Professional Texts about Reading, Reading Workshop, Conferring, Assessment, and Reading 2.0

Print Resources for K-6

Teachers engaging (Reilly, Newark, NJ 2014)

I.               Texts About Comprehension & Literacy

Allington, Richard L. (Ed.). (2010). Essential Readings on Struggling  Learners.  Newark, DE: IRA.

Barnhouse, Dorothy & Vicki Vinton. (2012). What Readers Really Do: Teaching the Process of Meaning Making. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Campano, Gerald. (2007).  Immigrant Students and Literacy: Reading, Writing, and Remembering . New York: Teachers College Press.

Dorn, Linda & Carla Soffos. (2005). Teaching for Deep Comprehension. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

Fountas, Irene  & Gay Su Pinnell (2006). Teaching for Comprehending and Fluency: Thinking, Talking, and Writing About Reading, K-8. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Miller, Debbie. (2013). Reading with Meaning: Teaching Comprehension in the Primary Grades. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

Serafini, Frank (2004). Lessons in Comprehension: Explicit Instruction in the Reading Workshop. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Strickland, Dorothy, (Ed.). (2010). Essential Readings in Early Literacy. Newark, DE: IRA.

Taberski, Sharon. (2010). Comprehension from the Ground Up: Simplified, Sensible Instruction for the K-3 Reading Workshop. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

II.              Texts about Reading Workshop

Akhavan, Nancy. (2008).The Content-Rich Reading & Writ​ing Workshop: A Time-Saving Approach for Making the Most of Your Literacy Block. New York: Scholastic.

Barnhouse, Dorothy. (2014). Readers Front and Center. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

Bennett, Samantha. (2007). That Workshop Book: New Systems and Structures for Classrooms That Read, Write, and Think. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Collins, Kathy. (2008). Reading for Real: Teach Students to Read with Power, Intention, and Joy in K-3 Classrooms. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

Collins, Kathy. (2004). Growing Readers: Units of Study in the Primary Classroom. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

Hahn, Mary Lee. (2002). Reconsidering Read-Aloud. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

Heard, Georgia & Jennifer McDonough. (2009). A Place for Wonder: Reading and Writing Nonfiction in the Primary Grades. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

Orehovec, Barbara & Marybeth Alley. (2003). Revisiting The Reading Workshop: A Complete Guide to Organizing and Managing an Effective Reading Workshop That Builds Independent, Strategic Readers (Scholastic Teaching Strategies). New York: Scholastic.

Parsons, Stephanie. (2010). First Grade Readers: Units of Study to Help Children See Themselves as Meaning Makers. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Reif, Linda. (2014). Read Write Teach: Choice and Challenge in the Reading-Writin​g Workshop. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Serafini, Frank (2001). The Reading Workshop: Creating Space for Readers. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Serafini, Frank & Suzette Serafini-Youngs. (2006). Around the Reading Workshop in 180 Days: A Month-by-Month Guide to Effective Instruction. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Sibberson, Franki. (2012). The Joy of Planning: Designing Minilesson Cycles in Grades 3-6. Holden, ME: Choice Literacy.

Sibberson, Franki & Karen Szymusiak. (2003). Still Learning to Read: Teaching Students in Grades 3-6. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

III. Texts about Teacher Language & Student Talk & Conferring

Allen, Patrick A. (2009). Conferring: The Keystone of Reader's Workshop. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

Genishi, Ceila & Anne Haas Dyson. (2009). Children Language & Literacy. New York: Teachers College Press.

Johnston, Peter H. (2012). Opening Minds: Using Language to Change Lives. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

Johnston, Peter H.  (2004). Choice Words. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

Lindsfor, Judith Wells. (2008). Children's Language: Connecting Reading, Writing, and Talk. New York: Teachers College Press.

Nichols, Maria. (2008). Talking About Text: Guiding Students to Increase Comprehension Through Purposeful Talk . Huntington Beach, CA: Shell Education.

