Digging into the Frayer Model for word understanding

Word knowledge happens in layers.  We are first introduced to a word, learn the meaning, how it might be used - but then over time we begin to place that word on a continuum where we can relate it to others that may have slightly different connotations.  Our ultimate goal should be to add the word to our word bank so that we might communicate more effectively over time.  Studies show that the word-exposure gaps between children in poverty and children of affluent families are staggering - millions of words!  What does that tell you about the communication skills of some of those kiddos who come to us everyday from low-income families?  It tells me that I need to work double hard to ensure that these children have a competitive chance!

One of my go-to strategies is the Frayer Model.  Now I've seen this strategy morphed into dozens of different organizers - all with the same outline but different prompts.  The ultimate goal here is to add the word to a continuum of words so that we can pick from a variety of words that might mean similar things.

The Frayer is a great tool for our visual /  spatial students who like to see relationships and information organized spatially.  You can have them draw pictures or write in the boxes.  Make the boxes big enough and your linguistic kiddos will enjoy this one also because there is potential for lots of room to write (although may of them like lines on which to write).  Put it on the sidewalk in chalk and now your kinesthetic students will have to bend down and crawl around to write on it.  Make them move!

Here's how it works:

• Place the word to be studied in the middle oval.  
• I prefer to write "What it is" instead of definition because it leaves for some wiggle room on a definition.  Definition, to many students, means open up a dictionary and copy the first definition for the word.  Before any of my students write down what it is, we discuss, and then they write down what it is.
• When using characteristics, be sure that the word has some distinct characteristics.  This could take some grappling, but it's not supposed to be easy, either.  Characteristics can be replaced with "What it is not".  I LOVE asking kids to identify what it is not because it makes them think in a way that requires more distinct lines drawn between words.  This will also require some discussion and grappling as well.
• Examples requires students to take it a step further.  Now they can't just define it, but now they have to apply the information, which is, again, a visual strategy.  Don't forget you can have them draw. They don't have to write.
• Finally, non-examples, again, requires students to stop, back up, and think backwards.  I've also used the prompt connection here to make my students connect the word somehow to their own background knowledge.  Research clearly shows that linking new knowledge gives the information a better chance of sticking.  

Keep in mind that once all is said and done, having students reflect on what the strategy did for them as a learner is always beneficial.  It'll be painful at first, but drawing attention to them, as learners, keeps them thinking that these strategies are not just gimmicks but true learning tools.  

And that is it.  A quick (yet not-so-quick) vocabulary acquisition strategy that can be used over and over and over again and in every content area.  You can use it on paper, make it miniature and put four on a piece of paper, or create gigantic ones on sidewalk with chalk.  What are some ways you can see adapting this simple strategy to your teaching?  Have you used a Frayer before?  What are some of the ways you have used it, and how have you had your students reflect on their learning afterward?

Five Love Languages and how they can be applied in the classroom

Just yesterday my daughter came to me with an acorn top, handed it to me, and told me to put it on my dresser so "you can remember me every time you look at it."  For years she’s been doing this with random items from nature, and my usual response is a hug and a “thank you”, and then I place it somewhere in hopes of remembering to put it back outside.  But after I ran across GaryChapman's Five Love Languages series, my views on her behavior have changed.  

Chapman started out with the book itself, and it morphed into one specifically for men, for parents, and even for the workplace (which I am currently reading).  The word love in the title was originally put there because he started out this idea by helping married (sometimes almost un-married) couples figure out how to reconnect.  After reading that book, I easily understood how the same principles can be adapted to any situation if you open your mind to the idea of really understanding other people.

Over the last year I've researched intrinsic motivation up, down, backwards, forwards, and inside out.  One of the main philosophies of rebuilding lost motivation is getting to know a person at the foundation.  I've discussed learning styles, intelligences, skills, and types of learners, but one thing I've never really delved into is the idea of making a child feel appreciated and (yep, I'm going to say it) loved.  This may partly be because of the state of today's education system.  Love doesn't really fit into the data collection and analysis equation, does it?  But yet we have large numbers of kiddos who step through those doors feeling worthless and unappreciated.

Before you do anything else, take the test yourself.  You'll be amazed at what knowing the results does.  The basic gist of the philosophy is that any person gives and recognizes love and/or appreciation in one or more of five ways: words of affirmation, acts of service, receiving gifts, quality time, and physical touch.  To know your love language is to understand that you both express appreciation through that language and recognize it the same way - whether or not another person expresses it to you in that manner.  The problem comes in when one person expresses appreciation in a language that goes unrecognized by another - not because the other person is a bad person or is unwilling to recognize it, but because the other person simply doesn't speak that language.  This is how relationships break down, and this can happen at lightning speed in a classroom.

Teacher/student relationships are always rocky at the beginning. Thirty eyes staring at you the first day, no matter how veteran you are, can be unnerving.  You have all sorts of kiddos in that group and from all sorts of backgrounds.   There is almost no point in trying to teach a kid who is angry or upset because the brain chemistry won't allow that information to store.  We need to put our students into a mindset that says they are appreciated.  All of them.

