Literacy Now

Recently, I had the opportunity to present a lesson to my readers on “voice.” My intent was to better understand students’ beliefs about self-expression and reading. When I asked students questions such as “Who owns voice in reading?", I expected them to detail how they responded to questions after reading, maybe worksheets, or wrote a summary after reading. From there, I could launch into a lesson that would liberate their comprehension. 

To spice up the situation, I asked two new teachers to observe my lesson and acquire ideas that would invite their students into writing about reading. Not surprisingly, the lesson did not go as anticipated. 

When I opened the discussion, my fifth graders provided responses about voice that didn’t match my expectations. As much as I wanted to hear students say, albeit generically, “I own voice in reading because I can express my opinion,” they instead replied:

• “Voice is what you sound like when you are reading out loud to people.”
• “Voice is how you sound when you sound like the person in the story using his accents.”
• “Voice is what I hear inside my head when I am reading to myself.”

I then introduced the idea of voice to my class, focusing on comprehension, specifically the instructional concept of writing about reading. I wanted to empower students to harness their perceptions and perspectives through writing. In the coming days, we would be discussing, sampling, and then constructing various responses to reading, including index card book reviews, our class newsletter, “Wiscasset’s Middle-Grade Reading Flyer,” and archetypal comparisons across genres.

Back to the lesson. Since my readers were not familiar with this concept of voice, I had to make an instant shift in my instruction. I looked to the two teachers who observed my lesson. Both seemed at a loss of what to do, since the lesson had not gone according to plan. 

Meghan Schofield, a new third-grade teacher, recounted, “Being a new teacher, I haven’t taught ‘voice’ with respect to reading. Although I’ve mentioned during writing conferences, ‘You have such strong voice in your writing,’ I hadn’t considered the voice as a personal perspective of text. This lesson made me reflect on what I’ve said to my own students.

I knew Justin’s lesson wasn’t going according to plan. From my seat, I started panicking because I didn’t know the outcome. I thought to myself, ‘What would I do in this moment?’ I probably would’ve made my best attempt to get myself back to where the original teaching point, because I felt committed to the planned outcome, resulting in non-authentic learning.”

I proposed to students that “voice” has two roles in reading. I acknowledged students’ recognition of the oral competent of reading followed by the comprehension component, which includes participation in book groups, opinions, and perspectives, which I described as “articulation.” Finally, I suggested to readers, perhaps most importantly, that writing about reading is developing their voices, giving them a chance to preserve their legacies.  

Meghan noted, “I was impressed with how quickly and seamlessly responsive teaching can happen. I’m not yet comfortable with my lessons not going as expected, although it happens frequently. I find myself trying to get my students back to my original teaching point rather than being comfortable with responsiveness or adapting to their needs and knowledge on the spot.”

During our post-conference, Meghan and I discussed how responsive teaching is not always about data. Rather, responsive teaching is about making instructional moves that attend to students’ knowledge while simultaneously rerouting students to meet the overall lesson goal. 

During this lesson, I made sure to celebrate students’ knowledge before offering another definition of voice. In doing so, I didn’t discount what they knew, or bring my lesson to an abrupt end, rather I invited an opportunity to learn something new. When new teachers can see this instant adaptation, they realize that it’s ok to fall off the script or plan, which can define good teaching. 

“I learned, rather than panicking about a change in a lesson, I should acknowledge celebrations of what students do know and their attempts to connect with a lesson," she said.

Justin Stygles is a fifth-grade teacher in Wiscasset, Maine. He's taught for 15 years in various settings. You can follow him on Twitter at @justinstygles.

 

This is the third installment of a five-part series on cultivating gender-inclusive classrooms. It was written as a complement to “The Power to Include: A Starting Place for Creating Gender-Inclusive Literacy Classrooms,” an article that appears in the July/August issue of Literacy Today, ILA’s member magazine.  

It’s common for literacy educators (and educators in general) to do a general classroom inventory at the end of each school year. This is an important proactive move, as it helps us to determine how we need to prepare for the upcoming year.

When working to create a gender-inclusive literacy classroom, educators need to be especially conscious of the questions they ask about their classrooms and procedures. The following inventory offers you some questions to consider when thinking about what type of community and physical space you provide your students. This classroom inventory should be ongoing throughout the year; there will be guaranteed learning opportunities along the way. Don’t be afraid to invite your students to teach you and learn with you.

Posters and displays

• Do they reinforce normative and/or negative gender stereotypes?
• What could you replace them with, or how might you use them to teach about gender equity and inclusivity?
• Find posters that include gender nonconforming people to add to (not replace) your existing posters.

Textbooks

• What messages are being sent about gender in the pictures, word choice, and content?
• What might you bring in to supplement/extend the textbook to promote gender equity and inclusion of transgender, genderqueer, and gender nonconforming people?
• How might you encourage students to challenge the text?

Picture books

• How many of the books in your classroom library promote traditional gender binary rules and roles?
• How can you teach gender equity with these?
• How many books include transgender, genderqueer, and gender nonconforming individuals? What books could you add?