Nichols, Maria. (2006). Comprehension Through Conversation: The Power of Purposeful Talk in the Reading Workshop. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Serravallo, Jennifer  & Gravity Goldberg (2007). Conferring with Readers: Supporting Each Student's Growth and Independence. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Zwiers, Jeff & Marie Crawford. (2012). Academic Conversations: Classroom Talk that Fosters Critical Thinking and Content Understandings. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

III. Texts About Assessment

Sibberson, Franki & Karen Szymusiak. (2008). Day-to-Day Assessment in the Reading Workshop: Making Informed Instructional Decisions in Grades 3-6. New York: Scholastic.

Yetta Goodman, Yetta  Gretchen Owocki. (2002). Kidwatching: Documenting Children's Literacy Development. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

IV. Texts about Reading & Technology

Hyler, Jeremy & Troy Hicks. (2014). Create, Compose, Connect!: Reading, Writing, and Learning with Digital Tools. New York: Routledge. 

Johnson, Denise. (2014). Reading, Writing, and Literacy 2.0: Teaching with Online Texts, Tools, and Resources, K–8. New York: Teachers College Press.

Miller, Suzanne M. & Mary B. McVee (Eds.) (2012). Multimodal Composing in Classrooms: Learning and Teaching for the Digital World. New York: Routledge. 

Serafini, Frank (2015). Reading Workshop 2.0. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. (To be published. Info here).

Vasquez, Vivian Maria  & Carol Branigan Felderman. (2012). Technology and Critical Literacy in Early Childhood. New York: Routledge.

Lesson Learned?

from here. 

I often think of Frank Smith's wise insight that we are always learning. Always. What we are learning though is often not what has been intended.

Why Uncertainty Matters: Measuring Teacher "Effectiveness"

Maxine Greene (1988) wrote: A teacher in search of his/her freedom may be the only kind of teacher who can arouse young persons to go in search of their own" (p. 14).  It represents a singular truth that I believe and have believed across decades.
 
There have been many teachers who have helped me to understand that learning is essentially about searching for one's freedom and that the idea of freedom is often a far too slippery concept to hold still and study.  A paradox, perhaps. Mrs. Seeliger, my second grade teacher, found joy in the smallest of things and demonstrated that the inconsequential is critical and worthy of one's notice.  I still can recall the winter day in second grade when she placed Charlotte's Web in my hands. Many years later I reread the book at a friend's home in Massachusetts on a different winter afternoon. The constant between the events was pleasure.

Ms. Donovan, a high school social studies teacher valued experiential learning. Many years later, I still recall being the judge in our class's simulation of the Triangle Factory Fire case. Our findings and sentencing clashed with the outcome of the actual case. In addition to learning about the particulars of the case, I also carried  the uncomfortable understanding that justice is not always blind, especially for those without powerful advocates.

More recently, Ruth Vinz, doctoral adviser and friend told me, Slow down when else in your life will you have this time to theorize, research, read and write?  Draft after draft of writing, Ruth read and consistently inspired me to work in order to understand the dilemma from slightly different points of view. Perhaps more than any other, Ruth helped me to value uncertainty.  

Although different, each of these teachers demonstrated what it might mean to live a wide-awake life through their passions, capacity to reflect, curiosity, and desire. They occasioned in me a desire to want. After many schools, degrees, and lots of informal learning choosing to live a wide-awake life represents the most significant and profound learning I have experienced.

In a recent Edutopia post, Maxine Greene clarified the term, wide-awakeness. She said:

I use the term wide-awakeness. Without the ability to think about yourself, to reflect on your life, there's really no awareness, no consciousness. Consciousness doesn't come automatically; it comes through being alive, awake, curious, and often furious.

American Bus Stop: No Lemming Left Behind

These days we seem to be overly interested in measuring teacher effectiveness.  Yet, the question of "effectiveness" is a poor question, if not a wrong one.   It suggests the plausibility of schools being causal worlds of inputs and outputs, where variables can adequately be controlled and effectiveness rightly and singularly determined.  And yet, when I think of the teachers I mention in this post, none of them could aptly be measured via a single test measure (such as my performance on a state assessment), nor could anyone have projected what their range of influence might be decades after contact.  

