"Don't Read Aloud" and Other Misguided Directives

Field Work (2011, M.A. Reilly)

I. A Problem

During the last few weeks, many principals and teachers who are clients of mine have greeted me and quickly said, "We've been told we can't read aloud to children anymore. The children have to do the work." Colleagues in other states have shared similar stories.  Such talk gives me pause.

I wonder about this notion of work. What is meant by this term as it used here? What might the word be a placeholder for?  What has been left unsaid? In this post I want to get beneath what seems to be an odd directive.  It is healthy and wise to read aloud and surely not limited in classrooms to only the teacher as actor.  Many a student of mine have read aloud. Likewise, I've known principals and superintendents who read aloud to faculty, students, and parents sharing their love for the written and spoken word.

II. A Question: Why Do We Read Aloud?

In a letter to Ottoline Morrell, Katherine Mansfield (1922) wrote: "The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books." We read aloud for many reasons and sharing the pleasure of the text is certainly a primary one.  There is something quite beautiful and aesthetic about hearing a text read aloud that resonates with most of us and helps to develop community.  Reading aloud, swapping texts often helps us to connect with one another, to develop empathy, to stretch and challenge our points of view, to share and complicate knowledge, and to broaden and deepen our understanding of self and other.  We ought to think twice before we devalue such outcomes.

Another reason we read aloud is to help children develop content knowledge. This summer I had the opportunity to work across 16 elementary schools and co-teach every day. The interactive read aloud was an important practice we conducted with K-3 children.  We carefully selected high quality texts, created a mix of potential questions and methods for students to develop/augment knowledge and keep track of new learning. Few if any of the children could have actually read any of the texts on their own. By reading aloud, teachers invited children to wonder about mutualism, the Boreal Forest, Sonia Sotomayor, Bill Traylor, redwood trees, the power of the press, and Sylvia Earle to name but a few topics.

We read aloud (teachers and students) because there are texts that must be sung. In reading aloud, and preparing a performance, we model for other learners how our voices convey meaning.  Consider the opening to The Odyssey:

"Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.
"Many cities of men he saw and learned their minds,
many pains he suffered, heartsick on the open sea,
fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home.
But he could not save them from disaster, hard as he strove—
the recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all,
the blind fools, they devoured the cattle of the Sun
and the Sungod blotted out the day of their return.
"Launch out on his story, Muse, daughter of Zeus.
Start from where you will—sing for our time too."

I cannot imagine silencing this call to the muse because someone issued a rule that says the spoken text is not allowed, especially at upper grades. How very narrow and foolish.

We read aloud challenging portions of text because seeing and hearing the text helps us to better understand it.  We model this for learners and invite them to make use of this practice when they are trying to make sense of a complex text they are reading or attempting to write. I know I read aloud my own writing (and usually pace as I do so) as hearing it helps me to revise and better understand the emerging intentions of the work.

We read aloud in order to guide students to better read specific types of texts, such as poetry and drama and to compose performance art or to use someone's voice in a remix.  For example, photographer Laurie Amodio, makes use of Laurie Anderson's, Walking and Falling in her 2 minute visual piece.




Hearing works read aloud inspires me.




And sometimes the words of another inspires our own creative acts as this young film maker does.




III. An Interlude

I am reminded as I write this of Robert Frost and his rather important lines from Mending Wall when the speaker says:

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.

IV. Towards Independence 

What I suspect might be fueling this rule is the concern that learners need to do, not only watch. I share that concern.  In some classrooms, children and teens spend a considerable time watching their teachers and then mimicking what they have seen their teachers do.  This method may be appropriate at times for specific reasons, but certainly would not represent all of the ways that learning can happen. What is ironic is that a similar absence of thoughtful practice is present in the decontextualized rules as those with some form of power are telling principals and teachers not to think, but rather to just enforce this new rule as it is dictated.

We learn by watching completed performances and we learn by doing/undoing, erring, knowing and unknowing.

