Advocating for our Strugglers and Teaching Them to Do the Same for Themselves

Since I began really digging into this vocabulary issue, my eyes are opening to the idea that we are not just talking about the typical reading struggles, but a much more serious deficit in oral vocabulary.  So where do I start?  That has been my question all week, and if you read last week's blog on expressive and receptive vocabulary, you know why. And now that we have established that the issue is no longer just about reading but about speaking and listening - we ALL get to participate!

I had the chance to pull out four more students for vocabulary screening tests over this past week.  Because I've been so busy, I only completed two.  I plan to pull the other two next week to finish that testing before I bring their scores to our Tier 2/3 team.

One student has been on the fence with me since she was in sixth grade.  Her progress was minimal, at best, and yet I felt like when I made more contact with her she seemed to do better than when I left her alone.  We worked hard during her sixth grade year to move over the humps of phonics and fluency.  Our seventh grade hurdle was finding reading material that she would actually READ.  Oh, this was ridiculous!  I will forever remember this girl as one of my most difficult in terms of matching her with a book, but in some way we ended up hooking her up with the Miki Falls series by Mark Crilley (which she inhaled) and then branched her out bit by bit.  Currently, she is an eighth grader and has gotten her hands on the Perfect Chemistry series by Simone Elkeles (on of my all-time FAVORITE love stories, because I'm kind of a love story lunatic).  Although we do not house this series in our middle school library, our eighth grade girls (and some boys) always seem to end up with it in their hands before year-end.  Simone has been so kind as to send me a stack of very cool posters (autographed by her) with pics of the (adorable) three main characters.  When I have a kiddo who is THIS into that series, I always award them a poster when they finish it.  It's a motivator for our girls, anyway. I digress.  Anyway, I ran the vocab screener on this student.  She fell within the two middle quartiles.  Relatively average, although when I looked at her scores, the range seemed low, but I'm not familiar enough with the testing to make that determination, so I'm going to have our speech path take a gander at the numbers as well to help me interpret them and make the best use of the data.  This student, however, I know has some major motivation issues.  I just need to figure out the source.  For right now, she goes into my "not scary" pile for vocabulary screeners.

I had a request from a science teacher to move another student who has come up as a concern. She's a good student.  Quiet.  Hard working.  Grades are okay.  Normally, she wouldn't be one that would rise to the top of our "concerns" pile, but I've been digging around for kiddos, and her name surfaced due to lack of progress in the READ180 program and a concern that she needed support in science and social studies.  So I screened her.  Her numbers came up at close to the bottom of the middle two quartiles.  Low.  Hers went into the "scary" pile.  I've got at least one more that will go in there once I finish her testing because her receptive testing was at the bottom of the average range, and her expressive seems like it is going to be much, much lower.

Our speech pathologist got me thinking a lot last week when we discussed these kiddos.  I usually have strategies in my back pocket for a majority of reading issues, concerns, and supports, but I've got empty pockets on this one.  The idea that I could be working with small groups of kiddos who are potentially tens of thousands of words behind their on-grade-level peers scares me so much!  It's like looking at our kitchen and trying to figure out where to start cleaning it after a Lambert Thanksgiving! The situation is daunting, at best.

But one thing our speech path said stuck out to me.  It was the idea that we need to teach these students to advocate for themselves because self-advocacy will help them immediately, whereas vocabulary-building will come with lots of time and work.  In other words, we need to teach them to ask for clarification.  Because we are working with eleven to fourteen-year-olds (and an occasional fifteen or sixteen-year-old), they need some "right now" strategies.  Much easier said than done.  Here are the immediate setbacks of this idea:

• Most of the kiddos I pull out for testing don't have a clue that they need support.  This is just life for them, and they don't get that things would be a whole heck-of-a-lot easier if somebody would open up their brain and pour in a Webster's Dictionary.  This is that whole fixed versus growth mindset.  It is cultural.  How do we bring our students who are currently in this fixed mindset (thinking that this is just the way things are) to a growth mindset where they feel like they can make some changes to their situation and feel successful more often?
• Many of the students I'm identifying are ELL.  If you remember from my blog over the summer on reaching our social students, we are looking at a variety of cultures sitting in front of us daily, and those who come from a more collectivist culture are taught not to bring attention to themselves in class - which includes asking for clarification.  What we are now asking these students to do is go against everything they've been taught socially by their parents so that they can succeed academically.  Not an easy request!  It's family-first for many of these kids, which means what I teach them about helping themselves may fall upon deaf ears if it goes against what Mom and/or Dad has taught.
• This is middle school, and asking for clarification is uncool.  If you're caught looking even remotely interested in academics, there is a stigma attached to your efforts.  Asking questions is often out of the question.  

