IRC Presentation: Fighting Adolescent Apathy With Authentic Engagement by Jason Brogan & Mal Keenan

After our first inspiring session on Wednesday in the basement of the Conference Center, we headed outside into the 40+ degree, sunny morning, eyed the mile-long line at Starbucks longingly, and headed up the elevator to the top of the Hilton for our second session.  My colleague Karen and I were interested in catching a presentation that tackled the motivation piece of reading because we had prepared to make a presentation on the exact same topic later in the afternoon.  Secretly, I was praying that, although the topics were the same, the presentations would focus on completely different aspects of student motivation, and I am happy to say that this was, indeed, the case as we sat down to listen to what Jason Brogan and Mal Keenan had to say.

Brogan and Keenan started their session by describing what they call their Triple A students: apathetic alliterate adolescents, and the first point Brogan made was that these students needed an environment of trust.  I immediately connected to our presentation that was planned for later in the day.  Part of what we had planned to deliver focused on this idea of connection, which feeds right into the student's need for a trusting environment.  I liked what I heard immediately, and I relaxed in my chair as I geared up to hear more.

The session was split into several large topics, each one designed to give the attendees a general idea to take back to their schools and implement.  Unlike most of the other sessions I attended in the two days, this one focused on big picture ideas rather than individual strategies, and I liked that because when you focus on the big picture, you usually have to make major pedagogical and philosophical decisions that impact a large number of people.  I'm all about making big changes and changing my philosophies based upon my clientele, so I maintained alertness as they presented.

One of the most interesting and useful ideas described during this session was Inquiry Circles.  Common Core Standards require students to seek information from multiple sources (ie - research), and the inquiry circle is a highly motivating way to introduce this.  Here's how I see it working.

• Start with an essential question (there it is again!).
• As an entire class, view a variety of graphics all related to the same general topic or big question.  Ask students to observe (or notice) details in the graphics.  Brogan suggested using upwards of forty photographs (if you use photos) and just allow students to write down what they see.  
• As students are noticing or observing each picture, also have them write down some questions.  This activity is similar to the Observe, Infer, Question activity, if you're interested in reading about it.  The beauty of this is that students can't be wrong when they write their observations, and their questions will hopefully stir up some natural curiosity, which will keep them engaged.  You can always add the infer column in there if you want, as well.
• Gather student questions, and group students according to the things about which they were most curious.  
• Include the LMC director and other support staff (reading specialist, for example) and begin the research process, using the initial questions to guide the research.
• During the research process, include mini-lessons on the content and research process.
• After the initial information gathering, meet with groups and have them evaluate what information they still need to successfully move toward answering and supporting the essential question.  
• Once the groups are satisfied that they have gathered enough information and put it together, they "go public" with it.  I loved this term.  Its a fresh way to have kids present, and who says they all have to present?  Maybe they go public a different way.

Why will this work?  The Triple A students are the ones who would be considered the least motivated.  We know from Dr. Ross Green's 2007 article, "Kids Do Well if they Can," that the reason these kids do not perform is because they lack something.  Many of them lack the academic self esteem or curiosity to become engaged, and our job is to create a safe environment where they feel comfortable enough to be curious and take some risks.  What a beautiful way to allow this to happen!  If we can just let go of the reins a little bit and allow our striving (love this word, by the way!) kiddos to explore topics and produce information the way they want (with guidance, of course), we might find these same students to be highly achieving.  You just never know!  

Brogan and Keenan had a wealth of information to share with their audience, but this idea of inquiry circles was, by far, one of my favorite of the eight sessions I attended at this conference.  Although I went into their session worried that they would bring the same information we had planned to share, I left wishing we could have teamed up with them for a half-day session!  I felt like so much of what they had to say complimented what we brought, and I left feeling a little wiser on the topic of fighting adolescent apathy.  

IRC presentation: Essential Middle School Strategies for English Language Learners (ELLs) in the Content Areas

Eight a.m. came pretty early this morning, but I started out my day with a Dr. Pepper Ten and a hope that I would increase my knowledge about reaching our high population of former-bilingual students.  Even though most of our kiddos receive no bilingual or ELL services, I knew that attending a session dedicated to ELLs would arm me with even more strategies and philosophies to take back to the staff and use immediately with our kiddos.  Boy, was I right!

