IRC Conference: Scaffolding for mastery of the Common Core by Deb Franciosi of Project CRISS

It was my pleasure to connect with Deb Franciosi and Anna Deese of Project CRISS at the IRC Conference for dinner Thursday night.  I've been conducting trainings for and embracing the Principles and Philosophies of Project CRISS since 2005, and although the emphasis on CRISS at the middle level seems to have waned in my district, my faith in the philosophy has not.  

The next morning I had to choose between Anna and Deb's sessions because they both had presentations planned at the exact same time on Friday.  I had seen Anna present the year before, so she encouraged me to attend Deb's session this year, and I'm very glad I did!

Franciosi's session focused on the idea of scaffolding.  According to the Glossary of Educational Reform by the Great Schools Partnership, scaffolding is "a variety of instructional techniques used to move students progressively toward stronger understanding and, ultimately, greater independence in the learning process. The term itself offers the relevant descriptive metaphor: teachers provide successive levels of temporary support that help students reach higher levels of comprehension and skill acquisition that they would not be able to achieve without assistance."

To start out her session, Franciosi went through the CRISS frameworks for teaching and learning, which is really a fancy name for a plan for instruction.  She called the framework "PPER" (pronounced peeper).  The acronym stands for Plan, Prepare, Engage/Transform, and Reflect.  Nothing earth-shattering here, but the focus of the scaffolding happens during the planning and preparation stage.

One target of my coaching this year has been the area of planning.  I never begin a collaborative project without first discussing the goals of the project and what outcomes are expected.  It's a tricky situation when I begin work with a teacher, only to discover that he/she is unclear on the final assessment for the unit.  What scares me even more is when the final assessment is created by somebody else and the teacher with whom I'm working has never seen it.  To me, its not enough to know what the objectives are for the unit.  The assessment is written with the idea that the skills tested are expected to be mastered.  If the assessment is based upon anything other than those goals and the teacher hasn't seen the assessment, the students are immediately set up to fail.  Period.  Franciosi's first P in PPER is Plan.  Plan beginning with your goals, how you will assess, and what materials you will need to begin and engage your students.

Prepare is the second P in PPER.  To prepare oneself to engage students in content means to consider the learner and the content to be presented.  We have already determined the end-product and the goals of the lesson, but without properly assessing our learners, we cripple ourselves as educators.  What kind of background knowledge will our kiddos need for us to scaffold properly?  Who are our learners?  What are their strengths and learning preferences?  Are we standing in front of an entire class of struggling readers or a group of gifted kiddos?  Does our audience speak English?  All of them?  How much do they already know about the topic?  Do they know anything that I can easily connect to the topic?  What about the content?  What resources are readily available to me?  Are the resources easily accessible for my kiddos?  In other words, can they easily glean information from the resources or will they need support to do so?  Without asking every single one of the questions above, and possibly more, we leave out part of the preparation process and therefore risk losing our audience before we even begin.

Scaffolding happens as a result of preparation.  Once you know your learners and your content, you prepare to engage them, which may require some pre-teaching before actually teaching.  Earlier this year I worked with a science teacher on a close reading activity on global warming.  Although we chose to introduce the strategy and practice it with easily accessible text, in hindsight, we could have (and probably should have) used sections from the actual text book to work through the strategy.  

One idea that Cris Tovani describes in her book Do I Really Have to Teach Reading? is the idea of text-sets.  The reason we chose the easily accessible text was because we weren't certain students would have enough background knowledge to pull-off a good close read of the text book itself.  If we had considered the piece of text that we did use as more of a part of a text-set, we could have had the students read it first with the essential question in mind and then dive into the science text book to conduct a close read on sections of the text.  We could have given students time in class to explore several different texts, in fact, so that we could build up their current knowledge before we hit them with the really tough stuff.  This would have given the students an opportunity to build some background knowledge and maybe allow them to formulate some questions before tackling the more challenging text from the book.  It would have allowed them to feel challenged but successful.  Hindsight is always 20/20.

Another point that Franciosi made during her presentation was that the initial material that should be presented to students should not only be accessible but relevant.  In other words, find material that relates somehow to students' lives.  I read this recently, and I wish I could remember where . . . wherever it was, I recall the speaker adamantly telling the audience that no matter what the content, make it relevant!  Somehow find a way to connect it to students' lives.  If it is history, start with how the outcome impacts us today or parallel the situation with a current day situation.  Science? Health?  Music?  Get creative and make it fit.  Without relevance, you immediately lose a large percentage of your students without even beginning.  