So in an effort to approach this with a growth mindset myself, I went hunting for some things I can do as a reading specialist to start working with some of these kiddos (and their teachers).  My search is most definitely NOT over. This is just the beginning as I start scratching the surface on my increasing pile of students who lack receptive and expressive vocabulary.  Here are some goals I've set for myself for 2014.

• Identify groups of students who would benefit from small group "self-advocacy" and "oral vocabulary building" instruction. This is going to require a lot of work on my part because each time I give the test, it takes twenty to thirty minutes to administer.  For one student.  
• Identify appropriate times in the school day for this small group instruction (Working with social studies teachers to use social studies material as a springboard for this instruction is one idea that I have discussed with our district reading coordinator).
• Reach out to teachers with specific student names and specific data to illustrate the need to be sensitive to the way instruction is given in the classroom setting.
• Give teachers specific strategies and behaviors that they can begin using in the classroom to better support our increasing numbers of students who have fallen into this linguistic abyss (for example, rewording directions even if nobody asks for clarification or creating a visual or demonstration of the directions aside from just giving them orally).
• Continue to look for researched strategies to use for older students.  There's a lot of research there on building expressive and receptive vocabulary with preschoolers and younger elementary kiddos, but once they get into the middle levels, the research and strategies taper off.  To me, its scary.  
• And you have the motivation piece to factor in - because, by this age, many of them are feeling pretty unsuccessful, and to ask them to stick their necks out and try again is asking a LOT.  What can we do to motivate them?  I need more motivation strategies!
• Buy stock in Kleenex because I feel like I'm going to be doing a lot of crying over all of this in the next year.

So there you have it.  Nothing.  Not a strategy that is even close to useful, I'm afraid.  Just a lot of unanswered questions and vague goals.  But my direction this week is more clear than it was last week, and by next week I am hoping to hone in on some strategies that I can start whipping out at you so that YOU have some ideas in your pocket you can use.  So stay tuned as I detective my way through some of your kiddos to figure out what their issues are.  I figure if I dig far enough eventually I'm going to uncover something we can use!

Why do many of our English Language Learners suffer in our system?

I'm wondering when my reading specialist colleagues are going to stop answering text messages and emails from me with the subject "vocabulary".  They have to be sick of my ranting by now because I've been beating that poor dead horse all year, and it seems that I'm only beating harder nowadays.  But this time I'm backing up my rants with some real data. 

For two years, I've suspected that vocabulary is at the root of our issues for many of our kiddos, but vocabulary is such a vast and general topic, and I'd never been satisfied with any assessment that I'd seen for vocabulary.  As it currently stands, there's the most commonly accepted Three-Tier Model for reading vocabulary: Tier 1 vocabulary (sight words), Tier 2 vocabulary (academic vocabulary), and Tier 3 vocabulary (content-area vocabulary).  Project CRISS's fourth edition manual now includes a Four-Level Model that, in no way, aligns with the Tiers, but the tiers would absolutely fit into the four levels (mostly academic and/or content-specific vocabulary).  Level 1 critical words are words that must be pre-taught before reading.  Level 2 words are important but do not require a lot of pre-teaching time.  The third level are words that are important, but they are clear in the text and do not require preteaching.  Finally, level 4 words are words that are not necessary to be taught to students before, during, or after.  As an educator, I make automatic assumptions that vocabulary-building means words that you read, right? Well, after this week I have begun to wonder if maybe I had it all wrong from the beginning.