We attended our first session by Amanda Schacht & Gabriela Carbajal from Crystal Lake School District 47.  The ladies started out their session by explaining that their strategies would be presented in three main categories, headed up with an essential question - which seems to be a hot topic the last few years in the education world.  Their three stages were the preview stage, focused literacy stage, and the application stage.  Unfortunately, most of the sessions here are sixty-minute sessions, so we ran out of time before we could go through each stage thoroughly, but the handouts contained explanations of every strategy.  This made it worth attending, in itself, because I could go back to my room and collect more information afterwards (which is what I am doing currently).

We spent most of our time on the preview stage, trying out out some of the strategies and learning about different language frames.  One point that these ladies made was that working with students who are still developing English language, the preview stage should probably be done orally rather than weighing down activities with written language.  The term language frames was new to me, but when I took a look in the packet, I realized that they were similar to Project CRISS's sentence frames.  Over the last few weeks I've been working in an eighth grade US History class.  While supporting students or delivering instruction, I try to interject sentence frames whenever I can.  We have so many students who still grapple with the English language, that sometimes they struggle with the act of even starting out sentences.  By giving students a frame into which to place ideas, they can use the English language properly and focus more in their ideas than formulating language.  Here's how it works.

When you are asking students who are still developing English language to perform a specific task that requires language (ie. answering a question or responding to media), supply them with several choices in language frames.  

• To make a prediction, start out your sentences with phrases such as "I predict that . . . " "I bet that . . . " or "I wonder if . . . "
• To ask a question, think about using starters such as "What would happen if . . . " "Why did . . . " or "Do you think that . . . "
• To clarify something, supply your students with phrases such as "At first I thought _____, but now I think . . . " "Oh, I get it . . . " or "This part is really saying . . . "
• To encourage students to make a connection, supply them with a things like "This reminds me of . . . " "This part is like . . . " or "This  makes me think of . . . "
• If students are expected to answer a question, support them by giving them the beginning of what you would expect them to supply as the answer, and then let them continue on with their answer.

The above examples are just a small sampling of what Schacht and Carbajal included in their packet of resources, but I'm guessing you get the idea.  One question that a colleague asked me just today was, "At what point do you stop supplying students with these frames?"  I had to really put some thought into that question because at first glance, I can see how a student would use the frames as a crutch, but then I went back to the presentation that I gave later in the day today.  If our kiddos are armed with one hundred percent of the tools they need to perform a task, they will.  If they rely on what we give them as a crutch, there are still skills that they lack.  It is our job to figure out what those skills are, and one of them may very well be dealing with the fear of failure - a skill that many of our reluctant learners have (making them look unmotivated because they refuse to even try).  Perhaps if we made our efforts two-fold and provided students with academic as well as social-emotional support, we might find them moving forward at a much quicker pace and we might see them taking healthy academic risks more often.

The remainder of the presentation included a whole slew of preview, focused literacy, and application strategies such as Word Sorts, Think-Pair-Share (which they termed Think-Partner-Share), TPR (Total Physical Response), Video Jigsaw (see graphic to the right), Pane It / Retain It, Connect 2, THIEVES, Anticipation Guides, Say Something /Write Something, Narrow Reading, Numbered Brains (like Numbered Heads), Jigsaw, Combination Notes, Question / It Says / I Say / And So, GIST, Magnet Summaries (another CRISS strategy), Sketch to Stretch, LEA (Language Experience Approach), Side-By-Side Translations, and Metalinguistic Focus. So you can see that they supplied their participants with a wide variety of strategies to take back to their buildings and use immediately.  

THIEVES example

Late in the presentation, Schacht and Carbajal discussed the THIEVES strategy, which is an in-depth previewing strategy.  During this part of the talk, the ladies showed us a beautiful bookmark that was color coded, and then they unfolded a color coded copy of a chapter from a text book to demonstrate to students which parts of the bookmark coincided with the parts of the chapter.  It was beautifully done, and I could see this being something that could be adapted to a content area to support our students who are still developing English or for any of our students struggling to grapple with the complicated text in their text books.  

