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Visible Voting

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Friends and neighbors gather to caucus at one site in Ames, Iowa. (Image by Darin Johnson)

NBC’s Jonathan Allen writes at 12:31 a.m. on Feb. 4 from Des Moines: “All the top Democrats are moving on to New Hampshire, because Iowa failed to do the one job it had.

A colossal caucus night technological foul-up — straight out of a dystopian political novel — will make it harder for the state’s Democratic Party to justify its prized status as the first in the nation to hold a presidential election contest every four years.”

In a similar fashion, the editors of the Boston Globe declare: “Kill the tradition: N.H. and Iowa should not vote first.”

There are plenty of calls for Iowa to lose its status, and perhaps we no longer deserve to be in the electoral limelight. As an Iowan, I’m embarrassed the technology failed, and I’m surprised that the backup plan was so painfully slow in tabulating results.

Is it time to kill the Iowa Caucus? Personally, I would rather have us reform some of the caucus procedures, find highly dependable technology, and figure out a way to increase participation rather than killing the tradition of a caucus.

I see two clear advantages to a caucus. First, for me a caucus is more visceral than a quick and easy vote on the way home from work. I felt  a sense of catharsis as I saw neighbors and friends sitting around me and neighbors and friends sitting across the room. I felt deep appreciation for the genuine respect for differences in opinion.

As we prepared to vote, I thought of the earliest days of democracy in ancient Athens when men would sometimes have public votes using a white pebble for “yes” and a black pebble for “no.” In a caucus as each group huddles together and physically takes a count, it just feels like democracy in action. Public voting like this requires the coordination of mind, body, and spirit. It is a powerful communal experience unlike the cold efficiency of filling in a series of dots on a paper ballot.

The second advantage to the caucus system is that it provides additional data beyond placement. As The Washington Post’s Philip Bump points out: “What makes the Iowa caucuses unique, besides serving as an inadvertent software beta-testing laboratory, is that they include voters’ second picks in their calculus. . . . The biggest overall shift was from businessman Andrew Yang to former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg.” We saw this same Buttigieg Bump at our own caucus site. In teaching we talk about the importance of Visible Learning. Likewise, a caucus provides Visible Voting and analysis.

And so I’m left with more questions than answers. In a vote where so many had second thoughts, what do second choices reveal? And what other applicable lessons can we find in the results from Monday night?

Professional Reflections

Adjusting my prescription

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Free-Photos / Pixabay

Last week I returned to two pages from one of the core texts of our 2019 summer course on the Secondary Reading and Writing Workshop.

On p. 8 of Workshopping the Canon (2017), Mary E. Styslinger writes:

Along with the above, when structuring reading and writing workshops around classical works in middle and high school classrooms, it is important to keep in mind the stages of reading literature suggested by Milner, Milner, and Mitchell (2012). They proposed four stages of reading literature: (1) reader response, (2) interpretive community, (3) formal analysis, and (4) critical synthesis. This four-stage construct moves student readers from responding personally to sharing and deepening these responses within an interpretive community, to illuminating them through formal analysis, and toward synthesizing critical perspectives into their own interpretation. Milner et al. (2012) explained the teacher’s role during the initial stage of reading as nurturing unmediated, unencumbered, felt responses to the text. Once students have responded to the text personally, they are ready to move into an interpretive community, as teachers facilitate engagements that bring students together to unravel the text. During formal analysis, we help students explore the craft of the text read, noting such elements as plot, character, setting, point of view, tone, style, themes, or symbols. In the final stage of reading literature, critical synthesis, the text is considered from the perspectives of varied schools of literary criticism, such as historical/ biographical, moral/philosophical, archetypal, feminist, Marxist, or Freudian.

