Network Improvement Communities: Teaching, Researching, and Designing Learning in Newark

Making Meaning with Paint (Robert Treat Academy Central, 2013)

I. Entering

It has been a most amazing year.  I am finally catching my breath and wanted to take some time here to discuss the work my company, Blueprints for Learning, has done with teachers, administrators, students and parents in Newark, NJ and what that work means.

This year we partnered with 7 schools in Newark focusing on K-2 literacy at four of the schools, K-8 mathematics and K-8 literacy at two of the schools, and 6-8 literacy at one school.  On every measure schools used, children at our partner school sites were able to demonstrate very significant gains in literacy and mathematics.  The vast majority of children at all of our sites will enter the next school year having met or exceeded all school and district benchmarks.

So what went right?



II. Working in Network Learning Communities

A principal and teachers from different schools work together to dramatize a scene from
a Barry Lopez essay. (Newark, 2013)

First, we have no set program, but we did create relationships with our clients.  It is in the context of these relationships that community knowledge was made. Making community knowledge allowed us to understand our work as flawed, flexible and (in)formed by emerging situations.  We revised our work so often that we understood this behavior as essential to creating conditions where effective learning most often happens. Alongside community knowledge, commitment arose. (I suspect community knowledge and commitment are co-specifying).

Administrators and third grade teachers from different
sites working together. (Newark, 2013)

One observation an assistant superintendent in the city made that I most prized was that everyone from Blueprints spoke with teachers and children with great respect and clarity.  I imagine this occurred a a norm because we experienced teachers, administrators and children as partners.  These partnerships allowed us to frame and respond to emerging situations.  Because we worked across 7 sites within a city, we also were able to leverage the power of that network, which formed and remade itself as different alliances and commitments grew.  The dynamic nature of network improvement communities allowed us to situate our work in the middle of learning spaces as teachers, researchers, learners, and designers.  I think here David Weinberger's observation that "...in a networked world, knowledge lives not in books or in heads but in the network itself" (p. 45).

Jal Mehta (2013) in The Allure of Order: High Hopes, Dashed Expectations, and the Troubled Quest to Remake American Schooling writes about network improvement communities (Bryk & Gomez, 2008) as promising practices in education improvement.  He says:

Here the idea is to bring together local practitioners, researchers, and commercial designers around a set of shared objectives and across a number of networked schools. Rather than stage the process in the usual way (first research, then policy, then implementation), researchers, practitioners, and designers work together in real time to develop, adapt, and revise knowledge to solve a problem of practice across a variety of institutions. Learning takes place at three levels: the classroom, the school, and across the network. This model is particularly promising because it expands upon the more familiar idea of individual “learning organizations” and provides a process by which we could capture and adapt knowledge across a diverse network of schools" (5342-5343). 

Teachers observe as a kindergarten teacher teaches
a high intensity literacy lesson to her students.
(McKinley Elementary School, Newark, 2013)

Rather than understand emerging conditions as being uni-dimensional (i.e., a reading problem, teacher x's problem) and solely the 'problem' or 'practice' of a school, classroom, teacher, or child--we were able to understand these situations through a variety of lenses as networked intelligence informed our understanding. This led us to routinely create occasions that situated consultants, administrators, researchers, authors, and teachers from different places alongside one another. This juxtaposition allowed all of us to better learn and problem frame and solve.

III. Looking Toward

As we think about next year, we will privilege designing ongoing occasions where learners (that would be all of us) connect, contextualize, collaborate and create in more idiosyncratic ways with one another, as well as with others beyond the city.  At a workshop I conducted during the last week of school, I was so pleased to hear teachers and administrators in attendance getting one another's email so that they could stay in touch and work together during the summer and next year.  They valued one another's work.  For next year I have tentatively designed the opportunity for 300+ educators to learn in cross-school PLCs focusing on mathematics and literacy instruction.

I'll let you know what emerges from that invitation...



Work Cited
Mehta, Jal (2013-04-02). The Allure of Order: High Hopes, Dashed Expectations, and the Troubled Quest to Remake American Schooling (Studies in Postwar American Political Development). Oxford University Press, USA. Kindle Edition.

Weinberger, David (2012-01-03). Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest People. Perseus Books Group. Kindle Edition.