All in all, this presentation was a great way to begin my conference, and I am thrilled to bring back some of this information to start using in supporting our content area teachers and students.  With over forty percent of our student population being native Spanish speakers, each content area classroom contains groups of students who might benefit from any number of the strategies presented today during this first session.  

IRC Conference, March 14-16, 2013, Kelly Gallagher

Write Like This: Teaching Real-World Writing through Modeling and Mentor Texts
Kelly Gallagher

I feel a little naïve in the area of reading/writing instruction sometimes.  I say this because I started my career out with full intention of acquiring a position as a US History teacher and staying there until I retired.  This didn't really work out the way I had planned.  In fact, it wasn't until I was 13 years into my teaching career that I was even offered my first job as a US History, and by this point I had given up and moved into reading.  Now don't get me wrong, by this point I had a deep understanding of how important reading was and I was excited with what I was doing.  It wasn't that reading was a second choice; its more like reading was the place I was meant to be, but I was distracted early in my career by the glory of social studies.  I truly believe that I am where I need to be right now.  It just took me over ten years to get there. 

I bring this up because I've never seen Kelly Gallagher speak until a few weeks ago at the IRC Convention.  It was embarrassing to admit this, as the girls with whom I was traveling had all seen him at least once.  My co-department chair actually paid to go see him next month because she wanted to hear him speak.  Gallagher is a contributing author to our newly purchased literature series.  So, after a crazy morning (I overslept by an hour and a half and still had to pack!), we managed to make it to breakfast without missing anything.  I have NO idea how this happened, but after hearing Gallagher speak, I'm glad that I didn't miss him.

The idea of mentor texts was also one that was new to me - again, I am admitting to this, knowing that I probably should have known this term.  After hearing Gallagher speak, I think I have used this strategy in one form or another, but I have never called it mentor texts.  The name makes sense to me, and the way that the idea is used is really brilliant. 

Gallagher began his session with a quick discussion about what today's students are facing in the next ten years.  Because he currently lives in California, he spoke of the California Highway Patrol assessment.  The examples that he showed his audience were clearly vocabulary-based.  Gallagher reports that the majority of this assessment is vocabulary and writing.  Prospective police officers are even required to write an essay!

One point Gallagher made in his presentation is the idea that our expectations for our students are getting lower and lower.  Gallagher stated that he felt like the expectations for our juniors and seniors are decreasing and yet the college expectations are not changing.  I hear this statement over and over again - the academic comparison of today's kids to kids of the past.  I was a kid a little over twenty years ago, and there is no comparison, in my opinion.  It's like the comparisons that are made country to country, state to state, or even district to district!  The number of variables that would have to be factored into the equations are so vast, it is impossible to make such a generalized statement, and yet educators of all walks do it. 

Sixteen years ago I saw my students' ability to absorb classroom content to be more than today's students.  But sixteen years ago I also communicated with their parents through phone calls and face-to-face discussion.  Today, I text or email parents.  I tweet, post and blog.  Input and output come in different formats for our students and for their parents, and this stimulates different parts of these kiddos' brains.  Sixteen years ago (my first year of teaching), my students were not inundated with digital media at every turn.  They were still reading paper books and researching using books and encyclopedias.  The internet was such a new tool back then, and youtube was nonexistent.  The term "just google it" had no premise, and AltaVista was my go-to search engine if I couldn't find the answer in the library.  These kids' brains were still tapped into things that could be touched.  Today's kids are not like this.  To me, this changes things.  We have added an entirely new type of literacy into the lives of our students - digital literacy, and yet we are expecting them to perform at the same capacity or higher, with all of our new research in higher order thinking, than we have in the past.  And we say our kids are not performing?  Of course they are not performing!  They're not meeting these expectations because we are moving at the speed of light and trying to keep up with the increasingly-complex technologies of tomorrow.  We are piling so much on our kids and then shaking our heads in puzzlement when they do not respond!  The bigger problem is that there are students who can achieve at such high rates, and this causes the chasm to spread between those whose brains have been able to adapt and those whose haven't.  Those whose parents read to them every night since before they were born and keep books in every room of their house.  They are the same who buy the latest technology at home who have a bigger advantage and will perform higher on every assessment than those who don't. 