Word choice

• Do you use phrases such as “boys and girls” or “ladies and gentlemen” when you address your students? If so, consider saying “students,” “classmates,” or “citizens” instead.
• Do you know for certain what pronouns your students prefer? Make sure you ask. If you don’t know, use they/them/their until you do.
• What salutation do you use? Consider Mx. (pronounced “miks”) in place of Mr./Miss/Ms./Mrs.
• How do you refer to your spouse? Consider using partner instead of husband or wife.

Rules and procedures

• Do you split tasks between boys and girls? Do you ask your students to line up according to gender?
• When asking for volunteers, instead of saying, “I’m looking for a boy…,” say, “I’m looking for a person…”
• When asking your students to line up, encourage them to stand where they feel most comfortable.

Dana Stachowiak is an assistant professor of Curriculum and Instruction in the Watson College of Education at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she coordinates the Curriculum Studies for Equity in Education Master’s program. Dana is also a literacy consultant with The Educator Collaborative. She holds a doctorate in educational studies with a concentration in cultural studies from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, a master’s degree in curriculum and instruction from Winthrop University, and a bachelor’s degree in elementary education from Western Michigan University. Follow her on Twitter @DrStachowiak.

In an ideal world, every teacher would approach every student like a blank slate of potential. But the truth is, despite teachers’ best efforts, prejudices and assumptions get projected onto students. A recent study in the Social Science Research journal found that teacher bias has a profound impact on students’ own expectations and achievement.

As a pre-K–12 trainer for educational equity with her organization, Seed the Way, Rebecca EunMi Haslam dismantles systemic bias for a living. Although she acknowledges that none of us are immune to bias, she says we can all do our part to “try to be aware and increase our capacity to question our assumptions, to recognize when our perspectives might be influencing our judgments and expectations of others, and to check our bias at the classroom door with the goal of aligning our stated core values with our actions.” 

In the July/August issue of Literacy Today, ILA’s member magazine, Haslam makes the case that speaking openly about racism, bias, and inequity makes for better teaching and learning. She unpacks bias and self-assessment, schema theory, values-based teaching principles, personal politics and religious beliefs, and implications for student outcomes. 

As an organization that strives to bring equity issues to the forefront of literacy education, we feel that this is a must-read for all educators—which is why we’ve decided to make this article open-access.

Reading teachers like to teach. For most of us, that means that we need to have something to share with our students: some concept, some skill, some strategy. To teach content, teachers must be able to define what the content is and is not. Teachers also need to be able to determine how the content is to be taught, practiced, and ultimately mastered. The latter requirement necessitates some form of assessment.

However, teachers do recognize that reading involves things that we can’t teach: in other words, the process of reading. Thinking comes to mind; so does the reader’s self-monitoring of text; and the reader’s connection to personal prior knowledge.

But what about reading comprehension? Is it content or process? Can we teach it, practice it, and master it? Is reading comprehension the result or goal of reading?

Those who hope that comprehension is the result look to fill developing readers with the concepts needed to be learned, such as phonological (phonemic) awareness; the alphabetic principle; reading from left to right; understanding punctuation; and spacing. Teachers also introduce, practice, and assess student mastery of the requisite reading skills, including phonics, syllabication, analogizing, and recognizing whole words by sight. These concepts and skills have a solid research base and a positive correlation with proficient reading comprehension.

Furthermore, these concepts or skills can be clearly defined, taught as discrete components, and assessed to determine mastery.

The same cannot be said for reading comprehension strategies, such as activation of prior knowledge, cause and effect, compare and contrast, fact and opinion, author's purpose, classify and categorize, drawing conclusions, figurative language, elements of plot, story structure, theme, context clues, point of view, inference categories, text structure, and characterization.

Note that the list does not include summarizing the main idea, making connections, rethinking, interpreting, and predicting. These seem more akin to reader response actions than strategies, per se.

None of the specific reading comprehension strategies has demonstrated statistically significant effects on reading comprehension on its own as a discrete skill. Although plenty of lessons, activities, bookmarks, and worksheets provide some means of how to learn practice, none of these strategies can be taught to mastery, nor accurately assessed.

So, if individual reading comprehension strategies fail to meet the criteria for research-based concepts and skills to improve reading comprehension, should we teach any of them and require our students to practice them?

Yes, but minimally—as process, not content. We need to teach these strategies as being what good readers do as they read. The think-aloud provides an effective means of modeling each reading comprehension strategy. Some practice, such as a read-think-pair-share, makes sense to reinforce what the strategy entails. A brief writing activity, requiring students to apply the strategy, could also be helpful. But minimal instructional  time is key.

Daniel Willingham, professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Virginia, suggests that reading comprehension strategies are better thought of as tricks, rather than as skill-builders. They work because they make plain to readers that it’s a good idea to monitor whether they understand as they read.

In other words, teaching a reading comprehension strategy, such as cause and effect, is not a transferable reading skill, which once learned and practiced can be applied to another reading passage by a developing reader. However, when teachers model paying attention to the author’s use of cause and effect in a story or article and have students practice key cause and effect transition words in their own context clue sentences, it’s the analysis of the text and the author’s writing that’s valuable, not the strategy in and of itself.