Rules demonstrate the limitations of our thinking.


V. Cultivating Radical Openness

We need to be mindful and to cultivate radical openness, not more closed systems where permission is denied. We are teachers and what we model is what our children learn most powerfully.  Let's show them what radical openness looks like, feels like through the many occasions we and they compose that open spaces of permission.

Jason Silva situates this idea well in a three-minute TEDx performance.



Let's say it loudly
            (and often): We need to cultivate 
radical openness 
                 as a way of participating 
                                      and accelerating evolution. 


                          Wow.

Schema Theory & Transmediation in Action: Conferring with a Fourth Grade Writer

Alejandro's Drawing (September 2012)

Learning with Alejandro

Alejandro, a fourth grader, is struggling as a reader and writer to express ideas. On the day I met him, he had completed writing a personal narrative and was trying to use the comments from his teacher to revise/edit the text. The problem though was that Alejandro's reworked narrative remained very difficult to understand given the significant syntax issues (incorrect word order, fragments, missing words, incomplete sentences). My work at Alejandro's school for the next year is to support intermediate and middle school English Language Arts teachers by collaborating with them during a weekly 2-hour  PLC and modeling, coaching, and co-teaching during class time. As such, I asked Alejandro's teacher if she wanted me to confer with a few students while she observed.  (I previously posted about one editing conference here). She selected the students I would work with and observed the conferring sessions.

Conferring

I often begin conferring seated alongside a child and ask him/her to read the text or section of the text aloud. I most often ask the writer to make sure she or he has a pencil/pen at hand.  As Alejandro began reading, he too had difficulty discerning what he had written. In order to curtail his frustration, I asked him if he would get a blank flip book that his teacher had made for another activity the children would be doing later that day.  Alejandro brought me the blank flip book and I explained that sometimes when we draw it helps us to recall experiences and organize them.  I opened to the first two-page spread, and indicated that Alejandro would make a drawing of what happened at the beginning of his story about his bike mishap.  Beneath the drawing, I explained that he would then write what happened. We continued through the flip book and I marked the place where he would draw the middle and the end of the story and where he would write. I suggested that he not copy from the written text he had already produced. Alejandro was excited about the task and immediately returned to his desk and began working by himself.

About 20 minutes later, Alejandro returned to where his teacher and I were working (with other children) to share his completed work.  I found it interesting that he initiated sharing his work.  This time when I conferred with him, I began by asking him to tell me about the first picture he had drawn.  As he talked, he added the straight line beneath the image of him on the bike, indicating that he had been on a sidewalk.  I asked him what he might have drawn behind him and he quickly described that his story happened during the summer and that he had been at an uncle's home in the same city where he lives.  "They have just three houses on the whole block," he told me. We next looked at what he had written and what was interesting was that most of the syntax errors that had been so severe in the first draft were largely missing in the flip book. This is a phenomenon I have seen before.  As writers gain control over what they want to say (in this case by first drawing) their syntactical control increases as well.  As we worked together, Alejandro was able to talk about his drawings, imagine scenes he had not drawn, read his story aloud, and add details to the written text and he worked.  As he did all of this his confidence increased.  In the final written version of the story Alejandro wrote a brief narrative about a time during the summer when he had lost control of his bike, fell, and got back on his bike. Teh text made sense and was readable.

Schema

Today I conducted a two-hour professional learning session with Alejandro's teacher and her third grade colleagues. I introduced the teachers to schema theory and made use of the conferring session with Alejandro to illustrate three modes of learning: accretion, tuning, and restructuring. When new information is remembered in the context of an existing schema, without altering that schema, accretion occurs. Alejandro's teacher had written comments on his draft in the attempt to guide his revision and editing.  Her comments were cogent and meaningful and she anticipated that Alejandro would be able to make use of the comments to guide the revision. A challenge for Alejandro though was that he did not seem able to integrate the comments into his existing schema about personal narratives. Further, the situation did not simply call for Alejandro to modify his existing schema (tuning).  Rather, Alejandro needed to restructure the concept of personal narrative which he seemed to know as an act he routinely failed at doing.  He seemed unable to sufficiently call forth, create, and organize important details and images of his story through written text alone.  He seemed to have difficulty seeing scenes using only written language, nor did the written comments by his teacher sufficiently guide him to better see.