With all of these categories and ways to approach vocabulary, why do we struggle so much once we hit this roadblock in reading?  We seem to have all of the answers for phonemic awareness, phonics, and fluency, but yet when it comes to vocabulary - the answers come in all shapes and sizes, and yet none seem to be fitting for so many of our middle schoolers.  Most of us skip considering vocabulary as a major issue because we assume that we are covering it when we teach content or literature-specific words, and when our kiddos test below level in comprehension, we push comprehension strategies, not vocabulary (in my case because I thought I had already covered it).  But what happens when you have a student who started life speaking a different language (in the case of most of our ELLs - Spanish)?  Maybe she began learning English at the age of six.  Imagine all of those important first-words that she missed and then had to learn!  How many years do you think it takes to catch up in a new language?  And how does that impact her at the age of thirteen?  Research tells us that each year our students absorb thousands of new words, but what if you don't start learning them until age six or seven?

So a few months back I remembered an assessment from my graduate work in reading that I wanted to try - one that targets oral vocabulary, specifically.  Although I was unable to get my hands on that specific assessment (the Peabody), our speech pathologist had something very similar for both receptive and expressive vocabulary.  I spent some time skimming through these two assessments and decided to give them a shot with one of our eighth graders (let's call him Tito) who has been through just about every Tier 2 intervention we offer.  At this point in the year, I begin to panic when nothing is working because I know that my time is limited with our almost-freshmen, and I need to act quickly to pinpoint a solution.

What I found did not surprise me one bit with this kiddo, and my former hypothesis that oral vocabulary is at the root of many of our English Language Learners' reading struggles sprung to life again with all sorts of questions attached to it.  Tito's scores on both the receptive and expressive vocabulary tests were in the very low average and below average range.  During the receptive vocabulary testing (where he had to identify pictures that best matched the words that I gave him), his responses came quickly.  However, the expressive vocabulary assessment was almost painful - he took so much time trying to formulate words for the pictures that at one point I wondered if he had forgotten that he was supposed to give an answer!  In several instances he finally gave up and said, "I don't really know."  Also, at times when the answers were incorrect, Tito's response was a short phrase description of the actual word.  It was obvious he was trying his best to express himself correctly every time.

I then started to formulate a list of questions that I will be pondering over the next few months:

• What can I do, as a reading specialist, to help close the gap for these ELLs who fall under the RtI umbrella?  It is my responsibility to "catch them up" in reading, and yet I'm not trained to develop tens of thousands of missing pieces in oral vocabulary.  This is the most loaded question and very general, so then I started to get specific.
• Will testing more of our ELLs produce the same information?
• How do these gaps effect their performance in their content area classes?
• What can I do to communicate this information to our staff?
• How can I support our students who are lacking in oral and aural vocabulary so that they can be more successful?
• What strategies work best for middle level students who have significant gaps in expressive and receptive vocabulary?
• Within the confines of our current schedule, when can we work on these gaps?
• How can my speech path (who is AWESOME, by the way) and I work together to make a plan, even though she is tied mostly to her students with IEPs?
• Who else can help? (I have already talked to our speech pathologist who gave me some ideas, a bilingual reading specialist, and gotten an email from a former colleague who is hoping to help me use some resources to which she has access, and I'm super excited about all of it!)
• At what point do I stop digging? Because I'm exhausted and exhilarated at the same time.  Although the screeners are just screeners, so are our comprehension, fluency, and phonics screeners - but you have to start somewhere, and the fact that both of Tito's tests came out just a few points from each other tells me that we do, indeed, have a problem.  

By next weekend, I hope to have a few more students assessed so I can report on how those went.  I have chosen three more students (three eighth graders and a repeat seventh grader) on which to complete testing. Once I get that done, my next step is to consult with our other reading specialists on this and formulate a plan of action after we put our resources together.

For now, friends, the next time you stand in front of your class and register that you have ten students who appear to have zoned off, take a moment to evaluate how you speak to your class.  The trick is to support them all without "dumbing it down".  The last thing we want to do is to stop exposing them to rich academic vocabulary, but know that if you do that without rephrasing and supporting, many of your kiddos may not have the skills to even understand the words that come out of your mouth.  A few years back I had this exact conversation with a respected social studies colleague who admitted that she hadn't considered that her vocabulary choice when instructing her students would impact their performance in class.  Also, we often think that if we read the text to our kiddos it will make a difference (and it sometimes does!), but imagine trying to keep up with an instructor who spoke to you in words so difficult that you often couldn't understand him, no matter what strategies you used.  What would you do?  I know what I would do, and it certainly wouldn't be to pay more attention and take more notes.  And yet this is often the answer just about every student gives when we ask them what they think they can do to improve themselves - even those who struggle due to language . . .

