Literacy Now

As a literacy teacher, I tend to look at the world in ways that others may not. I listen for figurative language in song lyrics, find the craft of argumentative writing on ESPN, and ask strangers reading The Hunger Games what their image of Cinna looked like after Lenny Kravitz was cast in the film. However, I learned more about literacy through the composition of one single writing task: my mother’s eulogy.

When my mother was diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer, I began the task of writing her eulogy. Not on paper, but in my head. For almost four months, I drafted this document in my head whenever I had time and ideas. In the hospital while she slept. On a plane to speak at a literacy conference in Arkansas. In a car line while waiting to pick up my children. At night when I could not sleep. However, it was not until the day after she died and the night before her funeral that I put pen to paper. The accompanying images are some of the documents I used as I delivered my mother’s eulogy at her funeral last December. If you notice, it looks messy. Haphazard. Unorganized. Yet these images represent almost four months of deliberate planning, drafting, and revision. Rewrites that existed only in my head, but which aided substantially in the final—yet not so final—product.

Drafting this piece made me seriously reconsider how writers plan, think, and revise. It also made me think hard about the emphasis that is often placed on written prewriting or planning. In fact, I am ashamed to admit that I required a graphic organizer for all writing tasks my first year of teaching. In many classrooms, my mental planning and thinking that went into the crafting of this piece would not have been acceptable. How can thinking be measured? How could a teacher assess my mental planning without some type of written piece of justification or evidence? These types of questions are often the very ones that prompt teachers to continue to use traditional teaching methods and assessments when it comes to writing instruction. However, any teacher could have assessed my thinking and planning just by simply having a conversation with me about my writing.

Here is what writing my mother’s eulogy taught me and reminded me about writing:

• Most writing is messy. Most of what we write in our daily lives never becomes published and polished. Instead, it functions mainly to inform, communicate, understand, explain, and process information. In the classroom, this tenet is especially important. For one, it gives students the freedom to write without the pressure of ensuring that every piece of writing they complete is publishable quality. In fact, 90% of what students should be writing in their classrooms should fit the previous descriptors. But here’s the really important part: Students should be writing in class every single day. Practicing writing for a variety of purposes gives students opportunities to improve basic skills and prepares them for writing tasks that need to be more polished and presentable. In my experience, many students care only about the letter grade and either ignore the comments if the grade is satisfactory or shut down completely if the grade is poor. With less emphasis on the final product, teachers should spend less time grading; qualitative, focused feedback may yield better results.

• Prewriting does not have to be written. One mistake I made as a writing teacher was requiring students to submit a graphic organizer or other form of written prewriting as proof that they had planned their writing piece. Although the written prewriting task did aid some students in the construction of their composition, I found that others haphazardly filled in the obligatory organizer at the end of the writing task so they would not lose points for omitting this portion of the assignment. This is not the true purpose of prewriting, planning, or both. Some tasks require more planning than others. Planning and prewriting need not be written; valuable planning may take place through thinking or oral discussion. These venues are no less important than written ones.

• Revision is ongoing. Revision is not a destination; writers do not simply arrive at the revision step, complete the task, and move on to the final draft. Rather, revision and writing are recursive processes that are ongoing and certainly not linear. While I was drafting Mom’s eulogy in my head, I was also revising and modifying the writing, whether it was in phrasing, word choice, or organizational structure. Revision is a sophisticated process and is not as simple as capitalizing letters and adding punctuation (that’s editing). Revision requires writers to revisit their pieces, consider their audience, think about the words they chose, and make decisions about the flow, purpose, and voice of their piece.

When designing and implementing writing engagements in the classroom, I implore teachers to consider these principles. Instead of focusing on a final product or the steps within the process, teachers can encourage and facilitate writers as they plan, revisit, and revise. Acknowledging these simple principles offers opportunities to nurture and support writers as they wade through a variety of writing engagements in both the academic and personal realm.

Rebecca Harper is an assistant professor of literacy at Augusta University. She received her PhD in Language and Literacy from the University of South Carolina. She is the author of Content-Area Writing that Rocks (and Works!).

Last year our elementary school opened a makerspace. The colorful space is always full of active learners using new tools and materials to advance their learning. The room itself has sparked the interest of teachers and students to try new things and explore ideas that they are passionate about. Although science, technology, engineering, and math are logical connections in the makerspace, we are also working to integrate meaningful connections to literacy that spark curiosity and engage our learners.

