Digital Composing Resources for Primary Grade Teachers

2nd Graders' Blogs on KidBlog (Newark, NJ)

I. Oral Language [Audio/Single Image for Storytelling, Recounting]

AudioBoo (free)

• Kinderarten example: Child recounts a favorite book.

Draw & Tell

Narrable (free) Narrated Slideshow.

A storytelling platform that is free and easy to use.
Allows you to connect a series of single images and narrate a story, recount information, be persuasive, express an opinion.

• First Grade Zoo
• World Language example (blog post)

Tell About This (2.99 Great for very young children)

Provides prompts for children to tell about.  You can also create your own prompts. I like this for center use after children have learned how to use the app.

 (See Write About This too)




II. Drawing & Design


Sago Mini Doodlecast (2.99)

This screencasting app allows children to draw and narrate while drawing and then share their screencast with others. Simple to use.

A Homage to Jaws from Small But Kinda Mighty ( here. )

Felt Board App (2.99)
Felt Board - Mother Goose on the Loose (Free)

Patterned after the original felt board, this digital version allows children to tell and retell stories by selecting and arranging felt objects and placing them into different environments.




III. Writing

Kidblog

2nd Grader's Response to Read  Aloud Book on Kidblog (Newark, NJ)

A blogging platform designed for teachers and students. 

The Complexity of Teacher and Student Relationships

Thinking of Hopper ( M.A. Reilly, 2013).

I.

Tonight a former student of my husband who he taught in an urban NJ middle school contacted him through LinkedIn. The student is now married, living in southern California, and works in the alternative energy business (solar energy). He contacted Rob to thank him for teaching him and to connect with him again after 12 years.  He wanted to talk writing and asked Rob if he ever got around to writing that 9-11 essay that Rob must have mentioned to his class wanting to write.  They have reconnected.

This student would not have been considered a model student by most standards.  He is the student you could have asked "What are you learning today?"--and there's a very good chance he might not have known. One might have described him as a poor kid, who had been deskilled, and yet was quite bright. Rob says he could be handful and that was most days.  As I listen to him talk, I'm reminded of another boy he taught--this one coming from a very affluent home who also was a handful. This young man is now in medical school and contacted Rob, asking him to meet for coffee and some conversation.  

But it's not these stories that I want to write about tonight.  Rather, I want to say something about the complexity of the relationships between students and teachers and how impossible it is to know the trajectory of a teacher's or student's influence.

II.

Two weeks ago Rob and I had dinner with a former student of mine, Mark, and his wife, Karen. I taught Mark 20 years ago at a NJ high school. I was his tenth grade English teacher.  We've kept in touch during the years. He told me at dinner that what he remembered most was that I took him to visit a graduate course I was taking in writing so that he could see poetry in action at the 92nd Street Y.  I can still recall his class and of course him in the class and what he thought about books we read, acting, and the many works we wrote.  At dinner we had several laughs reminiscing about our class and his classmates. In a few weeks he plans to send me the completed draft of a book he is authoring about teaching. It's a critical look based on teachers he has had and his own experiences teaching.  I'm a bit anxious as he told me there's a chapter in it about my teaching as he recalls it.

III.

When I think about Mark, I realize that it is hard to imagine the trajectory of influence we have had on one another across these last two decades as we moved from teacher and student to friends.  Who knows how that trajectory might be shaped in future years.

There is nothing simple about teacher and student relationships.

I think about the plethora of teacher evaluation rubrics that are so very popular now and wonder how Rob or I might have been scored on such an instrument.  As I browse the 120 pages of the Danielson Rubric, I see there's nothing about love and perhaps that for the better.  

I don't know a teacher who's excellent who doesn't love his or her students, first. Last. That's what teaching is mostly about.

Breaking Silence

This is an example of some thinking about Wordsworth's "The World Is Too Much
With Us," posted by a 3rd grade teacher. I covered table tops with paper so
  community knowledge might be built, shared.

I. Dissent

During this last week, at a professional learning session I was engaged in with administrators and teachers, a guest joined the group looking through the materials I would be using and stayed for about 20 minutes.

The guest said almost nothing.

