Background knowledge and purpose setting - without them you could face epic fail

This topic never gets old for me.  I think it is because I've walked into dozens of classrooms over the years and have heard students ask over and over and over again, "Why are we doing this?"  When those words come out of their mouths, immediately I understand that the relevance of the activity and information has left the building, and the kids are instantly disengaged.  Posting standards and target goals in one's classroom gives a purpose, but the relevance is still not there.  Thus, continued disengagement.  Well, the last two weeks I have been working with two educators who are always willing to step out on the highest cliff with me and peer over just to see what possibilities lie over the edge, and I have to say, its been so wildly successful that we have rallied two more teachers to join us on this adventure!

Its tough to let go of things we have loved from years past.  There is currently a joke running in our department about a dramatic version of The Diary of Anne Frank and how this has been one of the toughest pieces for some teachers to "let go".  My risky colleague is no different.  Last year she and I collaborated on her long-loved biography project.  It's one of those projects that she has been teaching for years, and we needed to revamp it to cover the correct standards.  I'm a firm believer that if you really love something that much, you'll teach it with passion, so I knew that we needed to fix it up and make it work for her.  

Well, she approached me again about this same unit three weeks ago, but this year we were both ready to amp it up.  In the past she has had students choose biographies, read them, and then do some sort of project on the person.  As with so many other long-standing projects across the curriculum, it was a basic research report where kids choose a topic and become the expert on this topic, and we pray that they have found enough relevance and interest in the topic to complete it. This year we wanted to tie in some argumentative tone to the project, so we met and decided to focus on the essential topic Most Influential People.  We decided that students would be required to research a person and then provide evidence that proves that the person is, indeed, one of the most influential people in their field.  

Our first meeting consisted of pinpointing standards that we wanted to be certain to cover in-depth and then outlining our expectations.  We knew we wanted to focus on the research process, and we knew that we wanted to leave the final project open to student choice. After that planning meeting, we met off and on to start the process of front-loading important information, and we decided that we needed to get everybody on the same page in terms of defining what an influential person was.  I was also able to interest my retired former-colleague (and Project CRISS partner in crime) Pam, who loves to come back and share her wealth of knowledge with middle schoolers.  

Because the project has turned out to be one of the most interesting collaborative adventures I have ever had, I wanted to outline, in depth, what we did - partly to share what we have done and partly to remember the beauty of how it all came together.

Our first few days with the students focused on the phrase influential person.  We did a few background knowledge activating activities which ended up being as telling for us as they were for our students.

• We had students draw a target on a piece of poster paper and fill in people they considered to be influential in their families, school, neighborhood/city, state/nation, and the world.  This was an immediate bust.  It was clear, after only a few minutes, that some of our kiddos could identify the word influential, but few could apply it and identify people they would consider influential because their definitions of the word were so wishy washy.
• We then went back and had students discuss, in groups, their definitions of the word before they looked it up in the dictionary to clarify their misconceptions.  A whole group discussion took place, and we pointed out misconceptions over several days.  My biggest fear is always that students will go back to their former thinking because its easier and has been ingrained in them for so long.
• Finally, we had groups discuss and identify a list of ten characteristics they thought a person of influence might have.

Students took purposeful notes

I knew I wanted to hit this idea of influential people really hard, and I also knew that if we didn't clean up all misconceptions on the word that our project would fall apart during the early stages - an epic fail I was not willing to watch, considering we actually had the time to clear things up.  We decided to work this idea for a week.  My colleague and I googled "characteristics of influential people" for kicks, and we found some pretty amazing articles on the web that outlined what these organizations believed it meant to be influential.  We chose 4 different ones (two from Forbes  and the other two from different websites that focused on self-help).  One was so long that we split it into two.  From there we performed the same twisted jigsaw that I had done with a group of kids in science earlier in the year.  