Increasing Comprehension During Independent Reading

2nd grader independently reading with a flashlight. (Newark, NJ. 2014)

Please note: This post is based on a chapter for three upcoming e-books that explicate how to increase learner knowledge and comprehension through read alouds and independent reading at grades 3, 4 and 5. I am in the process of writing these books and they will be available through iTunes.

Important Research on Independent Reading

In addition to developing children’s knowledge through reading aloud quality texts--ones that students would likely not be able to read on their own--independent reading is also essential.  The volume of reading children do matters as volume helps to build stamina and content knowledge.  When considering independent reading we will want to keep two things in mind:

1. We will want to teach children how to name and explore topics of interest. 
2. We will want to ensure that children can find texts that reflect those interests.  

We will also want to know explicitly which methods of independent reading work best at increasing students’ comprehension of text. What are the best uses of independent reading time? This was the question that researchers studied in order to determine which practices yielded the mist significant increases in comprehension. Cathy Collins Block, Sheri Parris, Kelly Reed, Cinnamon Whitely and Maggie Cleveland (2009) concluded: 

The highest comprehension scores for all populations occurred through three approaches. When struggling readers received 20 min of instruction with 1 of these 3 approaches, their literacy growth was equal to or greater than that of their peers. Implications are that treatments using classroom books produced significantly higher comprehension scores than workbook practice or extending basal treatments.

The approaches they studied included:

1. Workbook practice (meaning pages of practice containing short passages) 
2. Individualized schema-based learning (meaning that the teacher circulated in the room and had mini-conferences with students, providing one-on-one support with a three-step strategy of praising the student, doing a quick re-teach and/or think aloud, and then returning to check back in with the student later on) 
3. Situated practice (meaning that students were asked to use their independent reading to practice the skill that had been taught during the whole-class lesson) 
4. Conceptual learning (meaning that students choose two non-fiction books on the same topic and read them back-to-back, and use that to answer higher-order questions) 
5. Transactional learning (meaning students read a teacher-chosen book related to a thematic topic the class had been studying and then had a 5-minute class discussion) 
6. Traditional instruction (meaning the control condition where students simply read out of the basal reader for 20 minutes) 

The three best practices that produced significantly higher comprehension scores were:

1. individualized schema-based learning, 
2. conceptual learning,
3. transactional learning. 

The three shared these features:

1. allowing student choice of books to be read for guided independent reading practice,  
2. the reading of more than seven pages of continuous text from fiction or nonfiction classroom books, and 
3. 15–20 min of silent reading that contained specific teacher actions.

Individualized Schema Based Instruction: Recalling Detail

One way you can maximize the reading aloud lessons is to scaffold students use of strategies they learned during the read aloud  lesson with their independent reading in order for them to problem solve at points of difficulty and to delve deeply into the text. Fifth grade teacher Rich Kleine demonstrates  this in the video in the next page. Watch as Rick circulates in the room and has mini-conferences with students, providing one-on-one support with a three-step strategy of praising the student, doing a quick re-teach and/or think aloud, and then returning to check back in with the student later on. In this portion of the film we watch Rick as he confers with a student about word knowledge and reinforces a reading goal he has established with the student. Individualized Schema Based instruction produced the greatest gains for recalling details.

Conceptual Learning: Main Idea

Conceptual learning is silent reading of two student-selected, same topic, nonfiction books that are read back to back. The researchers found that  

when students read two nonfiction books on the same subject back to back, they become stronger at finding main ideas (p. 278).

Creating classroom libraries that contain multiple expository titles about the same topic is important so that students are able to read two texts about the same topic back to back and have choice while doing so. In the Year of Wonder project I am doing with Jazleen Othman, an elementary teacher at Park Elementary School in Newark, NJ--students have spent the last few weeks immersed in the study of Charles Darwin and adaptations. I began the project by reading aloud Jason Chin's Island: A Story of the Galápagos and the students, Jazleen and I worked hard to make sense of how some of the finches adapted and produced larger-billed finches.  Through dramatic tableaux, students retold the story the next week and instead of continuing the read aloud, Jazleen and I provided students with a collection of books that they worked together in small groups and pairs to read. 