So what can we do to express this appreciation?  Below are some ways to shower your students with appreciation and hit all of the languages so that your students' brains are ready for learning.

Words of Affirmation

In his February Kane County teacher inservice, Rick Wormeli spoke a great deal about providing feedback to our students.  The trouble is, we fall into this trap of destructive feedback rather than constructive feedback.  The words good job and great work are so overused that they become meaningless.  Our kiddos are seeking meaningful affirmations.  

One example of this might be, "That's an interesting thought, Jessica.  I heard you say that Edgar Allan Poe's relationship with his father may have impacted his writing.  That shows me that you're putting things together and are really thinking about his purpose for some of his writing.  I'm wondering if we can hold on to that thought as we continue this discussion."  This not only gives the student an affirmation that she is on the right track in her thinking, but it also shows her you were really paying attention to her (see Quality Time below).  You've now made a connection.

Acts of Service

"For these people, actions speak louder than words."  Keep in mind that what one student recognizes as an act of service might not be what another recognizes.  It might be something as simple as stopping by a student’s desk to help him start a paragraph or picking up a book from the library for another one.  An act of service might be helping a student get organized during the last five minutes of class or helping him figure out a logic puzzle for fun.

Chapman warns his readers, however, that if you plan to serve somebody, keep a few things in mind.  Always ask before you help; sometimes kids just want to do it by themselves.  Be genuine and positive, but not over the top.  And for heaven’s sake, do it their way.  If you’re going to help out with something, don’t start dictating.  That defeats the purpose of an act of service.  And always finish what you start.

Quality Time

When Chapman suggests quality time, he means make the time that you do have with your kiddos count.  Have undistracted conversations.  Keep eye contact.  LISTEN and don’t interrupt, and watch for body language.  This is a perfect place to throw in the idea of mindfulness in the classroom. 

When one practices the language of quality time, instead of focusing on what you are saying, like in words of affirmation, you focus on what you are hearing and observing. 

Gift Giving

From now on I plan to really focus on what my students give to me and each other.  At Valentine’s Day some of our girls walk around giving each other cheap little stuffed toys and hearts on sticks.  Pencils, erasers, and other school supplies that can be purchased cheaply at the dollar store or in August when everything is on sale are great gifts for kids who will appreciate them.  Tickets for special privileges are cheap and easy as well. 

Physical Touch

The final language of appreciation is one that comes with the most controversy.  There was a time in education when hugging a child or putting your arm around her was okay, but today many school boards frown on this type of touching, and some teachers have actually seen disciplinary consequences for these acts of appreciation.  So what is one to do to fill the need for physical touch from the large number of kiddos whose primary language IS physical touch? 

Chapman gives a few suggestions.  First off, don’t underestimate the power of quality time.  Closeness doesn’t have to always be physical.  It can be emotional or social, and that can take on the form of uninterrupted conversation and eye contact.  But things like firm handshakes, fist bumps, a high five, or a pat on the shoulder should not be underestimated either.  I have even made jokes about our “no hugging” rule, and now we do “air hugs” in my classroom where we open our arms in front of each other and then wrap our arms around ourselves.  It’s the feeling involved with the physical touch that makes it wrong or right, and who can go wrong with an “air hug”? 

The toughest part of using the love languages in your classroom is figuring out which ones to use and when.  Use them all and use them often, and you will begin to see who responds to what.  Maybe even give your students choices.  Something as simple as, “Would you like me to help you now during class or would you like to come in at lunch?” might allow you to understand if a student is looking for and act of service or quality time. 

Can you think back to a time when you’ve noticed differences in the way kids respond to different ways you’ve shown appreciation?  What new acts can you try this year to support more languages than you have in the past?

Finding your students' inspiration to write through interest inventories

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I’ve been wandering around my house for days thinking it should probably be blog time, but as I went into my brain, looking for a good topic, I kept coming up blank.  That’s a bad feeling for a writer.  Summer is tough.  I don’t have teachers around me asking questions or wanting to upgrade their instruction with some more engaging strategies.  It’s all me.  A perfect example of why I could never just blog and why I surround myself with inspiring people. 

Last summer I had colleagues, friends, and family feeding me articles to ponder, and I was taking classes that gave me more reading to process.  I had blog ideas all summer long last year, and they took me right up through Christmas break. This summer my friends have been quiet (I’m not sure this is a good thing), and I’m not taking classes – so I’m back to relying on myself to come up with stuff my readers will appreciate!  As I started thinking about this, though, I realized that one of my favorite places to get blog topics is from learning I do myself - things that hook me and give me inspiration to do what I love to do.

It was then that an idea struck me.  If my favorite writing topics are things that hit me emotionally and inspire me, shouldn't it be the same for our kiddos?  I know what you’re thinking.  “Duh,” right?  Well, it’s kind of willy-nilly to get up in front of thirty eighth graders and say, “Ok, all!  Write about what inspires you.”  Most of them haven’t got a clue what inspires them.  That’s when I started formulating a fantastic idea for getting resistant writers to write!

