Literacy Now

One significant challenge I encountered as an early career teacher was student engagement. My subject area, history, is notorious for creating disengaging, passive learning environments filled with dry lectures and hand-cramping pages of notes.

However, concerns about student disengagement are not limited to just history. Increasingly, disengagement characterizes much of a student’s experience in school. In fact, reports from Institute of Play and the Gallup Student Poll suggest that the Gallup Student Poll suggestwhile 80% of elementary school students feel engaged in their work, only 60% of middle school students report feeling engaged and a mere 40% of high school students are engaged. Importantly, research also suggests that high school students are more likely to feel engaged when the work they are doing has personal or social meaning attached to it.

Work by John Guthrie and Gay Ivey suggests that allowing students a choice in their reading material is critical for engaging readers in both informational and literary texts, respectively. The Connected Learning report also offers compelling examples of youths using digital media and online networks to learn more about topics of interest, to share ideas, and to take action in their communities. One recent teaching method that integrates text choice and technology is Genius Hour (aka 20-time), consisting of sustained, in school, interest-driven student inquiry projects, which culminate in a public presentation of learning. I worked recently with a middle school science teacher, Michele Austin of King Philip Middle School in Massachusetts, as she and 24 students embarked on a 20-time program.

Process

We framed our work loosely on Joy Kirr and Tom Driscoll’s 20-Time in Education model along with AJ Juliani’s helpful infographic, putting an emphasis on inquiry projects that would improve the community. We drew inspiration from Chris Rosati’s Big Ideas for the Greater Good initiative in which local students developed projects to improve their community and videotaped their process. We allowed students to choose their topic and refine its scope as necessary.

Our 20-time project was scheduled for one period per week over 12 weeks, with presentations to take place during the 13th week. Class periods ran approximately 50 minutes during the students’ study hall/lunch block, and all students had access to desktop computers. Students were not required to participate in the 20-time endeavor, but nearly 90% opted in to the program and even brought friends from other study halls to collaborate.

We began by giving students time to explore and search for websites to construct their own understandings of 20-time. From there, we broke up the program into three four-week segments: brainstorming, researching, and action. Although student autonomy was a primary feature of this project, we provided graphic organizers to help students organize their ideas and push into deeper inquiry, plan out logistics, and aid them in getting unstuck.

Students took on a wide variety of projects. Three groups chose to run events, including a lip-sync contest, a baseball clinic, and a baseball league Opening Day Walk for charitable foundations, which raised over $4,000 combined. Other groups chose to focus on the process of creating clubs in school, such as a peer tutoring club and a nursing home collaboration club. Others wanted to research how to make things such as Scratch video games, a slinky toy, and even a human hamster wheel. We held the presentations on May 8 to a crowd of more than 50 community members, and several of the projects were highlighted in local newspapers.

Takeaways for practice

From these experiences, four important observations emerged:

1. Students find 20-time to be an engaging learning experience
   Students thoroughly enjoyed the 20-time process. After ending the program in early May, some students wanted to start a new project while others carried on with their projects into the end of the school year. Students valued the opportunity to choose their learning topics and the ability to receive peer feedback and support when they made their work public. The vast majority of students worked on their projects outside of class time, although they were not asked to do so. One particular feature students enjoyed was receiving feedback instead of a “score” because “messing up” was perceived as an opportunity to fix a problem rather than a path to a lower grade.
2. Internet navigation + reading + communicating = work in progress
   Students entered into the project with some background in Internet navigation and critical evaluation of sources. They were taught the differences in top-level domain types (edu vs. com) and the importance of finding the author of Internet texts. However, locating the author of a website and identifying his or her perspective on an issue was still a challenge for students. Furthermore, professional e-communication norms such as e-mail inquiries were relatively new to students, compared with informal methods such as texting that they were used to. Minilessons on observed challenges along with just-in-time modeling to meet student needs effectively addressed some common gaps in digital literacy.
3. Mentors make a big difference
   Make no mistake about it—it is a challenge for the teacher to help guide students through all of their projects. The teacher’s role is especially tough when the action takes place outside of school or if the teacher has a limited background in the student’s area of interest. We found the most successful projects were those where students actively sought out adults to help mentor their projects, as these adults could help the students navigate unforeseen logistical issues.
4. Genius Hour can be discipline specific
   While we and many other teachers have made 20-time or Genius Hour open ended, they do not necessarily need to be that way. Brian Hodges, a history teacher in the Public School system in Massachusetts, also runs 20-time in his classroom. His class has the caveat of tying their inquiry to a topic in social studies. Despite the constraint, Brian’s students reported positive experiences with 20-time because they had the autonomy to choose both their topic and presentation method. These two tweets (tweet A and tweet B) offer additional examples of the types of 20-time projects possible within different content areas.