The group and I were exploring the connections between figurative language and meaning. Specifically we were examining how assonance, consonance, alliteration, metaphor, and connotative/denotative language complemented, complicated and perhaps even sharpened our understanding of Wordsworth's "The World is Too Much With Us." It was a dynamic session--the type I had hoped for as I made my way to the school that morning. Our thinking could not be contained.

Later, I would learn that the guest who is employed in a position of power was concerned that I would be referencing an article in which I had written:

Screen capture from article,
"Opening Spaces of Possibility: The Teacher as Bricoleur,"
published by JAAL in 2009.

The concern as I would later be told (not by the guest, but by another who had been present) is that I would ever reference something critical of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in front of educators. Such a problem further called into question whether hiring my services for next year would be a good idea.

Because I authored the article, I rarely (if ever) use it with clients.  It's an intimate look at a teacher, Murray Krantzman, and his students and the beautiful work they compose as they compose themselves. It reveals (perhaps) more about me than I might want to share.  But with this group, I was willing as we have worked together for a few years and I am thinking of them like family.  We rarely seem to mention love & schooling these days, but really love is at the center of the work we do as teachers, yes?

I wanted to contextualize the poetry study we were doing which originated in Krantzman's classroom and as the article focused on him and his students, it seemed like a good idea. But here's the rub: the article predates the CCSS, so even if I wanted to be critical--it would have been the wrong article to bring.  The CCSS did not exist.

II.  Breaking Silence

All of this has me thinking, wondering about issues of power and rights and fear and democracies and teaching and learning. And children. It was just a moment, I tell myself--as if saying this could allow me a reason to say nothing here about this matter.  There's a considerable contract that feels a bit threatened.  But the very words once uttered (and only in my head) do nothing to soothe me.   As Seamus Heaney alludes to (here),"there's distance" in my head for this is a silence I could choke on.

Education leaders must engender thinking, not act to control teachers' and students' thoughts. To control thought is to do harm.

Doesn't a democracy require the possibility of dissent?  Are not public schools our committed method for teaching democracy?  Was it not Jefferson who said dissent was the highest form of patriotism?  It seems ironic that the very next day I would find myself back at the same school site, except this time I am learning alongside a group of history teachers and we are studying, very closely reading, Dr. King's speech - Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.  Dr. King says,  "A time comes when silence is betrayal."

On that night at Riverside Church in April of 1967 my father sat in the audience. A year later to the day, I would see my father cry for the first time when Dr. King was assassinated.

My silence, even on this slight matter, would shame my father.

10 Things I Witnessed Educators Doing During the Last Month

I am in a lot of schools and interact with, co-teach, and observe educators at work with students.  Here are just a few of the things I've witnessed during the last month:

1. Counseling parents of a former student whose child is being bullied in and out of school and then securing help for the parent and the child
2. Procuring eye glasses for children whose families cannot afford to do so
3. Buying dinners for children and their families on a daily basis
4. Buying heating fuel and having it delivered to the family of a student who did not have the money to buy it.
5. Advocating in person for children to get into specific schools
6. Taking instructional time to better ensure children were ready for high stakes placement tests
7. Clothing a child and family.
8. Reading with a child after school as she had no one at home who could do so.
9. Volunteering to teach a child to read and doing so each day.
10. Mentoring a former student by visiting with him in his classroom and co-teaching

Creating Conversations Worth Having at School: Leading with the Heart

Community is Infinite (M.A Reilly, 2012)

I am engaged with primary grade teachers in a workshop when one says, "If I run over the scheduled time I will be written up. Teachers cannot deviate from the posted schedule." 

Another adds, "I was told by my principal that I had to time students when they read and that a running record without it being timed is wrong." 

A third chimes in: "I realized my students were struggling and instead of continuing in the small group as a guided situation, I read the story to the children and we discussed it. I was told  that I had done the lesson wrong and not to do it again."

As I think about these comments and the potential conversations that are needed, I consider that the first important act in this work we are doing with inner city primary grade teachers and school administrators is to bear witness and listen.  The second is to remember that what I write here is more for my benefit than anyone else.  These are lessons I need to remember because it is  often easier to slip into evaluative discourse when confronted with the complexity of teaching and learning. At such time, I know it is hard to lead from the heart.

