Guiding Reading: A Necessity

I. Thinking on Your Feet

Here's the thing I don't quite grasp--why is guided reading so hotly debated and often debated by people who don't seem to actually teach? Now I admit that I get some of the problems folks have with 'guided reading' as there seems to be a lot of rules about book choices, book levels, lesson planning, length of lesson, and other dos and don'ts. These rules often obfuscate our role which gets lost among the clutter.

When we guide reading, we act as Vygotsky's more knowledgeable other, scaffolding readers' attempts at making meaning while problem solving.

It's a think on your feet role. It's privileged work.

Now, I'm not suggesting that it's easy to do. I get how comprehension is complex and anything human ups the complexity meter significantly.  I mean I just spent the better part of a week figuring out how I might engage middle and high school English teachers in Walter Kintsch's (1998) Construction and Integration Model (Comprehension: A Paradigm for Cognition) so that the theory can be embodied.  I just have to finish cutting 40 strips of paper, collect a bunch of scissors, pencils and tape so we can make, mark (center line or two parallel lines) and cut Möbius strips and use these to ground Kintsch's theory. 

Comprehension is rhizomatic.

Look,  anyone who uses a Magritte painting as the cover 

for his cognitive science text already has my attention.

II. The Possibility of Hope: Gaiman's Hansel and Gretel in 5th Grade

So I will be modeling a few guided reading lessons with intermediate grade students during the next few weeks.  I have decided to push at the boundaries of text selection by using books I think the students will love because they are catalysts for thinking.

That's my criteria. I want them to love books that help them to unlearn, unfix, unsettle.

As I have said in other posts, I am less concerned about text level or lexile level as all of these students are well past emergent and early reading stages. I'm more concerned about the quality of thought that the text they compose might occasion.

With some fifth graders, I am thinking that Neil Gaiman's (illustrated by Lorenzo Mattotti) newly published Hansel and Gretel looks so promising.  I plan to read it on Monday when a copy of the book arrives.

Here's how he opens the work:

I'm wondering what the group of students I have in mind ( I met them last Wednesday) will make of Gaiman's sparse language or the darkness of the illustrations or the dropped-cap letters in red--the only source of color.   How do these contrasts echo potential themes a reader might make from the work? Is form here an extension of content? What might this text suggest about love and its limitations and excesses?

Do we live, metaphorically, at the edge of the great forest?

There's so much waiting here for us. And that's the point.


III. Grade 3: Fireflies and the Price of Moonlight

With some amazing third graders I have taught for the last few years, I want to introduce them to Thoreau (they have learned to walk like Gandhi) and decided to pair D.B. Johnson's Henry's Night, with Julie Brinkloe's Fireflies.

Brinkloe's text chronicles a young boy's joy that comes from filling a jar with fireflies he has caught and then confronting a difficult and necessary choice he will make.

Johnson's text, the fifth in the Henry series, channels Henry David Thoreau as a bear whose restlessness one evening has him taking to the night (walking of course) with a jar of fireflies to light his way in search of an elusive bird.

What escapes us often interests us.

Both texts are beautifully written (lots of figurative language) and Johnson's angular art is as inviting as it is compelling. I'm curious as to what the children will make of each text and the effect from placing them side-by-side.  What might Henry think about the young boy's capture and release of fireflies? How might the young boy empathize with Henry's desire to find the whippoorwill--a night bird no one sees?

What stuff dreams are made of.

Composing Essay & Story in 2014: Are Kids Learning this At Your School?

Facing East (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

This is composing. Today.
This is what convincing essays look and sound like.
This is how they move.





Are you teaching multimodal composing at your school? 

Are your kids learning how to compose?  

Are they doing it despite school?

Below is a first grade horror film. It was created using Garageband, Photoshop, and Final Cut Pro. The story is based on Alvin Schwartz's "In a Dark, Dark Room." 

Tales from the Yard from Needleworks Pictures on Vimeo.

Teaching Writing: A Few Resources

Happiness Is The Longing for Repetition. (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

I. Repetition

I cannot imagine teaching writing without writing daily . Janna Malamud Smith writes:

I posit that life is better when you possess a sustaining practice that holds your desire, demands your attention, and requires effort; a plot of ground that gratifies the wish to labor and create—and, by so doing, to rule over an imagined world of your own. (Kindle Locations 66-67). 

How often do young leaners have the time and agency "to rule over an imagined world of your own"?