Dave Quinn is a doctoral student in URI/RIC PhD in Education program. Previously, he was a history teacher at King Philip Middle School in Norfolk, MA, and a member of the Seekonk School Committee.

Chromebook is a laptop computer that is dependent on the Google Chrome Internet browser. In other words, a Chromebook is used by connecting to the Internet through Google apps such as Google Classroom, Google Docs, gScholar, and WeVideo. Many school districts are integrating Chromebooks because they are cheaper and easier to maintain as compared with laptops using Windows or Mac software. In addition, students and teachers can access their work (e.g., documents, presentations, photos, and e-mail) through any computer just by using the Chrome browser and signing into their Google account.  

During the 2014–2015 school year, I worked with educators from a small public school in a rural area in the northeastern part of the United States. The school district had received a grant to purchase six Chromebooks for each classroom. The faculty noticed a large portion of its literacy instruction was focused on print text and paper-and-pencil literacy practices. This was a cause for concern because the recommendations outlined by the Common Core State Standards Initiative emphasize a balanced instruction with both print and digital media literacy practices. For example, the Common Core indicates students should be able to use technology thoughtfully and digital media strategically “to enhance their reading, writing, speaking, listening, and language use. [And that] they are familiar with the strengths and limitations of various technological tools and mediums and can select and use those best suited to their communication goals.” As a result, Chromebook integration was meant to support the notion that digital media are blended throughout daily literacy instruction rather than used as an add-on special assignment.

Three-week integration framework

In order to give teachers consistent support and freedom to play with the Chromebooks, professional development was broken into three-week intervals. During the first week I met with third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade teachers in a face-to-face environment. The second week was conducted through an online environment. The third week involved a classroom application environment. This three-week integration framework rotated 16 times during the school year.

Week One: The face-to-faceenvironment allowed me to introduce an instructional method using a gradual release model. For example, I would model how to plan and conduct a close reading of a print and digital text. Then, I would invite the teachers to share their process for close reading. Next, we experimented with different reading paths: linear (top-to-bottom and left-to-right) and nonlinear. Finally, working in pairs, teachers took turns practicing explicit instruction of close reading. The session always ended with time for teachers to discuss the benefits and challenges of the instructional method. They also collaborated in small grade-level groups to integrate the method into their literacy instruction.

Week Two: The onlineenvironment gave teachers the opportunity to continue to build their technological pedagogical content knowledge, also known as TPACK. Using a Google Classroom platform, I posted one or two relevant professional journal articles written for practitioners; short video segments that modeled the instructional method within the classroom; and discussion questions for teachers to share their thoughts. For instance, Bridget Dalton’s article in The Reading Teacher entitled “Multimodal Composition and the Common Core State Standards” provided a bridge between theory and concrete examples. As teachers used the Google Classroom platform for their own learning, they began to feel more comfortable using this tool in their classroom.

Week Three: The classroom application environment held teachers accountable for adjusting their weekly lesson plan to include a hybrid model of literacy instruction. As defined by this school district, a hybrid model contained direct, collaborative, and individual instruction using both print and digital texts. As teachers took risks and explored integrating Chromebooks, I created a Google Doc where teachers could post feedback on their successes and challenges. This document allowed teachers to receive immediate support from administrators, teachers in other schools, and instructional coaches.

