By Larry Ferlazzo

 

I have been a consistent basketball player for over forty-five years – I have played regularly during that period and also remained consistent in the mediocre level of my play.  Nevertheless, any time I moved cities, I was easily able to connect with new-found friends on the court. And, apart from soreness, a few black eyes, and one broken wrist (I did finish the game despite that injury!), I had been able to escape with any serious physical problems.

Until last March, when I suffered a severely herniated disc.

It’s been seven months, and I’ve almost recovered.  In fact, I just played in my first friendly game of basketball since the injury (though I have retired from league play).   During my successful rehabilitation process, I noted a number of similarities between what it takes to be a successful patient and what it takes to be a successful learner and gained increased empathy for my students.

Here are a few things I learned:

 

• It’s easy to give up if not initially successful

 

During the first few weeks of my injury, I spiraled into what my wife called “the abyss” – I was making no progress, saw no future progress on the horizon, and had nightmarish visions of never getting better.

 

If I, a person who has a long list of personal and professional successes behind, can feel this way, how must a student who might have a much less positive track record feel when he or she is just “not getting” some concepts?

 

• A little bit of progress can go a long way

Professor Teresa Amabile is well-known for the research behind The Progress Principle.  She found that the key to motivation was daily progress – no matter how small.

Through physical therapy, I was able to begin escaping my “abyss” by noting even the tiniest amount of progress – I was able to walk one additional step without experiencing excruciating pain, I was able to do one additional set of an exercise.  And both the physical therapist and my wife (who is a nurse practitioner) helped create situations where that progress happened and pointed it out even when I didn’t notice.

For struggling students, how easy is it for us to miss very small, yet positive, steps they might be taking?   And how many of us take the time to help deliberately create situations to increase the odds of those small positive steps happening?

 

• Words can make a difference

 

When my regular physician referred me to a sports doctor, the specialist nonchalantly dismissed the idea that I would ever play basketball again – within the first five minutes of my appointment.   I was devastated, and shaken, and began to fall into the “abyss” again.

 

How often do teachers make a comment about a student’s goals – to be a professional athlete, or performer – that can appear to them as dismissive?  What kind of impact can those words have on them, even if they are successful in hiding those emotions? How much motivation can be quashed by a few misplaced words?

 

• You often can’t get very far without deliberate practice

The concept of deliberate practice, a strategic and focused practicing of a skill, is often discussed in education and athletic circles.  One element of deliberate practice which is sometimes missed, however, is the role of coaching – the need for someone to observe and give you detailed feedback.

In my physical therapy, and in my regular TRX exercise sessions, it became very clear that regular feedback on my techniques were and continue to be crucial to my recovery.  It’s easy for a novice to make numerous mistakes – both big and small – that can hamper success and even cause harm.

It’s difficult for a teacher with thirty-five students in his/her classroom to provide regular and consistent individualized coaching.  But if research shows that it’s critical to success, should we place a higher priority on exploring ways to generate more of it – for example, through top-notch peer editing and other specific ways that students can provide quality feedback?

 

I’m not pretending that any of these meanderings are lightbulb-worthy insights.  Nevertheless, I figure my teaching practice will never be hurt by gaining a little more empathy for students….

 

Larry Ferlazzo is a long-time teacher at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, California.   He has authored nine books on education, writes a weekly advice column for Education Week Teacher, and hosts his own popular resource-sharing blog for educators.

By: Lester Laminack

 

Mr. Rogers understood and demonstrated the elegance and power in simple and consistent structures and routines.  His framework was predictable and visible, even to his young viewers. Think about the opening scene for any episode.  He enters and speaks to you, directly to you, in the singular. He sings and moves toward the closet where he unbuttons his jacket, removes it, and hangs it in the closet.  He takes his sweater from a hanger, puts it on and buttons or zips. Then he steps down to a bench where he removes his loafers, neatly tucks them away before slipping his foot into one sneaker and tying it, and then the other.  In that simple routine, he greets you, speaks directly to you and engages you in the familiar song that is your welcome each time you visit. During the time it takes to sing that simple song he demonstrates buttoning/unbuttoning, zipping/unzipping, tying/untying, and putting things where they belong so you can locate them the next time.  And, then, at the end of each episode, he does it all again as he makes his way to the door signaling the closure of our time together.

 

Each of the daily routines is paired with a song or his gentle, focused voice giving you an overview of what he has planned.  He tells you what to expect as he begins to unfold the episode and you move forward with a story, a visit to picture-picture for a virtual field trip or a deeper look into a topic, or he phones a neighbor to request permission to bring you along for visit, or on occasion someone drops in to visit with you.  In all this, he models civility and the importance of planning and preparation, the efficiency of reflection and thought before action.