The second part of Franciosi's session was filled with an example lesson, using the framework that she introduced at the beginning.  She went into much detail about all steps in the framework, but what I brought from the session was the emphasis on scaffolding, the research behind it, the implications for using it, and how it applies to good planning.  

Good, solid planning equals a well-managed classroom where students know the goals and the plan to get there.  Knowing your goals, your plan, your students, and your resources creates an environment where students may be less self-conscious about trying new things and stepping out of their comfort zone.  Once the ice is broken, students begin to feel more independent in their learning, and that is the whole premise of the Principles and Philosophy of Project CRISS.  CReating Independence through Student-owned Strategies.

IRC Conference: Why curiosity, thinking, and collaboration matter in the 21st century by Stephanie Harvey

I have seen so many big names in education speak over the last few years that it makes me wonder why our education system seems to be imploding.  Cris Tovani, Rick Wormeli, Steven Layne, Jeff Anderson, Janet Allen, and Kelly Gallagher all have delivered messages to me at different times in the last thirteen months, and in each of these messages I leave wondering what I can do to spread the word. Stephanie Harvey's message at this year's IRC Conference was no different.

We had just eaten a delicious lunch when Harvey took the podium for an hour.  After being in sessions all morning and eating a nice lunch, I was ready to stretch my legs and then take a nap, but Harvey must have known I was sitting in the audience because she began to deliver the most riveting session I had seen all day on a topic near and dear to my heart - intrinsic motivation.

Harvey's entire presentation revolved around the belief that we need to feed students' natural curiosity to build intrinsic motivation.  She used some quotations by Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, to illustrate why the education system must change.  "Teaching will be learning how to ask the right questions.  I was taught to memorize facts.  Why remember them?  Now you just need to learn how to search for information and sort through the burgeoning data available on computers."  What a brilliant thought in this day of information overload!  21st Century Learning Standards are asking learners to do just these things: ask the right questions and know how to find reliable answers to draw conclusions.

Don't tell me that you haven't been with a group of people, and somebody asks a question that nobody can answer.  Three people immediately pull out their phones to do a quick Google search. For names of celebrities and the nearest Mexican restaurant, this is a piece of cake, but what happens when the tough questions get asked?  How do we know that the information we are gleaning from XYZ.com is valid?  Who was supposed to teach us this?

Curiosity, according to Harvey and Schmidt, is essential for learning.  I think about my own kindergartner and how his curiosity runs WILD.  The questions start as early as 6 a.m. sometimes, and there are times when I have to force myself to sound interested and not flop down in a chair, exasperated by the questions.  Why don't our thirteen-year-olds do this?  Why are we not bolting the door to the library daily because the kids are beating it down, trying to find answers to their limitless line of questions that should be running through their brains?  According to Harvey, our kiddos start to lose their curiosity between fifth and seventh grade because answers are the focus in school, not questions.  This must change.

Einstein knew this well before Stephanie Harvey told us.  "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."  And then marches in Common Core . . . but entirely too late.  Although there are two sides to each new initiative in education, there are also those educators who choose to stand in the middle, hoping to find positives in the old and the new.

That's me.  The one standing in the middle of this Common Core debate continuum, waving wildy.  So much of the controversy in Common Core revolves around the assessment pieces, not the core standards themselves.  In fact, if you take a good look at the actual anchor standards for our English Language Arts (I can only speak for the ELA standards), most of them seem like an amped-up version of good teaching and former standards.  I mean, look at what they're asking students to do: determine the purpose of the author, argue with evidence, figure out the meaning of words independently, read "grade level" (whatever that means) material, gather information and determine reliability, and draw conclusions.  Are we saying that we shouldn't be teaching our kiddos how to do these things?  Are we saying we don't already do them?