Challenges

Despite the success of the three-week integration framework, there were a few challenges to keep in mind. First, some teachers lacked basic technology skills and became overwhelmed. However, the face-to-face and online environments could be differentiated to meet the needs of the teachers. Being able to offer different levels of professional development may have provided better support to meet each teacher at his or her comfort level.

Regardless of proficiency, most teachers struggled to envision a hybrid classroom. They continued to use familiar print text and paper-and-pencil literacy practices instead of adjusting their instruction to include online inquiry and multimedia text sets. Without consistent instructional support from literacy coaches, technology staff, and administration, teachers may not have changed their instruction.

Even though teachers suggested that Chromebook integration increased student engagement and motivation, there were also digital citizenship issues to address. For example, while providing revision feedback on a Google Doc, one student disagreed with a peer and deleted those comments. Likewise, another student was writing inappropriate comments in a collaborative writing assignment. Finally, students were clicking on videos that were off topic. Fortunately, the cloud storage saves all of this activity and provides evidence when talking with students about what they might do differently in the future. From these experiences, teachers realized the importance of also teaching digital citizenship in the 21st-century classroom.

This three-week integration framework could be applied to any topic or any type of technology integration. I would love to learn more about the integration framework your school district uses for professional development. Feel free to send an e-mail to the address linked below.

Julie B. Wise is a doctoral student at the University of Delaware. You can follow her on Twitter. This article is part of a series from the Technology in Literacy Education Special Interest Group (TILE-SIG).

In today’s world, the topic of using technology in the classroom can be intimidating. In this monthly column, join one teacher on a quest to discover the best way to meet the needs of her digital-age learners…moving beyond the technology tools to focusing on supporting each student’s learning. 

For many of us, summer is a time when we can clear our minds and truly think about our teaching practice. Questions like “What was successful?” or “Where can we grow?” ring in our minds even when our bodies may be engaged in fun summertime activities. Like many of you, my mind also delves into thinking about the possibilities for the upcoming school year. We peruse Pinterest or other digital mediums for new ideas or practices. With new ideas often come the questions that begin with “What if…?”

What if students didn’t sit in a desk all day listening to teachers talk? Learning is an action verb, so shouldn’t students be active to truly learn? How actively involved are students if the teacher is doing all the work and the students are passive? We know that our students become experts at playing school: appearing to be engaged in class when a teacher is talking while being a million miles away mentally. Wouldn’t that change if students had the opportunity to work with their peers, both locally and globally?

Students could share their strengths for the benefit of others while developing in an area of their weaknesses by collaborating with their peers. They could ask questions of one another and get many more perspectives beside the one that a teacher might have. If students are actively involved in learning, they won’t be able to go unnoticed and slip between those proverbial classroom cracks.

What if learning weren’t a “one-size-fits-all” proposition where every child is doing the exact same things at the exact same time? What if students actually had a choice in how they learn content?

We know that students have different learning styles; they learn best across different modalities and learning environments. Some students may learn best by reading and writing a reflection while others may learn best by creating something new to show their learning. Others may benefit from creating podcasts, videos, or interviews.

What if students were given the opportunity to share their mastery of learning standards in a way that was meaningful for them? What could happen if we let students create their own rubrics, break down standards, and assess one another?

Students would become experts at understanding standards while understanding where they stand on the learning continuum. Instead of every student creating the same teacher-directed project with very little variety or ownership, students can build an entire interactive digital world in Minecraft while others publish an anthology of writing or create a board game for peers to play. They learn how to take what they have learned and apply it in a way that is meaningful to them and impactful for those around them. With these opportunities, students gain a much deeper understanding of the content and how it fits within the framework of their lives.

What if students became their own advocates for learning? What if, while they are with us, they learn how to articulate their learning?

Students need the tools to communicate successfully with educators and other adults how they learn best. They need to be equipped with the terminology and research to argue for the types of learning experiences they need to get the most out of their education. If our students spend a school year discovering themselves as learners—their strengths, weakness, and goals—they build the confidence and the ability to explain to anyone not just what they need as learners but also why they need it.