Start tinkering

Tinker trays are one way to pull students in and provide opportunities for exploring objects as a part of the writing process. A tray of found materials or small loose parts can spark creative ideas that evolve into a piece of narrative writing or a poem. The trays can include items like buttons, beads, rocks, or any craft item. As students explore with the materials, they are using manipulatives to activate their minds and to generate writing ideas.

While tinker trays (like the ones described above) align with the invitation for learning approach often associated with primary students and Reggio inspired learning, trays can be used in middle school classroom, too. Our junior high English department has found that students enjoy the hands-on invitation to fiddle with materials while they brainstorm and write.

What's the hook?

Lesson hook. Anticipatory set. Whatever you may call it, it's the way we generate interest in the content of a lesson. Fueling student curiosity can happen naturally or we may need to facilitate opportunities to draw our students in. Have you tried a mystery bag or a curiosity box? Imagine revealing artifacts to students that can serve as a clue to the content of a story or a prop that might be used by the character. What if these materials were placed in the box or even placed in a special location in the classroom? How might this get students wondering?

For example, when reading a familiar story like Charlotte's Web, strategically place a spider web across the corner of the door. Infuse story vocabulary words, such as "humble," "terrific," or "radiant" in the classroom (written on the chalkboard, taped to the back of a chair, or on the windowsill) and place prop items like hay, a spider (fake, of course), or a stuffed animal pig in classroom. Would students notice? Would they begin to wonder why? How else might you build suspense to heighten student curiosity around a good book?

Try new tools

Hands-on making can be a pathway to generate student engagement in reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Consider trying a new tool to pique the interest of your students. Create with Legos. Program a robot. Build a circuit. Our fourth-grade students used copper tape, coin cell batteries, and a little bit of tape to complete a circuit and light up a small LED light bulb. Not only did it spark a new interest in circuits, but it also served as a springboard for procedural writing. Students were able to document the steps they took to design and complete the circuit. They were also able to communicate those steps to their peers as they presented their circuits to the group.

There are lots of great ways to ignite the spark within your students around literacy. These three ways are just a start toward building student interest in reading and writing by connecting their learning to hands-on literacy experiences.

For more ideas about literacy and hands-on learning opportunities, visit my website steam-makers.com.

Jacie Maslyk is an educator, presenter, and the author of STEAM Makers. You can find her on Twitter @DrJacieMaslyk or on her blog, Creativity in the Making.

Within tiered intervention frameworks, collaboration is an essential key to providing early and effective intervention for students who may lag behind their peers. Stalled and unresponsive to our coaching, it may be time to expand collaboration and invite coaches with unique skill sets and fresh perspectives to join our intervention teams. Our students need these skills to get in the game, yet they’re stuck sitting on the dugout and warming the bench.

Who’s missing from intervention teams?

After reading numerous research articles on tiered intervention, a common theme emerged: Occupational and physical therapists are left out of the discussion. Yet, as a reading coach, I have come to value these roles in my own lineup.

For students in reading intervention programs, therapists have a lot to offer in terms of strategies to get students off the bench and into the game. Therapists contribute unique skill sets when it comes to helping children access reading curricula—especially students with autism, ADHD, sensory processing issues, dyslexia, and writing challenges.

Expanded definition of stamina

The term “reading stamina” is often used when describing a student’s ability to focus and read independently without being distracted or distracting others. From a therapist’s perspective, stamina includes not only the ability to focus for literacy lessons, but also the ability to monitor his or her own behavior and to know what to do when focus starts to wander.

Additionally, the therapist’s view of stamina includes the ability to sit upright at a desk; to understand directional tracking, or to process letters in order from left to right; and to “cross midline,” or to use and move the limbs of one side of the body in the space of the opposite side (for example, holding a paper with one hand while writing with the other).

When students struggle to build reading stamina, they may warm the bench longer than students who do not. Getting students off the bench and into the game is easier when using therapy strategies proven effective for improving literacy skills for the diverse readers in today’s classrooms.

“In the school environment, our jobs are to provide access to school curricula for all students. Going into the classrooms to support students and teachers is rewarding,” says Rachel Gambino, a physical therapist in Long Island, NY. “We help our students to be more available for learning and feel successful alongside their peers.”