But we have kind of sucked the fun out of it all with a lot of our surface level question and answer, knowledge-level questioning, and Harvey says that we need to analyze what is not fun about it if it isn't fun.  I was just reading Cris Tovani's book Do I Really Have to Teach Reading? yesterday, and she spoke of this science teacher who was taken back by how quickly Tovani was able to engage her science students in a unit on viruses with a simple student-directed questioning strategy.  This happened just minutes after one student proclaimed how boring viruses were and "Why do we have to learn about them anyway?"  Tovani told the science teacher she thought it was boring too.  Feeling a little defensive, the teacher went on and on about how interesting it all was, and expressed that Tovani only felt that way because she had never read any of the really great research on viruses, etc.  It was at this point when Tovani questioned why the teacher wasn't using the fascinating research articles to help engage her students in the unit on viruses.  I mean, if they're really that interesting . . .

Well . . . . ?  Crickets.  Good point.

Stephanie Harvey continued her talk with a list of ways we can teach our students to bring back some of that old curiosity they had when they were little.  Some of her suggestions were:

• Ask questions in front of your students.  All the time.
• Model your own curiosity and what you do with it.
• Show that you care about finding answers. (I used to Google search stuff on the projector all the time when I was teaching in a classroom full-time.)
• Demonstrate where you find those answers (be certain to talk yourself through why you choose certain websites and the appropriate times to use different types of sites).
• Show your thoughts after you learn something new.
• Model your interaction with others to gather information.
• Model reading and writing while we gather new information.
• Model skepticism.

One of the big pushes in the upper grades in reading is the fifth component of reading, comprehension.  Harvey talked about why this is so important.  It's more than just reading and understanding.  "We teach comprehension strategies so kids can acquire and use knowledge."  I loved this quotation because it took comprehension much further than a set of comprehension questions at the end of a story or section in the science text book. Pulling details out of a passage is not comprehension.  It's recall.  Being able to think about and process information to produce something else is comprehension, and that's what Harvey was telling her audience.

At the end of her session, Stephanie Harvey threw out four principles of Reading Achievement and Learning.  I thought that these four principles were a good balance.  They are below:

1. Volume (the more kids read the better they read).  I have been singing this song for years, and we actually saw the fruits of this several years back when we instilled a mandatory silent reading period during our homeroom for a year.
2. Response (the more kids interact the more they learn and understand). This is research-based and has a plethora of pieces of evidence to back it up, including multiple intelligence research, learning styles research, and brain research.
3. Explicit Instruction (kids need both teacher modeling and time to practice).  Duh.
4. Purpose (readers must see reading as a meaningful experience).  I was so happy to see this one I almost cried.  It parallels the research my colleague and I have done this year on engaging unmotivated readers, so it was nice to see this piece once again and know that we are on the right track.

Well, if you have read this far, I applaud your efforts.  Stephanie Harvey really hit home with her talk after our luncheon that day, and I am certainly grateful to have had the opportunity to hear her.  If I could have bottled up her entire talk and brought it home with me I would have because it was just that good.  Unfortunately all I have is the notes I took to create this blog for you, but I think I was able to capture the parts that I felt were most meaningful.  Now its your turn to take the information and create some meaning for your own teaching.  

Creating Success for the Unsuccessful

Recently I had a request from a science teacher who asked me if I had any tricks up my sleeve to help her students read and comprehend their science text books.  She reported that even after doing read-alouds as a class and two-column notes that many of them space out or don't fully understand what is being read.  Sound familiar?  I know it did to me . . .

Ironically I had just finished (that evening) rereading some notes I had taken weeks ago from another of Cris Tovani's workshops at the Day of Reading Conference, and I immediately went back for another read-through with the request in mind.  This science teacher was most concerned about her inclusion classes, classes where students with IEPs are placed along with a paraprofessional to give additional support and communication to the classroom teacher (often our students who receive tier two and three reading interventions are placed in these classes purposely as well).  Basically you're looking at a class where more than half of the students sitting in there are probably reading slightly to significantly below the reading level necessary to easily manipulate and extract information from the tricky text found in the science text book used in this class regularly. 

My plan is to meet and collaborate with this teacher, but I figured the situation would make a nice blog, as well, so below are some suggestions (some from Tovani's workshop) I'm going to consider as we discuss possible supports that we can implement in her classes.