Transmediation

David Rumelhart and Don Norman (1976) write when "existing memory structures are not adequate to account for new knowledge restructuring occurs" (p.14). By drawing first, Alejandro was able to use another symbol system to help him write about the bike accident. When students use multiple symbols systems (in this case visual and written) as potential ways of learning, they engage in transmediation.  Less clear is whether this experience might help Alejandro begin to restructure his understanding of the personal narrative.

In the article, Saying What You See in the Dark Engaging Children in Art, I wrote (2009):

Teaching that makes use of transmediation (Cowan & Albers, 2006; Eisner,

1994, 1997, 2002; Leland & Harste, 1994; Siegel, 1995, 2006; Suhor, 1992; Tierney, 2005) potentially produces more flexible thinkers, an important cognitive prowess. Eisner

(1997) contends that “different forms of representation develop different cognitive

skills” (p. 349). The work described here produced the potential for learners to not

simply transfer their understanding as they engaged across sign systems, but rather

to develop new understandings. Eisner states that “the choice of a form of representation

and the selection of materials to be used both constrain and offer possibilities

we use to represent what we think influences both the processes and products of

thinking” (p. 349). I suggest that by thinking about the given topic through multiple

representations, the end products were enhanced (p. 78).

The important work in the conference was not only about helping Alejandro write a better narrative, but more so I wanted Alejandro to develop some new understandings about how to compose a narrative and the importance of seeing/imagining scenes while writing.  This latter outcome is bigger than a single text and will serve Alejandro well as he continues to develop as a writer.


Work Cited:

Rumelhart, D.E. & Norman, D.A. (1976). Accretion, tuning, and restructuring: Three modes of learning (Report  No.7602). Washington DC: ERIC.

Resources for Teaching Argumentative Reading and Writing

from I'm Not Quite Jack

Research

Developing Argumentive Discourse & Writing

View more PowerPoint from Mary Ann Reilly / Blueprints for Learning, Inc.

Resources
Argument Handout from The University of North Carolina @ Chapel Hill
Classical Argument
from English Language Education: Argumentative Texts
OWL: Purdue Online Writing Lab
The Toulmin Model of Argument
Education for Thinking
One Good Move

Lessons
Selecting Evidence to Support an Argument (HS) 
Writing Argumentative Texts
Introduction to Textual Analysis 2

Texts
The American Forest - John Muir (The Atlantic, 1897)
Guns Don't Belong in the Hands of  Administrators, Professors, or Students - Jesus M. Villahermosa, Jr, (The Chronicle of Higher Education, 4.18.2008)
Lecture is Dead, Take 3 - Murray Jensen (American Biology Teacher, March 2007)
Bibliography (with links) to argumentatitve essays for middle schoolers

One Hand, Your Breath & an iPhone: Editing by Ear

The Context

Today I was observing and modeling some ways to work with intermediate grade writers at an inner city public school. There I  had the pleasure of teaching one child how to edit by ear as her teacher observed.  Some years ago I heard my husband define punctuation as musical notation for the breath.  That understanding of what punctuation is has remained with me and informs the instructional decisions I make.  So today when I conferred with Kiara, a fourth grader who had written a terrific personal narrative, I was thinking about how to help her hear and feel punctuation as her text was largely missing most end punctuation marks.

The Process

I asked Kiara to take one hand and to place it close to her mouth so that as she read her text she could actually feel her breath hitting her hand as she said the words.  I explained that when her breath stopped hitting her hand that would be an indication that some type of punctuation (comma, period, etc.) was needed.  It was tough going at first as Kiara read very quickly.  I asked her to slow down the pace of the reading and she began to notice her breath and the absence of breath.  We practiced together and she slowly gained the confidence necessary to name those places where end punctuation was needed. She got better at naming the place where a period, question mark, or exclamation point was needed with each passing sentence.