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).

Thanksgiving . . .

In an effort to be very cliché, I thought I'd triple post this week and talk about being thankful.  I forget how thankful I am for things on a daily basis, so it's really a good thing that we HAVE Thanksgiving each year.  Otherwise I'm pretty sure I'd forget to be thankful at all - life just moves too quickly.

To start, I'm thankful for the opportunity to be a middle school reading specialist - for the district who had vision enough to understand that the job of a reading specialist has to move past our elementary schools and seep into secondary education.  A step up from that is my current building administration and their vision for reading intervention and the faith that they have in my decisions as a reading specialist.  I'm given freedom to create my own schedule and use my time in a way that I feel will allow me to impact the most students in the time that we have each day.  They listen to my ideas for improvement and do their best to accommodate those ideas.  When I ask for a schedule change on a student, it is never challenged, and I know it is because my judgment is respected and trusted by those who make those final decisions.

I'm also eternally grateful for the staff who have come forward to be part of our intervention team.  Without this group of tireless teachers, there is no way we could impact over 200 (out of 800) students each day the way that we do.  Not only do we have language arts teachers working intervention classes and running homeroom interventions, but we have had science, social studies, and fine arts teachers step forward as well!  They're eager to learn and to help out, and they're candid with their feedback, which allows for positive change.

Those teachers and staff who have offered to help progress monitor our 140+ students who need to be monitored in either fluency or comprehension are the next on my list.  Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.  Because of you, I only have to run assessments on forty-five students every two weeks for fluency and about fifty in comprehension every six weeks.  It's still a lot, but imagine if I DIDN'T have your help!

I am grateful for those of you who have trusted me enough to invite me into your classrooms, collaborate with you, discuss specific students, or brainstorm strategies to target groups of students.  Your classrooms are the reason I have loved this job.  You allow me to provide support to you and your students AND you allow me to learn from you.  Thank you.

Finally, I am grateful for the kiddos I reach every day.  Each mini-success provides me with the confidence and will to move forward in this time of great change in education.  I have loved (yes, I said love) hundreds of children in the last seventeen years, and one of the greatest gifts a teacher can have is to run into one from ten years ago and see that I might have had some impact on where that adult is today.  There is no greater gift than that.

So that's all I'm going to say on this topic, as I kind of feel like I've just "social media"-ified my blog.  But, hey, I'm feeling in the spirit, and I promise a professional post will come sometime over the long weekend!  Happy Turkey Day, all!

Sixth Grade Wit

I don't usually post stories about kids, but I couldn't resist telling this one from today.  I spent four periods in a sixth grade language arts classroom today with an amazing colleague, as we prepared her students for a Save the Last Word listening and speaking activity.  Every time I do this, I always start with asking students about their own lives - how they use speaking and listening as a kid.  We get all sorts of answers - from talking to parents, teachers, and friends to ordering food at a restaurant or translating from English to Spanish or visa versa.  This is the first year, however, that we had a few students tell us that one of the ways they use their speaking skills is to just be annoying. 

You could tell that these two kiddos thought their answer was hilarious as they slapped each other a high five and went on and on about how they wanted to just be annoying . . . I will decline to comment on this except to say that we did our best to move on and ignore the behavior.

But when it came down to discussing how these lists would change in ten years, one of their witty female classmates countered them quickly.  She raised her hand properly, and when called on, she responded, "Maybe when we are twenty-one we can take 'be annoying' off the list because by that time we would have matured." 

I don't think she realized how funny my colleague and I thought this was because she wasn't laughing, but inside I chalked one up for her, smiled, and thanked her for her answer.

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!

Vocabulary Unit 6 - "Selfie Culture"

Here is the next vocabulary unit I finished today for our intervention SLC classes!  Enjoy!

Unit 6
"Selfie Culture" article
Mystery Word Bubbles
Jeopardy Game (if you can't get this to work properly, email me, and I will email you a copy or upload it and share it from my dropbox)
Jeopardy answers