The books included:

• Campbell, Eileen & Judy Rand. (2011). Charlie and Kiwi: An Evolutionary Adventure. Illustrated by Peter H. Reynolds. New York: Atheneum.  This is a link to the website, Charlie & Kiwi’s Evolutionary Adventure, that accompanies the book.  (The students loved the website!)
• Gibbons, Alan. (2008). Lifeline: Charles Darwin. Illustrated by Leo Brown. New York: Henry Holt.
• Jenkins, Steve. (2002). Life on Earth: The Story of Evolution. New York: Houghton MIfflin.
• Lasky, Kathryn. (2009). One Beetle Too Many: The Extraordinary Adventures of Charles Darwin. Illustrated by Matthew Trueman. Cambridge, MA: Candlewick. 
• Loxton, Daniel. (2010). Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be. Tonawanda, NY: Kids Can Press.
• McGinty, Alice B. (2009). Darwin: With Glimpses into His Private Journal & Letters. Illustrated by Mary Azarian. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. 
• Pringle, Lawrence. (2011). Billions of Years Ago Amazing Changes: The Story of Evolution. Honesdale, PA: Boyds Mill Press.
• Schanzer, Rosalyn. (2009). What Darwin Saw: The Journey that Changed the World. Washington D.C.: National Geographic.
• Weaver, Anne H. (2007). The Voyage of the Beetle. Illustrated by George Lawrence. University of New Mexico Press.
• Wood, A.J. and Clint Twist. (2009). Charles Darwin and the Beagle Adventure. Templar.

We scaffolded the reading as needed and students had been immersed in reading and writing nonfiction based on their interests for the prior month.

Transactional Learning: Summarizing

Transactional Learning is silent reading of a fictional text related to a thematic unit followed by a brief  group  discussion of the text. Transactional learning produced the greatest gains for summarizing. The researchers clarify how transactional learning occurred during the study:

In the current study, transactional learning occurred when students read teacher selected fiction classroom books related to a thematic unit under study. After reading, students conversed about how the information in each book tied to the theme and could be applied to their lives. This learning environment replicated thematic units that included independent silent reading of classroom books and a class discussion following the reading of these books (p. 264).

James Britton (1970) told us that “All learning floats on a sea of talk” (p. 164).  Creating the conditions where students can engage in meaningful discussion is important. Teaching students specific discussion protocols and strategies can greatly help them to build ideas with each other. Above is a slideshare containing information about ten different discussion protocols that is based on this work of Stephen Brookfield and Stephen Preskill. 

Block, Parris, Reed, Whiteley and Cleveland (2009) concluded that:

silent reading periods appear to need teacher monitoring so that students’ questions can be answered as soon as they arise and students can be held accountable for what they read through teacher-led discussions relative to a general theme (p. 279).

Works Cited

Block, C.C., Parris, S.R., Reed, K.L., Whiteley,C.S. and M.D. Cleveland. (2009). Instructional approaches that significantly increase reading comprehension. Journal of Educational Society, 101 (2), 262-281.

Britton, J. (1970). Language and learning. Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press.

Brookfield, Stephen D. and Preskill, Stephen (2009-05-18). Discussion as a Way of Teaching: Tools and Techniques for Democratic Classrooms (Jossey Bass Higher and Adult Education). John Wiley and Sons. Kindle Edition. 

A Year of Wonder - A New Project and Book

A fifth grader conducting some research.

I am super excited to announce that I am beginning an in-school project with fourth and fifth graders, their ESL teacher, Jazleen Othman, and their principal, Sylvia Esteves from Park Elementary School in Newark, NJ that will result in a book proposal and hopefully a completed book (tentative title: A Year of Wonder: Composing Disciplinary Knowledge through Engagements with Text). The project aims to increase and complicate children's disciplinary knowledge through engagements (think multimodal) with read aloud and independent texts that are consumed and produced.  For some time I have been designing collections of read aloud texts that are coupled together based on important theories, such as evolution.  I am wondering what might happen if the read aloud selections and engagements across a school year were strategically determined and negotiated based on a desire to develop and complicate disciplinary knowledge by dwelling in wonder.

For the last few weeks I have had the pleasure of learning with Ms. Othman and her fabulous fourth and fifth grade children who are so very bright and curious. The children, Ms. Othman and Ms. Esteves have expressed interest in the project and so we are underway and have begun to document what we are doing, learning and unlearning.  During the next few months it is my intention to report via this blog on what we are learning/unlearning as we make our way.  I plan to include multi-voiced and multiple narrative accounts authored by Ms. Othman, Ms. Esteves, the children, myself and perhaps others who at this time I have not identified (yet).