• Active engagement in the reading is key for kiddos who struggle with difficult text.  I'm a firm believer that students CAN comprehend material that is considered at "frustration" level, but they're unlikely to have the motivation to wrestle with it until they make meaning (in other words - they choose not to), and THIS is why they space out and don't understand what they're reading (or not reading, which is probably more accurate). 
• Require students to be actively metacognitive.  Teaching them to close read may help, because that is what close reading is - recording what you're thinking as you're reading.  And when I say this, I'm not suggesting that we ask our students to jot down things as they come to mind; I'm suggesting that we require students to stop after every sentence or two and record their thoughts (on sticky notes, photocopied pages from the text book, or response journals).  If they're not recording thoughts, they're probably not making meaning because they're not thinking.  This may mean that you, as a teacher, need to narrow down what it is that your students read or you'll never get through what you need to cover. See the next bullet point for more details.
• Taper down what is expected to be gained from reading so that students begin to feel success with smaller chunks of reading.  The idea is not to work slower, but to work smarter.  What can you get away with skipping so that your students can do a close read of two pages rather than five?  What things can you present to them in different ways other than reading?  You don't want to eliminate reading because there are so many benefits that can come out of teaching your kiddos to read text in your content area, but can you find better methods of presenting some of the material?  Does your text book have an adapted version?
• Give students specific purposes for smaller chunks of reading.  For example, "After reading the first two paragraphs on page 95, tell me why you think that solar energy is not used more than it is today."  Allow students to work in pairs or trios and expect all group members to have the same response (require them to formulate answers together).
• Use a timer, chunk their reading into small sections, and stop them after about seven or eight minutes to reset them and then set them off again.  For kids who struggle, unless you see that they are fully engaged and would be better off left alone - continuous resetting will be necessary due to low attention spans.  In instances where the text is SO tough that the simple act of reading the words on the page is horribly frustrating, how can you group kids so that they can work with you or another adult to hear it being read so that the struggle of decoding is eliminated?  What about setting it up so that students can listen to the book online if this is available, but still chunking the text and expecting engagement?
• Make the content matter.  FIND a way to relate the content to their lives and make it matter to them somehow.
• Use strategies such as the Read and Say Something.  This is good for kiddos who are auditory/aural learners.  Partners read (aloud or silently) a small section (a paragraph) and then one restates, summarizes, or comments on what he read to the other one orally.  Then partners switch roles and the second partner reads the next small selection, restates, summarizes, or comments.

Sometimes when teaching content-area material, we know that reading in the content is important and we LOVE us some content-area reading - but we have to put ourselves in the shoes of our kiddos.  The likelihood of a struggling reader loving them some science info straight from the tap is a big fat ZERO.  Ok, maybe not zero, but those students who love reading their science or social studies text books are few and far between - and are even more scarce when all they've done is encounter failure.  It's easier to zone off and choose to fail than try and fail anyway.  Our job is to create situations that create success for these kiddos so that they begin to want to succeed more often.  If you've ever been a teacher, you've seen that moment where a student has a glorified moment of success (with you or with a colleague), and then that student changes her tune for that one teacher - possibly for the remainder of the year.  By using some of the strategies listed above, the likelihood of this happening with one or more of your students grows, because you're purposely setting your kiddos up to have small, successful moments. And that, friends, is what teaching should really be about (yes, I just ended my sentence with a preposition).

November 22 Crumble - A New Spin on the Carousel

So I went back this morning and reread my notes from the Day of Reading Conference again because there were so many philosophies and strategies that I gained from attending.  Writing these blogs helps me just as much, if not more, than my readers because I use writing as a way to process through information.  Usually, I start my weekly writing with one objective and it morphs in the hour that it takes me to crank it out.  By the end I often have a new idea, and I feel happy about being able to share that with the world.

After rereading my notes from my third session with Cris Tovani, I was reminded of an idea that I wanted to share with my staff.  Because I'm not an auditory learner, I am pretty sure that I tuned out during part of her talk, so the way that she presented this idea is probably not the way I'm going to share it.  Nonetheless, the connection I was able to make while listening to her explain was with a strategy in which many of you are probably familiar: the carousel.  I will first explain how I have originally seen this strategy done, and then I will explain Tovani's spin on this.  What a GREAT way to allow active, social kiddos to learn from each other, all the while practicing their listening and speaking skills!

