hope, in my optimistic heart-of-hearts, that for every "invisible" student out there, there will be some teacher along the way that tries and succeeds in connecting with them so that they get something, anything out of their years in the public school system.  But I know that I am overly optimistic.

I was a good student growing up.  School was always quite easy for me, and reading has always been intuitive.  I'm not sure what age I was when I learned to read, but according to my parents, I taught myself.  I was always "intrinsically motivated"--I made my grades for myself and motivated myself to do well.  There was no twenty-dollar bill promised for bringing home all As.

I worry that as a teacher, I may miss the signs of the struggling reader, the invisible student, that has been passed along despite lack of mastery of reading and writing from many grades before.  I worry that I won't be qualified as "the Art Teacher" to help this student if I have the wherewithal to recognize him/her.  But I do feel that I am responsible to help these kids, even if they are almost done with public school and have been failed by the system so many times that they don't even know what to expect as success.

The only way I can reconcile myself to these shortcomings of our education system and to the mistakes and failures I know I will experience as a teacher is to remember that learning can last for a person's entire lifetime.  I certainly can't tell you what standardized curriculum elements I learned over the course of my public school experience in small-town East Texas twenty years ago, but I do remember how to carry and borrow in arithmetic--that's a life skill.  I know how to find the main idea and write an essay with an introduction, body and conclusion--another life skill.  I know the basic timeline of the U.S. Civil War and its battles--not a life skill, but damn useful at Trivia Night.  And I know that while I don't want to teach reading, math, social studies, or science as my content area, I can expose my art students to the connections between those subjects and art in meaningful ways.  Maybe a student will remember something he or she saw or read or created in my classroom and how it connects to astronomy or geometry or poetry and that will matter to them.  Maybe it will help them feel a little less invisible.  Maybe it will inspire them to keep learning, even as an adult. 

Chapter 5
Why Am I Reading This?

 I think most students wonder this about most assignments.  I remember thinking it about a book called The Story Bible by Pearl Buck that was assigned over the summer between 8th and 9th grade.  It made no sense--why would we be reading religious stories, rewritten by some lady, in English class?

Tovani drives home the point that recognizing the purpose for reading is vitally important for students to engage.  It's also extremely important when teachers teach a text that they have read many times over.  For the student, it's the first read.  It may overwhelm them and they aren't even sure what they should be selectively attending to (as Rosenblatt would say) because they are experiencing plot, characters, theme, vocabulary, etc, all at once.  Or if it's a science text, they are trying to decipher methods, hypotheses, vocabulary, results, conclusions....  The same is true for math or social studies or even art--the first exposure to the text is a lot to swallow!

Teachers forget this--they have read the material so many times that the purpose or purposes for reading have become internal to them.  They may even struggle to articulate what those purposes are.  They may try to cover so much of the text that they fail to connect the students with the most important points.

Tovani recommends an approach in which the teacher clearly instructs the students on what they should look for in their initial reading.  Her example is this:  
  "A U.S. history teacher may say to his students, 'By the time you finish reading tonight, I want you to be able to discuss three causes of the Civil War.'  The teacher is not telling his students the causes; he is merely giving them a sense of what will be important for tomorrow's discussion."  (p. 59)

Is this "dumbing it down" for the students?  Tovani says it's not, and I agree with her.  She goes on to discuss how adults learning a new skill or preparing to enter a new profession are told what they need to know.  Doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers, and others are "given a lens through which to learn about their fields." (p. 60)  It makes just as much sense to give secondary students a little direction in which to proceed when reading something for the first time.

She says when she has to read something and is not sure of the purpose immediately, she starts with the title and goes through, noting interesting details, the opinion of the author, new information, or ways she can connect with it personally.  She also considers who the author is and their style of writing.  She says it helps to think about how you can use what you're reading once you're done.  When choosing texts for her students, she tries to consider what their difficulties with it might be and how she can model negotiating those difficulties for them. 

When students are unsure of their purpose in reading, she says their minds wander and they lose their "interactive voice" of conversation in their minds that keeps them engaged in the reading.  Having a purpose to the reading keeps that "interactive voice" in charge and suppresses the "distracting voice" that interrupts their connection with the meaning of the text.  This is a practiced skill, one that still gives me trouble from time to time with my own reading.