• Start with interest inventories.  Many of you might use them for reading, but why not use them for writing also?  If you look at an inventory and find that a student loves to watch scary movies, then you have a place to start.  What kind?  Ghost stories?  Slasher movies?  A quiet kid in the back of the room bleeds football, plays for the school team, and spends the entire weekend watching college and NFL games with his uncle.  What can you do with this information?
• Go to Google.  Type in “effects of watching horror films on teenagers” and watch what happens.  Dozens of websites and articles pop up.   Now google “teenager playing football”.  Again, dozens of websites and articles that somehow relate to teenagers playing football – all with different angles.  These websites don’t even have to be “evidence based”.  All we are looking for is something to inspire writing and get our kiddos writing passionately.  This type of activity is a great start to finding a good writing topic.  Grab the laptop cart or go to the lab and have your students do some searches with one goal in mind - to find something that really grabs their attention and sucks them in.  You could even have them work in pairs to help each other come up with good search topics.  And we all know they LOVE using Google.  This, in itself, could be a great collaborative lesson with the school library media specialist!
• Once your students have their articles (hard copies might be a better choice), you can have them read and react.  A mini lesson on close reading or annotating might be good here.  The idea is to get some meat and potatoes from the article and get the kids thinking, feeling, and eventually writing. 
• Free-writing is the next step.  If the topic is truly inspiring, these kiddos will now have lots to say. Give them as long as they need to write about what they read and their reactions.  Model this process.  Start a free-write by talking and writing in front of them.  Then let them go and keep writing in front of them.  The more you write, the more they will write.  I’m a firm believer in creating on the spot so they can see me struggle with it like they might.

From here, it really depends on your goal.  If you want some material for grammar lessons, try using some of Jeff Anderson’s approaches.  They’d fit perfectly here.  If you’re looking to move into a specific type of writing, ask students to go back into their writing and start pulling out information that applies.  In my opinion, once you have the inspiration – the possibilities are endless.  For a kiddo who reads an article on negative effects of horror films on teenagers, he could write a piece that argues the other side or a narrative about a kid who started hurting people after going on a horror film watching spree.  He could compare types of horror films and their effects or do his own study on how middle schoolers view them. He could compare horror books to horror films to see what the differences are in their effects on kids. 

The keys here are to begin with a goal in mind and to get your students writing about relevant topics.  If you know that your idea is to get some good free-writing down for grammar instruction, you may want to give free reign on what they load up from the internet.  If you have a specific writing goal in mind, then when you conference with your students while they’re searching for material, let them start by reading anything from the internet, but you’ll need to teach them how to find credible sources once they’ve picked a topic.  It all depends on where you want to go with the instruction, and don’t forget to tap into your resources yourself.  Use your media specialist to help you out from the get-go!

As I have found over and over and over again, once I find a topic that inspires me, the 833 words I crank out in 30 minutes seems like nothing.  This is what we want for our kiddos.  Writing should not be work.  Revising and editing?  That will and should be work.  But writing itself should flow from their fingertips like words do from their mouths.  If it does, they will create inspired works for you.  Guaranteed.

Motivation - the overlooked sixth component of reading

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Trina is an eighth grader trapped in her own prison.  She's the one whose seat you've had to move a dozen times in the last semester.  The one who pokes four different kids on her way to sharpen her pencil for the fifth time before you've gotten through the daily warm-up.  Yep, she's that kid.  That's the kid who, on the rare chance that she's absent (more likely suspended or in the dean's office), the class seems more . . . well . . . manageable.  And that kid is what prompted me to start really looking into what makes our "unmotivated" adolescents  . . . well . . . not tick.

 In a Stamford Advocate article entitled "The Disturbing Transformation of Kindergarten", columnist Wendy Lecker reports that kindergarten has changed drastically in the last fifteen years, shifting to reading instruction rather than discovery and creativity.   Anybody who knows a five-year-old is well aware that they have a natural curiosity that, if fostered, becomes a full-blown desire to learn.  In her March, 2014 IRC session, Stephanie Harvey said that when kindergartners come in to school, they are wide-eyed with curiosity and a desire to learn, but by fifth grade, our focus has become answers and not questions.  She quoted Albert Einstein who said, even in his time, “It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry.”  Enter: the “unmotivated” adolescent. 

Reading instruction is commonly broken into five components: phonemic awareness (knowledge of sounds), phonics (the idea that sounds equal letters and those letters make words), fluency (pace and accuracy of reading), vocabulary, and comprehension.  When our kiddos are first learning to read, everything is new and exciting to them.  To some (probably our linguistic ones), reading comes naturally.  To others, not so much.  Well-meaninged educators identify those who struggle and give them more support, taking time away from other areas, and then during the process we begin to try to boost their confidence by showering them with praise and incentives when small successes are made.  Thus, the sixth component of reading – motivation.

But what of those kiddos who are now ten, eleven, twelve or older?  These are the ones who have heard the words of praise hundreds of times.  The ones who feel dumb because they have to miss art for reading.  They’re the ones who deflect their inability to function at the same level their peers are by throwing a pencil when the teacher isn’t looking or bullying others. Dr. Ross Greene, psychology professor at Harvard University, writes in his 2007 article, “Kids Do Well if they Can,” that all children would perform if each possessed the necessary skills to complete the task.