My response to the group today was a request that they begin to contemplate how they might initiate a change in the discourse at school so that richer and more complicated conversations can happen between and among faculty.  There are compelling reasons for everyone--students, teachers,  administrators, and coaches--to work and situate ourselves as learners.  In order to prevent reading and writing difficulties with children, we will need to problematize the work of teaching and learning through critical and caring conversations.  To do this well requires that we exercise our imagination and become (other)wise.

Listen to Maxine Greene (2007) who in a lecture on the imagination writes this:

For John Dewey, facts are mean and repellent things until imagination opens intellectual possibility...It is often said that imagination is the capacity to look at things as if they could be otherwise; and, surely, if we ourselves might come to a point of being yet otherwise than we have become, our altered perspective might well enable us to break with a fixed and one-dimensional view and look at things as if they too could be otherwise. 

Our capacity to become (other)wise is connected to imagining--to pausing and wondering why the administrator or the teacher did or said X.  Imagining and inquiring opens us to the possibility of richer conversations than those that are gotten when commands and counter-commands are uttered.

We have so much to learn about, from, and with one another--especially when we are trying on new or revised ways of teaching and leading.  Again, turning to Maxine Greene and listening carefully can be helpful. She closes the speech by saying:

To be enabled to activate the imagination is to discover not only possibility, but to find the gaps, the empty spaces that require filling as we move from the is to the might be, to the should be. To release the imagination too is to release the power of empathy, to become more present to those around, perhaps to care.

And so tonight as I think about the complex work at hand--how deeply the administrators and teachers and those of us working as coaches care about the children and the work, I am wondering how to nudge the discourse from one that is overly steeped in evaluative language--to one where the heart leads and our capacity to become (other)wise is strong and unwavering.

Possibility, Not Certainties: Consulting and Teaching

Dreaming of Fireflies (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

I was reminded today about the complexity of teaching and how in this age of efficiency and faux expertise, how often the hired consultant can and does do significant educational damage.  I say that with some humility as I am a hired consultant. Today I met with primary grade teachers, teaching assistants, special education teachers, and technology coordinators who will be part of an early literacy summer project that I have designed for a city. 11 years ago, I left this same city, resigning at that time from the position of director of literacy.  So in many ways, today felt like coming home.

The work before us is the prevention of reading difficulties for 4,000 children. Although I have shared and refined the design with master teachers from the city, many of whom I had worked with previously, today was the first day that teachers had a look and of course what they had to say mattered greatly. I was encouraged by their response as the summer plan is ambitious and rests on teacher expertise, risk taking, and diligence. Preventing reading difficulties requires expertise and care when working with children, especially those whose reading progress appears stalled. It requires us to be risk takers and to acknowledge what we don't understand as we ask ourselves, what made the child do or say x? It is from a teaching stance of not knowing that great learning is possible.

2-hours into the work this morning, a participant raised her hand and said that she had been visited by a consultant who spent 10-minutes in her class and reported her to the principal because she was teaching vocabulary through a call and response method. The principal later told her that she had to stop this practice as it was wrong according to the consultant. This comment surfaced after I had said that there are multiple ways to attend to a reading aloud component and that what was most important would be our thinking at the time. Several other participants said that they had been told (again by  visiting consultants) that they had to read aloud a text without interruption first and then they could return to it to do intentional work such as attending to vocabulary, aspects of comprehension, etc. I suggested that again that our intention should be informed by our thinking, not an arbitrary rule.

These stories gave me pause, not because of a matter of right or wrong, but because the exchanges exemplify the misuse of power. Consultants often are afforded significant power by those who hire.  It's so very easy to name something going 'wrong' when observing teaching if for no other reason than the work is so inherently complex and the thousands of decisions that a teacher makes are ones that another might and probably would make differently, especially if the other person is not the teacher of record, shares not a histroy with the students, and is simply visiting for a brief period of time. Our personal and professional histories always inform how we see and fail to see. It also is incredibly different to observe a lesson and revise it in your head as opposed to actually teaching. The distance between revising in one's head and teaching is vast.

At best, it's a foolish exercise for a consultant to be a pseudo-evaluator and equally foolish for a principal to situate the consultant in such a role.  In practice, it harms children, especially when it reduces the risk taking and confidence of the teacher.  I find that a method that allows for more authentic and meaningful work as a consultant is to teach.  Part of the summer school plan involves three consultants from my company and myself teaching, along with the city's master teachers.  This literal rolling up the sleeves allows me to work from the stance of learner.  I have no doubt that the children I will have the opportunity to teach this summer, along with their teachers, will help me to learn any number of things that on this late June night I cannot name. That's a gift, for sure.

