What are you currently reading?

Part of our "culture of literacy" push this year has been, as a staff, to more explicitly model the qualities of lifelong passionate readers.  Time and energy are always tight, so we borrowed an easy idea from one of my old colleagues, the brilliant Sarah Drezek (thank you!): the "currently reading" poster.  Right now almost all of our teachers, administrators, and custodians are sharing their reading choices with students by using these posters.  Check out this collage of photos I took in the week before Spring Break!  Next step: getting parents, volunteers, and other community members to join the charge...

Do you have a mentor text in hand?

One rule of thumb for teaching any writing genre is as follows: don't ever teach without a mentor text -- preferably several -- in hand.  This is perhaps most crucial when it comes to those apt-to-be formulaic persuasive pieces; certainly if we ever want our students to move beyond the stultifying five paragraph essay, then we must show them real-world models of persuasive writing.

In today's New York Times, conservation scientists Samantha Strindberg and Fiona Maisels provide us with a rare treat -- a visually compelling, emotionally grabbing full-page piece, "The Slaughter of African Elephants," that includes two distinct genres within: the first, a persuasive piece (complete with a call-to-action) urging an end to the ivory trade http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/opinion/sunday/slaughter-of-the-african-elephants.html; the second, an informational piece (complete with charts, photos, captions) based on research http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/03/17/sunday-review/even-on-reserves-scant-protection-for-elephants.html?ref=sunday&_r=0.  The sum of these parts is a perfect mentor text for this time of the year, as we pust the finishing touches on our published persuasive pieces and move towards our final genre study, research reports.

My newspaper, complete with coffee stains

Here are a few mini-lessons that "The Slaughter of Elephants"could support:

1. Writers hook readers by appeal to their emotions early in persuasive pieces
• The lead: "There is nothing a mother elephant will not do for her infant, but even she cannot protect it from bullets."
2. Writers conclude persuasive pieces with a call to action so that persuaded readers can act upon their newfound beliefs
• The conclusion (which uses emotional appeal): "A universal attribute of humanity is compassion.  We protect those in harm's way.  We need to show this compassion to forest elephants, giving them space to roam and protection from danger.  Most crucially, people must stop buying ivory. If we do not act, we will have to shamefully admit to our children that we stood by as elephants were driven out of existence."
3. Writers use less common sentence structures (in this case semi-colons, colons, and dashes) to draw the reader's attention to crucial pieces of information
• "Her sacrifice was for naught; the baby was also killed."
• "Lately, nowhere is safe: killings are rising inside the reserves."
• "Nor do young elephants develop secure social relationships when living in a state of terror, or mourning slain family members -- and elephants do mourn."
4. Writers/Researchers/Scientists use text features such as bold text and bullets in order to communicate a lot of information in a succint, readable fashion: 
• Three elephants are profiled in the research report, and each is described by:
• Name
• Photo with caption and date
• Place in group (age, relationships to other elephants)
• Traits
• Death
5. Writers/Researchers/Scientists use graphics in order to communicate information to readers that is difficult to communicate efficiently with text (a picture is worth a thousand words)
• Map of the elephant Resilience's wanderings, before and after she was attacked by poachers, including her three week struggle to overcome the injuries sustained in that attack

In genre study, student always analyze several mentor texts in order to develop their working understanding of the defining characteristics of that genre.  Obviously no one mentor can illustrate all of these characteristics.  That said, some mentors do stand above others and are worth coming back to repeatedly, throughout a spiral or even a year.  Because of its unique hybrid nature, this article certainly merits that honor.  In the meantime, we have two weeks until our next spiral begins -- so let the mentor-hunting commence!

No "implementation gap" here!

A recent Zone coach's PD focused on the so-called implementation gap, the typical distinction between those who are trained to implement a new technique and those who actually do so.

In the last three weeks, I've been trolling the classrooms of Everett, looking for evidence of implementation of our Writers Craft techniques (e.g sentence unscrambling, sentence patterning, sentence combining, and mentor sentences -- see below posts for more info), and I'm cautiously optimistic that we are on our way to defying the conventional wisdom on this one.  Earlier this week I got to observe Mr. Wright teach transitions through paragraph unscrambling, a smart and strategic way to get students to build their understanding of how transitions function as sign-posts in well-organized paragraphs, and today I observed Ms. Soto using sentence patterning (based off of her read aloud of The Boy in Striped Pajamas) to increase students' capacity to create their own complex sentences.  Check out her signage below.

