Diane Tehrani 1

CI 548 Advanced Language Arts Methods Prof. Beth Herman-Davis Choice: Professional Conference

In attending the Oregon Reading Association annual meeting February 4th and 5th, the keynote "Teaching Inquiring Minds to Read Nonfiction Well: Tapping Into Children's Natural Sense of Wonder and Unleashing Endless Possibilities for Powerful Learning" the basic idea of Virginia Lockwood was that if you can tap into a student’s humanity, he or she will go to incredible ends to link his or her needs with society as a whole to accomplish social justice. If students are free to pursue their interests, they will maintain and apply incredible energy to learning. Teachers must tap in to values of seeing relevance to themselves, families, friends, and society as a whole to create and sustain commitment to learning. Ms. Lockwood gave examples of Ryan Hreljak who developed fresh water access for Africans thus freeing girls from carrying water for long distances, a time-consuming role that denied them school attendance, teaching Harvard Medical School future physicians to observe patient cases carefully to avoid quick assumptions and speedy prescriptions, seeking to find answers to medical conditions and questions with only a partial set of facts without visualizing or opening their minds to a myriad of possibilities. She felt that our society is conditioned “to get the right answer quick” without thinking flexibly by grappling, studying, and reflecting, learning how to fail, and learning from failure and error, how to revise, to understand ourselves and to amend our ideas about the world. The idea is to cultivate a sense of wonder and a habit of mind in which one does not always have the answers and must pursue new discoveries, explore and debate new ideas. She noted that ours is not a big conversing society any more in which talk could allow learning to bloom and help students make sense of their learning, literacy, life, and themselves. Not losing sight that questioning enervates and energizes students to seek new information that is the essence of intellectual development, Ms. Lockwood gave an example of students whose concern about noise in the neighborhood around their school moved them to contact neighbors, write letters to the mayor and their legislators in such a way that finally a noise ordinance was posted with a fine for violation. In "Using Multicultural Literature to Connect Students to Social Justice", Ms. Beth Herman- Davis started by giving statistics for numbers of cultural groups increasingly represented in Oregon and an increasingly large dropout rate that she attributed to a need for moving from cultural awareness to feeling and acting to make sure social justice was available for all different stakeholders by challenging perceived notions, engaging exploration, and examining experience to implement socially just behavior. Ms. Herman-Davis asked attendees to write and share why they would teach social justice. She proposed the book Fair Skin, Black Fella as a launching pad into “courageous conversations” with groups about racial color. She suggested vocabulary activities such as ‘word sort’ of relevant vocabulary from a text to be studied in order to predict a chosen reading to allow students to key into prior knowledge. The Surrender Tree, a book of poems about a young girl coming of age in Cuba confronting socialism that would present a way of comparing the political system of democracy. Another book entitled The Immigrant is a series of pictures to help students get into the topic of immigration that might start with a set of questions to elicit student feelings about immigrants in their community and later consideration of key words such as ‘deport’. A book entitled The Ninth Ward could be introduced with a couple Diane Tehrani 2 pictures of flooding in New Orleans and a quote or excerpt from which students could think about any social justice implied. "A Novel Approach to Writing: How to get your students to write a novel in a month", two 4th- 5th grade teachers Connie Greenlee and Diane Kinion described a project they mount every November, National Novel Writing Month (nanowrimo), into their curriculum. The teachers follow the lessons of the national program but rewrote the workbook to apply especially to their grade level. Students were exposed to read alouds that modeled good writing of characterization, plotting, conflict rising, and resolution. Students write for thirty minutes a day for one month but are allowed to share what they write with peers several times a week. A poster of ideas to get students back on track when they get ‘stuck’ is available. September is for promoting, October is for planning that includes gathering vocabulary to use, November for writing in which students get comfortable, take average of individual word count, December for celebrating with creating novel folders, and receiving certificates. Benefits include students not being able to say later in the year that they can’t write since they have already proved that they can. Larry Lewin in “Differentiation: The Next Level” explained four principles of differentiation: choice, tiers, modes, and groups. He described choice with the acronym RAFT for role, audience, format, and topic meaning that the topic of a lesson could be created to include a role to a certain audience in a certain format. His example was a ‘cherry’ writing a letter to a ‘rock’ about Newton’s law of motion. Spicing up instruction would get kids engaged in reading and writing in higher level thinking with a product they themselves generated to build choice into learning. Tiers were different levels of expectation based on writing levels to state (know), explain (comprehend), and deduce (analyze). Students generate literal, interpretative, or evaluative questions while reading. Mr. Lewin asks students to write one ‘puzzlement’ (literal ) and one ‘wonderment’ (interpretive or evaluative) question. Students would use sticky notes of different color for each question. Lewin’s book on this is Teaching Comprehension with Questioning Strategies to get kids to read critically. For modes, Mr. Lewin proposed ‘student-authored study guides’ in which students rewrite a certain chapter of a text book. This could be done as a jigsaw in which seven groups of students each prepare lessons to teach their classmates in kid- friendly language. This would also involve the principle of grouping by readiness, mixed-readiness, interest, seating, special skills, random, or student preference. For helping students check their performance, he is suggesting a ‘ChecBric’ written so students can understand next to a Rubric in teacher language. He concluded with two types of activities for students who finish class assignments early. One of these called an ‘Anchor Activity’ takes minutes and another one, a ‘Sidebar’, takes a few class sessions. In the first, students write about their best friends/ games, start their homework, or read a library book. In the second, students write to an author or illustrate a story. Anchors should be self- directed, demanding but engaging, and intriguing and fun such as a comic strip story, tall tale, or short story. A Sidebar could be with a group of students who create postcards to write to an author, evaluate new textbooks, compare and contrast another version of a reading, or a student-authored study guide. In the student panels several students from the University of Portland reported about their work to engage students in meta cognitive activities to try to get students to control their learning. One was a survey of reading and writing preferences and abilities. Two others were to engage students in observing emotions in art and to evaluate learning after solving some posed-problem. Diane Tehrani 3