 

These simple routines remind us of the impact a consistent practice can have. They provide a structure that enables our students to anticipate what is coming next. It sets them up to prepare their materials and their mindset.

 

What You Can Learn From Mr. Rogers

 

Each episode includes time for nurturing the imagination. You know Mr. Rogers will lead you there when he takes a seat on the bench next to Trolley.  Almost always the plan for “make-believe” will extend the theme of the day (e.g. worry, feelings, competition, mistakes). As you move through the tunnel and come out on the other side in “The Land of Make Believe” you have trusted friends there as well, ( e.g. X the Owl, Henrietta Pussycat, Lady Aberlin, Mr. McFeely, Daniel Striped Tiger, and others). You know that in each visit several of these trusted friends will be involved in some drama of their own. The storyline is typically simple and relatable, the variety of characters lets you see that it is possible for the same events to be perceived differently by a group of individuals.  Feelings get hurt, friends realize their comments and or actions can inadvertently cause another to feel bad. You see the powerful positive impact of heartfelt apologies and the opportunity to change thinking and behavior. Perhaps the beauty of those simple puppets is that they can say things you feel; things you may not have the words to say or that you may not be sure it is ok to say.  Mr. Rogers and your friends in “The Land of Make Believe” allow you to acknowledge feelings even before you can name them, to see the impact of words and actions and to understand that you have control of your own.

 

The entire episode moves through a series of events or scenes hinged one to another with a simple routine (e.g. an action, a movement, a song). The predictability of his routine does not result in boredom; rather it brings a sense of stability in a world of the fast-paced, ever-changing schedules and routines in the lives of children. There is never a wasted moment, yet there is never a moment when you feel rushed.  There is no pressure to do it right or do it better. There is no suggestion that your value as a person hinges on your success with any activity. Instead, Mr. Rogers assures you over and over again that you are enough just the way you are. He assures you that he is proud to be your neighbor and that you are the only you in this great wide world.

 

Important lessons for Teachers

 

Mr. Rogers is still teaching us.  His show spanned over 30 years and in that time his structures and routines remained consistent.  Let’s pause here to consider what this can mean for us today.

• Each of us desires to be acknowledged, to have our humanity recognized and confirmed.  Mr. Rogers greets you and makes you feel welcome. We owe that to our students, each of them deserves to be acknowledged and welcomed each day.
• Simple structures, rituals, and routines help us focus and move into the frame of mind needed to engage. Mr. Rogers had songs that marked various transitions in the visit.  We can easily adapt that to sharing a poem, a song, or a rhyme that is age appropriate to mark the opening and closing of a class meeting.
• Unspoken visible rituals can be effective as transition markers. Mr. Rogers had several of these including his jacket, sweater, loafers, sneakers, feeding the fish, and more. We can adapt these easily.  Designate a stool for read-aloud and sit on it only when sharing a text. Or set aside a cap or hat that you wear only when reading aloud. You may keep a pair of reading glasses on a shelf next to the basket of read-aloud texts for the week. Wear those particular glasses only when you share a text.  Simple routines send clear messages that soon become a part of the classroom culture.
• Civility is learned.  Mr. Rogers was a living model of civility.  He was always kind. He never had an unkind word for or about anyone.  He greeted visitors warmly and genuinely. He always phoned ahead to request permission to visit and to bring you along with him.  He was conscious of the feelings of others. Today we often hear adults lament the loss of civility. Well, my friends, it is we adults who must be the models of what it looks like and why it is needed. This one is easy, but essential.
• Planning and advanced preparation reduces anxiety and increases efficiency. In each episode, Mr. Rogers talks through his plans for our visit.  He poses questions, offers ideas, reflects, and then takes action. He invites us to think. Consider the importance of sharing aloud your plan for the day. When students know how the class will unfold and how each piece fits into the whole we reduce the potential for misunderstanding, misconnections, and misbehavior.  
• Imagination is a powerful tool. Mr. Rogers folded imagination/pretend into each episode.  It was in our visits to “The Land of Make Believe” that we had an opportunity to see the “theme” of the episode play out inside the stories of a familiar cast of characters.  As teachers, we recognize the importance of giving our students multiple access points to the lesson. Follow Mr. Rogers’ lead and offer students the opportunity to imagine and to consider the lesson through a different lens.

Keep in mind that children thrive on routines, kindness, and recognition of what they do well.  Reach and develop the imagination of every child you teach, for heightened imagination is a path to creative thinking.