And on p. 49 of Workshopping the Canon (2017) Styslinger continues:

While the more text-centered theory/pedagogy of New Criticism may seem at odds with reader response, it does not have to be. As Rosenblatt (2003) clarified, “Emphasis on the reader need not exclude teaching criteria of valid interpretation or application of various approaches, literary and social, to the process of critical interpretation and evaluation” (p. 7). In the workshopping classroom, we begin with reader response, allowing and encouraging students to bring prior knowledge—their personality traits, past events, present needs, physical conditions, moods, and preoccupations—to the text. These initial associations form the foundation on which we build, establishing an interpretive classroom community through sharing of personal responses, then engaging in more formal analysis and critical study. During formal analysis, we guide students in understanding how a text achieves its effects and, often, its meaning. When we embark on critical study, we view a text through one or more literary theories (e.g., historical/biographical, moral/philosophical, Freudian, feminist, archetypal, Marxist, formalist, rhetorical, deconstructionist, new historical, etc.).

As I look at these different lenses, I find that I am more comfortable using the Feminist and the Social Class lenses. When I was teaching AP Literature & Composition, I used the Postcolonial Lens during our critical study of The Heart of Darkness. Now as I’m confronted with an Equity Challenge by my administration, I’m thinking that my application of the Postcolonial lens to just The Heart of Darkness was too limiting. So I’ve been re-viewing my teaching practices. What teaching strategies do I need to return to and to strengthen for contemporary use? How can these lenses work with nonfiction? If my teaching is too myopic, perhaps this is just the prescription that I need.

One text that influenced me in the past was Deborah Appleman’s Critical Encounters in Secondary English (2015). In her third edition, Appleman includes these two strategies for exploring the Postcolonial lens:

    1. Search the text for references to colonization or current and formerly colonized people. In these references, how are the colonized people portrayed? How is the process of colonization portrayed?
    2. Consider what images of “others” or processes of “othering” are present in the text. How are these “others” portrayed?

And Appleman goes on to write: “Analyze how the text deals with cultural conflicts between the colonizing culture and colonized or traditional culture” (p. 203).

So this week I’m turning my attention to the “processes of othering” that are present in our culture, in my school and in my classroom. I’ll try to give a vision update soon.

Professional Reflections

Professional Development Opportunity

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Creating Secondary Reading/Writing Workshops: Teaching for Transfer, Transformation, and Authentic Engagement

July 8 – Aug. 2, 2019

In Kelly Gallagher and Penny Kittle’s afterward of 180 Days, they write: “We believe our profession needs just what our students need: less standardization and more teacher creativity. Less common ground and more radical transformations, beginning with the smart thinking and professionalism of each of you. Let us recapture the spirit of innovation that is the central ingredient in great, passionate teaching. Let us make decisions that lead to increased student engagement with reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Let us slow down and go deeper, even if this means the entire curriculum is not covered” (p. 225).

Join us as we critically examine and comment on the scholarship in 180 Days, Berit Gordan’s No More Fake Reading, and Mary E. Styslinger’s Workshopping the Canon in order to radically transform our secondary ELA classrooms into smart, innovative, and inspiring reading/writing workshops. Workshopping the Canon is an NCTE Reads summer book club selection this summer!

After taking this class, participants will form

  • a strengthened set of beliefs, daily practices, and the knowledge to transfer “essential reading understandings” (Gordan, p. 18) for Iowa classrooms.
  • a guiding philosophy that balances and/or blends independent reading, bookclubs, and core texts.
  • a guiding philosophy that teaches a rhythm for teaching writing (narrative, informational, argument) and research (multigenre project).
  • an understanding of how the workshop structure allows us to maximize profound connections with our students by providing frequent formative evaluations, supportive interventions, greater teacher clarity, and authentic feedback.

We’ll collaborate, communicate, create, and think together. Join us, enter your heroic zone of proximal development, and walk away with a renewed spirit of innovation and the knowledge to empower and engage your students this fall.

For more information or to enroll, visit AEA Online.

Multimedia Composition

Our Image-driven Culture

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“Gender-swap Justice League” by randychiu is licensed under CC BY 2.0

In my mind, I thought we would be done with “Our Image-driven Culture” unit by the end of March. But now it is April, and we are just starting to look at Digital Audio and Podcasting.

For the unit on images, we examined gender using a sociological  lens and did content analyses of our work. Here’s one document that we used to prepare for our analyses.

In the next few days, Multimedia Composition students will post their content analysis presentations on their blogs.