So the question that may be ringing in your head is whether this works within a regular classroom of a diverse population of students. What does it look like? How can it be managed with everything else we juggle as teachers? I would love to show you what happens when students take the driver’s seat in their own learning. Be sure to join me on Sunday, July 19, at 9:00 a.m. at ILA’s Annual Conference for my session, “License to Learn: Putting Students in the Driver’s Seat of Their Own Learning.” I’ll be sharing many of my students’ stories, their projects, and our adventures down the “what if…?” path. I hope to see you there.

Julie D. Ramsay is a National Board Certified Teacher and the author of “Can We Skip Lunch and Keep Writing?”: Collaborating in Class and Online, Grades 3–8. She teaches ELA to sixth graders at Rock Quarry Middle School in Tuscaloosa, AL. She also travels the country to speak, present, and facilitate workshops in applying technology to support authentic learning. Read her blog, eduflections.

As a teacher, I have long thought that if I could know which strategies were the most important for novice online readers to develop, then both my pedagogical efforts and my students’ learning efforts could be tailored for results. The logic here is somewhat economic and linear: Return on investment (ROI) is likely to be maximized if teachers and students focus efforts on the particular learning strategies most likely to support advanced reading comprehension.

If we consider the example of inquiry-based activities we often ask students to do online (e.g., “go online to learn about climate change and then write a report”), studies have shown that appropriate use of particular online reading strategies can lead to better understanding of the topic. The logic of ROI is not, therefore, misguided. During online inquiry, studies have shown that experts are more likely to ask questions related to purpose, generate search terms to allow quick access to relevant information, and evaluate its trustworthiness. Experts also engage recursive processes of connecting background knowledge with the salient ideas they read in the texts they find. Experts synthesize understanding and then communicate it using (at a minimum) knowledge of genre, medium, and audience. Experts also persist in the face of challenge. They are critical, recognize gaps in understanding, and adjust strategies seamlessly to find meaning. It is truly a wonder to see this unfold.

When presented with the same tasks, novices can struggle. They are more quickly overwhelmed. They can lose their focus. Teachers and librarians who have seen novices struggle with cognitive overload have asked me to advise them of the order in which this array of known expert strategies should be taught. Sometimes, they ask me how to chunk the strategies so that they can be presented discretely, in more manageable parts for their novice learners to practice and acquire.

Lately, I’ve been thinking that the appropriate response to my colleagues should be a set of questions that explore the fit between the complex thinking we would like students to develop, and the pedagogies we adopt to scaffold their emergence.

I’ve come to think our pedagogies should be inspired more by an integrated, ecological view of literacies systems and less by the belief that complex literacies activities can be deconstructed and taught piece by piece or strategy by strategy. Knowing what experts do is a fundamental starting place, but lately I’ve wondered whether ROI is the right way to frame my thinking as a teacher of online literacies, especially when, as a field, we don’t yet understand all of the interactions at play as diverse online readers construct meaning.

This morning, the intricate blooms of the peonies in my garden made me wonder whether ecological models could inform online inquiry and strategies instruction and, if so, what that might involve.  

Looking at the peonies, I remembered how I waited for them to bloom. I planted them first in one spot, and then another but, for years, they didn't seem to do anything. They had stems. They had leaves. I watered them. Nothing happened. I fertilized them. Nothing changed. My mom encouraged me to be patient. “They take a while to get established,” she said. I didn’t think she meant seven years.

Now, when I see the intricate swirling of the petals, I am reminded that this beautiful flower emerged from complex systems. The conditions for peonies are multifaceted and interconnected. There are no blooms if the roots haven’t had time to grow deeply. There are no blooms without a balance of nutrients, or a slightly acidic pH. There are no blooms without sunshine and rain. There are no blooms without repeated cycles of growth and senescence. There are no flowers in June without December’s frost. Which of these conditions is most important, or which should come first or last?

If, as teachers of digital literacies, our goal is to enable learners to develop complex and similarly beautiful processes of meaning making through online inquiry, then maybe peonies can help us to plan instruction.