Collaborating with therapists taught me that a few simple yet effective techniques can go a long way toward turning passive benchwarmers into active players. Three valuable concepts I learned from working with therapists are deep pressure, heavy work, and self-regulation.

Deep pressure

As mindfulness and meditation becoming buzzwords in today’s classrooms, it’s important to understand that, when deep pressure is added to deep breathing, the routine becomes even more effective—especially for children with ADHD and sensory processing issues.

A simple deep pressure technique is to press into the palm of one hand with the thumb of the other. Press all around the palm on one hand to a count of 10. Stop. Take a deep breath and repeat on the other hand. Stop. Take another deep breath.

Then squeeze 10 times up one arm. Stop. Take a deep breath and squeeze up the other arm. This simple technique activates the vagus nerve and causes the release of serotonin in our bodies, which reduces stress and increases feelings of safety. This is essential for students who become stressed during reading activities, such as timed tests.

For added benefit, children can spell words during deep pressure therapy. This simple activity helps with both word retention and overall focus.

Heavy work and spelling

While collaborating with classroom teachers, occupational therapist Jennifer Vogtmann introduced heavy work—a therapy technique that uses large muscle movement to help children calm down and focus.

She says students’ favorite activity is to do wall push-ups while reading their sight words, which are posted on the wall above. This activity improves postural stability, shoulder differentiation for writing, and visual convergence for reading—all while building that all-important reading stamina.

According to Heidi Bartle, principal at Michigamme Elementary School, MI, this exercise has been effective.

“We have seen tremendous gains in our students' overall academic performance, especially in math and spelling scores, due to the wall push-ups,” she says.

Self-regulation

Therapists have shown me the value of teaching children how to monitor their own behavior and to recognize when they are losing focus or need to move. I’ve learned that there is no point in pushing students through literacy lessons when they are unduly stressed, tired, antsy, or losing focus.

Next time you gather your intervention team, invite the therapists to the coaching strategy meeting. In doing so, there’s a good chance your benchwarmers will be swinging for the fences in no time.

Debra Em Wilson is a reading specialist and collaboration coach and the founder of S’cool Moves. 

Where do you find your teaching inspiration? In our tech-savvy world, chances are, you turn to other educators on social media. Facebook groups and Google+ communities provide avenues for digital conversations about teaching and learning. Twitter connects educators through micro-writing. Pinterest houses millions of lesson plans, activities, decoration ideas, and more. Even Instagram can link us to authors and books to bring into our classrooms. So, which one has inspired you?

Twitter has been a particularly important tool for building my personal learning network (PLN). The virtual support, camaraderie, and inspiration fuels my heart and mind. I tweet for my next book to read, for advice on an upcoming presentation, to request resources, and to participate in Twitter chats for real-time professional development and learning.

Twitter chats have connected me to other teacher educators, have hatched ideas for collaborative research projects, and—put simply—have supported my own professional learning to better my teaching. I have often said that I wished I knew about the power of Twitter much earlier in my career. Therefore, I have woven Twitter and social media into my teacher education classes to introduce my students to the power of social media to build our fellow tribe of educators.

Imagine if we created a support system where education students cultivated their own professional learning networks within, across, and beyond institution walls so that, when they graduated, they were armed with a tribe of supportive teachers to support them on their new journey? Enter #preservicelit—a new Twitter chat where undergraduate and graduate education students and preservice teachers connect to discuss current ideas in the field, share ideas and resources, grapple with teaching challenges, ask questions, and meet new mentors for their own professional learning.

Our inaugural chat was a complete success as education students, preservice teachers, new teachers, literacy teacher educators, practicing educators, literacy coaches, and even prominent authors in our field came together to support new educators as they explored the world of social media and began building their professional support systems.

While #preservicelit was especially created for education students and preservice teachers, all educators play an important role in its success. Preservice teachers learn about the power of growing their PLNs and practice using social media professionally, ethically, and responsibly to further their learning. Literacy teacher educators coach preservice teachers through virtual interactions, collaborate with other faculty across institutions, combine expertise, and strengthen education programs together. Educators, mentors, and guest hosts support the newest members of our profession and even connect preservice teachers to the very authors, researchers, and professionals they are learning from in their teacher education programs.