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Ruth Culham 

Truth. We live in an educational world of high standards and pathetically few resources.  Every year teachers and schools are asked to do more with less. And, short of opening up the state and national checkbooks and finally funding schools the way they deserve, it’s going to stay that way.   I can’t help but wonder if other essential professions have to operate like this. Likely not. School funding should be like my parents taught me about saving:  Pay yourself first. Put money aside for the future and then deal with rent, groceries, car payment, and living expenses.  Americans should pay schools first, plain and simple. But, until that day, there are things we can do with the resources we have to accomplish more.

Writing in Today’s Classrooms

Writing is a big deal in today’s classrooms for all the right reasons. Writing is thinking and clear thinking is required for everything a student does and will want to do throughout his or her life.  And yet, it’s not an instructional area of strength and confidence for most teachers. Almost every educator I know, at every level and across the country⎯North, South, East, and West⎯asks the same question:  How do I improve student writing?  The truth is, most teachers are not adequately prepared to teach writing and a great many do not feel they received any help in college to teach this critical subject.  In my work with assessing and teaching writing for the past 30 years, I have often found that teachers are not aware of the most dynamic and proven writing practices, defaulting to the same ones they were subjected to during their own formative years–practices that created generations of adults who have no confidence in the quality of their writing and therefore avoid it like the plague.  

Given that writing is a collective goal and that resources to teach writing well are not likely to come flooding in any time soon, it behooves us to look for help at what is already present in every classroom:  print and nonprint materials. For a highly successful and extremely motivating way to engage students in reading AND writing, one of the best teaching strategies I know is to share high-quality books and resources for more than their original reading purpose⎯to see them as sources of writing models, too.  Reading like a writer. Here’s what I mean.

Reading Like a Writer

Regardless of how you organize your reading instruction, a stunning novel such as Wonder by R. J. Palacio is likely in the reading lives of one or more students in your classroom.  You hear students talking about it, you see how they eagerly pass the book around, you feel the palpable energy of this text. Terrific.  This is exactly the buzz we’d hope a fine book would create. But don’t let it stop there. Aside from what students can learn about reading from Wonder, ask yourself what can be mined from the book about writing, too.  The book is already in the classroom, accessible to students, so why not use it to teach reading’s fraternal twin:  writing.

A quick browse through Wonder and I found passages on almost every page that illustrate different traits of writing.  (see culhamwriting.com for the scoring guides and additional print resources that define the traits and their key qualities:  ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, and conventions.)

One quick example:

Pg. 156:  I shrugged but I didn’t say anything.  I just couldn’t. If I told him that Julian had called August a freak, then he’d go talk to Julian about it, then Julian would tell him how I had bad-mouthed August, too, and everybody would find out about it.  (Sentence Fluency: Varying Sentence Patterns)

Once you find a passage that is a model of good writing for a particular reason, share it with students.  With their student-friendly versions of the traits of writing scoring guides in hand (www.culhamwriting.com) they can pinpoint what the author has done well and discuss it using the shared vocabulary so essential to understanding how writing works and being able to talk about it. For instance, in this passage, the author has created rhythm and a smooth sound to the reader’s ear by using a variety of sentence lengths.  Challenge students to find passages from other favorite texts that vary sentence patterns and share them. Then ask them to find a place in their own writing and revise several sentences so they vary in length similar to Palacio’s.

The print and nonprint materials you have in your classroom and school library are a rich resource for teaching writing.  And the beauty of using them is two-fold: 1) you already have access to them and 2) modeling from mentor texts is a powerful instructional technique for teaching writing.  For more detail and examples, my book, The Writing Thief, (Stenhouse, 2014) might be helpful.

Closing Thoughts

Bottom line:  We must learn how to do more with less in this age of school funding woes. But good news!  If you have a classroom library, you already have what you need to move writing instruction forward with energy and success.  How to plan a year, week, and day of writing instruction with resources already on hand are found in Teach Writing Well, by Ruth Culham, Stenhouse 2018.  With access to proven strategies, regardless of your preparation in college or your experience as a teacher, you can turn teaching writing from cringe-worthy to credible to completely phenomenal.  

 

Palacio, R.J. (2012).  Wonder.  New York: Knopf Books for Young Readers.

 

Ruth Culham lives in Beaverton, Oregon with her two cats and her always-ready-to-write computer.  She creates professional books and materials for teaching writing based on the traits of writing and conducts professional development workshops for teachers and administrators across the country and world.   Her most recent book, Teach Writing Well, is based on 30+ years of teaching, researching, and learning about what works and what doesn’t work for classroom teachers.  

 

Timothy Rasinski, Ph.D.