In fact, a 2014 study by Gail Lovette and Daniel Willingham found three quantitative reviews of reading comprehension strategies instruction in typically developing children and five reviews of studies of at-risk children or those with reading disabilities. All eight reviews reported that reading comprehension strategies instruction boosted reading comprehension, but none reported that practice of such instruction yielded further benefit. The outcome of 10 sessions was the same as the outcome of 50. 

So, should we teach reading comprehension strategies? Yes, but as part of the reading process, not as isolated skills with extensive practice. Reading comprehension strategies have their place in beginning reading, content reading, and reading intervention classes, but not as substitutes for reading concepts and skills.

Mark Pennington, reading specialist, is the author of the Teaching Reading Strategies reading intervention program and the Sam and Friends Guided Reading Phonics Books for struggling readers.

These days, it seems we can’t look at our phone or computer without being bombarded with others’ opinions. Perhaps, for this reason, it has never been more important to encourage our children to express themselves in ways that rise above the din (and involve more than 140 characters!). What follows are author signing experiences in three very different Tennessee classrooms with three very different teachers. Yet, they all share a common theme: students learning that their voices are important and can powerfully impact their communities beyond the classroom. In fact, their voices can even change the world.

Reclaiming community  

The classroom I shared with 16 fourth graders was on the east side of Nashville. Not the swanky East Nashville where million-dollar townhomes are popping up, but the one referenced by the “Over the river and through the hood, 37206” bumper stickers on the new cars rolling through. Gentrification had arrived, and along with benefits, it brought tension. Inspired by my experience with Middle Tennessee Writing Project, I sought ways my students could use writing to explore their world, free of encroaching social boundaries. I asked myself, What do “real” authors do to showcase their work? The answer: they host author signings.

Each student was asked to complete a writing project, which was then formatted for publication. We invited the community to a “Meet the Authors” event and asked attendees to bring a $10 roll of quarters. My team teacher and I held author training sessions to prep students on how to engage with an audience, and provided students 25 copies of their work. But would people come? My heart nearly burst as professors from local universities, art gallery owners, data scientists, a parole hearing officer, fellow teachers, and a renowned local composer—more than 50 people in total—came to support my students and to hear the reading of their work, the offering of their intellectual property.

Throughout the day, students read their works, collected quarters for each signed copy, shook hands, and generally enchanted new “fans” they would never have otherwise encountered. After the signing, we sent letters of appreciation to each attendee and nearly half wrote us back to tell us how profoundly they had been impacted. Through their writing, these fourth graders realized that they had powerful, relevant stories to tell and unimagined audiences eager to listen.

“Gotcha days”

Four of the 14 kindergarten students in my Franklin, Tennessee, classroom were adoptees. At the suggestion of their parents, the class embarked on a month-long project to celebrate their “gotcha days” (the anniversary of the day the child joined his or her adoptive family) to gain a better understanding of what it means to be adopted. Each week we read a new book about adoption and the students brought a book home to share with their families. Their responses, recorded in a journal, were then discussed in class, with incredible results. After reading Grace Lin’s The Red Thread: An Adoption Fairytale (Albert Whitman & Company), a student named Carly revealed that her aunt and uncle were hoping to adopt a baby named Eli. She explained that they were still trying to raise enough money to complete the long and expensive process.

Immediately the students began talking about how they could help, offering to sell their toys and even their writing. We advertised our best work to the community for 25 cents a copy and, in the end, raised over $100 toward the adoption of Carly’s new cousin.

Writing for social justice

My eighth-grade students were reading Livia Bitton-Jackson’s I Have Lived a Thousand Years: Growing up in the Holocaust (Simon Pulse), but couldn’t seem to connect to the narrative. Realizing that it was difficult to grasp that moment in history from the comfort of our Murfreesboro classroom, I asked myself, How can I move them so that they will move? When I expanded the discussion to current day oppression and slavery, my students were shocked to learn that such atrocities still exist. As they began to ask questions, I sensed an opportunity. We decided to use our writing to raise awareness and support for Exile International, a nonprofit dedicated to helping former child soldiers in Uganda. The students broke up into teams and wrote proposals outlining their plans, including seeking support from the school principal, the student body, and local leaders. The community responded, and we raised $1,500 to help Exile International fight oppression and slavery.

These three projects empowered students to use their voice and the power of the written word to impact a family, an East Nashville community, and another continent. After the Meet the Author event, one student for whom teachers had once collected grocery money, joyfully announced that she was able to help support her family using proceeds from her writing. Our hearts broke a little, but we were also overjoyed that she had the opportunity to write her truth, contribute to the world and earn money to help the people she loved most. We don’t know if it changed her life, but it certainly changed ours.

Katie Schrodt is an assistant professor for the College of education at Middle Tennessee State University. She teaches courses related to literacy and the elementary classroom. 

Erin FitzPatrick is an assistant professor in the Department of Special Education at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She teaches courses related to reading and assessment for students with special needs.

Suze Gilbert is an assistant professor for the College of Education at Middle Tennessee State University. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses focusing on language and literacy.