Discussions began

• Print enough articles for every student to have one (be sure to even out the articles so that each one is read by the same number of students).  Have students choose what article they want to read and get into groups after they've chosen.
• Give students their purpose for reading the article.  Their purpose is to decide which of the characteristics they feel are most important and to be prepared to explain why by arguing the case for the chosen characteristics.
• Once everybody in the group finishes, the group must somehow agree on the most important characteristics.  If one person feels strongly about their second choice, he must argue his case, but he cannot choose it unless the entire group agrees.  By the end of this group work, all students in each group should have identical lists of characteristics and be prepared to provide reasons why they were chosen.  Here is where it gets fun.
• Count each group off again.  In one group, each person gets a different number.  Then put the new groups together by number.  Now each new group should have at least one person in it that has read a different article.  In a normal jigsaw, the job of the group would be to "teach" the information to the rest of the group, but not in this one!
• Every student in the group will, undoubtedly, have come armed with three to five characteristics of an influential person - all from different perspectives.  The group's job is to whittle down those into a list of their top ten.  What our kiddos found was that one characteristic may have shown up several times, and all they had to do is put some of them together!  Some, however, had to be debated.
• Their final list then got submitted to us before they left for their next class.

Once we got those lists, we took the time to cut them apart and put like-characteristics together until we came up with a long class list of every trait mentioned.  The next day, we made the class discuss and vote on the final top ten.  What we found beautiful is that six of the ten characteristics chosen for the top ten were the same in both classes!  I'd call that success!

Our kiddos were finally ready to move forward to previewing topics and choosing their biographies.  Reflectively speaking, a few beautiful things happened during this entire pre-learning stage.  

Final lists derived from jigsaw activity

• In the time that it took us to complete this entire process (about a week), only one student got "schooly" on us and asked what the final project was going to have to be.
• Misconceptions were cleared up, and we now had an easily accessible list of ten characteristics that students could use while they played detective in their reading of their biographies that they didn't even HAVE yet.
• Interest was piqued.  I say this with hindsight because we are several days ahead as I write this, and the behavior of the students after they received their biographies blew us away.  More details to follow on this.
• A good discussion was had in both classes about negative influences and how they would align to the top ten characteristics. Without even doing it, students had developed a top ten list that would easily include the negative influences as well as the positive.

The next steps in this process are just as exciting, but this is a great place for me to stop for now.  What I can say is that every day I cannot wait to step into this classroom to see what is going to happen next.  Even though our plans are secure, the implementation is entertaining.  Watching our students remain engaged excites me.  But what really is interesting is that they all know they will be expected to produce something at the end, but they're so involved in what they're doing right now that none of it seems to matter.  Next weekend, I should be able to report to you the process of choosing topics and beginning the prep for research.  Stay tuned!

Feeding curiosity and writing questions to guide research

I had the pleasure of working with eighth graders this week on an activity that had two clear and important goals.  When I met with my colleague several days before, she showed me examples of final products from years past and explained that she was trying to build much-needed background knowledge on the Holocaust and WWII before beginning a novel study unit on the Holocaust novel Night.  She also planned to hit target standards that focus on research skills.

My role as a reading specialist is generally one of reading support for struggling readers, but another part of my job is to support teachers with best practice instruction, support for implementation of the Common Core standards in English Language Arts, and to give our achieving readers strategies to become more independent learners.  Collaborating on this research project was an exciting prospect, and I couldn't wait to get started!

After establishing our goals, we decided that I would come in to do a mini lesson on creating good questions for research.  Research instruction has changed significantly over the years.  Because our kiddos are inundated with information from all angles, our job is to teach them how to retrieve the information and then process it.  When I was a kid, we researched one way - encyclopedias and books, card catalogs, and index cards.  Today we have brain research to thank for the dozens of organization and note taking techniques that we can teach along with millions of cyber-resources, making teaching research more challenging than it has ever been!  Stephanie Harvey discussed this same idea in March when I attended her session at the IRC Conference.  Kids think they can just hop onto Google and type in a question, click on the first link, and voila! Question answered!  Next!  To avoid this, teachers make lengthy lists of previewed websites so that students can use them like books - scanning the documents for information and reporting their findings.  Why are we not teaching them how to scan the web to find the information for themselves?  Time is always of the essence, and teaching web searches is a time-consuming process.