Kids are motivated to learn by three different factors: desire to learn, incentives, or fear of failure.  As they get older, desire to learn decreases, external and internal obstacles increase, and we find that they rely on incentives and/or fear of failure as their major motivating factor.  Most of the curiosity has been tested right out of them, and school becomes work.  JackCanfield, self-esteem expert and author of the Chicken Soup series, reports that in a self-esteem survey eighty percent of first graders reported high self-esteem, but by graduation this number had dropped to five percent.  Five percent of high school graduates reported high self-esteem.  That's staggering. 

But can this be reversed?  Can the motivation blockade be torn down?  The external factors such as family and neighborhood distractions sometimes cause internal factors to arise.  What starts as a hostile environment may cause a struggling eleven-year-old to develop low academic self-concept, and the downward spiral begins.  Often this happens much earlier than age eleven.  When the external factor of standardized testing provides feedback that spells intervention, our kids know, and their fragile sense-of-self takes a nose-dive.  

Certainly you aren't reading this blog for that bleak truth.  Your real question is Now what? 

Martha Farrell Erickson, PhD. (2003) of the University of Minnesota describes the Three C's as "critical ingredients for healthy child and youth development."   In my opinion, they are critical for educating any child, and most importantly, for reversing the earlier damage done to self-esteem, which can cause blocks in motivation.

Connection

Erickson says, "as children move into the school years, connections to teachers and other caring adults, and also to peers, become increasingly important, allowing children to feel a sense of belonging not only in the family, but in the larger community as well."  Shortly after I read this, I began to take inventory of the different ways teachers can make connections with their students, use the information to their advantage, and begin building back that battered self-esteem.  The idea is to get to know your kiddos so that you can best educate the entire child.  Brain research tells us that if negative emotions are present, internalization of information is unlikely.  When students feel happy, protected, and comfortable, they are more apt to take in and retain information.  Dr. Ross Greene (2007) says that if we can pinpoint and support students with skills they lack, they will begin to feel successful and want to succeed.  It is our job to get to know these kiddos inside and out.  Here's how.

·         Reader Self-Perception Scale - Some of our kiddos are completely disengaged with the reading process and have no reason to re-engage.  Others struggle, even though they want to do well.  With this information, you could determine which students need more encouragement and how to approach each one individually, which makes a huge difference in differentiating your instruction. 

·         Learning Styles Assessments - I use the VARK.  It can be done paper/pencil or online, and it comes in an adult and student version.  I ALWAYS take these assessments first because the epiphany that comes after learning something new about myself is mind-blowing.  Once you find out what YOUR learning style is, reflect on your teaching to see if your teaching style matches.  If it does (and it inevitably will), start to realize you will have to make some changes because teaching to one style leaves out three others.  And learning your students' styles and making them aware of them gives them power to learn and produce.  It's pretty amazing.

·         Multiple Intelligences Assessments - I can tell you that I've taken close to half a dozen from different websites, and they've all come out the same.  It doesn't matter which one you take or give.  But take one first, realize that there are reasons you do certain things in your teaching and life, and then give them to your students.  Allow them to reflect, gain power, and proceed carefully with this new knowledge of self.

·         Skill Deficit Inventories - Kids will perform if they possess the skills necessary, according to Dr. Ross Greene.  What better way to help these kiddos than to teach them those skills.  The problem usually lies in the fact that we never seem to dig deep enough.  My favorite question to ask about a student is, "Why?"  If, in a conversation with another teacher, the teacher mentions a student's misbehavior or refusal to participate, I always ask myself, "Why?"  What's missing?  The only way to find out is to assess (formally or informally) and observe, draw conclusions, and collaborate.  What skills are missing?

·         Interest Inventories - These are especially useful when looking for reading material for a resistant reader.  Here's my favorite, created by two of my colleagues (one whose blog you should definitely read!). Getting to know your students' interests allows you to match them up with good-fit reading material.  Pair this with a skill inventory, and you could quite possibly find a book that not only matches what a student is capable of managing but on a topic he enjoys!  You can't get any closer to getting a resistant reader to read.  I've done it dozens of times.  Lexile.com is great for choosing great-fit books.  Simply type in an approximate lexile score from a reading inventory and check the boxes of interests.  Lexile.com will narrow the millions of books available to adolescents to a much less intimidating list.  "There's nothing good to read in this library," may just become, "I never knew there were this many good books here!"

·         Types of Learners questionnaire – Dr. Valerie Rice and the US Army did a study on types of learners.  The gist of the study breaks learners into four different types, depending on their approach (or non-approach) to learning new material.  Imagine the power our students would have if they knew what type of learner they were and how his information could benefit them!

Contribution

In the book Bridging Cultures Between Home and School, the author team discusses collectivist cultures and what educators can do to honor this growing number of students.  Adolescents of immigrant families from all over the world grow up with a sense of collectivity, and parents emphasize working together and community instead of bringing attention to individual successes.  As educators, it is our job to support each student individually while maintaining that we have a large number of students who also need to feel like they are contributing.  