 

In my previous blog posting for The Robb Review, I focused on what should be the real goal of phonics instruction – to get kids to the point where they don’t have to use phonics much in their reading.  We want students to be so proficient and efficient at word recognition that minimal attention is given to word decoding and maximum attention can be directed toward comprehension.   Staying with this theme of reading instruction goals, I’d like to focus on reading fluency and state right off the bat that the goal of fluency instruction should not be to make kids read fast.    It has been this incessant focus on increasing reading speed, I think, that has unfortunately given reading fluency a bad rep.

 

What is Reading Fluency?

Fluency has been called the neglected goal of the reading program (and it is) (Allington, 1983); it has also been called the bridge from word recognition to comprehension.     I like that bridge metaphor a lot. Fluency is the critical link to making meaning while reading. There are two components to fluency. The first is automaticity in word recognition – the ability to recognize words so effortlessly that most of a reader’s attention can be devoted to comprehension.   Automaticity is the part of the bridge that links to word recognition.

The other part of the fluency bridge is called prosody or reading with expression.  This is the link to comprehension. When a reader reads with appropriate expression that reflects the meaning of the text, she is striving to comprehend that text.    This is the part of fluency that is often neglected in instruction; yet it is critical for comprehension to occur, even when reading silently.

 

How Should We Teach Fluency?

As with anything we want to become fluent at (e.g., speaking, driving, golf, cooking), fluency is developed through practice.   In reading we have several forms of practice that can and should be employed. These forms of practice include wide reading, assisted reading where a reader reads while simultaneously hearing a fluent reading of the same text by a partner or recording, and repeated reading where a reader reads a text several times until she achieves fluency on that text (Rasinski, 2010).    In all these forms of practice the goal should be reading for meaning, and if reading orally, to read with appropriate expression that conveys meaning to anyone who may be listening.

 

How Does Reading Speed Fit into the Fluency Equation?

Reading speed (words read correctly per minute) is an indicator of word recognition automaticity and is often called the oral reading fluency (ORF) score.   The more automatic or effortless you are in recognizing words in text, the faster your reading becomes, AND the more attention you can devote to comprehending the text as opposed to analyzing the words in the text.    Reading speed is an indicator or consequence of the fluency component of automaticity, BUT it is not fluency. Our reading speed increases as our fluency improves, not the other way around. I often say that I want our children to become fast readers just the way I am and all of you reading this blog are reasonably fast readers;  but I want them to become fast the same way we all became fast readers – through lots and lots of authentic practice in reading.

So go ahead and use DIBELS and AimsWeb ORF scores, or Hasbrouck and Tindal’s norms (Words Correct per Minute) cautiously and sparingly as indicators of students’ growth in automaticity, but please please please do not let children think that you are trying to get them to read faster.   The increase in reading speed (as well as improvements in reading with expression) will happen with authentic reading practice, not with overt instruction or implied emphasis on reading fast.

  

Fluency is More than Automaticity

A few years ago I came across recordings of arguably two of the most fluently read speeches in American  history – Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech” and John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address “Ask Not What Your Country…”     I subjected the oral readings of both of these speeches to an ORF (reading speed) assessment. In both cases, Dr. King and President Kennedy’s readings of their speeches may have landed them in a remedial reading class based on their very low ORF scores.     I am sure they were both automatic in their word recognition, and they could have read those speeches quickly. But doing so would have taken away from the meaning they were trying to convey. Because they were automatic in their recognition of the words in their speeches they were able to devote their attention to making and elaborating on the meaning they wished to share orally. They raised and lowered their voices, had dramatic pauses, changed volume and tone in order to more effectively to deliver their intended meanings to their audiences.   What truly made those speeches fluent was not the speed, but the expression (prosody) that they embedded in their readings.

For fluency instruction to truly work we need to see the goal of fluency as expressive oral (and silent) reading that reflects the meaning of the text.    When we make expressive and meaningful reading of texts the true goal of fluency (and avoid putting emphasis on fast reading) we will see significant improvements in reading comprehension (as well as reading speed).

 

You can find resources on teaching accurate and automatic word recognition and expressive prosodic reading (i.e. fluency) at Tim’s own website – www.timrasinski.com

 

Please see also my new book on reading fluency (written with Melissa Cheesman Smith) – The Megabook of Fluency published by Scholastic.

 

References

Allington, R.L. (1983).  Fluency: The neglected reading goal.  The Reading Teacher, 36, 556-561.

Hasbrouck, J., & Tindal, G. A. (2006) Oral reading fluency norms: A valuable assessment tool for reading teachers. The Reading Teacher, 59(7), 636-644.

Rasinski, T. V. (2010).  The fluent reader:  Oral and silent reading strategies for building word recognition, fluency, and comprehension (2nd edition).  New York: Scholastic.