Just as we know that peonies need nutrients, sun, and rain, teachers must know which online reading strategies are important. However, adopting a systems view of strategies instruction may be more appropriate than one that is too discrete or linear.

What would happen if students were offered repeated and diverse opportunities to engage with a range of online inquiry tasks over time and with diverse disciplinary, rhetorical, and communicative purposes driving their work? What would happen if every teacher, every year, in every subject area helped students to identify and explore the many important and recursive online reading strategies required for inquiry across disciplines, texts, media, and contexts but without emphasizing particular strategies as more essential than others?

June brings flowers and time for teachers to reflect. Systems, complexities, interactions, context, and conditions. Could peonies inspire us to think differently about digital literacies instruction next year?

Michelle Schira Hagerman is a newly appointed assistant professor of Educational Technology at the University of Ottawa. Michelle is also an enthusiastic gardener. You can learn more about Michelle's teaching and research on digital literacies instruction by following her on Twitter. This article is part of a series from the Technology in Literacy Education Special Interest Group (TILE-SIG).

Digital tools open up powerful possibilities for informing teacher instruction and enhancing student learning. It takes time and thought to integrate traditional teaching methods with technology. Teachers need to consider their objectives and goals, seek tools that will improve understanding, and decide how best to incorporate them. In working with younger students, I have found three digital practices particularly worthwhile to use: researching with online sources that read text to the student, using online resources that provide classroom materials and multimedia experiences, and sharing opportunities that go beyond the classroom. 

There are countless ways technology can be integrated into any and all areas of study. For example, my first graders examined elephants in a three-week, mid-year interdisciplinary unit. I included digital tools for research, resources, and sharing to enrich inquiry, literacy, and content area learning. Prior to this endeavor, my students already had experience with accessing, navigating, and reading online sources. 

Online research and resources

To acquire background knowledge, the students researched elephants on an online site that could be read aloud to them. They used PebbleGo, which provided text, map, video, and audio resources intended for young students. First graders are typically capable of understanding information at a level that is higher than their independent reading level. Digital tools like this assist students in gaining knowledge because they can listen instead of reading independently. Students also have the benefit of being able to use this feature at their own pace. Using this tool was an effective addition to my typical way of introducing topics, exploring new vocabulary, and preparing students for independent reading.

Because I needed more reading materials for my students, I created a class set of guided reading books using Raz-Kids, which provides printable resources on a variety of subjects. I selected two books on elephants that contained similar content but were at different reading levels. Because I was assembling them, the website also offered me some flexibility regarding the content. I was able to take out a page about elephant poaching that was not appropriate for my students and construct the book without it.

Throughout our study of elephants, students viewed videos I had found online, helping them to gather facts, understand concepts, as well as thoughtfully analyze and synthesize their ideas with classmates. Students grasped why an elephant’s trunk is so strong after observing the inside of it and seeing the rings of muscles. My first graders more deeply appreciated elephant families through the captivating real-life story of a patient mother helping her baby, who was born with bent legs, learn how to walk. While watching a video of a mother elephant instructing her baby on how to move a rock, my students used what they had previously learned to keenly analyze the actions of the elephants. 

Online sharing

My students were eager to share what they were learning, and online resources made it easier to communicate this with their families. We used Alphabet Organizer from ReadWriteThink to create an ABC book as a culminating project. Students created pictures using Pixie creativity software and wrote the accompanying text. Their book was stored and saved so it could be completed over the course of a few days before sending it out to their families.

In the end, technology offers a number of advantages to classroom learning. Technology makes it possible for young students to more easily acquire knowledge at their comprehension level, rather than their reading level. Online sites provide multimedia materials that are both engaging and substantive. Students are better able to understand concepts and share their work through the use of these platforms. Although effectively digitizing curricula takes time, practice, resources, professional development, technical assistance, and the freedom to make mistakes, the outcomes are valuable and meaningful for students, teachers, and families.

Karen Pelekis is a first grade teacher at Greenacres Elementary School in Scarsdale, NY. This article is part of a series from the Technology in Literacy Education Special Interest Group (TILE-SIG).