Mike Rose

The New Press (2009)

Hardcover: 192 pages

I don’t tout a book that I’ve never read, just as I don’t give students a writing assignment that I haven’t already written myself, but the National Writing Project book group ning is having an online discussion of this book and the coversations have been quite intriguing. Imagine, adult conversation centered around big questions. It made me feel like a professional again. If you too are yearning for those adult conversations, this is a great group to join.

From the New Press website:

A powerful and timely exploration of this country’s public education goals, and how they are put into practice, by the award-winning author and educator

I ask how to educate a vast population, what to teach and how, who will do it, what the work will mean. We still ask these questions because we haven’t satisfactorily answered them. And the way we answer them says a lot about who we are—and what we want to become.
—FROM WHY SCHOOL?

Water that once could take no human weight-
We were students then-holds up our feet,
And goes on ahead of us for a mile.
Beneath us the teachers, and around us the stillness.

–Robert Bly

from Eating the Honey of Words, 1999
HarperCollins Publishers, New York, NY

Double-Entry Journals – a while reading strategy

Background

The Double-Entry Journal strategy enables students to record their responses to text as they read. Students write down phrases or sentences from their assigned reading and then write their own reaction to that passage. The purpose of this strategy is to give students the opportunity to express their thoughts and become actively involved with the material they read.

Benefits

Double-Entry Journaling improves students’ comprehension, vocabulary, and content retention. This interactive strategy activates prior knowledge and present feelings, and promotes collaborative learning. It fosters the connection between reading and writing as students are able to “reply” to the author or speaker as they write their responses.

The technique offers flexibility in that teachers can use any form of written text, read alouds, or listenings that are assigned in class.

Create and use the strategy

Introduce a passage of text to the students. Discuss the Double-Entry Journal technique and model the procedure including specific guidelines for writing. Have students read the selected text making journal entries whenever a natural pause in the reading occurs, so that the flow is not interrupted constantly.

1. Students fold a piece of paper in half, lengthwise.
2. In the left hand column, the students write a phrase or sentence from the selection that was particularly meaningful to them, along with the page number.
3. In the right hand column, the students react to the passage by writing personal responses to the quotes on the left. The entry may include a comment, a question, a connection made, or an analysis.
4. Students can share their responses with the class or literature discussion group.

KWL (what I know, what I want to learn, what I learned) is an old technique (Ogle, 1986) that basically informs you, the teacher, about what students already know about your topic unit, and what they want to learn. After the unit, they go back to their chart and tell you what they learned. Here’s the problem. In the middle school on, I find that KWL is a mood killer rather than a motivator. According to my KWL expert (my senior in high school), the problem is really that teachers pass out the KWL worksheet too early. He says, “how am I supposed to know what I want to learn if I don’t know what the possibilities are?”

His advice: teach a little bit of the topic first, like a movie trailer – just enough to tease out the WONDER. As a parent, that’s always my hope for my children, that the institution of SCHOOL will not kill my child’s natural wonder.

A workshop on non-fiction reading and writing with Stephanie Harvey offered an idea that sounds like an alternate to KWL. Let’s take a sample unit: slavery in America

1. Start with images – post the images around the room like a gallery walk. Students silently walk around the room, look at the images, then on post its with their name, they write a wonder statement and an inference statement, then put it near the photo.

I wonder how heavy these chains are and when they were used?

I infer that the shackles were not the only way that slaves were controlled by their owners.

This activity will also show you what kind of background knowledge the students are coming with.

2. Use picture books about the topic to form book clubs (literature circles) where students choose a kids book, they read it with their group and discuss it. Within three days, since the pieces are short, they’ll trade books. This gives them enough background information to tease out some “I wonders.”

Once they have a little bit of information, then they can do a KWL chart, or you can bring in your resource materials and let them do personal or group inquiry research.

• must do. . .
• must read. . .
• must learn.  . .
• must implement. . .
• must revise. . .
• must reflect. . .
• must report. . .

Our own Liana Iaea Honda has a painless, fun way to increase our Hawaiian language learning (another “must”) through her blog: He Momi. Subscribe to her blog, put it on your feed reader and enjoy the stories that come from these words. From today’s blog:

Ōlaʻi

1. earthquake, tremor.
2. light porous stone or pumice, as used for polishing canoes or for scraping off hair of pig or dog to be roasted.

In light of the ōlaʻi that have taken place in the Pacific Ocean recently, perhaps you can find some use of today’s word in your daily practice.  Ōlaʻi (with a macron over the o for stress) is an old word, as ōlaʻi are not a new phenomenon to Hawaiians.  Many ōlaʻi occur in our islands, particularly because of the activity generated by the still active volcano on Hawai’i Island.  I find it particularly interesting this word has a smaller word in it, la’i, that actually means calm or peaceful.  Perhaps this refers to the calmness that follows an earthquake, when you experience it.  I’m only speculating and using this connection as a tool to help me better remember the ōlaʻi.  As we make connections to certain words, that’s how we remember them, right?

Ōla’i ikaika loa i ‘ike ‘ole ‘ia kona lua – very strong earthquake, the like of which had never been seen before.

Halulu ka honua i ka ōla’i ē – The earth resounds because of the earthquake (from a chant by Edith Kanaka’ole)

Nei ka honua, he ōlaʻi ia
When the earth trembles, it is an earthquake.
(We know what it is by what it does)

Ua loa’a ʻelua ōla’i ma Vanuatu i kēia pule. – There were two earthquakes in Vanuatu this week.