Steven Pressfield opens The War of Art by describing the rituals of his writing. He writes:

I get up, take a shower, have breakfast. I read the paper, brush my teeth. If I have phone calls to make, I make them. I've got my coffee now. I put on my lucky work boots and stitch up the lucky laces that my niece Meredith gave me. I head back to my office, crank up the computer. My lucky hooded sweatshirt is draped over the chair, with the lucky charm I got from a gypsy in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer for only eight bucks in francs, and my lucky LARGO name tag that came from a dream I once had. I put it on. On my thesaurus is my lucky cannon that my friend Bob Versandi gave me from Morro Castle, Cuba. I point it toward my chair, so it can fire inspiration into me. I say my prayer, which is the Invocation of the Muse from Homer's Odyssey, translation by T. E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia, which my dear mate Paul Rink gave me and which sits near my shelf with the cuff links that belonged to my father and my lucky acorn from the battlefield at Thermopylae . It's about ten-thirty now. I sit down and plunge in. When I start making typos, I know I'm getting tired. That's four hours or so. I've hit the point of diminishing returns. I wrap for the day. Copy whatever I've done to disk and stash the disk in the glove compartment of my truck in case there's a fire and I have to run for it. I power down. It's three, three-thirty. The office is closed. How many pages have I produced ? I don't care. Are they any good? I don't even think about it. All that matters is I've put in my time and hit it with all I've got. All that counts is that, for this day, for this session, I have overcome Resistance. (Kindle Locations 70-81)

WHAT I KNOW There's a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don't, and the secret is this: It's not the writing part that's hard. What's hard is sitting down to write. What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance. (Kindle Locations 82-84). 

What rituals do learners make inside of classrooms?  How might these rituals inform/become content we need to learn?

II.  Loss

An odd truth, perhaps, but writing like fine teaching, requires something to have been lost--something beyond our naming and what we think we know at the beginning.  It is in this losing that the work we craft is the work we become. This is not something I think you can learn easily from reading a book about writing.  Rather, it is work that requires more of you and the you you are becoming alongside others.

So before venturing on to the list below, if you are not already writing daily, I hope you will make time to do so.  Perhaps 10 minutes a day to start...

III. A Few Lists...Largely Arbitrary

A Few Books That Inspire Me to Look Closely (Really this list is arbitrary.  Perhaps substitute with those texts you cannot help but put down/pick up/put down/pick up/Turn towards and away... and so on)

Bateson, Mary Catherine. 2010. Composing a Further Life: The Age of Active Wisdom. New York: Knopf.
Berger, John & Jean Mohr. 2011. Another Way of Telling. New York: Vintage.
Berry, Wendell. 1996. The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture. Sierra Club Books.
Danticat, Edwidge. 2011. Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. New York: Vintage.
Diaz, Junot. 2012. This is How You Lose Her. New York: Riverhead.
Dillard, Annie. 2013. Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters, Revised Edition. New York: Perennial.
Gaiman Neil. 2013. The Ocean at the End of the Lane: Audio CD. New York: William Morrow. (I could listen to hime= read for weeks and weeks.)
Heaney, Seamus. 1997. The Spirit Level: Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 
Heaney, Seamus. 2011. Human Chain: Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 
hooks, bell. 1997. Bone Black: Memoirs of a Girlhood. New York: Holt.
Morrison, Toni. 2008. What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction. University Press of Mississippi.
Solnit, Rebecca. 2010. A Field Guide To Getting Lost. New York: Penguin.

A Few Books To Strengthen Your Own Art as Writer

King, Stephen. 2000. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. New York: Scribner.
Lamott, Anne. 2007. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. New York: Anchor Books.
Pressfield, Steven. 2011. The War of Art. New York: Black Irish Entertainment LLC.

A Few Books To Complicate Your Teaching Practices

Dyson, Anne Haas. 1993. Social Worlds of Children Learning to Write in Urban Primary Schools.New York: Teachers College Press.
Dyson, Anne Haas. 1997. Writing Superheroes: Contemporary Childhood, Popular Culture, and Classroom Literacy.New York: Teachers College Press.
****Dyson, Anne Haas.2013. ReWRITING the Basics: literacy Learning in Children's Cultures. New York: Teachers College Press.
Graves, Donald. 2003. Writing: Teachers and Children at Work –Twentieth Anniversary Edition. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Heard, Georgia and McDonough. 2009. A Place of Wonder. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

****Reading now.

Cited
Smith, Janna Malamud. 2012. An Absorbing Errand: How Artists and Craftsmen Make Their Way to Mastery. Berkeley, CA Counterpoint.

On Creating

Being creative takes work.




In writing about creating music, Keith Jarret says:

Each piece emerged out of a "zone." I have certain zones that I sit down with, a
given key, a given general mood. In that sense, there is an element of
preconception. From there, everything is new to me (although I generally work
within conventional, relatively simple harmonic movements). The music starts from
a seed, a few notes; it sprouts; arpeggios, textures and melodies develop; new leaves
appear; sometimes a theme or two from previous explorations of the same zone
appear; they're incorporated; new branches appear; everything expands and grows
and becomes fully developed — seeds, sprouts, branches, leaves, flowers in
profusion — then it concludes on its own. Sometimes it takes three minutes, or five,
sometimes ten or fifteen, whatever feels right. It's got a life of its own, which I
respect, cherish, and honor.