In “Reclaiming Good Literary Practices after NCLB” Maryann Manning critiqued reading instruction of the last ten years through detailing fallacies of research with regard to phonemic awareness, isolated and letter names, fluency, reading process, and skill-based instruction. All these led to a distortion of preventing reading difficulties, scripted commercial programs/direct instruction, and behaviorism vs. constructivism. These resulted in loss professional autonomy for teachers, text czars, fidelity police, standardized model of teacher education and a number of other consequences such as high stakes testing, and overemphasizing phonic and leveled books. She noted that a better correlation of student performance would have been students taking free lunches with test scores. She summarized what we know of reading and writing instruction is opportunity to grow with authentic and meaningful literary events. Engaging ‘funds of knowledge’ and background experiences is key. Shared tears from stories read build community, sharing illness of classmates, thanking staff, talking, sharing viewpoints is critical thinking, going back and forth about what matters. Children need time to read and write in different genres, need assessment of portfolios, interviews, reflection, self-evaluation, believing and seeing selves as ‘doers’, perceiving learning as meaningful and low-risk, learning with other ‘doers’. Instruction is to be loving and friendly, that means “more judging is less teaching.” In “Song Books: Bringing Rhythm and Rhyme Into Your Literacy Program” Diantha Mollahan described how to generate better readers through engaging students in picture-book stories of traditional and popular songs. This is playfully engaging, familiar, teaches phrasing, the pre-readiness skill of memorization, repeated reading, and builds classroom community. A few of the titles presented included “Down by the Seaside”, “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”, “Summer Time”, “This Little Light of Mine” (Tubman, Parks, MLK), “This Land is Your Land”, and “America the Beautiful”. Ms. Mollahan spoke about the various places such as ORA and school district for grant money to buy books. In "When Inoculations Fail, Adolescents Require Reading Insulin" Almitra L. Berry explained a program of moving students reading as many as five grades below to school level in one year through a response to intervention (RIT) model with four classes a day in reading (English), reading in content areas of science and social studies (Science and Social Studies), and reading intervention (Elective). Dr. Berry suggested meeting students where they were, using engaging materials, teaching meta cognitive skills such as SQ3R and Cornell note taking, diagramming sentences, and teaching skills of phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, word knowledge, vocabulary, comprehension, and motivation. I will use the information from presentations attended through ‘word sort’ and predicting text with excerpts or quotations from text. To get at deeper issues of social justice from reading multicultural literature, I will be cognizant of seeing the issue of race in multicultural literature such as Fair Skin, Black Fella. Since the story of The Immigrant is clearly European, I will possibly look for other works with Asian, African, Hispanic, or Middle Eastern backgrounds and perhaps attend to the other more particular cultural matters. Since the presenters of ‘nanowrimo’ suggested that students could also participate by using their own native language and in fact had had several Israeli students who had used their language, I would like to try the program, or a modification of it, with ELL students and/or those with low writing skills. Much of the Lewin presentation on going to the next level in differentiation seemed relevant to my teaching, especially involving students fully in RAFT, ‘puzzlement’ and ‘wonderment’ questions, student- generated study guides, ‘Checbric’, anchor activities, and sidebars. Diane Tehrani 4

The student panels on meta cognition reinforced my resolve to build responsibility for learning into my curriculum and offered me several ways of doing this. The humane concerns of Maryann Manning for students building class communities was certainly welcome and refreshing. Using songbooks reinforced the connection between music and learning that I will want to always keep in mind, especially when using “We’re Going on a Lion Hunt” with attendant gestures as a possible warm-up activity for students studying Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. I will give our librarian of our ESL Library at Clark the list of books provided by the presenter. The presentation on inoculating students, especially African-American students, two thirds of whom do not graduate high school because of low skill level in reading was especially moving. The four- hour-a-day ‘reading insulin’ seemed a program that might be relevant to ELL students also to move them as many as five grade levels in one year. The presenter will give a free workshop later this month at the convention center in which participants will be trained in such a program.