Multimedia Composition

Multimedia Composition

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Access • Analyze • Create • Reflect • Take Action

COURSE DESCRIPTION
In Create to Learn: Introduction to Digital Literacy, Renee Hobbs reminds us that “Digital literacy competencies are important for learners in all fields of study” (p. vii) and that “Today, every student needs to be able to create to learn” (p. iv).  This course focuses on the lifelong learning process that involves accessing, analyzing, creating, reflecting, and taking action, using the power of communication and information to make a difference in the world.

Create to Learn balances critical thinking about media and digital composition with digital media creation. We’ll use critical questions about the purpose, form and content of all forms of communication, and then we’ll apply our knowledge to create blogs, social media posts, digital images, podcasts, infographics, video production, screencasts, and animation.

Four Period 6 students help each other with their blogs. They were also noticing that it had been a long time since I had added a blog post to my blog.

‘BUT WHAT DO YOU DO IN THAT CLASS?’
In the last few weeks, I’ve had several students ask about Multimedia Composition. “But what do you do in that class?” one junior asked me last week. After I explained what we do, I could tell by the tilt of her head and the tone of her voice that my response was unfulfilling. I didn’t have the course overview in my short-term memory.

One Period 6 student brainstorms a possible tagline for his blog. The overall goal for the last two days has been to couple creativity and the concept of play in learning.

So far, we’ve read from six chapters in Create to Learn, and I’ve tried to create microlearning opportunities of our topics using Bookwidgets. We’ve looked at contemporary blogs, discussed the characteristics of blog posts, and then analyzed the content of blog posts. After several snow days and days away from school because of a Polar Vortex, we’re moving to the creation phase as students are creating their own blogs and their initial blog posts.

STANDING ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS
One of the headings in Chapter 5 of Create to Learn is “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants.” As you have probably noticed, Create to Learn is an essential mentor text for me and for my students. But I’m also dependent of two other mentor texts: Kristen Hawley Turner and Troy Hick’s Argument in the Real World (2017) and Troy Hick’s Crafting Digital Writing (2013).

I came across an amazing quotation by L.S. Vygotsky this month: “Children grow into the intellectual life around them.” In reality, it’s not just children but all of us. And this is why I strive to surround myself and my students with mentors like Renee Hobbs, Kristen Hawley Turner, and Troy Hicks as we struggle to make a difference in the world.

Good night, and good luck,

DJ

 

 

 

 

 

 

Professional Reflections

LEOs and Making Curriculum Pop

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“Making Curriculum Pop is fizzing with exciting ideas and creative plans for classroom teachers, but it also has a clearly articulated rationale. The LEOs (Learning Experience Organizers) provide a systematic and engaging way to explore the diversity and complexity of media texts with students in a wide range of curriculum areas.”

—David Buckingham, professor at Loughborough University, UK, and author of Media Education: Literacy Learning and Contemporary Culture

Discovering Learning Experience Organizers

One summer when I was in graduate school, Dr. Richard Fehlman took a group of us to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to hear Dr. David Buckingham offer the audience brilliant, inspiring, and practical advice about media literacy. Buckingham’s Media Education was the go-to book in our graduate course as we explored expanding concepts of text and of reading.

And so Buckingham’s praise for Making Curriculum POP: Developing Literacies in All Content Areas (2016) in the epigraph above and on the first page of Goble and Goble’s book added instant credibility and only fueled my enthusiasm for reading and later incorporating the Gobles’ theories into practice in my own classroom. And I have to note that seeing exemplary presentations by the Gobles at the National Council of Teachers of English and at the Iowa Council of Teachers of English though the years only added to the Gobles’ credibility.

In their opening chapter, the Gobles succinctly describe the shifting educational paradigms of the last century and the theory and research behind their Learning Experience Organizers. They contrast their noninterlocking LEOs with traditional study guides and worksheets (p. 20). And if you’ve ever used literature circles in your classroom, these LEOs will be familiar hybrids ready for your immediate consumption. However, these LEOs “are not your daddy’s caddy.” These Learning Experience Organizers have been modified for today’s students and today’s expanding textual experiences.