I'll keep you posted.

A student with Ms. Othman.

P.S.


I was thrilled to learn that Ms. Othman and her children have dedicated the one window in the classroom as a window of wonder where learners can peer out, taking time to wonder, observe, question, see and so on...without an imposed agenda.  A small and important start.

Looking at a Writing and Reading Process Connected to Research

Lately I am thinking about the amount of reading I am doing as I write two articles & wondering about how that process compares to research methods that middle and high school students are required to do at school. A few observations:

1. My reading list emerges alongside the writing.
2. My reading list is fueled by what I read. I read a lot of  the works referenced in a text. Like Frost knew: way leads on to way.  For example, I am anxiously awaiting Full House (Gould, 1996) as I need to read it in order to better understand a point that Brian Sutton-Smith makes concerning evolution and play. I could never have predicted this would be a text of importance as I began this work.
3. Sometimes an unrelated article I have read will later inform the work I am composing in surprising ways.
4. Sometimes I stop the writing and create a work visually. Not sure how this matters but it seems to help me write.
5. I know very little and am aware of this as I read and write. 
6. I could never list the resources I will read/view/listen to for any single article I write until I have the work ready for publication. Even then, my experience has been that editors and peer reviewers will raise questions that send me back to rewrite, reread, and select works to read I had not considered. If I was required to make a list of the resources I planned to use before I actually started, it would make me not want to write.
7. I never know what will emerge even when I think I have a good idea.  
8. Talking with key people as I have drafts completed helps me enormously. 
9. I have a handful of people (and now since Twitter some of that is changing) that I share initial drafts with and these confidants actually read and respond to the work. I am selective with whom I share drafts.
10. My husband is the best editor (not only in the narrow sense of surface text, but also in the deeper structure and thinking of the text) I know and thankfully he loves me enough to suffer through those early drafts and push me to think in ways that stretches my thinking and often my intentions.
11. I meticulously list the works cited as I write.  I don't leave this to some end time. 
12. Making the works cited page somehow makes me feel productive even when I am not producing pages.
13. What I am wondering about alters as I read and listen to taped interviews and classroom sessions. 
14. I could never write a thesis statement or chose one from a list of four choices (A, B, C, or D). Meaning emerges.
15. Just because I am writing it, doesn't mean I understand. Often I don't.
16. I listen to the interviews and classrooms sessions a lot, often.  
17. Vacuuming, driving, walking in the woods are all ways that help me to think about the work while not directly thinking about it.
18. As ideas flow, I visualize cognitive bifurcation happening inside my brain. It's a lot like tree lights blinking On. Off. Growing stronger.
19. I locate what will become *the article* in several different documents and later join some of these initial writings. Collage seems to be a method I employ.
20. I like to join dissimilar things and see what pops.
21. I write far more that I will ever use in any one article.
22. I reread a lot.
23. I do a lot of things not directly related to reading or writing, and yet so much informs the work.  Even when I am not consciously thinking about the work, my mind seems to be busy seeking patterns, etc.  For example, on a trip to have lunch with a friend one day I listened to Brian Lehrer show and had the opportunity to hear Jonah Lehrer discuss his new book. I though I heard him say something about reinvention of self.  And yet when I listened to the show again (thank you Stitcher) I couldn't find what I though I had heard. The insight nonetheless was important and will likely be a critical understanding in one of the articles: in a classroom I am studying, reinventing one's self is the curriculum. It is what play looks like inside of school.  The play is not the Minecraft. The play is the many ways reinvention occurs.
24. I rely on story in most of my 'non-fiction' works. Narrative informs everything. (Sorry Common Core people who think these things are unrelated. Not so for me.) 
25. I appreciate deadlines.
26. I detest deadlines.
27. I often doubt I will finish the work at hand.
28. I abandon writing and return it at time.
29. I am continuously amazed by how much I don't know which helps me to understand.
30. I read obsessively. It's like a hunger. 
31. I reread my work on screen as I am composing.  
32. I reread my work on paper when I need to do a deeper revision or edit. 
33. I need to hear the work aloud and find a pen in hand matters in that physically writing with a pen  helps me to find the 'right' word, phrase.  
34. I abandon most processes related to revision and editing and return to writing on screen as soon as these initial ways of delving catches some fire I need to follow.
35. I see in pictures, wholes. There is a logic to this that is critical for me as I revise.
36. I never use a rubric, checklist to guide my work.  I don't want an ending imposed. Impose an ending and I probably will find I have nothing to say.