Project CRISS trainings have included this fun way of reviewing and discussing:

• On large pieces of poster paper, write a topic or a broad question.  Include enough different topics so that you can split your class into groups of no more than four students. Three is my ideal number.
• Give each group a different colored marker (so you can monitor group participation in the discussion).
• Put each group at a different piece of poster paper with the idea that they will discuss and formulate an answer or information related to the topic to be written by one of their members with their colored marker.
• Set the timer for a specific amount of time (2 minutes, maybe?) and allow groups to discuss and write. 
• At the end of the specified time, call for groups to SWITCH, and they will move to the next poster to read what has been written, respond to responses, correct information, embellish on answers, and add their own thoughts. Try giving groups the responsibility of changing writers at every switch as well.
• Carousel through until all groups have gone to all papers.  
• Choose how you want to conclude this activity.  It could be a quick run-through of all of the papers.  It might be where you take a day to read through and prepare the next lesson based on what you have learned.  Or maybe you used this as a test review, and students are now ready for a test.  This can be used in so many different ways!

So, in an effort to keep up with the theme this year of teaching our kids to observe, I attended a session at the Day of Reading Conference, earlier in the morning, that emphasized the use of observing artwork as a "text".  Interestingly, I heard in several sessions that the word text is not necessarily referring to words on a page anymore - that artwork, videos, and even audio-recordings might be considered text.  It's almost like the word media has been overrun by the word text just to confuse us all.  Flexibility is the key, I suppose.  

Anyway, in both of these sessions, the presenters asked the participants to take a look at a graphic (a piece of art or photograph) and write/discuss observations, ask questions, and make comments or inferences (with evidence to back it up).  Being completely not visual, this activity annoyed the heck out of me because I miss all sorts of clues in pieces where others see things plain as day, but I went along with it because I know I'm in the minority when it comes to learning preferences, and I know many of our kiddos are visual learners.  I also know that if I push myself I will strengthen this area of weakness, so I gave it a try. 

Tovani took this activity a step further and combined it with the carousel.  Genius, really!  She suggested multiple visuals set up around the room or at desks where students perform that same carousel activity listed above, but they respond to a visual instead of a prompt, topic, or question.  Then they have to read what others have written, respond, and add their own thoughts until they've made their way around the entire room.  This type of activity can be used in so many classroom situations using things such as:

• paintings or pictures of historical events or cultural activities for social studies or language arts
• graphics of geological, astronomical, or other scientific events or ideas
• different pieces of art for an artistic period in history
• listening stations with different musical pieces playing and multiple headsets so that all group members can hear
• pictures of situations or scenes in health to discuss good decision making
• sports or fitness-related visuals in PE
• tough geometry or algebraic equations in math (REALLY tough ones that might require multiple brains or a longer time to figure it out so that one group starts to solve it, and others may have to take over)
• finished three dimensional projects, websites, or other tech projects

The list here is really endless.

The use of the carousel supports so many of our students in their need to move and be social.  If structured properly and kept moving, this activity can be a beneficial learning experience where you simply observe and let the students learn from each other.  And what better way to teach than to let the kids learn from each other!

November 15 Crumble - Active Engagement and Column-Notes

I spent some time this week collaborating with a colleague from another building.  The focus of our meeting was to discuss ways to support some of our content area teachers in providing students with organized information, yet keeping these same students actively and collaboratively engaged.  Tough order, but absolutely possible.

As we talked, the question arose about teaching students organization strategies for note-taking.  Too often in education we follow a trend to a fault, let the pendulum swing so quickly to one side, and neglect to see that we have abandoned things that are working.  Buzz words such as collaboration and active engagement have risen so high above anything else that many of us are starting to abandon key life-skills such as organization and summarization - skills that would be taught during more structured lecture-style lessons where students were expected to take notes. 

Don't get me wrong, friends.  I am absolutely not justifying making students sit for fifty-minute periods while they listen to an instructor drone on and on about a topic, ferociously jotting down copious notes.  What I am suggesting is that there are some beneficial skills that still need to be taught that may or may not be taught during a more engaging activity or collaboration.

In previous blogs I've discussed the power of note-taking, choosing what organization strategy works best for you, and organizing that information according to your strengths.  Some teachers are having a difficult time finding a happy medium between teacher-centered instruction and student-centered instruction, and that's where many of us are struggling.  We want our kiddos to be able to pull out important information from the text, but we don't trust them enough to be able to handle this task alone, so we spend time in the classroom asking them to copy down what we think is important. 

After my discussion last Tuesday, I was reminded of some ways that we can use an oldie-but-goodie and revamp it to be used in the classroom as a partner tool -- all the while allowing the teacher to still have some control over what students might be recording in their notes.