After she completed the first round of editing, I gave her my iPhone and invited her to record (iTalk pro) what she had written and revised so that she could hear her composition.  This process yielded another round of editing as Kiara heard more places where she wanted to make both content and editing changes.  What was wonderful to see was the decision making that Kiara began to undertake.  She stopped checking with me and took control.  I was quietly cheering.

The Outcome

By the close of our 15-minute conference, Kiara had fully revised and edited the text resulting in a well told narrative about an afternoon she and her aunt played soccer.  I will be sending the audio recording to Kiara tomorrow so that she might share it with her family at home.  Involving the senses when writing can be an important method for writers to use.  This method often helps writers gain better control of the text so that they can convey their intentions.  Using technologies enhance that process. 

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.

9/11: The Rings and Rings of Stars

9.11 (2010, M.A. Reilly)

The Distances

Henry Rago

This house, pitched now
The dark wide stretch
Of plains and ocean
To these hills over
The night-filled river,
Billows with night,
Swells with the rooms
Of sleeping children, pulls
Slowly from this bed,
Slowly returns, pulls and holds,
Is held where we
Lock all distances!

Ah, how the distances
Spiral from that
Secrecy:
Room,
Rooms, roof
Spun to the huge
Midnight, and into
The rings and rings of stars.

Islands of Expertise: Implications for Early Childhood Learning

The Swimmer

It's not exactly that I didn't understand anything, but I did not understand a lot of the dinner conversation the other night.  At that time my husband, son and I were in a restaurant and perhaps the noise level contributed to my lack of understanding.  The truth though is much closer to the fact that I did not have adequate background knowledge to fully enter into the conversation.  I can't even recall the terms that were bantered about as all of the terms left my mind as quickly as they entered.  My son was schooling my husband and me on programming and the requisite hardware he has and wants to further acquire in his quest to do something with a computer. 

My son's academic discourse related to computers, programming, gaming, and digital know-how eclipses my own.  He has immersed himself for the last two years playing, making, doing, talking about, and engaging daily with others who share and deepen his interest in these technologies.  He has always been like this: passions develop across large spans of time and the domain specific discourse becomes integrated into his daily speech. In this process, he is not at all unusual.

Most parents I imagine can recall fondly the first passions their child experienced. Perhaps like me, you too recall the Thomas the Tank Engine passion which for us led to learning about, riding on, and coming to understand trains. This period, like all passions, was highly experiential. The Thomas Period arrived while my son was still a young toddler. His enthusiasm for all things that were trains informed many of our outings and decisions, books and movies (yes we sat through the Thomas movies over and over again). Alongside this period, my son also developed a passion about the inner ear. He was fascinated with an illustration of the inner ear that was in a oversized book he would cart around and well before he knew all his ABCs, he was fluent in inner ear discourse and would proudly discuss the cochlea, canals, incus, and Eustachian tube. He studied the illustration and asked question after question about how sound was heard and what in the ear facilitated sound.  He wanted to work out how hearing happens. About this same time, my husband was being fitted for a hearing device and I wonder now if the two were related.  My son's questions pushed us to learn more, to find connections to the ear in other activities we were doing as a family, and to incorporate domain-specific discourse into our conversations about hearing and the ear. We didn't do this to enrich him academically.  We did this because we naturally wanted to support his interest and often his interests sparked our own. Out of our shared inquiry the language we used became increasingly specific and mature.  This is what happens when children develop these islands of expertise.  the language we use with them, changes and becomes far more domain-specific than other types of talk we use when speaking with children.

Kids are quirky experts. If you have a child, I'm confident you know what I mean.  Just take a look at four-year-old Stella in the video below as she explains what is inaccurate with the toy dinosaur she is holding.  Notice especially how her father supports her learning by providing domain-specific language.