U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, State Representatives from Florida, a "Teacher Effectiveness Panel" in NJ, and so many others, want all of us to foolishly think we can equate the measure of a teacher via the results of a single round of test scores with "effectiveness".  I can't help but wonder if Secretary Duncan would submit himself to such examination and be satisfied with the determination of his effectiveness based on a single measure. One might ask: How well did Arne Duncan do as Superintendent of Schools for Chicago based on test scores during x year in comparison to y year?  Based on that criteria was he effective? Let's assume there was no "Texas Miracle" for this Secretary, would that negate all that he had done if the results demonstrated less student achievement via a single measure? (See Larry Miller's blog for the skinny on this).


Perhaps a better measure would be to ask to what end is a teacher/administrator in search of his/her freedom? How do they inspire and guide young people to go in search of their own freedom?  In what ways do all of these learners live wide awake lives and how do we support them in these quests as a public committed to public education? 

I realize that we could not capture such depth using a bubble sheet and a #2. But then again, that might be for the best.  In understanding this limitation, we would also acknowledge that we cannot know the trajectory of our efforts with any great certainty and would be best to not waste effort and time trying to do so.   As Ilya Prigogine explains “for a large class of dynamic systems, small perturbations in the initial conditions are amplified over the course of time. Chaotic systems are an extreme example of unstable motion because trajectories identified by distinct initial conditions, no matter how close, diverge exponentially over time” (1997, p. 30).

We would do well to remember that teaching, like learning, is nomadic and trying to assess such dynamic systems using a single measure at a particular point in time is wasteful, wrong, and will reduce what we value to the limits we can measure.


Work Cited:
Prigogine, I. (1997). The end of certainty: Time, chaos, and the new laws of nature. NY: The
Free Press.

Let's Not Confuse Assessing Writing A Response to a Prompt with Assessing Meaningful Learning: Are NJ Taxpayers Being Duped?

In New Jersey, every public school student from grades 3 through 8 is assessed using the NJ-ASK in reading, writing, and mathematics.  The public is told to believe that these state measures adequately  represent and correctly measure important student LEARNING.  In this post, I want to test those assumptions by sharing a seventh grade student's returned essay written in response to a "speculative" prompt on the grade 7 NJ-ASK test. The response was selected by the New Jersey Department of Education (NJDOE) as an exemplar of a failing score (3). The NJDOE publishes a collection of student writing that they believe exemplify writing across a score of performance form inadequate command of writing to superior command of writing (scale of 1 to 6) using the RHSM rubric. A score of 3 means that the student did not demonstrate command of written language. A 3 means the student showed only partial command.

This is the prompt the student responded to.  S/he had 25 minutes to read the prompt and write a response during the test.

Writing Task:

Imagine you have the chance to meet a famous person in history. You will get to spend the entire day with this person. Whom would you choose to meet, and how would you spend your day?

Write a story about meeting a famous person in history and how you spent the day.

This is the student's written response as written.

If I had the chance to meet one famous person in history, it would be Walt Disney. Walt Disney created Disneyland and Disney World, huge theme parks that tons of people have been to. Many people go back to visit the parks again! These parks make kids and adults happy. He created all the characters…that’s amazing. That would be why I would want to meet him.

            How would I spend my day with Walt Disney? That is a good question. First I would go to breakfast with him and ask him many questions about how he created Disney Land/World, and about how he created the characters. Then off we would go to Disneyland and sneak a few rides in! After walking around a while we would take a break and have lunch. I would then take the time to ask him more personal questions, about himself. Like, when did you start making the characters, or, when did you first start drawing?

             Then we would walk around a bit and let our food digest. After that…more rides! Also I would discover how they work everything and how long it took to make everything.

 By that time dinner rolls around. We go eat at one of the restaurants there and he tells me about how he made everything and what does it feel like to be making families happy and having a huge business.

 Finally, we would check out any shows and he would show me the room where everything gets created. After that we say our farewells and I head home.

             That would be who I would choose as my famous person, and what we would do in one day.

 

I want to make a few comments about what the student wrote, the nature of the assessment, how the evaluators confuse issues of prior knowledge with composition skill, and finally ask if this type of assessment actually measures important learning.

