By Tonya Gilchrist

“Run often and fast, toward or away from something. Trust yourself to know which. And trust yourself to know when by the chanting clocks that hang on walls of dreams. This is called wise and this is called brave.”

—Rebecca Kai Dotlich, The Knowing Book, 2016

We are living in times of great uncertainty. The truth is, we always are. And, sometimes, it can be hard to see the forest from the trees. 

Pause. Breathe. 

Look to your North Star: the kids.

Ask yourself: What is it I really want for kids? You will likely have various ideas that pop into your mind—yet they all circle back to one key truth: I want them to grow and learn with joy and curiosity. Always.

And while you can’t predict the future, you can “run often and fast” toward four cornerstones—four core values that can keep student progress and wellbeing at the center of all that you do.

1. It’s All about Relationships

This is THE cornerstone upon which everything else that we do stands. It is vital that we build genuine relationships with our students, centered on open dialogue (which includes active listening!), relational trust, and mutual respect. 

Always remember that kids are people, too. Showing students respect means you see them as the unique, incredible human beings that they are, and you treat them as such. Through showing genuine respect, trust is developed—and trust opens the door to building strong relationships. 

Of course, it is important not to misconstrue compliance with respect. According to Oxford English Dictionary, respect is “a feeling of deep admiration for someone or something elicited by their abilities, qualities, or achievements.” Indeed, respect is earned.

In 1975, Judith Kleinfeld, a professor of Psychology, coined the term “warm demander.” In her work and research, she found that teachers need to be high in both “active demandingness” and “personal warmth.” It must not be either/or—we need both. We must earn the right to demand effort. Only once our students know that we legitimately care for them, can we then push them to high expectations—because they know the push is us looking out for them and truly wanting them to soar.

2. Amplify Inquiry

Inquiry can serve as the cornerstone to the stance and spirit that lives in our classrooms. When you start from a place of inquiry, you send a powerful message to your students: I am a learner, too. You are not a “sage on the stage,” rather you are there to explore questions with them. You are there to build and grow new ideas together. Through this inquiry stance, you model and honor questioning and learning more than knowing.

Rather than teaching students about argument writing, about multiplication, about laws of motion, or about the Cold War, how might you instead provide purposeful questions and inquiries for them to explore in order to develop the understandings for themselves? When we make our own meaning, lasting learning occurs. That’s the beautiful “stickiness factor” that comes with inquiry.

Of course, this does not mean that your teaching expertise is no longer needed. Quite the opposite, actually. Great teachers are essential. It is vital that you serve as a lead learner to support students as they grow. In addition, it is important that you are there to give explicit instruction as needed. Contrary to popular belief, explicit teaching definitely has a place within inquiry-based learning. The power lies in the how and why of this instruction. As the International Baccalaureate Organization says in PYP: From Principles into Practice (2018): “In an inquiry classroom, explicit teaching occurs ‘just in time’ (Hmelo-Silver, Duncan, Chinn 2007) not ‘just in case.’”

“Just in time, not just in case” can echo as a mantra in your teaching practice. Prioritize time for kids to live the work. Be careful not to over scaffold. Open up space for your students to intellectually grapple, think critically and creatively, and problem solve—while also being there to give “just in time” instruction and feedback to feedforward. 

3. Honor Agency

The International Baccalaureate Organization defines agency as choice, voice, and ownership. While we all have agency within us, whether or not we can utilize our agency often depends on whether our environments respect, value, and support it. 

Harnessing agency, then, is about empowerment. As you design learning experiences and cultivate a classroom culture, ask yourself: What am I doing to provide students with opportunities to be authors of their own learning?

In the world of education, we often refer to classroom management. However, rather than management, I encourage you to think of it as classroom empowerment. After all, teaching is not about being in control; it’s about providing an environment where students can cultivate their own autonomy, agency, and self-control. Too often, we adults lament that we want kids and teens to “take responsibility”—but are we opening up responsibility for the taking?

When you think of so-called classroom management, often what you are really after is engagement, attention, and motivation. This is all the more reason to lean into honoring agency.