I opened my lesson with the Observe, Infer, Question activity that has had me smitten this last few months.  Clearly, students were engaged, as we saw them write and discuss, ultimately beginning the process of asking good questions.  We used the photograph to the left to get the students thinking about our topic for the day - Adolf Hitler.  Next, we moved into the real purpose for the day, which was to write research questions that would help us to understand Hitler - my colleague called it biographical information, which it is, but with a spin.  Gone should be the days of writing reports where we simply talk about something.  Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, in Austria might seem like important information if we were gathering biographical information on Hitler, but for this particular assignment there is no purpose for it.  Project CRISS would call these questions right there questions.  They're quick to ask and quick to answer, and they take about as much thought as 1+1.  We wanted to push our kiddos to do more "thinking and searching" in their research.

In order to do research like this, we had to look at the purpose.  My colleague's purpose for research was to build students' background knowledge on the Holocaust so that they can better pick apart the themes and literary elements of the novel Night.  That being said, the Holocaust is where we needed to head, so anything that she wanted students to research ultimately had to connect to that.  Once that was established, she asked the students how they could connect World War I with the Holocaust.  After some discussion, the class was able to come up with How did the events during and after World War I effect what later happened, causing World War II and the Holocaust?  This is exactly what we did with Hitler, then, the next day.

I posed the big question How did Hitler effect what happened during World War II and the Holocaust?  From that I demonstrated how I would write more questions that led us to a better and clearer understanding of Hitler and what his part was in the Holocaust.  I wrote questions like What was Hitler's path to power? What events in Hitler's life may have impacted his decisions while in power? and How did the citizens of Germany view Hitler and why?  We organized them in a two-column note and started reading the synopsis of the article on Adolf Hitler from biography.com.  Instead of skimming the article looking for the answer to the first question and then the second question and so on (which is so often what I see students doing), I encouraged students to just start reading, and what they found was that we could begin to answer three questions in the first paragraph, but those answers made us ask more questions, so we wrote the new ones as well!  In that short twenty minute period we had written eight pretty good research questions that would easily give us a handle on who Adolf Hitler was and what his role was during the Holocaust.

In hindsight there are a few things I would have done differently during this lesson, but I was pleased with much of what we had done.  A few things to consider when taking a stab at a research activity are below.

• Be absolutely clear on what your purpose(s) is(are).  Be certain your final product will align with the purpose.  It is always refreshing when a teacher takes a look at his original vision of a final product and realizes he has made it way more complicated than it needs to be.  If the goal is the research process, why go on and waste time with publication?  If the goal is a final published work for some purpose, then, by all means forge ahead!  My colleague wanted the students to organize their notes in a booklet-form for easy reference and connection during the novel study, which was a meaningful and purposeful final product.  If you are a content area teacher, you will probably have a two-fold purpose - one skill-based purpose (ie. - asking good research questions) and one content-based (ie - What was Hitler's role in WWII?)
• Once your purposes are clear, establish a "big question" that can be answered by all students.  I'm working with another colleague right now on a biography unit, and, after lengthy discussion, we  finally decided to ask students to prove that the person they chose to research was a major influence in whatever industry he/she was in.  This is a great way to introduce informative writing with the argumentative purpose.  Our big umbrella question was What makes people influential? So the big question became, for the students, What made so-and-so a major influence in the such-and-such industry?  Once the big question is established, everything leads back to that question.  It's like a foundation.
• Require students to ask loads of questions before allowing them into the resources.  I make this mistake over and over and over again - I let my kiddos into the resources, and the first thing they do is abandon the questioning.  Then it's days of clean-up as I watch them start randomly writing down unimportant information, and the entire process crumbles before my eyes.  Once your kiddos stop asking questions, their purpose is blurred and they lose focus.  Make questions mandatory, and do not give up!  If these kiddos get into the habit of asking questions, their entire educational career becomes more focused.  Imagine if your students opened a science book to chapter 12 and started immediately asking questions before they began reading!  How much more focused their learning would be!
• Teach note taking strategies and allow students to give input on strategies that have worked for them in the past.  Pick one.  Ask the teachers in grades below what they use and the grades above what they use, and build a bridge.  Wouldn't it be fabulous if a sixth grade student used one type of note taking for research in sixth grade and repeated it in seventh grade and then eighth grade? Or even better - what if sixth grade teachers taught multiple note-taking strategies and allowed students to choose which one fit their learning style better?  And then seventh grade teachers built on those same strategies, and then eighth grade teachers did the same??? Kids are adaptable, but jumping from strategy to strategy every year never allows them the spiral effect where they can build upon acquired skills.  
• Pique curiosity.  Allow students to choose.  Appeal to their emotions.  Get visual.  Use their five senses.  Nobody dreads a research project more than a person who researches something that has no interest or connection to their lives whatsoever.  Brain research tells us negative feelings impede learning. Some of our kiddos go through their entire day with a negative outlook on school.  No wonder these kids make so little progress!