What the Student Wrote
The student who penned this response in 25 minutes has command of English language.  Not only does s/he demonstrate command, but the writing has moments of sophistication as evidenced by syntax, phrasing, compositional risks, and humor. If I taught this student, I have no doubt I would consider him/her very able. To have partial command, the following characteristics would be present in the student's writing (this is from the states scoring rubric) :

• may lack opening and /or closing
• would have some lapses or flaws in organization
• may lack some transitions between ideas
• would have repetitious details
• would have several unelaborated details
• would have errors/patterns of usage errors
• would have little variety in syntax
• wold have some sentence errors
• would have patterns of mechanical errors 

This response has an opening and closing, is organized sequentially, has transitions that allow the reader to move from one moment in the day to the next, has significant syntactical sophistication, and few mechanical errors.  There is a "vagueness" about the nature of work done by Disney. This student (not his/her writing) received a partially proficient score on this writing task on the NJ ASK. Although educators are told not to place students into remedial courses based on the NJ ASK, it is routinely done.  It is possible that this student would be placed in a remedial course in order for his writing to be "fixed."

What Does this Assessment Measure?
This assessment measures the degree to which a student can render a multi-paragraph response to a specific prompt using pen and paper and no other tools. The student is not required to develop a topic, frame a topic, or use any resources to assist him or her in elaborating upon details.  Although the students are directed to revise and edit, the time frame provided (25 minutes) renders this process null.  It is hard to revisit a work within the same time frame it is first created.  Therefore, the presence of first drafts as finished products is more usual than not in NJDOE testing. I have written about ten books and at least a dozen juried articles and none have been written without research. I routinely check information when I blog. I always have a search engine open in another window.  This is not unusual. And yet, NJDOE purposefully requires students to not make use of any tools other than a pen and paper in 2011.  If the tests didn't hurt kids and cost taxpayers megabucks this might be an amusing anecdote. But, it is not.

Was the Assessment Measured Correctly? What Role Did Prior Knowledge Play in the Writing?

So, if the concerns are not compositional, why didn't the student write with more details? As I indicated, one might consider there to be vagueness with the text. But this "problem" is not a compositional issue, but rather suggests an absence on the part of the student to know usable information about Disney's actual work. As such, the vagueness only surfaces when the student references the work done by Disney. Had the student access to information about Disney, the absence of details would likely go away.  Do we really want to measure how much information a student has about an historical figure in his/her head and is that information any indicator of compositional power? Stating that the writer only has partial command of English language is wrong.

Students' written work on state assessments is evaluated by scoring companies who spend about 90 seconds scoring a work. These results are then tabulated and aggregated and the pass/fail scores make front page news in our local and state paper, declaring the winners and the losers. Judgments based on these limited assessments and faulty scoring become truths we use to justify the goodness and poorness of a school, a teacher and a principal. The issues concerning the scoring process has been written about.  Todd Farley's account of scoring state assessments is an eye opener. His book, Making the Grade: My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry describes his career in the test scoring industry. He raises serious questions about the validity of the test scoring process and the scorers.

What We Need Instead
 
Learning is situated, not an autonomous activity. NJDOE, like other states, privileges a belief that information (like Walt Disney's work habits) is stored in the individual's head and the assessment's purpose is to make visible that knowledge via a test.  The more required "information" a learner can pull from his/her head and represent using the tools provided (paper and pen) the more proficient the learner is said to be.

In contrast this century requires a more informed perspective about learning and assessing. As James Gee explains, a sociocultural perspective on learning:

looks at knowledge and learning in terms of a relationship between an individual with both a mind and a body and an environment in which the individual thinks, feels, acts, and interacts.

An apt assessment for this century does not posit the learner being only a "head" and the assessment a means to extract specified information from that head. A more appropriate assessment would be:

1. authentic (a text [written, multimedia, etc.] the learner or learners had actually developed, revised, edited and published for real purposes), 
2. of this century (the learner(s)made use of a variety of tools as necessary including other human beings and composed text(s) using full array of materials, methods and technologies), 
3. privileged audience by including the potential for reader responses and further responses from the author(s), 
4. situated the learner(s) as author(s) and co-assessor(s) whose performance would be informed by their environment.