In fact, both neuroscientists and psychologists have found that attention, motivation, and agency are inextricably linked. For example, cognitive neuroscientists Mike Esterman and Joe DeGutis spent years at the Boston Attention and Learning Lab developing a standard test to measure how well people can focus. They found that extra motivation had an astounding effect: it increased sustained attention by more than fifty percent. Knowing motivation is that powerful, how might we help our kids get more of it? Well, for decades, Edward Deci has been studying motivation, and he has found that one of the greatest factors is autonomy. 

As humans, we crave positive emotions. Feelings of boredom, stress, and/or helplessness grind learning to a halt. On the other hand, when we are entrusted to make our own choices and design our own goals and challenges, we are empowered. Motivation, focus, and learning soar.

We all want our students to develop skills for deep thinking and living a life filled with growth and learning. In order for this to happen, we have to give them opportunities to try new things, take risks, get a little messy, and learn from it all. That cannot happen in a tight vacuum of control, but it can flourish in an environment filled with trust and agency.

4. A Forever Stance

“Searching for meaning is the purpose of learning, so teaching for meaning is the purpose of teaching. If teachers do not have meaning making at the core of their pedagogy and practice, then let’s not call the activity teaching. Doing so demeans the word and the noble art and science it represents.”

—Jacqueline Grennon Brooks, “To See Beyond the Lesson,” Educational Leadership, 2004

It is crucial that we take a forever stance in our teaching and learning. We are not here to assign; we are here to teach.

Students must know, feel, and experience the truth that learning does not happen in isolation. As they learn and make their own meaning, they continually add knowledge, skills, and experiences to their repertoires. They think across, between, and beyond individual lessons, disciplines, days, months, and years.

Words matter. Whether teaching a whole group lesson, working with a small group, or conferring one on one, be intentional in communicating a forever stance. You can remind your students that anytime they are reading, painting, writing, listening, researching—or whatever the skill may be—they can choose to pull on this strategy that is now a part of their own, unique repertoires. 

As you live out your forever stance, your students will, too. They will recognize that learning is lifelong and lessons are transferable.

About Tonya

Tonya Gilchrist is an internationally experienced educator, instructional coach, and curriculum specialist. Tonya earned her Masters Degree in Educational Leadership from Hong Kong University. She also holds an IB Certificate in Leadership Practice and an IB Advanced Certificate in Leadership Research. Tonya currently serves as a senior strategist for Erin Kent Consulting where she specializes in helping schools around the world amplify inquiry and honor agency across all components of balanced literacy—including readers’ and writers’ workshops. She also works with schools to support them in enhancing disciplinary literacy and in effectively utilizing translanguaging practices. You can connect with Tonya on Twitter at @mrs_gilchrist and via her blog at tonyagilchrist.com.

By Lester Laminack

Enjoy, as Lester guides you from teacher-centered to student-centered teacher read alouds!

When you reach the end of an article, a story, or a book do you reach for your notebook to answer a set of questions written by someone else?  Do you feel that your understanding of what you have read, your worth as a reader, hinges on being able to give the answers to someone else’s questions?  Probably not.  Yet it seems that much of our reading instruction relies heavily on having our students answer a set of questions after they complete a reading assignment.  Following reading with a set of questions is a longstanding practice in literacy education.  In fact, many commercial reading programs follow this pattern.  One well-known program assigns a point value to each title, then has the children read and log on to a computer to read and answer a set of 10 multiple-choice questions. Other programs have students read then write answers to similar questions. And if we are teaching from a literature-based approach that doesn’t rely upon a commercially produced program we tend to have our own questions to hold our students accountable.

Questions Can Create Patterns

As teachers, most of us were introduced to Bloom’s Taxonomy as undergraduates in a teacher education program.  We likely practiced developing questions for each of the levels in the taxonomy and began our teacher careers believing that it was our charge to develop good questions that would hold our students accountable and yield proof that they read and understood the assigned text.

We sat with our notepads at hand and read the books, articles, poems, and various other texts our students would read across the year.  We paused at various points in the text to draft the questions we would give our students. We were attentive to character traits, shifts in the plot, nuances in word choice, the author’s use of simile and metaphor and figurative language.  We noted allusions to cultural references and other literature.  We were alert to the role of setting in the text, the way the author used dialog, bias, and narration.  We read closely and synthesized as we developed the questions we would present to the students.  Questions, whether presented by the program or developed by the teacher, may fall into a pattern or categories.  For example, questions about the main character, physical descriptions, main idea, vocabulary, opinion, evaluation, analysis, synthesis, inference, etc.