Project CRISS calls this strategy Two-Column Notes.  You might know it as Cornell Notes.  I'm going to take these notes a step further and move to three columns.  Below is what it could look like:

Main Topic   This is where the teacher might start students by giving them a purpose for reading and discussing.  Teachers can do either one of two things here: Provide students with main topics or broad questions Allow students to use text features to come up with their own main topics or broad questions. Whatever happens in this column, know that this is the purpose-setter, so if you want your students to explore specific topics, this is the place to do it!

Partner Discussion   In this column, students work with a partner or partners (no more than three to a group!) to decide together what goes here.  You may want to be specific about what you think should go here. For example, you might ask students to look in the text to find evidence that climate change is, indeed, happening on Earth.  This purpose should be stated in column one.    All group members need to agree on everything put into this column.    This is a great time to listen in on discussions and gage what will need to be addressed during the final large-group discussion.    Cris Tovani suggests during times of engagement to stop the class, state observations, redirect if the entire class seems perplexed by something significant, and send them off again.   Another idea here is to find one piece of information in each group that you ask the group to share with the class.  This validates their group work.

Additional Information   During the discussion, the teacher should have collected information about where students have missed chunks of important information.  As a wrap-up activity, point these things out and have students note them in this column.  If you choose to go over all information, students can even go back to column two and highlight information that was emphasized during this phase.   Students will not see value in the second column, however, if they end up copying down everything that you present, so be certain to have each group share something you felt was important and have students check their second column for that information.    I wouldn't even put up a three column note taking guide on a projector at this point here.  I would use a two column note or make a simple list.  This will get students out of the habit of copying down exactly what they see and get them into the habit of checking their previous work before adding to it.  This column is for additional information, not restating work they've already done.

I had another conversation this week with a valued colleague on her frustrations with her struggling readers - why do they struggle with things other than reading (like group work)?  You'd think that if you give a struggler the opportunity to work with a partner or small group that he would be more motivated by the social aspect of the activity, but the group-work that this teacher had planned dissolved before her eyes as these students completely resisted (kind of as a whole) and did not complete the activity effectively.  The teacher then expressed that she never revisited the idea of group-work again.  Don't fear - this is so common, so know you're not alone!

If you have a kiddo sitting in your class that is still struggling with reading at age eleven, twelve, or thirteen, know that your class is not the first class she has struggled in, and that the struggle with reading is no longer the issue.  She is now a struggling learner, not because she can't learn, but because she has faced failure enough times to understand that things are more likely to go down the tubes than to turn out positively.  Because of this, she resists any school work.  Your job is to create small successes.  My suggestion to this teacher was to break up that group work into smaller chunks, give specific guidelines, and redirect frequently (like every ten minutes or so).  And don't give up.  Giving up is one of the worst things a teacher can do when teaching students to work effectively in groups.  This is one of the reasons why so many of our struggling readers have no collaboration skills - once you face failure as a teacher (you see that group work is not working), you do not want to revisit that type of activity again.  Hmmmmm . . . ironic, isn't it?

If you've ever visited a Montessori classroom, you've seen that even five, six, and seven-year-old students can work collaboratively and effectively.  These students are taught from the beginning specific skills, and their teachers train and retrain them until they get it right.  This is what could be happening with our kiddos as well.  It's never too late to train them.

To bring this to a close - remember a few things:

1. Collaboration doesn't have to include building a house or  starting a business; it could be as simple as agreeing upon significant pieces of information in a text selection.
2. Validate group work by not making your kiddos re-do work they've already done.
3. Organizing information is important.
4. Group work comes after training and consistency.
5. Even struggling learners can do it.
6. Reflecting on what works and what doesn't is very important.  Let your students reflect also!

And most importantly, don't give up!

Who is the Expert?

I remember back in 2005 when I moved to my current school and was asked by my former principal to take on a building leadership role - Balanced Literacy Coordinator.  See, when I spent some time working near Chicago several years before this, I had a superintendent who felt that it was imperative that I take a class in teaching reading, even though my primary focus was social studies - so I did.  I should have thanked the man back then, because what I found was a new passion that eventually grew into a career path - content area reading, now known as content area literacy. So I became a trainer for Project CRISS and talked a good "content-area reading" talk, and before I knew it I was the . . . Balanced Literacy Coodinator.  Fancy title, right?