This is just as much an engagement philosophy as it is one of esteem-building.  Discussion activities can be as simple as a quick think-pair-share to a whole group activity or discussion model.  The more you use them, the more engaged your students become.  

Competence

Erickson's third C is the heart of intrinsic motivation.  The entire reason for the esteem breakdown in the first place lies solely with the fact that many of these kiddos have faced so much failure that success no longer seems attainable.  To build that back, we need to give our students a feeling of mastery, even on things that don't seem to matter.  For example, writing out a clear agenda and reviewing it at the beginning of each day allows our students to transition from activity to activity with greater confidence than they would without knowing what is coming next.  Over time, students begin to feel as if they "run the place" themselves, especially if daily routines are set and maintained early-on.

Providing specific and constructive feedback is another way to build competence in our struggling students.  Rick Wormeli, author and speaker in the field of education, told his audience last February that one of the worst things we can do for our students is assess without providing feedback.  Talk about an esteem breaker!  To assign a number or a letter grade to student work without providing any true feedback is meaningless, and yet we do it all the time.  Wormeli's idea is to empower our students.  To give them a true feeling of success, honor their work.  Observe.  Honor. Tell the student what the work does for you.  Then help them to set a goal to improve on it.  

"Trina, I noticed that when you read the first few chapters of your novel you wrote sticky notes that asked a lot of questions.  This shows me that you are really thinking about and wondering about your reading, and I'm wondering if you've found any answers to any of these questions.  As you read the next chapter, can we make a goal?"   At this time the discussion should move toward either writing questions that may have answers rooted in the near-future text or to look for some answers in the next chapter and record them somewhere. You can then check back with her in a day or so to see if she has met the goal, honor and re-adjust if necessary.  Help her make goals attainable so that she can begin to feel some success.  The more successes she feels, the more she will strive to succeed. 

And succeed, she will.  If even one of Trina's teachers meets her with the attitude that says, "I'm going to get to know you, kid.  I'm going to give you a chance to be a part of this community and to feel success," she will respond.  The biggest challenge is changing our mindset so that she can change hers.  There are no kids who are "just not motivated".  They do not exist.  Each one of them has a story.  It's our job to read it, learn it, and help them to use it as power, not as a prison.  

One summarizing strategy EVERYBODY can use

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Writing in the content areas - a new buzz phrase in the field of education. Some content area teachers embrace it as a great challenge to overcome while others duck tail and run the other way.  Regardless, research states clearly that if you can write about it, you can process through it and display mastery of it.  Plus, writing about certain things actually helps one to reflect on the process of whatever skill he is mastering.

I've had some interesting discussions about writing with teachers over the years, and what I have found is that our content area teachers outside of the language arts department may avoid writing for a variety of reasons. Below is a list of those reasons, and my responses to each one (in purple).

• It's uncomfortable for me. It's not my expertise, and I don't have a clue how to teach it.
• This is valid.  If somebody were to ask me to teach math, I would be uncomfortable also because teaching math is not my area of expertise.  As a veteran teacher I would ask for some support from the experts.  Know that, first off, you ARE the expert in your content area, and you are the expert in reading your subject - you just don't realize it because you're so good at it!  You are probably the expert in writing in your field, also.  No language arts teacher is going to be as knowledgeable in writing in your content area as you are because language arts teachers are the experts in writing for literature.  But ask one for some guidance if you don't feel perfectly at ease.  Ask other experts in the building (your department chair or literacy specialist).  Ask an administrator for suggestions.  Everything new is uncomfortable, but if you give it a shot it won't be new forever.  
• Formal writing takes too much time.
• Writing does not have to be a formal practice.  It could take five minutes or five days - depending on your goal.  Having students write about whatever they learned each day will begin that process.  The key is consistency.  Experience has told me that writing-stamina will improve with daily practice.  A five minute writing session at the beginning of the year might yield a few sentences from a student, but by the end of the year, that same student may be able to produce a page of writing in the same amount of time - all informally.
• I don't see a real purpose that would support my content.
• As a teacher of science, music, or physical education, the last thing most of your are thinking is, "Ooooo, what can I have the kids write today?"  But you have to remember that, just as a language arts teacher needs to remember his kiddos with musical and kinesthetic intelligences, you have to be mindful of those students who are linguistic.  You have them.  They hate PE, art, or music, but they love to write.  Meet these students half-way like your counterparts would in a language arts classroom.  Processing information or skills through writing about them is a research-based strategy for learning.  If you can talk about it or write about it, you know it.  And there is physical evidence that you know it because it is all down there in writing.
• I don't want to grade all of that writing.
• I have some news for you.  I've never met a language arts teacher who said to me, "I can't WAIT to go home and grade some argumentative essays tonight."  Nobody WANTS to grade it.  But the beauty of most writing is that it doesn't have to be assessed.  We want to expose our kiddos to as much experience with writing as possible.  So don't grade it if you don't want to, but please walk around and give feedback as students are writing.  The more feedback they get, the more they will want to write for you.