Really, I could go on and on about the research process, but I will quit now while I am ahead.  The chances of me discussing this same topic next week are pretty high, as I have begun an exciting research project with two seventh grade teachers and a retired library media specialist this week, and we are all pretty psyched so far with what we have done!  Research has never been more challenging for students, so our job as educators is to help them to use their current reading and writing skills to make the task easier.  This is a daunting challenge, but one that can be conquered with the proper planning.  

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.  

Social Studies inquiry - April 19 Crumble

As our seventh graders continued work on their biography projects this week, and I have moved into the eighth grade social studies classes.  I touch base with our biography-readers, and I've even been able to talk one into using Haiku Deck for his presentation rather than Power Point.  Unfortunately, after I got him started, I realized he can only access it on an iPad, but the project looks great!  This would be a nice app to use on our iPad cart, and it started me thinking about the possibility of checking out iPads from the library here.  It would have been great to allow him to do that for this project!  He seems to be enjoying it - partly because its on iPad and partly because it's cool and different.  Once he is finished, I will blog it so you can see the ease of this app.

So I spent most of my week with eighth graders.  Eighth graders have been given the task of creating a social history scrapbook to hit research targets for CCSS.  The project, itself, is big, but the entire task is really colossal - not unmanageable for a two-week project - but a big shock to our eighth graders.  Again, I am seeing an interesting phenomenon - the same trend that I saw with our seventh graders.  Give the kids a task (with good direction) and leave them alone.  They will do their best to complete the task. 

This is what has occured so far:

• Students were given directive on the entire project, including being given a grading rubric that included specifics on the final project as well as specifics on the expectations on the process.  All targets were aligned with Common Core Standards and explained at length.  I will touch on this again below, so keep this bullet point in mind.
• Students were also given direct instruction on citing sources by our Library Media Specialist.  She uses a spiral system where student expectations for citing increase sixth through eighth grade.  During this insruction each student (while working in pairs) also had an opportunity to try their hand at typing out a full citation in MLA style before being expected to write one on their own for the project. 
• Students were then given instruction on how to use the Q-Chart.  This time, instead of having students write their questions on the chart, they wrote them in their three-column-note sheet before they began their research.  The Q-Chart was used, then, to keep track of what types of questions they were asking.  Students were directed to put a check mark on the chart and try to spread out their question types so that they use a variety of questions.
• Finally, students were instructed to look for their topics and answers.

I am quite pleased with the process.  For three years we have been working on a functioning research technique, and we are getting to a point where we have one that we like.  As with everything, however, changes can be made to differentiate and make this an even more efficient procedure. 