The first comment posted to the Stella video was by a palaeontologist who wrote this:

It's awesome seeing this. I'm a palaeontologist and this makes my heart soar. I've seen kids in museums are the ones who educate their teachers and parents in nomenclature - I know my brother and myself were like that. My brother could name more than 20 dinosaurs at the age of four (genus and species) and would correct our parents if they couldn't pronounce them. This is a parenting WIN in my opinion!
akhshai 8 months ago 3

So what's going here? What do we need to learn from this as teachers? Principals?

The Island of Expertise Theory

Kevin Crowley and Melanie Jacobs (2002) labeled this at home cognitive development that young children develop prior to attending school, islands of expertise.  They defined it as such:

An island of expertise is a topic in which children happen to become interested in and in which they develop relatively deep and rich knowledge. A typical island emerges over weeks, months, or years and is woven throughout multiple family activities.  Because of this, developing islands of expertise is a fundamentally social process. They are con-constructed through the ongoing negotiation of children and parents' interests, children and parents' choices about family activities, and children and parents' cognitive processes, including memory, inferencing, problem solving, and explanation. As children develop deeper knowledge, islands of expertise support conversations and learning that can be more advanced than would be possible in domains in which the child's knowledge is of a more typically sketchy nature (333-334).  

What is significant about these islands of expertise is that they facilitate abstract and general knowledge development.  Again Crowley and Jacobs explain:

....islands of expertise become platforms for families to practice learning habits and to develop, often for the first time, conversations about abstract  and general ideas, concepts, or mechanisms.  Even when a child loses interest and an island of expertise begins to fade, the abstract and general themes that used the island's rich knowledge as a launching pad, will remain connected to children's other knowledge (pp. 333-334).

The palaeontologist and Stella not only share some aspects of a scientific discourse, but more importantly they share similar processes they have used to develop this domain-specific language.

The expertise of both the interested child and adult scientist reflect repeated exposure to domain-specific declarative knowledge, repeated practice in interpreting new content, making inferences to connect new knowledge to existing knowledge, repeated conversations with others who share or want to support the same interest and so on (Crowley & Jacobs, p. 337).

James Gee (2005) in discussing the importance and potential implications of islands of expertise writes: 

Even young children learn best when they pick up "islands of expertise" (Crowley and Jacobs 2003). Whether those "islands" are model trains, toy dinosaurs, or Pokémon, they constitute centers of expertise that introduce learners to complex languages and the ways in which such languages are married to specific experiences, like gravity to a tossed coin. These experiences are then used to solve problems and answer questions. With authentic professionalism, "knowing" is not merely the mastery of facts; rather knowing involves participation in the complex relationships between facts, skills, and values in the service of performing a specific identity. Here, word and deed are united and the knower is a knower of specific kind—a type of active professional, not just a generic recipient of knowledge. 

School Implications

So when I think about Gee's comments and some of the inherent challenges related to the acquisition of school Discourse(s), I wonder about the efficacy of creating sustained occasions (like the first three years of school) where young children could follow/abandon passions across those years and become active professionals whose experiential learning would serve as a powerful scaffold that supported other newer learning.  If we tapped into these islands, we could unleash a learning power that would dazzle us and the failed practice of situating some children as 'being remedial' would feel odd, unnecessary. I have no doubt that the development of these discourses would lead to an easier acquisition of reading rather than the more forced manner that some children experience school-based learning to read lessons.



Works Cited

Crowley, K. and M. Jacobs. 2002. Islands of expertise and the development of family scientific literacy. In Learning conversations in museums, eds. G. Leinhardt, K. Crowley, and K. Knutson, 333-356. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Gee, J. 2005. What would a state of the artinstructional video game look like?. Innovate 1 (6). http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=80 (accessed April 24, 2008). The article is reprinted here with permission of the publisher, The Fischler School of Education and Human Services at Nova Southeastern University.