Three key reflections the 7th grade team came to after a video share of this lesson in CPT today:

• sentence patterning requires scaffolding when introducing it to students, and one effective scaffold might have been to limit the sentence pattern to one noun until students were comfortable with the concept
• the ticker visuals make a difference (see Ms. Florita's in the "Writers Craft Part Deux" post)
• this activity is such a strong content vocabulary builder that it makes sense to use it with content that we deem most crucial (in this case, it might have made more sense to work on the students' Social Studies content, or the content they are using for their persuasive essays, rather than content from a read aloud -- though I can't lie, it was pretty cool to hear students recommend the far flung locales of Berlin and Auschwitz as the end of prepositional phrases!)

A Personal Post: meditation on pets, writing, and the literate life

This morning I awoke, as is my pattern, to the sound of my iPhone alarm, and then I checked my email in the dark, which I'm loathe to admit is is also my pattern, finding there an early morning missive from my father entitled simply "Frankie."  I knew, before I even moved my fingers across the touch screen to open the note, what would be within.  Frankie, our beloved family bulldog, had already outlived even the most wildly optimistic projections of his veterinarian and had been visibly ailing in recent months.

My suspicions were confirmed when I opened the email -- Frankie had indeed passed last night -- but what followed in my father's note was unanticipated and brought with it some small consolation and even a moment of delight: my father had woken early this morning to write his boon companion a formal obituary, a loving and tender and wistful tribute to Frankie's life.

Later today, when I had the clarity of mind to reflect upon this, I realized how significant it was that my father was able to express his grief in the written form, even going so far as to riff upon a standard genre (there are those, but certainly not those who have ever loved a pet, who would question the choice of obituary for a dog!).  Because he wrote, he was able to share his feelings widely with friends and loved ones; because he wrote, he was able to sharpen his insights and reflect more deeply on the nature of Frankie's life; because wrote, he was able to assemble for posterity his favorite recollections of Frankie, creating permanence out of what would otherwise be fleeting; because he wrote, we will all have this record of our great family love for this special dog.

We often speak at Everett of our literacy goals: some of them are concrete and short term (students will gain two grade levels in reading as measured by Fountas and Pinell), while many more of them are amorphous, intangible, and so long-term as to defy quantitative analysis (students will be passionate, critical, lifelong readers.)  To the latter set of goals, I now add this one: I hope that all of our students are able to write well enough to express their feelings and capture their most sacred reminiscences on paper.  And furthermore, I hope that they, like my father, turn to writing for consolation in moments of need.  Perhaps there should be a new essential question for our Balanced Literacy work together as a staff: how will the lesson I've designed today increase the likelihood that my students will turn to writing to make meaning of their joy or grief? (This is not as touchy feely as it sounds, either -- when you read the obit, you'll see the training and technical skill required to pull it off.)  I've copied the obituary after the jump.

Writers' Craft Part Deux

During each PD Cycle this year, our team has drawn up a document that articulates our shared beliefs and agreements about what these beliefs look like in practice.  These documents, known collectively as our "we believes," ensure that our practices are always connected to our philosophy and that our philosophy is always explicit, rather than assumed.  We use these living documents to guide classroom walkthroughs, feedback from visitors, and conversations about teacher growth.

One particular statement in our current "we believe" document -- the one focusing on Writers' Craft -- stands out to me as worth coming back to over and over again:

"Teachers have a range of teaching strategies that are focused on the manipulation and application of clear, sophisticated, and beautiful sentences."  

"Manipulation" and "application" are bolded because they describe actions that are contrary to the traditional teaching of grammar, teaching that typically focuses on correcting errors in isolated sentences and teaching that has, incidentally, been proven ineffective (see Carnegie's Writing Next).  The verbs in our document describe a different sort of work with sentences in which students intentionally move or combine parts of sentences to create the effects they desire, using grammar as a tool to help them reach a desired communication end.  As teachers, we're working to develop our repertoire of instructional strategies that engage students in this work.  So far, we've looked at sentence patterning, sentence expanding/combining, sentence unscrambling, and the use of mentor sentences.  As I do walkthroughs in our classrooms during this cycle, I'm looking for examples of teachers exploiting these strategies in authentic, context-embedded ways.  

Check out what I noticed in Ms. Florita's classroom last Wednesday.

First, she used an anchor chart to introduce the concept of subordinate clauses.

Then, she used sentence patterning to play with these clauses, modeling for students several ways in which she could manipulate sentence parts.

Note how she's teaching subordination using vocabulary and concepts that apply to the current class context of persuasive writing.

The subordinating conjunctions poster can move, depending on how she wants the sentence to sound.







After this "I Do" level instruction, Ms. Florita transfered the responsibility to the students, giving them their own sentence parts to play around with.  Check out Esmerelda and Mercedes explaining their sentence possibilities:

This is still in the Guided Practice, or "We Do," portion of the gradual release; the ultimate test is whether Esmerelda and Mercedes can apply this learning to use subordination in their own writing.  Ms. Florita, send us examples as you find them!