In addition to the impressive feast of 55 LEOs in Chapter 5, the Gobles include a chapter on designing learning experiences, a chapter with suggestions for modifications, and over 60 pages of impressive “Resources to Make Your Curriculum Pop” (pp. 66–132). Although I don’t have time to describe the magnificence of Chapter 4, the media-rich resources are perfect companions to the Learning Experience Organizers.

Returning to a discussion of the LEOs, the Gobles write:

Using Learning Experience Organizers, or LEOs, creates a highly differentiated instructional practice designed to engage students with any print or nonprint text, including objects and spaces. Instead of using a traditional study guide to search for a text’s “right answers,” students can use LEOs to individually and then collaboratively interact with the text using a variety of specific and open-ended foci. (p. 12)

And later in Chapter 1, Goble and Goble stress the importance of student choice: “Choice is a feature of this type of study guide, as is the opportunity to explore connections and feelings, make predictions, and focus on better responses (as opposed to those that are right or wrong). Noninterlocking study guides—such as our LEOs—incorporate higher-level thinking” (p. 19). Goble and Goble bring Chapter 1 to a triumphant close as they summarize “six interrelated strands of education research and theory” (p. 22) that have guided them as they created LEOs. Because the Gobles’ guiding ideas (pp. 22-8) of

  • Constructivism
  • Collaborative and Cooperative Learning
  • Cultural Studies and Media Education
  • Culturally Relevant Teaching/Engaging Students in Learning
  • Differentiation of Instruction and Multiple Intelligences
  • Literacy Across the Curriculum and New Literacies
  • 21st Century Skills

mirror so many of my own guiding ideas, grafting the LEOs into my lessons required minimal changes.

Designing and Developing Digital Learning Experiences

After using key LEOs with the whole class as we read several anchor works in my AP English Language and Composition courses, I had students use specific LEOs to respond to other shorter works in small groups. After multiple discussions and evaluations, I created editable PDFs of several LEOs that my students could use in nonfiction literature circle discussions of their choice books. (And if I had been a more careful reader, I would have noticed the link to PDFs right after the Table of Contents.) I liked how students were able to take more responsibility for their own learning as they chose and jigsawed the LEOs that would work best for their choice books. The LEOs were successful in terms of choice, independence, and critical thinking. And in terms of assessment, I found the Gobles’ metaphor spot on: “Most LEOs are designed for many possible responses, so we often assess these footprints of learning based on process and effort” (p. 51).

After four sessions of nonfiction book circles, I decided to make two design and instructional changes before we used LEOs with choice book again. First, about 5% of my students had problems editing the LEOs. Even after repeated instruction on the workflow, two or three students would inevitably turn in blank PDFs. To improve the workflow, I converted 18 of the LEOs to Google Docs, and I offered these HyperDocs to students as links that automatically copy the file for them. Here’s an example of just one HyperDoc LEO:

Connector

 The CONNECTOR’s job is to relate your text to other things you have studied in school, your own personal experience, as well as things outside of school (self, text, world). Make sure you are specific—for example, if you are using a passage from a text, write out the EXACT QUOTE OR PASSAGE in the upper boxes with quotation marks. Please be prepared to share your connections with your group.

After switching from PDFs to Google Docs, all students easily mastered the process.

The second area that needed change was in assisting students to better choose LEOs and to emphasize that if a LEO is not working (not authentic) for a particular book or for a particular section, skilled readers adjust their response and find a better fit. In addition, I had the students jigsaw LEOs after having read about 25 pages, and this helped students make more informed choices the second time around.

In the end, the HyperDoc LEOs were easy for the students to use, and they gave students voice and choice in their learning. With the Gobles’ solid foundation in theory and their creative genius in the creation of Learning Experience Organizers, my students and I were able to make the curriculum pop!

References

Buckingham, D. (2012). Media education: literacy, learning and
     contemporary culture. Cambridge: Polity.

Goble, P. B., & Goble, R. R. (2016). Making curriculum pop: developing
literacies in all content areas. Golden Valley, MN: Free Spirit
Publishing.