Aia ke ōlaʻi ma Indonesia. – The earthquake was in Indonesia.

Advantages of wikispaces:

• students can be the authors of their pages while you still hold administrative power
• videos (imovies, voicethread, flip camera quicktime movies, recordings from photo booth) are all simple to upload to a wikipage
• ohana and other students can c0mment directly on voicethreads from the wikispace rather than sift through drafts of presentations on the voicethread site
• the site is as private as you want it to be
• if someone inadvertently erases some content, it’s easy to fix, as the program tracks who changed what and when
• wikispaces, unlike your school blog, can be worked on from home

Check out the wikispaces sites of some of your colleagues, and if you’re ready to add to your repertoire, I’ll be happy to help you set up a site.

Jerelyn’s grade 8 social studies

Mele’s Papa Nohona Hawai’i

Based on their findings, the group came up with six features of instruction that make a difference in student performance. These six features are interrelated and supportive of one another. The higher performing schools exhibit all six characteristics. They caution that although addressing one feature may bring about improved student performance, it is the integration of all the features that will effect the most improvement.

 Finding 1: Students learn skills and knowledge in multiple lesson types

What does that mean?

Teachers use a variety of different teaching approaches based on student need. If students need to learn a particular skill, item, or rule, for example, the teacher might choose to step away from the curriculum in a separated activity in order to introduce the information as an independent lesson, exercise or drill. (e.g., they might be asked to copy definitions of literary terms into their notebooks and to memorize them)

To give students practice, teachers prepare a simulated activity that asks students to apply concepts and rules within a targeted unit of reading, writing, or oral language. They learn their skill at their instructional level so that the focus is on learning the skill without the possible hindrance of the content of the material. (For example, students can identify examples of literary devices within a particular selection, or write their own examples of these devices.)

To help students bring together their skills and knowledge within the context of a purposeful activity, teachers use integrated activities. These require students to use their skills or knowledge to complete a task or project that has meaning for them. (For example, in discussing a work of literature, students might be asked to consider how a writer’s use of literary devices affects a reader’s response to the piece).

All three approaches, separated, simulated and integrated, should be used or teachers are missing opportunities to strengthen instruction and to integrate it across lessons throughout the year.
Some activities that work:

• offering separated and simulated activities to individuals, groups, or the entire class as needed
• providing overt, targeted instruction and review as models for peer and self-evaluation
• teaching skills, mechanics, or vocabulary that can be used during integrated activities such as literature discussions
• using all three kinds of instruction to scaffold ways to think and discuss (e.g. summarizing, justifying answers, and making connections)

What doesn’t work:

• reliance on any one approach to the exclusion of the other two
• focus on separated and/or simulated activities with no integration with the larger goals of the curriculum

Classroom example:

At Reuben Dario Middle School in Florida, Gail Slatko uses all three approaches to empower her students to be better readers, writers, and editors. She teaches vocabulary skills within the context of literature and writing, but she also asks students to complete practice workbook exercises designed to inrease their vocabularies. They also create “living dictionaries” by collecting new words as they come across them in books, magazines, and newspapers.

In doing multigenre research, students don’t necessarily focus on the same content material, but multigenre research allows students to

• learn how to conduct research in search of answers to questions that they pose
• learn to self-evaluate by monitoring their own progress and set goals for themselves throughout the unit
• practice using technology skills in a variety of ways
• develop thinking and problem-solving skills by delving further into a topic that they are already familiar with or are interested in learning more about
• learn organizational skills
• learn the skills needed to collaborate

The outcomes of multigenre projects are ideals, and not all students will get the same satisfaction, or rigor out of their project, but teachers can keep several things in mind in order to keep their sanity. First, choose topics that students are interested in, or topics that have validity and usefulness for them. Second, have a clear rubric, but also allow flexibility. Don’t get upset if someone wants to do something that is not on your extensive list of options. Their passion for making iMovies could expand your list of options. Make sure students are balancing exploration with mastery. If the MLA format is important for all research, then have them practice until they show they can master it.  If you are not as picky about the elements of a poem, then let them go wild.

If you’re interested in learning more about multigenre projects, let me know. I have some resources for you.

How it works:

Students fill out the type of document and title/description on top, then move one to the first of three columns.

Column 1: “What does it say?” One social studies teacher used artifacts instead of documents, so the first column read “What is it?” (Draw and identify)

Column 2: “What does it mean?” The revised artifact form said “Where were the materials gathered from?” and “What was it used for?”

Column 3: “Why does it matter?” (”How was this artifact essential to daily life?”)

Try it, change it, adapt it, play with it.

say.pdf

If I were given a problem and one hour to solve it, I should spend the first fifty-five minutes asking questions and the last five minutes using those questions to solve it.
–Albert Einstein

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.
–Albert Einstein

Information is not knowledge.
–Albert Einstein

The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.
–Albert Einstein

The only source of knowledge is experience.
–Albert Einstein

So what do Einstein’s quotes have to do with us as teachers?  We must continue to be curious, continue to be learners and pass that curiosity onto our students. We can’t just give lip service to the idea of “lifelong learning.” What did you learn about yourself, your craft, your students? Once we learn it, we must share it with our colleagues so that the curiosity gets passed on. If  we have a fabulous experience in our classroom, but nobody else knows about it, did it really happen? It is not our duty to share our “aha” moments, but it should be done out of love – love for our students as well as our colleagues.

Love is a better teacher than duty.
–Albert Einstein