So now that we have established WHY writing is so important for everybody, let's write an essay.  Just kidding.  Let's not.  Let's do something fun and challenging that will help your students process their new information or skills with words.  Several weeks ago when I attended the Day at Judson with Jeff Anderson, he shared this absolutely awesome summarizing strategy with the group.  My colleague and I marveled at its ease and fun, and I couldn't NOT share it with everybody.

Anderson shared the book An Island Grows by Lola M. Schaefer as the mentor text (model) before he gave us the strategy.  Here is how it works:

• Write down ten (or a predetermined number if you want something shorter) nouns (person, place, thing, or idea) that connect with whatever your topic is.  It could be the day's lesson or an article, story, or video.  You decide.
• From that list, go back and connect one strong action word (you can use the word verb if you want) to each of the nouns.
• Arrange them in an order that makes sense.  Capitalize the first letter, and put a period at the end of each pair.
• And that is it.

Here is what we wrote to summarize the story The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe.

We are literature nerds, so it works well with a story written by a great author, but imagine the possibilities!  Teachers of social studies could have students summarize a section of their social studies chapter or write one as a summary of the entire World War II.  PE teachers could have students write about how their game of volleyball went that day.  A student in art might write about how she created a piece of art.  In music, students could write about a concert they performed the night before or their rehearsal that day.  Any teacher could have students read an article, watch a movie, or look at a visual image and use the strategy to summarize, predict, or describe it.  

Get creative with this strategy.  The endless possibilities make it versatile and easily adaptable.  Kiddos who struggle to read or write can handle the task with their own vocabulary while gifted students would be challenged by finding just the right words to use to create the perfect pairing.  And because there are so few rules, you can ask students to create using three sentences, seven sentences, ten sentences, or more!  As a teacher who avoids writing, you can now brag that you used a quick and easy writing strategy in  your classroom, and it worked so well, you'll do it again next week!

My spin on the Day at Judson with Jeff Anderson - how grammar instruction and literacy intertwine

Many words come to mind when I think of Jeff Anderson, but when I speak to a group of English teachers about him, the word genius comes out of my mouth at least three or four times.  Jeff Anderson, author of Mechanically Inclined and Ten Things Every Writer Needs to Know spoke at Judson University's Day at Judson last week.  I was sad to have missed Kelly Gallagher the year before, so when I learned Anderson was planning a visit to Judson, I was thrilled!  Jeff Anderson spoke at the IRC Conference in Springfield in 2013, and I had the privilege of attending his (highly entertaining and informative one hour session (click the link for an overview of that session).  I couldn't imagine what I could bring back to our staff after spending an entire day with him!

Anderson introduced his audience to his approach to grammar instruction after the figurative burning of DOL to the ground.  His audience giggled as he described the all-too-familiar scene of students "yelling" at a sentence that needs editing instead of looking at model text that is correct.  And then he went into his grammar instruction approach, which, for the first time in my teaching career, I felt really made total sense.

One point that I brought up early on in the session is that many of our kiddos lack the background knowledge and vocabulary to complete the grade level DOL sentences (or daily edit paragraphs).  The lack of correct grammar and/or punctuation plus the high-level vocabulary makes creating meaning from the sentences virtually impossible for some of our students, and therefore they copy down answers rather than practice using correct grammar and punctuation.  So . . . pretty much they learn nothing from this exercise.

I, personally, am a sentence diagrammer, which is ironic considering I am not a visual learner at ALL.  I think it is my mathematical/logical self that I try to hide that makes me love diagramming so much.  With diagramming there is a place for everything and a right or wrong answer, but the kids hate it, and when all is said and done, they can't apply it - therefore, making the same mistakes they did before they diagrammed that stupid sentence.

Anderson's much more applicable approach has six steps, three of which he outlined in his IRC session of 2013.  I won't go into too much detail on them, but check them out here.  His last three steps I will spend a bit more time detailing.

1. Invitation to notice: Choose a sentence that properly demonstrates your desired grammar element and ask students to report what they notice.  Honor everything (this could take some creativity on your part). Name everything.  Ask students to explain functions of what they're noticing.  I can see this being done with a lot of Think-Pair-Share discussion.
   
2. Invitation to compare/contrast: Write an imitation sentence and ask students to compare it to the model text.  Again, Pair-Share discussion seems appropriate here, as our intent is to get all students to participate.  Asking students to share with a partner takes away the pressure of being wrong in front of twenty-eight of your peers.
   
3. Invitation to imitate: And now it becomes your kiddos' turn to create a sentence that takes on the same form as the original.
   
   I'm envisioning Anderson's Invitation to Imitate as a perfect time for a teacher to practice that individual feedback Rick Wormeli thinks is so important, so that the "celebration" in the next step becomes more of a collective activity rather than individualized.  Students who come from collectivist cultures (click to read up on that bit of research) might participate more readily if individual attention is not the focus of this next part of the process.
   
4. Invitation to celebrate: As a teacher of students who struggle, one of the big problems our students with little to no academic self esteem have is that they rarely feel successful.  This is a perfect opportunity to give them that feeling of success (possibly using the pair-share approach before sharing out).  Anderson suggests sharing student-written imitations with the entire class.  The student who offers to share reads twice and the class applauds in celebration.
   