 

Professional Reflections

‘Thanks for having us use Canvas,’ said the sophisticated senior

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WHY KING CANVAS CONTINUES TO REIGN SUPREME

I had an interesting discussion last month about Canvas with a senior on her last day of school. The senior was thanking me for using Canvas, a powerful Learning Management System.  Here’s the gist: The student is attending the University of Iowa this fall, and Iowa is making the transition to use Canvas this summer.  The student ended the brief conversation with “It’s great that I already know how to turn in assignments and check my grades, so thanks for having us use Canvas.”

While I realize this wasn’t a Bette Midler “Wind Beneath My Wings” student-to-teacher compliment, it caught my attention because students generally compliment content (e.g. “Thanks for teaching King Lear!”) or personality (e.g. “I appreciated your sense of humor!) rather than how I deliver instruction.  Because of the source, I appreciated the compliment nevertheless, and it validated my deliberate choice in using Canvas on a daily basis in my English/language arts classroom.

As a teacher in a 1:1 environment, Canvas has simplified my teacher workflow while offering my students a superior place for us to begin and to sustain our inquiry. Our reading, our writing, our speaking, and our viewing activities almost always start in Canvas or continue in Canvas after a short hook or warmup activity. When I ask students to open Canvas, it’s a clear signal to them that it’s time to learn.

“Why don’t you use Google Classroom?” is a question I’m frequently asked at the start of each semester.  And perhaps the improvements Google makes to Classroom over the summer will finally convince me to migrate from my Canvas Free for Teachers account. But to be honest, it will require more than a few improvements to convince me to migrate.

So here are the five reasons I prefer Canvas over so many other Learning Management Systems to orchestrate the learning in my classroom:

  1. Canvas simply makes sense to me. It organizes, consolidates, and clearly communicates the most important information to students. I envision learning as a series of inquiry-driven units of instruction. Generally the units begin with essential questions and end with some sort of medium to communicate an individual’s understanding of the essential questions and/or skills. Because my units tend to be two to six weeks long, I divide them by the week. In terms of efficiency, I write the week in the year and the unit’s theme above that week’s assignments. Organizationally, this method of organization makes more sense to me than a stream of assignments. Here’s a student’s view of the final three weeks in my Advanced English 12 course on Canvas:
    Screenshot 2016-06-04 15.44.52

Even though I teach mostly seniors, I still get this habitual question: “I was gone yesterday. Did I miss anything?” Sometimes it is followed by “Did you hand anything back?” or (my personal favorite) “What are we doing today?”

 Using the information on the student’s screen, here are my answers for a student who missed May 10: Your peers viewed 19.1. It’s a TED Talk in Zaption, and then they began writing a Personal Mission Statement in 19.2. It looks like you have eight assignments on your “To Do” list, and I’m seeing several zeroes in “Recent Feedback.” Let’s have a look at your grades after we start the first activity.

All of the information the missing student needs is available on one screen or is but one click away.