********************

Now I wonder about how we guide students to think and compose as readers and writers. How does the list above compare with the expectation of school-based authoring? How do we manage the constraints and freedoms, both needed to compose well?  How is agency realized at school?

An Open Letter to Each Researcher Cited by PARCC in their Support of Close Reading

This is a copy of the email I sent to each researcher cited by PARCC as supporting close reading. I am interested in seeing their replies and will post accordingly with permission.

Dear Professor XXX,

I have been reading the Common Core Standards, PARCCs testing frameworks, as well as the cited research that these two groups list as support for close reading as the "guiding principle of the standards" and central focus of assessment for 60 million children. Frankly I am hoping you can explain how a single way of reading represents the whole of such an embodied act.  I'm a mom with a 12 year old son and the narrowness of this approach (imagine this is it for 13 years) makes more than a bit wary.

This is the paragraph that PARCC provides:

Close Reading of Texts

As noted above, the close reading model is a central guiding principle of the standards and as a result will be a central focus of the PARCC Assessment System. The Model Content Frameworks provide guidance for focusing on the close, sustained reading of complex text. Close reading stresses engaging with a text of sufficient complexity directly and examining its meaning thoroughly and methodically. It emphasizes using texts of grade-level-appropriate complexity and focusing student reading on the particular words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs of the author, encouraging students to read and re-read deliberately. By directing student attention on the text itself, close reading empowers students to reflect on the meanings of individual words, the order in which sentences unfold, and the development of ideas over the course of the text — to ultimately arrive at an understanding of the text as a whole. A significant body of research links the close reading of complex text—regardless if the student is a struggling reader or advanced—to significant gains in reading proficiency, and finds close reading to be a key component of college and career readiness.5

And this is the 'research' (not sure all of this actually is research) cited:

1. Ericcson, K. A., and W. Kintsch. 1993. The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance. Psychological Review 100(3):363–406; 
2. Plant, E. A., et al. 2005. Why study time does not predict grade point average across college students: Implications of deliberate practice for academic performance. Contemporary Educational Psychology 30; 
3. Ericcson, K. A., and W. Kintsch. 1999. The Role of Long Term Working Memory in Text Comprehension. Psychologia;  
4. Kintsch, W. 2009. Learning and constructivism. Constructivist Instruction: Success or failure? eds. Tobias and Duffy. New York: Routledge; 
5. Hampton, S., and E. Kintsch. 2009. Supporting Cumulative Knowledge Building Through Reading. In Adolescent Literacy, Field Tested: Effective Solutions for Every Classroom, eds. Parris, Fisher, and Headley. International Reading Association; 
6. Heller, R., and C. Greenleaf. 2007. Literacy Instruction in the Content Areas: Getting to the Core of Middle and High School Improvement. Washington, DC: Alliance for Excellent Education; 
7. The Education Trust. 2006. Gaining Traction, Gaining Ground: How Some High Schools Accelerate Learning for Struggling Students; ACT. 2006. Reading Between the Lines. 

Which text that you've written from this cited list would you recommend that I read that might explain why close reading should be the only approach an entire country adopts for all of its public school children? I am thinking about this as quite recently my husband and I were talking about Seamus Heaney's wonderful book, The Spirit Level.  You may have read it. Heaney closes the book with the poem, Postscript.

Postscript

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

I was telling my husband that the closing lines of the poem stopped my breath and did what I suspect the poet might have wanted, caught my heart off guard and blew it open. My husband said how when he read the poem--read it aloud, he recalled a rather cool morning in Ireland when the two of us, much younger than we are now, were motoring about, newly in love, and had stopped in at a pub for a bit of hot tea. He was recalling how soothing that morning had been.

I'm pretty sure we weren't having a 'close reading' lesson when we read The Spirit Level. In some ways we might have been following cummings' adage about feelings being first. I worry that this 'read like a detective' (David Coleman's phrase, not mine) dictum will harm my child, narrow his understanding of the many reasons we read, and above all else will dim his pleasure of the text.

I am curious as to what you have to say as it is your work that is cited in support of such a single method of reading to be exclusively used for all children beginning at age 8 until they exit the system at 17 or 18. I await your response.

Sincerely,
Mary Ann Reilly