   Now, Rick Wormeli may disagree with this practice, as he encourages teachers to give feedback that feeds intrinsic motivation rather than outward praise.  In his February presentation at the Kane County Institute he spoke about praise and how it can actually have adverse effect on students if it is too general and used to motivate them.  
   
   As I stated in step three, however, if steps three and four can be meshed together with Wormeli's strategy for supplying feedback, the adolescent's intrinsic motivation is tapped before the extrinsic hits, and hopefully she will see step four as more of a class-wide celebration rather than an individual pat-on-the-back.
   
5. Invitation to Apply Pattern:  Initially, this might look similar to the invitation to imitate, but the difference with this step and step two is that students are now going to be asked to apply their knowledge to real writing.  The way that Anderson demonstrated this practice was so beautiful that my co-department chair and I ran the exact same activity with our department a few days later and are hoping to include the practice in our new writing curriculum this summer.  Here's one way it can work.
   
   Read students a text selection with an easily-recognizable form- something students could easily imitate if they chose.  Ask them to think about it, talk about it, and then use what they heard to free-write.  The idea here is to get students to write something so that they can go back and revise it with their new knowledge.
   
   At the bottom of the page, have students create a T-Chart  like the one pictured below.  Label the left column Shopping List and the right column Receipt.  In the Shopping List students should write down what it is that they plan to "shop for" while rereading their own writing.  This becomes their purpose for the reread, then.  They read their piece of writing, highlighting where they used the targeted skill.  Once they finish, they need to "check out" and get a receipt. This is where they will write an explanation for what they did.  If they couldn't find evidence of the skill in their own writing, they need to go back and find a place where they can revise to make it fit.  
   There are dozens of reasons this practice is beneficial for your kiddos.  First and foremost, they have to reread and make meaning out of their own writing, which may, in itself, be eye opening.  Second, they're putting into practice the skill that they've been learning all week.  Finally, practical application!  They have to put into writing why they did it, which means they have to not only use it, but they have to explain why.  Genius, right?  With all of the practice, these kiddos should be able to handle this activity, right?  And they're using their own writing, which means that the reading level isn't going to trip them up like so many of our grammar books.
   
6. Invitation to Edit:  The last step Anderson introduced I could take or leave.  His idea actually makes sense - this idea that we need to prepare our students to identify when other writers use grammar or punctuation incorrectly (mainly for the purpose of standardized testing).  Instead of using the traditional DOL, Anderson suggests going back to the mentor sentence, the one he used to introduce the concept, and writing it three other ways, each rewrite having a different error.  Use the mentor sentence to remind students what they learned from the writer before uncovering the other three.  Each time you uncover a new sentence, ask students what effect the error has on the sentence.  Think-Pair-Share is an ideal discussion strategy to use here.  What I love about this step is that we never point out "incorrectness".  We simply discuss what effect the change has and go back to the correct grammar of the first mentor sentence.  What the kiddos may take from this is that the way we use grammar and punctuation can change the mood or tone of a piece, and there may be times when we want to break rules to create that mood or tone.  

To me, making meaning of text in both reading and writing is the difference between one who can and one who cannot function independently in life.  Without acquiring skills to communicate and comprehend, a person cripples himself.  Grammar and punctuation are, so often, treated as separate skills from reading and writing, but they're just one more piece to the big picture of literacy.  

Even though grammar instruction was the main topic of Jeff Anderson's program at Judson University last week, he had some other great ideas as well, but I may just save those for another blog, as this one seems to have grown three heads and a tail and has started walking on its own.  As I am writing I am now wondering if this same principle could be used to teach other subjects like music or art - the idea of creating something based from a model.  I think I need to process this a little more before I go too far with it, but the premise seems the same.  

See?  Genius.  That's what Jeff Anderson is.  He's got me thinking in three or four different directions now, where even this morning I wasn't that far along in my thinking!  How grateful I am that I was able to see him at Judson, and I do hope to see him present again sometime in the near future.

Background knowledge and purpose setting - Part 2

This blog is a continuation from last week's blog.  It is an ongoing narrative of a large project in which I am currently involved.  To get the scoop on what has happened previously, go back and read last week's blog.

On Friday I asked my colleague’s fourth period class for a show of hands of students who were more than half way through the biography that they had chosen last week.  Over half the class raised their hands, and some expressed that they had already finished!  Stepping out on a limb, I asked for a show of hands of students who are actually sort-of enjoying the biography (Never ask a middle schooler if they enjoy something about their education.  You’re likely to get crickets.).  What amazed me is the positive response we got when posing this question.  The room was filled with hands in the air.  They were admitting to enjoying  - not just reading – but reading a biography!  And, friends, I am not working with a class full of self-motivated or gifted students!  I’m working with a very diverse group of readers ranging from below average to above average in their reading levels. 

The big question from my former colleague (and tireless volunteer in this adventure) Pam is – WHY?  Why are these kiddos reading?  Why are they enjoying it?  What have we done that would cause a twelve or thirteen year old to find a biography on Helen Keller, Einstein, or Abraham Lincoln so satisfying that they’d want to finish it?  I’ll let you decide that answer for yourself after you read about the steps that we took  last week. 