  1. Powerful assessment tools are built in. Canvas makes frequent formative assessment a snap. Here’s what the Personal Mission Presentation rubric looked like to students:
    Screenshot 2016-06-04 16.05.23
    The formatting isn’t as nice as when I made rubrics using Microsoft Word and printed them on paper, but the look is very close to what my rubrics looked like before I moved to a 1:1 environment.    Canvas gets a gold star in my evaluation when it comes to communication about assignments. Not only can I offer assignment directions with this rubric listed below for students, but they can also submit a comment when they submit this assignment. This is where students can offer extra information to me: “This is late because I was sick (excused absence).” or “Don’t forget: I have an incredible fear of speaking in front of my peers. Can I present during your planning period?” or “I worked hard to have the perfect combination of images and dramatic phrasing! Feel free to mark this as an A++++++++!!!!” But it gets even better from the instructor’s side of Canvas. I don’t have to run any scripts or find that perfect extension to offer rich feedback to my students. Instead, Canvas has all of these tools built in.I can open the built-in SpeedGrader function on my laptop or on my iPad, and this is what I will see:Screenshot 2016-06-04 16.08.34
    On the left is a screenshot of the student’s assignment. If this were a Google Doc, I could click a link to see it live. If the student had submitted a PDF, several tools would be available for me to leave annotations and comments directly on the document. On the right is the rubric. I click on a box for each performance category, and the grader awards points. I set up the point totals previously. If I want to go between categories, I can manually enter the points in the far right column. If I want to type comments about that specific category, I can click on the green comment balloon. I click Save when I am done, and then I click on an arrow in Speed Grader to evaluate the next student. If I want to leave more comments, I can scroll down and type comments, speak-to-text comments, or record my comments (audio or audio/visual recording).
  2. Canvas allows me to easily group students to differentiate instruction.
    Screenshot 2016-06-04 16.42.46
    Students can self-select their groups, Canvas can randomize groups, or the instructor can decide on group membership. For this unit, Group 1A selected to read, view, respond, and investigate issues about the environment. Meanwhile, Groups 1B and 1C were exploring Popular Culture, and Groups 1D and 1E were exploring Sports and Society.    In the assignment window, Canvas allows me to make assignments to the entire class, to groups, or to individuals. This allows me to easily manage differentiated assignments. Imagine if Group 1D and Group 1E are exploring the same topic, but Group 1E needs additional scaffolding. Group Sets make the differentiation more manageable to the teacher and less obvious to the students. The entire class might be working on what I have labeled 10A, but group 1D’s 10A and Group 1E’s 10A have been differentiated with materials and then with different instructions.
  3. Canvas offers strong assessment tools and easy integration with formative assessment tools beyond Canvas.
    Let’s say I have decided to have students watch Angela Duckworth’s TED Talk     “Grit is the Key to Success.” I’ve created a lesson using that TED Talk in Zaption with multiple-choice questions to gauge their comprehension. After composing the lesson in Zaption, I enter Canvas to make the assignment. I choose Zaption as my External Tool, and then it connects me to Zaption:
    Screenshot 2016-06-04 17.09.44

Students click on the link in Canvas and they are automatically presented with the Zaption lesson in Canvas. When they are done, Zaption sends their score back to Canvas. Having the score automatically sent back saves teacher time, especially with late work. And integrations like this encourage lesson diversity. Thank you, Zaption, for making this integration easy to set up and easy to use!

In addition to Zaption, I have also appreciated SoftChalk’s integration with Canvas. Special thanks to AEA PD Online program director Evan Abbey for figuring out this integration!

Internally, Canvas has advanced analytics for testing. Although I don’t use these to their full potential, I have used some of Canvas’ analytics as we neared AP testing.

 5. Canvas nudges and supports me with alternative means of assessment. Last year I experimented with doing some reports of essential standards using the Learning Mastery gradebook. Canvas’ Mastery Gradebook lets me get a visual of which students need more help to achieve mastery.

Screenshot 2016-06-04 18.17.53

 

 

Professional Reflections, Uncategorized

How I used Newsela Pro’s actionable insights to improve students’ reading comprehension

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How I used Newsela Pro’s actionable insights to improve students’ reading comprehension from Darin Johnson on Vimeo.

TRANSCRIPT:

This last semester I was fortunate enough to use the advanced features of Newsela Pro with my students in my Additional Instruction Reading class. On the Newsela website, they write: “Newsela builds reading comprehension through leveled articles, real-time assessments and actionable insights.”

One of the first things I appreciated about Newsela was the leveled articles. At first I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the leveled articles. As an English and journalism teacher, I liked the timeliness of the articles and the ability to search for articles by topic, general category, and by Common Core standard.

However, it wasn’t until my students had taken enough quizzes and Newsela was automatically adjusting the reading to their lexile level that I saw the power to easily differentiate instruction in my classroom. Because my students were working on summarizing their reading, I searched for an article that would assess Standard 2: Central Idea. I did a Think Aloud as I focused on turning the headline and headings into questions and then highlighting the specific details that answered my questions. For the second section of the text, I asked the students to replicate what I had done. As I was walking around the room monitoring their progress, I was concerned when I realized my students were reading the text at three different levels.

I was relieved when every student was able to share his or her highlights and thinking. And suddenly it struck me that having students using the text that is closest to their level with the same Common Core target is similar to having golfers select the tee box according to their skill level.

The sign at one golf course reads: “The different tee markers are there to make play between golfers more fair and pleasurable so play the right tees for your skill level.” Likewise, having the leveled texts makes reading more pleasurable.