So why was I assigned The Story Bible?  Well, the purpose was to be familiar with the characters and most well-known stories from the Bible, so that when I read a biblical allusion in literature, I would understand it.  Of course, the teacher didn't tell us this until we started the course that fall.  And of course, I had not really read it over the summer as I was supposed to have done.  A little direction and purpose expressed by my teacher when making the assignment would have gone a long way to helping me find a reason to read it.

Chapter 4  Connecting Students with Accessible Text

U.S. History!  Did you love it or hate it?  I loved it, mainly because the teacher who did the first half in 8th grade was a really charismatic guy.  The football coach that taught the second half in 9th grade had a hard act to follow, but he still did a good job.  Did you ever stop to consider that the body of information for U.S. History increases by 365 days every year?  I can't say that I did; Tovani points it out in this chapter.  U.S. History is typically a subject that relies heavily on a textbook, and we all know that when a school district purchases textbooks, they keep them in circulation for about a decade.  So in addition to teaching all the information in the textbook, a good U.S. History teacher has to find ways to include current events or recent events that have occurred since the publication of the textbook in the curriculum.  What this all boils down to is that there is no time in U.S. History class for students to read; the teachers need every minute of that class time to lecture on the vast body of information that has been mandated to be covered in 9 months.  That means students are reading at home, and even proficient readers are likely not retaining much of it.  Struggling readers are probably crying into the crease of the book and hoping for divine intervention when the test comes around.

Add the wrinkle that harder textbooks are being purchased by department heads in the interest of trying to raise academic achievement.  Now you have a subject that is vast, and certainly not always interesting, being conveyed to students in a way that may be beyond their understanding or reading level.  Sounds like a recipe for disaster!  Tovani says that the first way to remedy this is to use accessible text.

Where does a teacher find accessible text?  Usually not in textbooks, but rather in newspapers and magazines.  It doesn't have a "controlled vocabulary" and is generally pleasant to the eye and interesting to read.  But accessible text is not DUMBED DOWN.  Rather, it has the potential to engage both proficient and less-than-proficient readers in a way that is meaningful.  After all, no teacher is going to have a class in which all the students are reading at the exact same level.  But routinely expecting any student to read and comprehend text that is too hard for them will eventually lead to the student associating school with pointless reading.  And continued failure for struggling readers is especially damaging as they progress through school and find their difficulties multiply with increasingly complex texts.

The bottom line is: if kids aren't reading, they will never get better at it.  So Tovani suggests alternative texts that are more accessible than textbooks to use as supplementary information for students who read well and as jumping-off points for readers that struggle.  One suggestion she makes that I think sounds interesting is the use of "text sets."  Instead of just one textbook for a given subject, there are multiple reading materials available, varied in length, content, difficulty, and structure, but that have a unifying topic or theme.  This gives students several options for obtaining information on a topic and provides different texts to try out and practice different reading strategies.  This is an idea that is utilized often in elementary schools, and I think it's brilliant for use in secondary school, especially in light of the fact that textbooks are not unbiased and should not be regarded as the be-all, end-all source of information for any given subject. 

Tovani states, "Text sets are designed to give reluctant readers a choice of interesting and accessible texts." (p. 47)  She gives examples of how text sets can be helpful to explore Shakespeare, Greek mythology, literary classics, math, health class, and science.  I found myself picturing some text sets I could use in my art classroom about artists, about art movements, about techniques, materials and processes.....  It made me want to go online and start ordering books!!  It also made me realize that if we want students to make connections between what they read and what they experience in the real world, we need to offer a variety of texts to engage them on whatever level best suits them.

If you're interested, she offers a list of Accessible Texts, and I found an online link to them:
http://contentliteracy101.weebly.com/text-sets.html.  I think my favorite is "song lyrics",  which reminded me of a funny meme I saw.  (You guys that grew up in the 80s will like this one.) 

Annnnndd there's your song-poisoning for the evening.  You're welcome.