We left off last blog with a final, class-derived list of the top ten characteristics that made a person highly influential.  Each class (fourth and sixth period) voted on the top ten, and, if you remember from last week, six of those ten characteristics were the same in both classes.  We felt like this was wildly successful.  If almost sixty students could conclude that the same six traits made a highly influential individual, then all sixty of those kiddos read, comprehended, and concluded at relatively the same level! 

Here they are.  The entire collection of pics just waiting to be picked.

The next step in this project was to have students choose their project topic.  Instead of giving the students a list of individuals from which to choose, Pam suggested going to the Library of Congress and printing photographs that represented the different choices we were offering.  She had even gone to the trouble of choosing only people who matched a biography of 100 or more pages in our library collection!  The pictures we printed and put into plastic sleeves before we laid out about 200 of them in the classroom.  The choosing process we conducted just like we normally do Steven Layne  Book Shopping activity (sadly, I can't find a good link for this activity).  With music playing softly in the background, we allowed students about twenty minutes to circulate the room and study the pictures.  Students carried sticky notes with their names on them so that they could mark their final choice when we gave the okay to do so.  Their instruction was to choose a picture that spoke to them.  What we didn't tell them was that the picture would be their choice for the biography project, and the next day we took a trip across the hall to the library where the students each checked out at least one biography that matched their picture from our collection.  Some students were intrigued by their choices, many knew at least the field form which their biography would likely come, and only a small number of students were outwardly upset by their choices.  We dealt with these students individually.

We couldn't get them out of their books!

What happened next was nothing short of miraculous for a group of seventh graders.  Our idea was to come back to the classroom the next day and have the students put themselves into groups according to field (artists, inventors, scientists, etc), which we did.  But we wanted the students to talk amongst their groups and share what spoke to them about the picture, why they chose it, and if they were surprised with the choice.  The picture to the left is what happened instead.  I walked into the classroom in the middle of the period to join the activity, and I was bowled over by what I saw!  These kids were READING.  Now, for those of you who know anything about most middle schoolers, its tough enough to get an entire class to sit still for independent reading when you ask them to, but to give them a social activity and have them choose to read (a biography) instead???  We couldn't believe it, and we finally gave up and let them read.

Working on the flip book

The following day we insisted on moving forward because we wanted our kiddos to read with a purpose before they got too far into their books, so we had the groups create flip books.  On each page of the book, they wrote one of the class-chosen characteristics of an influential person (ie. confident, good public speaker, etc.).  Then they had to go back and think about how that trait applied to their field.  We gave this question frame as an option if the group was struggling: What would it look like if a person in the field of _______________ was _____________?  So some students asked themselves something like What would it look like if an inventor was self-motivated?  They really struggled with this, and we found that, even though they could identify these characteristics as being important for a person of influence, they had a difficult time describing what the trait would actually look like.  This will be an ongoing vocabulary lesson with them as we move through the different stages of research, but there was no way we were going to be able to address all groups with all ten characteristics in one period.  The decision was made that we would clear up misconceptions on a small-group basis rather than with the whole group because each group had different needs.  The final product for this day was the flip book that we kept in a binder for future reference when it came to remembering the purpose for reading.

Pam's big job was to present the Question Formulation Technique (QFT) to the students.  We spent a day with the kids having them, as a group, write down all of their questions about their topic on a piece of poster paper.  Before they began, we reflected back on the essential question:  What makes (their topic) an influential person in (the field)? There were only four rules to the questioning activity:

1. Ask as many questions as you can.
2. Do not stop to discuss whether a question is good or bad.  Just write down every question.
3. Write down questions exactly as they are stated.
4. Change any statement into a question.

Once students spent time doing this, we then showed our kiddos how to change questions from In the Book questions (a Project CRISS QAR term) to Author and Me questions.  The idea was to show students that purpose changes when you change the questions.  We wanted students to think about questions before they really dove into their reading.  And that was that.  We let them read for two days.

Sticky notes by an average student

We really couldn't get the kiddos into their books fast enough.  Some of them had already gotten through half of their books because they'd been reading outside of school, and we wanted to arm them with some hard-core purposes before they got any further.  With sticky notes in hand, they attacked their books - looking for examples of the ten characteristics of influential people and answers to some of their preliminary questions.  At this point in the game, we didn't even really want them stopping to jot down notes other than on the sticky notes, and I have to say, it was an effective decision!  Some of them went sticky-note mad, marking spots on every page where they identified examples of how their person demonstrated confidence or public speaking, or the art of persuasion.

As you can see, the heavily-hit background information and purpose setting has made all the difference in the world to these kiddos.  And we still haven't told them what their final product will be!  Because the final product is not our real purpose, we didn't feel like we needed to focus too much on it, and honestly, we are having entirely too much fun to focus on ruining it with a final product.  We do have projects and rubrics ready to go, and the plan is to introduce them this week, but the kiddos are much more interested in the process than the product.  When more than half of them raised their hands when I asked who was enjoying their biographies - I knew we had them hooked.