It wasn’t until I had this positive experience with differentiation that I really started to pay attention to some of the Pro features Newsela offers. And what I discovered is that the real-time assessments make it easy to “use student performance data as a guide for decision making.”

Let me open my Newsela Pro account and show you what I mean. When I open my binder, I can get an overview of how my classes are doing. When I hover over my AI Spring 2016 class and then click, Newsela Pro allows me to Expand to View All Student Activity.

This is where I can start digging into the data to set individual goals. One difference between Newsela and Newsela Pro is that PRO goes beyond composite scores for the whole class and allows teachers to see individual scores as well as each student’s responses to annotations, responses to open-ended questions, and quiz question responses. And I’ll get back to the annotations and responses later.

In the mean time, let’s focus on Leslie, which is not her real name. After we returned from spring break in March, I encouraged students to read at or slightly above their Lexile level. Here’s one of the features that I like about how Newsela graphs these overall scores in that Leslie and I were both able to see a trend that shows she’s tackling more challenging reading . . . . sometimes with mixed results. Unlike the in-depth progress monitoring that I tried to do with each student every 2 to 4 weeks, the Newsela graph made Leslie’s learning visible on a weekly basis. This was very motivating for her.

If we zoom in a little, notice the dots above the dashed line. The dots above represent stories Leslie read in the 11th grade and 12th grade lexile levels. Unsurprisingly, as a ninth grader who is struggling to read on level, Leslie has 6 red dots and 5 green dots. Newsela marks proficient scores of 75% or 100% correct in green. Scores below 75% are marked in red. And so you’ll notice that Leslie has 5 green versus 2 red at ninth grade and 6 green versus 2 red at eighth grade. Visually, it’s apparent that Leslie is doing better at the ninth grade level than the 11th/12th grade level. And these scores actually confirm the results of my district-developed progress monitoring because in May, Leslie was struggling around the 1120L level.

Now you’re probably saying, how are these data points guiding your decision-making process?!? Here’s where Newsela Pro allows me to gain insights on Leslie’s development as a reader with just a few data clicks.

Before I do that, I’m going to narrow the data range to show you what I saw at the beginning of April. Note Leslie’s reading level and her average quiz score. Next notice how easy Newsela Pro makes it for me to check on Leslie’s performance by each Common Core standard. With just a few clicks, I can find which standards are the most challenging for Leslie. As you can see, Leslie is having the most problem with standard 1 and standard 2. Each week I decided I would target my activities with Leslie on one of her challenge standards.

Now the great aspect about measuring performance with Common Core standards is that it gives me, a veteran English teacher but an aspiring reading teacher, a solid foundation. I have a better understanding of the teaching targets when they are aligned to the Common Core because it’s using a language I have studied.

Turning back to Leslie, in April I put my focus on strategies that would help me see what she was thinking as she provided textual evidence and made inferences about what she read. Part way through the month, I started to have Leslie work on summarizing strategies. One of the best aspects of having this assessment data at my fingertips is that I could look for patterns within my class and form logical small groups.

So after an opening activity about vocabulary and a short Think Aloud, I might then have Leslie and Marcus read a story in Newsela that is asking questions dealing with Standard 1. Meanwhile, another small group of students might read an article that asks questions about the meaning of words and phrases. Or with Newsela’s search features, I could find an article that addresses both challenge standards for my two groups that day. I even had students search for articles that centered on their challenge standards that they found appealing.

But let’s dig deeper with some of Leslie’s data. To do that, I’m going to click on this third red dot. It’s telling me that Leslie scored 25%. With the click of a button, it takes me to Leslie’s responses to “New campus darlings: Your pets.”

Equally important to having the real-time assessment data is having the Pro features to offer explicit instruction and to highlight text and have a dialogue with students through Newsela Pro.

In his Improving Comprehension with Think-Aloud Strategies, Wilhelm writes: “To teach in the zone of proximal development, Vygotsky says the teacher must first generously model how to work through a task, highlighting and naming how a particular strategy or strategies can be used to successfully complete it.” On the day we read this story, I began annotating my Think Aloud.