Well, it was not fancy.  It was aggravating, and here's why.  At that time I taught science (way too many endorsements on my certificate, apparently), and our department chair - a well-loved and vivacious eighth grade science teacher - fought with me over and over and over again that science did not involve reading.  Well, it wasn't really a fight.  It was more of a statement - with his fingers planted firmly in his ears.  He wanted nothing to do with my Balanced Literacy Coordinator job that I was taking so seriously.

I bring this story up because, when I went to hear Cris Tovani speak last week, she brought this question up to her listeners: with the new informational text CCSS standards, who is responsible? Tovani discusses the finger-pointing and the shoulder shrugging that goes on in schools.  CCSS pinpoints those standards as ELA standards, but her argument is so brilliantly legitimate - why would my amazing science-teaching colleague dispute it?

The ELA (English Language Arts, for those of you who are confused by this new acronym) department will absolutely continue to support all of our students with the informational text standards.  Part of our curriculum is non-fiction and informational text, but who is the real expert in reading a piece of text from your content area - either in the text book or found elsewhere?  Look around . . . I'll give you a hint.  It certainly isn't your favorite language arts colleague.  It's you!  You are the one who loves your content so much that you spent eighteen or more hours studying it so that you could teach it at the middle or high school level.  You took those classes.  You spend your time diving deeply into the text to pull out information and add it to your lessons.

Tovani says that thinking in a science, math, health, or music class requires completely different techniques and strategies that we, as highly educated professionals take for granted!  Some of you have one or more graduate degrees, which implies that you have done more than your fair share of informational reading - it's become like second nature.  But your students are being met with more and more complex text with the expectation of meeting higher and higher demands in both reading, writing, and thinking.  Not to mention the fact that you may have thirty (or more) students staring at you with any variation of learning styles, and you are expected to bring them all up to snuff this year.  Without your expertise, some of them will never make it through those difficult texts that our text book companies continue to publish.

"Okay," you say.  "So what can I do?"  Below are some ideas to get you thinking about ways you can support your learners in reading informational text in your classroom.  Tovani included some great content-specific strategy charts in her talk on November first, but before you can think strategy, you have to think philosophy.  How will you modify your already-fabulous teaching philosophy to reflect this addition of reading in your content area - not just content-area knowledge?

• Know your learners.  Know that you have a variety of students sitting there in front of you, and in order to reach them all, you need to vary your presentation-styles. Talk some, put some on the screen, stop and have students process through discussion strategies, expect them to write, and get them up and move them around.
• Know your text and how you attack it.  You are the expert in reading your content text.  Know how you approach it.  Science teachers and math teachers may rely more on the illustrations, graphs, charts, captions, and tables than a literature teacher would.  Social studies teachers may jump directly to illustrations or maps before trying to conquer a piece of text.  Literature teachers may do a quick once-over on the text to see how it is organized before making the jump into the text.  Whatever it is, watch yourself do it once and be sure to note how you do it!
• Demonstrate how you attack text.  Once you know how you approach a text task, demonstrate how you do it.  Over and over and over again.  Let your kiddos know that the way you do it may be specific to your content area.  You can even ask them how reading or thinking in your class might differ from another!
• Chunk the text.  This is especially important for your struggling readers (and you're all going to have them).  Break it down into manageable sections if it isn't already broken down for you.  Stop and have them process after each chunk so that your students get used to reading metacognitively.
• Give students specific purpose for reading.  Say things like, "Read the next three paragraphs to find out why . . . " or "After you predict how the main character will respond to X, read on to find out if you were right.  Stop when you can tell me, and write down what you learned."  Giving struggling readers (or any reader, for that matter) specific purpose for reading each small chunk of text not only shows them that purpose setting is important, but it makes larger pieces of text (even three pages can be daunting out of a social studies or health text book) not as overwhelming.

As you explore the idea of not just teaching students your content, but how to acquire more knowledge within your content by reading, you will find that you have questions that need to be answered.  There are no better professional developers than your own colleagues, so go to those within your department and start the conversations there.  From there, seek out language arts teachers, your reading specialist (yay!) or literacy coach, department chairs, and others who may be currently taking classes or have had experience.  You never know who may have just the tools you need to move forward and embrace our new informational text standards that are weighing so heavily on so many people.