I wish I had thought about conducting a mini-lesson on text features like I had done with the seventh grade biography-readers.  Not all of our students needed this, but a majority of them had trouble picking out main topics or even understanding that they should have main topics for their research.  They needed to have four influential people, four historical events, four science and technology breakthroughs, and four parts of daily life plus some other research.  Some students just started writing a bunch of questions about historical events, and their research was slim.  Once we sat with individual students and explained how to make their social studies text book work for them (use the timeline for important dates and the Important words and people at the beginning of each section to come up with influential people), some of them took off and never looked back!  I'm even wondering if perhaps I could have taken a group of the struggling readers off to a separate section of the library and worked with them on this task.  They were supposed to use their social studies text book to give them ideas for what to research in the era that they chose.  The picture below shows how some of the students organized their notes.  They were pretty extensive!

Another thing I wish I had done to differentiate for our students with higher skill level is to possibly pull them off and explain to them that the question-asking process might seem tedious to them because they sometimes skip that part and go right to finding answers.  Sometimes the answers come faster than the questions, so we were able to suggest to some of our kids that if they find information they want to include but have no question for it, include it and do a "jeopardy" - come up with the question afterwards. 

Something that our eight grade social studies teacher and I discussed a bit is the idea that when I am working with our struggling readers in small groups or one-on-one, they struggle so much with the texts we use for research - even when given a purpose for reading.  I found myself reading a paragraph out loud and stopping to paraphrase every few sentences (and looking up pictures online) because I would read and then ask if there were answers in what I read, and they would just stare at me with their eyes wide in the deer-in-headlights way.  One student, in particular, had self-awareness enough to be able to communicate that he had no idea what it was reading - even after chunking it into a few sentences at a time.  Why would this be?  Blam!  It hit me again.  I started breaking up sentences for them, and there were sometimes one out of every five words that I had to define!  Our kiddos need more words!

Some things that I am learning through this process:

• Come up with some ways to communicate expectations over and over again.  Going over the packet at the beginning creates an overwhelming sensation with the kids that causes them to tune out and focus on one thing: when is it due?  I think that, if I can work on this project again next year, I might suggest creating a website with expectations laid out along with pictures of what pages should look like.  That way the teacher can direct students to the website and continue to emphasize how things should look.  Using a blog or Google sites would work just fine for this. 
• Make a bigger effort to identify students who may struggle, and communicate better with the teacher so that we have a plan for these kiddos.  We had a surface plan early-on and identified the kids who would need help and modification, but I feel like I could have done a better job with support to them. 
• Identify checkpoints in the project for those who struggle with organization and reading.  Stick with those checkpoints.
• Know that I will be doing a lot of reading and paraphrasing to keep struggling readers on track with everybody else or modify the assignment even more than we had so that they can feel more independent with it.  By eighth grade I want them to feel a sense of accomplishment without having to have their hands held by anybody. 
• Be prepared to spend some time after school and during lunch with those who are panicking.  We allowed the kids to come in during the second week, but I'm wondering if perhaps I should have insisted that the struggling readers come in both weeks.  I noticed that after working with some the first few days one-on-one, they were asking to come in during lunch, PE, music, and any other class to work on their project.  I'm guessing if I had set aside 3 mornings where the kids worked from 8:45 until lunch I would have had a few takers.  By the last day, they're all panicking - except those who asked to come in early-on.

This project has been a hard wake-up call for many of our eighth graders, but it is something they needed to experience as they prepare to become freshmen.  I'm praying that they all take it seriously over the weekend and finish it because it is out of our hands after today.  I have heard rumors of large quantities of students from our school descending upon public libraries this weekend to create and print.  I hope the library has stocked upon their paper!  But this project has also reminded me of my love for research, and it makes me want to get some projects going on an ongoing basis next year (partly because I don't want to have everybody doing their research in April next year and partly because I haven't had this much fun in a while!), so start thinking of some ideas and ways that I can be used to support you in your planning and execution of your research next year.