All educators are invited to the #preservicelit chat. Please visit our website for additional information, including a calendar of monthly topics and a place to sign up for text reminders. Join us in supporting our future educators on the first Saturday of every month at 9:00 a.m. ET for a lively 30-minute chat on all things literacy!

Stephanie Affinito is a literacy teacher educator in the Department of Literacy Teaching and Learning at the University at Albany in New York. Stephanie regularly teaches graduate courses on elementary classroom literacy instruction, literacy intervention, and children’s literature. She has researched literacy coaching as part of her doctoral studies and focuses much of her current work on how technology and digital tools can impact teacher learning and collaboration. You can find her on Twitter at @AffinitoLit.

It’s 3:00 p.m. on a spring afternoon and time for my last kindergarten reading group of the day. The group is made up of five students who know their letters, sounds, and some sight words. I put the bins of books in front of them and let them dive in. They keep lists of the books that they read, building strategies to use the pictures and to stretch the sounds. Though it’s late in the day and they’re tired and wiggly, they’re engaged, finding books that make them exclaim with glee and get to work on learning to read.

I circulate around the table, encouraging them to independently solve new words. Many of the students are also learning English and need some support with new vocabulary. They begin to grasp the patterns of the stories and make their way through the short books, soaking up new words. “You try it,” I say when Johan asks, “Ms. Hill, what’s this?” A moment later, as I make it over to his end of the table to check in, he’s already figured out the word he was stuck on and has moved on. “How’d you solve that word?” I ask. Beaming with pride, he replies, “I sound it out in my heart!”

I am bowled over by the wisdom and poetry of his words. In a simple phrase he has summed up the nuanced complexity of learning to read that the “reading wars” can never quite agree upon—that debate between phonics and whole language I’ve heard about the entire 20 years of my teaching career. He’d been reading Look Up, a book about the things we see in the sky, and the word he solved was “cloud.” Perhaps he used the first letters to connect with the picture clue to solve the word, but the /ou/ vowel pattern was way over his level of phonetic knowledge to “sound out.” He also used his knowledge of the world in his heart to “sound it out.”

In my years of teaching in the era of balanced literacy, I have read many articles on the phrase “sound it out.” Though it is on the lips of nearly every parent in the United States as they support their children to read, I’ve worked to take the phrase out of my own vocabulary. Because English has so many irregular word patterns, we can’t “sound out” every word. Instead, I have students look at the first letter and ask if they can remember the patter or if they have seen the word elsewhere or if there is anything else on the page that can help them understand the meaning.

However, because I work with many struggling readers, my background is a combination of phonics and whole language methods. I’m trained in Orton-Gillingham and Reading Recovery, among other programs, and use every tool I can find to help support my students who do not easily understand or retain the way text represents language. Orton-Gillingham helps students who benefit from the use of repetition to remember the symbols and patterns within words. In Reading Recovery, which follows a whole language approach, students build reading skills by reading books.

When I returned to school this fall, I kept thinking back to that spring afternoon and Johan’s wisdom as I waded through planning which interventions might be effective for a struggling second- or third-grade reader. How does a child who has worked her hardest to avoid putting her eyes on those black squiggles on the page feel about reading in her heart? How do children proceed when, no matter how hard they work, they still can’t make those letters hold still, or when they continue to confuse the “b” with “p”? I begin to doubt my commitment to choice and learning within context and start thinking I just need to drill those phonetic patterns into the students. I carry around a heavy bag of books and curriculum for weeks, searching for the right approach and start impulsively ordering new tools and books online to find that quick fix.

But then I remember Johan's words from last spring and I know we can’t forget the heart in learning to read either. In addition to understanding all those vowel digraphs and irregular spelling patterns, students also need to be able to connect with the word’s meaning. To find stories that speak to their hearts and represent something they care about in their lives. The heart brings in the importance of critical pedagogy and ensuring that students see themselves and their lives in the content we are teaching. The heart brings in the importance of choice and autonomy—the need for students to choose what interests them and makes their hearts beat a little faster.

Educators can and will debate for decades to come about the “right way” to teach reading, as if one way exists. Science can tell us a lot about how our brains work, but there remains a bit of mystery in the part the heart plays for each of us. Johan helped me remember that, as long as I help my students listen to their hearts, I am OK with the phrase “sound it out.”

Julia Hill is a K–3 reading specialist in St. Paul Public Schools.