This quality of "assessment" would potentially be worthy of our time and money. Assessing learners is important work and requires far more powerful and authentic measures than what NJ currently mandates.

On Tests, Testing & Test Scores: Out of Dark Confinement

Personally I'm a bit worn out from all of the talk about test scores and I imagine you are too. I want to say it here, that I know we are measuring the wrong things and doing so with such fevered intensity, that we obfuscate what will matter most to children and young people as they grow and mature: the multiple opportunities to compose and remix their very selves.

Composition is not a five paragraph theme.

Some years ago I was briefly a student of poet, Molly Peacock. I had taken a class at the 92nd Street Y with her and then stayed on that next year as a private student. She was far kinder than my poetry was good. And I recall the most significant advice she offered: Sometimes you have to let the poem go and say it is good enough as it is.

A lovely bit of life lesson in that. One that has held me in good stead as I have applied that wisdom to other facets of my life.

And so I wonder what life lessons our young people are learning as we line them up each spring (April is no longer the cruelest month) and subject 9- and 10-year-olds to four consecutive days of testing? What truths about themselves are they composing? I am reminded here of a time when I was the Director of Literacy for Newark Public Schools. At that time, mandatory 4th grade testing was being field tested and the NJ Commissioner of Education wanted "feedback" about the experience. I directed that the children have access to drawing materials at the end of the test to give feedback in image as well as word.  One child drew a picture of herself inside a coffin.

At the half century mark I can say what matters most in my life, and none of it has to do with the types of things we measure on state tests. The tests oddly enough point at important things: literature, composing, and problem solving. Yet they never ask anyone to pierce beneath the skin of the everyday to make something extraordinary. What we measure on state test is a lot of foolishness and misdirection that hurts children and young adult and occasions them to think narrowly about themselves, their promise. And the more we myopically focus on testing in this country the further afield we get from learning.

I have taught and have worked alongside literally 1000s of teachers in my career. I have conducted arts-based literacy institutes with preschool through graduate school educators and have listened to their stories. When they talk about the significant learning their students have composed, the stories offer an important insight into some ways that learning happens.  Duration is often a theme. Deep learning isn't had on the cheap. Rather, learners come to know often through multiple opportunities to work on the work. Their stories are about wandering and wondering, not certainty. Their stories are about having a caring "other" who scaffolded the learning releasing responsibility along the way.  But most important, the stories are about collaboration and the deep learning that can happen when learners work together.

Our lives are populated with the intention of others.  We are connected. As Whitman in Song of Myself  told us, "For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you." Why do we continue to only value measures that situate the learner as an island unto himself/herself?  Is that perspective even remotely connected to reality? When was the last time you had to work completely alone on a high stakes project? When was the last time you could not access assistance via other people and other resources? Why do we value such oddity?

I have no doubt that children would perform better on international measures if we stopped state testing and focused on local learning. Like Wendell Berry has said we ought to "learn to prefer small-scale elegance."

I have no doubt that children would perform better on international measures if we composed low-stakes assessments and shifted funding from test making companies and scoring (can you say billions?) to fund those locally determined projects.

I have no doubt that children would perform better on international measures if we composed low-stakes assessments that mirrored cognitive tasks we value.

I have no doubt that children would perform better on international measures if we composed low-stakes assessments that resembled public exhibitions.

I have no doubt that children would perform better on international measures if we valued "Do Overs" and collaboration, not "You got one chance on a spring day to get this right."

Like many, I have been watching the protests these last two months that have spread across the globe and I have been inspired.  Might there be a protest across the country about the misdirection of testing?

Do we have a will to change this train wreck by stopping it?

Listen! I will be honest with you;
I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes...

Allons! whoever you are! come forth!
You must not stay sleeping and dallying there in the house, though you built it, or though
it has been built for you.
Allons! out of the dark confinement!...

Allons! the road is before us!
It is safe—I have tried it—my own feet have tried it well. (Whitman)