I’ve taken Beers and Probst’s signposts in Reading Nonfiction, and I narrowed myself to two signposts: Numbers and Stats in Green and Quotations in purple.

For whole-group instruction like this, I’ve color-coded their signposts using the colors in Newsela and in the Kindle application. When I pause and reveal my thinking, I’m highlighting the text and putting what I say outloud in the margin. With the PRO package, I can share all of this information with a simple click. Likewise, all of the students’ annotations and short-answer responses are are shared with me. Having a record of their highlights is helpful because it reveals their interactions with the text; it makes their thinking visible.

Recently I was asked if I could do the same activities on paper. And in the fall, I was printing out Newsela stories and attempting to dutifully file the students’ responses and annotations into each of their folders. But what I noticed this spring is that the facile nature of clicking on a data point in Newsela Pro encouraged more analysis on my part. Newsela Pro did the busy work of connecting the student data with the students’ interactions. Newsela Pro allowed me to cut through the data smog and MOVE efficiently to analysis and evaluation. And in the end, it also gave me and my students the creative scaffolding to have richer conversations in class through our annotations and our comments. And the customizable writing prompts are a natural fit for an English teacher.

And so in the end, Newsela Pro gave me the tools I needed as an English teacher striving to be a better reading teacher by allowing me to better differentiate and customize my students’ reading instruction while expanding their knowledge of the world.

And for students like Leslie, Newsela Pro was the scaffolding we used together to help her grow this semester from the seventh grade reading level to the ninth grade level while improving her overall comprehension. 

Professional Reflections

Reading nonfiction in the ZPD

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NonfictionSignposts

Yesterday at an EdCampIowa session in Ames on “Teaching Literacy 6-12 with the Iowa Care,” the discussion turned to reading instruction. This is a particularly relevant topic for me because I have one section of Additional Instruction, Reading each day with a group of students who are not reading at grade level.

One teacher mentioned that the teachers in his district have been reading Seven Strategies of Highly Effective Readers. I appreciate learning what others are using as a research base for their instruction. If we had had more time, I would have shared how influential Kylene Beers and Robert E. Probst’s Reading Nonfiction: Notice & Note Stances, Signposts, and Strategies has been for me in the last two months.

Starting with Beers and Probst’s Notice & Note (2012), continuing through their presentations at the Iowa Council of Teachers of English in 2015, and now during my first and second reading of Reading Nonfiction (2016), I find Beers and Probst particularly appealing because their organic methods affirm some of the truths I have discovered in my 23 years of teaching students disciplinary literacy in English and journalism courses while providing me with scaffolding as I renovate my knowledge and understanding of content area literacy skills.

What I truly appreciate about Reading Nonfiction is that Beers and Probst have tested their stance, signposts, and strategies with students at multiple grade levels. In addition, they provide anchor questions for each signpost for students in elementary, middle school, and high school. While the signposts stay the same, the anchor questions increase in intellectual complexity to meet the cognitive needs of students. For example, elementary students coming upon Numbers and Stats might ask themselves: “What does this make me wonder about?” Whereas high school students reading historical texts might pause when reading numbers or statistics to ask themselves:  “How do these numbers help me see patterns occurring across time, regions, and cultures?” (p. 121)

Although I should be providing additional details to better explain my present renovation project, I’m going to turn to  how I have been implementing some of Beers and Probst’s techniques in my section of AIR. I’ve taken the signposts (slightly modified) and discipline-specific questions for high school students and color coded them on posters and bookmarks. Using the color-coded highlighting features in Newsela and in my Kindle app has kept me grounded when I’ve modeled think-alouds with my students. One of the reasons I have used Newsela is that I’m most comfortable sharing my knowledge of writer’s craft using news, feature, and opinion stories from newspapers and magazines. Newsela allows me to model and leverage my discipline literacy skills to strengthen my students’ content literacy skills. Another reason I like using Newsela is that allows me to naturally use a gradual release model in the classroom. I can model with a story at the original or a higher Lexile level and then have students practice with the same story or another story at or just slightly above their individual Lexile level.

I’m hoping this combination will keep my students in their ZPD.

Enter the Zone!

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