Edwidge Danticat (2011) writes this about creating:

I am even more certain that to create dangerously is also to create fearlessly, boldly embracing the public and private terrors that would silence us, then bravely moving forward even when it feels as though we are chasing or being chased by ghosts (p. 148).

On storytelling...




Steven Pressman (2010) offers this insight about creating:

Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It’s a gift to the world and every being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you’ve got. (Kindle Locations 1068-1069). 

On overcoming resistance:




Sir Ken Robinson (2001) asserts:


Human intelligence is essentially creative. We not only find meaning in the world, we interpret it through structures of ideas and beliefs. We each create the worlds we live in (Kindle Locations 2117-2119).

On creating...





Works Cited

Danticat, Edwidge (2011-09-20). Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

Pressfield, Steven (2010-10-11). The War Of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle. FastPencil PREMIERE. Kindle Edition.

Robinson, Ken (2001-06-15). Out of our Minds: Learning to be Creative.  John Wiley and Sons. Kindle Edition.

Part II Video: MTP - Shared Writing: - Writing and Rereading the Message in Kindergarten

This video features public school educator Margo Calderon conducting shared writing with kindergarten children in November of a school year. This is a math embedded problem she does with students using CLI's Message Time Plus format. In this section of the video, Margo writes a message (Math problem) in front of the children and they reread the message.

Digital Identities as Composition: Thinking about School

I. Composing Digitally

It's late evening when my son asks me to listen to something on his iPad.  The something turns into six different versions of the Elder Scrolls v. Skyrim. He shows me the different versions commenting on what he likes about each and how each is different.  His comments are specific and he speaks with confidence about the use of vocals in one version, the beauty of string violins in another, the simplicity of the piano version and tells me that another is more Baroque in style and that he thinks of himself as being a bit Baroque.  He then shows me a synthesia version explaining that the colors have tonal quality and how this helped him to compose Skyrim in Minecraft.

"I could see the music as colors."

Last week, he played his version of Skyrim in Minecraft for his dad and me.  He had composed the song using note blocks (singles and doubles) powered by redstone circuits and is now editing a screencast of him playing the song. This is a complicated process as the note blocks are visually spaced to represent the time signature: the distance between blocks is equal to each note's duration. Each note block represents a sound and can be layered to represent multiple notes played simultaneously.

Hartmann's Hut of Baba Yaga

He next played the Promenade from Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition and told me that he planned to compose this as well in Minecraft and do so for me for Mother's Day.  He located a synthesia version and played it and explained that this would help him to compose. Delighted, I thought how the mother's day card evolves. 

II. Composing At School

My son is not a musician by the standard measure. He does not take music lessons although he did for a year (trumpet). He does not play in the school band. He does not have music this year at school.  He hears really well though and he knows how to teach himself by watching related YouTube videos, reading Minecraft wikis, and asking for help from those with whom he interacts with online on his server and in other gaming environments.  He also knows the power of pull (Hagel III, Brown & Davison, 2010).

Hagel III, Brown & Davison explain three levels of pull:

"At the most basic level, pull helps us to find and access people and resources when we need them. At a second level, pull is the ability to attract people and resources to you that are relevant and valuable, even if you were not even aware before that they existed. Think here of serendipity rather than search. Finally, in a world of mounting pressure and unforeseen opportunities, we need to cultivate a third level of pull—the ability to pull from within ourselves the insight and performance required to more effectively achieve our potential. We can use pull to learn faster and translate that learning into rapidly improving performance, not just for ourselves, but for the people we connect with—a virtuous cycle that we can participate in" (pp. 9-10).

How is 'pull' being allowed and leveraged at school?  How are we altering school definitions of composing to include aspects of pulling (access, attraction, and achievement) and digital work?   How are we investigating the cognitive and social processes our children are using when they compose these digital works inside gaming worlds, as screencasts, as code, as how-to videos, as art works, as photographic works, as remixes? How do we understand the back story that informs the work?   How are we reconciling the 19th century school with digital learners who show up at the school door having composed multiple digital identities? How are we addressing immense equity issues for our learners who cannot show up at the school door having accessed significant hours of online leaning?