What we expect of our students is in no way less than what we expected twenty or thirty years ago.  It is just different.  We have skipped over some key foundational concepts like basic mathematical computation, phonics, historical dates, and science definitions and moved into teaching application of difficult, complex concepts beginning at the age of six.  Gallagher even concedes that the math from yesterday is not the same as the math of today - word problems are more complex and requirements for computation and answering require reading and writing skills!  Although I can see where this allegation of educational negligence stems, I think the accusation should change to figuring out how we can equalize the opportunities for all of our students and meet the new technological needs of this new generation, all while meeting the higher expectations and blended literacies popping up all over in our standardized testing and real-world experiences. 

Gallagher sees writing as a key educational component, but no longer are we talking about the five paragraph essay.  Today's writing expectations are much more complex and include a wider range of English words than students from years past.  Each year, hundreds of new words are introduced to the English language, and one of our jobs, as educators, is to help our students keep up.  Again, we move to the idea of vocabulary. 

Kelly Gallagher's idea of using mentor texts is a neat concept - it's the idea that we use a piece of uniquely organized current writing, analyze the author's craft to identify what makes it unique, and then have our students use their own ideas to create a new piece based from the craft of the mentor text.  Gallagher went through a series of mentor texts during his talk.  These easily-utilized mentor texts are listed below:

• 6 word memoirs - See the example lesson plan with videos from readwritethink.org on what they are.  My brief description will not do them justice.  They're six words long and can be used to say just about anything.  See?  Definitely not the detailed description that would be considered telling.
• Twitter posts - If you haven't looked on twitter or used twitter, I'll tell you right now, I opened a twitter account a year ago and the combination of number signs, ampersands, slashes, dashes, and stars freaked me out so much I posted very little.  Just within the last month, I've made more of an effort to "get to know" twitter, and I'm really starting to get the hang of it!  The restriction with Twitter is that tweets can be only 140 characters (including spaces), so the composer has to either condense information into a sort of twitter code or tweet more than one tweet on the same topic.  This supports the idea of summarization, and would also pique the interest of the students composing the tweets on whatever topic they're writing.
• Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life - Definitely a book I will own.  This text is organized in alphabetical order and features words that are significant in the life of author Amy Rosenthal.   Andrea Reichenberger posted a flickr slideshow giving some examples of some great projects created by her students.  Gallagher suggested using this project to start the year.  I LOVE this idea and can't wait to share it with some of our ELA teachers. 
• The "Unofficial and Unwritten Spokane Rules of Fisticuffs" from The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie.  Lisa Larsen,a teacher from Nevada, writes about this list of unofficial rules and how they can be used in the classroom in her book review.  Gallagher suggests using them in this way and then having students use Alexie's craft to craft their own unofficial rules.  A great way to cross writing with character education or PBIS!
• This I believe . . . It's really unfortunate that I can't recall if this is the mentor text or not, but what a cool book!  I would use it.  There seems to be a lot out there on the web about writing "I believe" essays, but This I Believe: the Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women (Allison & Gediman, editors) seems to support Gallagher's objective.  Again, he suggests this could be a good first week (or first day) activity. So many of our kiddos are resistant to writing, but asking them to talk about themselves or what they believe usually sparks some motivation.  It also sets a premise for a writing class that we start the year writing - we will be writing all year.
• "If you're looking for a way to  . . . " modeled from the ESPN article "If you're looking for a way to kill little league".  Read the article.  It's pretty awesome, and what a wonderful discussion on author's craft you and your students can have!

In each of the above examples, I am brought back to Jeff Anderson and Anna Deese where both presenters talked about the idea of observing or noticing.  Studying the craft of a writer or author requires this skill, and to use mentor texts like the ones above is a great way to practice this skill. The act of applying this craft then allows students to process what they've observed or noticed and morph it into their own writing.

I was thrilled to have taken so much from Kelly Gallagher's morning session at the IRC Convention, and I know that the ELA teachers with whom I work will embrace much of what I have brought back to share with them.  The fact that he contributed to our newly-adopted literature series gives this information even more meaning.  And . . . I also have a list of more books to go out and buy.