It is the initial not-naming that I want to emphasize.  When entering a classroom, we need to do so with the stance of not-knowing, so we have enough room to be puzzled, to notice, and to wonder. Complexity requires us to acknowledge that a single path, method, and belief regardless of how sound it may seem, represent not the way, but rather a momentary limitation.

I want to remember that the theory making I hope to do happens best alongside the learners as we problem solve, try on different ways of working, make leaps of faith, and often fail at the very work we most prize. So tonight I am hoping that along with these 160 teachers, I fail in ways that most inform the work and allow me the opportunity to model risk taking through action.

Taking risks, leaning in to learn, problem solving with the children and our colleagues, and becoming confident in not knowing represent important ways of working that open us to possibility, by releasing us from given certainties. 

Thinking about Last In, First Out (LIFO)

Appreciating experience when instant everything is so valued is a challenge.  Just think how often quickness is foolishly equated with success or progress.   I have been thinking a lot about experience lately as I never imagined public schools sans experienced teachers and frankly that possibility has me worried, and I hope it worries you too.  As a district administrator, consultant, and teacher for the last 25+ years I have learned with and from experienced teachers and administrators.  They are often the center to any progressive practice as they are not faddist but rather the leaders who ask the tough questions about an initiative, who challenge the status quo by teaching and leading well, who quietly tutor students and mentor colleagues, and who consistently deepen their own knowledge.

So what worries me about ending Last In, First Out (LIFO) is that I think permission to get rid of "difficult" teachers will happen. In every school system where I have worked, I have witnessed deeply talented teachers with experience be misunderstood or unappreciated by building or central office administrators because the administrators were ill suited for the power they held and viewed these teachers as threatening.  Quieting these important voices who question will likely inform dismissal decisions. Remove the talent and experience from schools and children will be harmed.



A second concern I have with ending LIFO is that experience cannot be had on the cheap.  Experience costs money and in this time of severe budget caps of 1-and-2%,  I think it is probable that even the most well intentioned superintendent and board of education may look to settle accounts by letting more expensive educators go and replacing them with new hires.  Already we are seeing signs of this happening in Kansas City, MO and Tulsa, OK where more experienced teachers are being let go and replaced by Teach for America (TFA) who are expected to commit for only 2 years.

Replacing experience with inexperience or no experience will lessen quality. I have met and worked with hundreds of beginning teachers who after a year or two gain control over the management issues and a sense of confidence develops. Alongside that confidence, these teachers often mistake their tacit knowledge for theoretical truths. Whereas they have learned much in those first years they are usually focused on teaching, and less so on how their students are learning. It is through their work with more knowledgeable others, that a shift from thinking mostly about their teaching to wondering and theorizing about their learners starts to take place. This shift is critical and cannot easily be seen by people with little teaching or no teaching experience. Without experienced teachers the critical learning for young teachers will be stilted.

Professional learning happens among teachers and administrators in the informal conversations they have before, during, and after school.  Wendell Berry talks about this process. In The Unsettling of America (1977), he describes the technical farmer and the good farmer. The technical farmer, Berry says can be made by training, while the good farmer "is a cultural product; he is made by a sort of training, certainly in what his time imposes or demands, but also he is made by generations of experience" (p. 45). The essential experiences of the good farmer, Berry explains are "tested, preserved, handed down in settled households, friendships, and communities that are deliberately and carefully native to their own ground" (p.45).

I imagine that it is easy to think of teaching as a technical act, especially by those with limited or no actual experience working alongside other teachers. As an outsider, it is easy to not know about schools as settled households.  From this vantage point one teacher looks about the same as the next. We cannot improve public education by exercising such poor judgment.  Ending LIFO will lessen quality of teaching and learning and does nothing to resolve the issue as to why very ineffective teachers are allowed to remain in their jobs. Consider this: The same administrators who keep ineffective teachers in place often because they fail to recognize ineffectiveness (like liking like) will be charged with recommending dismissals. Just who do you think they'll recommend?