III. Composing Identities

We are always composing versions of ourselves.  Research by Sénéchal and LeFevre (2002) indicates that home literacy experiences contribute substantially to children’s success in learning to read.  These home literacy experiences are formed by the frequency and quality of talk between children and parents and the consistent engagement with literacy habits that are privileged (playing word and song games; singing; reading to children; having books, magazines, newspapers, e-readers, computers in use in the home; having available and in use different types of writing materials; listening to nursery rhymes and so on) in the home and at school.  These experiences form identities that inform how children function at school and how they are recognized by teachers.  These children show up at the school door speaking and acting with the school Discourse quite in hand.

The home literacy practices that Sénéchal and LeFevre discussed in 2002 were quite comfortable for our school worlds as they mimicked literacy values of the school.  As literacies are fluid and changing, the way we understand them at school must also continue to evolve.  And this is a conundrum worth thinking about.  There is an increasing gulf between what we value at school as learning and what the connected child experiences as valued learning outside of school.  Likewise there is a troubling gulf between the child who is connected and the one who is not.  The play and work inside digital networks (in)forms and is (in)formed by our emerging sense of identity.  To what end are we considering digital identities as compositions worthy of teaching at school?

Bon Stewart (@bonstewart) has a terrific post about digital identities, "Digital Identities: Six Key Selves of  Networked Publics" that I would recommend reading.  She outlines six key selves that emerge via participation in networked publics (Note: all quotes are taken from the Stewart's blog post):

1. The Performative, Public Self: "The networked self is linked in multiple, complex, individual node-to-node relationships with others as part of an ever-shifting public."
2. The Quantified – or Articulated – Self: "...our network contacts are visible and articulated, and our actions and contributions are quantified."
3. The Participatory Self: "within my networks I am both a creator of my own content but also a consumer of that which my peers produce and share. My relationships are groomed by the constant iterative work of participation, and my comfort with working in isolation towards a final product – as was the paper model of creative work – recedes in the rear-view mirror."
4. The Asynchronous Self: "Digital sociality practices and networked publics moved increasingly towards asynchronous mediated communications, rather than the interruptive, immediate demands of telephones."
5. The PolySocial – or Augmented Reality – Self:"...digital identities not as virtual selves, but as particular subjects brought into being by our relational, mobile interactions in the world of bits and extending into the world of atoms."
6. The Neo-Liberal, Branded Self: "Our social networking platforms are increasingly neo-liberal “Me, Inc” spaces where we are exhorted to monetize and to 'find our niche.'"

In thinking about Stewart's six key selves (also acts of composing and being composed, yes?), I wonder what are we doing locally, nationally and globally to guide children who are connected to understand the selves they compose and are composed by?  What are we doing locally, nationally and globally to address the enormous equity issues most felt by children who are not connected? I want to urge that we resist categorizing composing as simply a matter of ink to paper as is most commonly done at school.  This is simply no longer a sufficient definition.  I am not devaluing ink to paper, but do want us to consider that composing is much, much larger and via the Internet, the social aspects of composition along with the modes of composition become increasingly important, dynamic, risky, confusing, and collaborative.  The selves Stewart outlines is not limited to adults. Our children who participate in networked publics are composing and being composed. Should this not be essential school-based literacies as well?

So let me close with a challenge: Take a walk around the school where you work.  Notice how composing is being defined by the work children produce and the work that is displayed.  I tend to do these walks with my phone in hand. A picture says so much, yes?

I'd love to hear about what you find...


Works Cited:

Brown, John Seely; Davison, Lang; Hagel III, John (2010-02-23). The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion. Perseus Books Group. Kindle Edition.
Sénéchal, M., & LeFevre, J. (2002). Parental involvement in the development of children's reading
skill: A five-year longitudinal study. Child Development, 73, 445–460.

Imagining A to Z: C is for Compose Walking Poems

C is for Compose Walking Poems

What you Need:

1. Yourself.
2. A recorder and cameras that can be found on a smartphone.
3. The app, Videolicious (You can see a demo movie I made at the bottom of the blog).
4. A walk.

Method

1. Take yourself out for the day with your smart phone in hand.
2. Deeply notice as you walk. 
3. Make images of what catches your eye, your ear. Be spontaneous. Playful.
4. Take a moment to notice what you have captured on your phone and think about how these disparate images and noticings might come together.
5. Make a 30-second poem that you videotape yourself reading based on your wandering. I use the Videolicious app for this.
6. Asssemble all of it using Videolicious or another app of your choice (Animoto, etc.)
7. Upload and share.

A bit of inspiration from Rainer Maria Rilke:

A Walk

My eyes already touch the sunny hill.
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has inner light, even from a distance-

and charges us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are; a gesture waves us on
answering our own wave...
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.


Translated by Robert Bly

Note: In this series of post during the month of April, I am participating in the A to Z blogging challenge, with each day focusing on a letter.  In order to bring some cohesion to this process--releasing the imagination is the focus of each post.