As students read and respond to the questions presented they begin to recognize the patterns as well.  Does this impact the way they read?  Does it shape what they tend to notice and pay attention to?  In other words, are they reading with the pattern of your questions in mind?  If the answer is, yes, then what are they failing to notice?  What is the cost to comprehension and attention and engagement?

Get In Touch With Ways You Read

Consider your own thought process as you read a text with the intention of writing questions for students to answer.  Are you beginning with a frame in mind? That is, do you begin with thoughts focused on Who? What? When? Where? Why? and How?  Or do you begin with the intention of finding three detail questions, two questions about the character’s motives, three questions that require the reader to interpret, two that require analysis, and one that calls for synthesis?  If the answer is, yes, then how does this frame influence YOUR approach as a reader? How does that process differ from the way you approach a professional text or a book you have selected to read for pleasure?  How does the approach effect your engagement with and your comprehension of the text?  Chances are that you read differently when you read for pleasure than when you read with the intention of developing a set of questions for your students.

Who’s Doing All The Thinking?

I have come to believe that the person who is asking the questions is the person who has done the thinking.  As you read to develop the questions for your students you were summarizing the text at critical points.  You were evaluating the merits of details and the use of Literacy devices.  You were synthesizing information and generating new thoughts.  You were noticing were the text called for an inference or expected you to have adequate background knowledge to connect to a metaphor or allusion.  In short, you were doing the deeper thinking, the more thorough analysis as a reader in service to the development of questions that would yield the proof of your students’ connections and comprehension.

Time To Flip the Read Aloud

I invite you to try something the next time you are reading aloud to your students.  As the story draws to a close and your voice delivers the last line simply close the book and exhale.  Pause for a few seconds and let silence settle over the group.  Then, look at them and speak quietly:  “Think for a few seconds.  Don’t speak yet, just think if you could speak with (author, illustrator, character, expert—beekeeper if the story is about bees, etc) what are the three best questions you could ask?  Think about that, please.  I’ll ask you to share your questions in just a moment.”

Have your notebook ready to jot down the questions as they share. At the end of the day when the students have boarded their buses to leave, revisit those questions and place them into four categories: Vocabulary, Background knowledge, Schema/conceptual frame, and other.  Take note of where the majority of the questions fall.  Think about what this reveals to you about their understanding of the text.  

I’ve come to believe that I find out more about where their understanding fails by examining their questions than I ever got from checking their answers.  

Lester’s books are on Amazon!

Learn more about Lester Laminack, check out his website!

Follow Lester on Twitter @lester_laminack

By Lois Letchford

Living in Brisbane, Australia, my six-year-old son, Nicholas, failed first grade. The effects of going to school showed themselves through his quietness, his bitten fingernails, and the daily wetting of his pants. His teacher shouted at him for his slowness, his withdrawal, and his inability to follow the “simplest instructions.” Testing revealed he could read ten words, displayed no strengths, and above all, had a low IQ. The prognosis was dire.

An opportunity arose for our family when my husband was offered a 6 month study leave in Oxford, UK.  For our family this was a bit like déjà vu as my husband had completed his PhD there and where our eldest son was born.  This trip allowed him to investigate the flow over the roofs of model buildings in the Oxford Large Wind Tunnel to better understand the mechanisms that lead to failure.

Planning to use this time to work with Nicholas in a one-to-one setting, I set myself up with a series of books entitled, “Success for All.” With a new environment and time on our side, what could go wrong.  Well…isolated words on every page and no pictures did nothing to assist me in my teaching or Nicholas’s learning to read.  It was an abject failure, and I was no better than his first-grade teacher.

Faced with a blank slate, and no excuses, I thought about Nicholas’ strengths. I knew he could rhyme words and see patterns in words and his environment. With only these known skills, I thought about writing simple poems based around consonant-vowel-consonant letter patterns and rimes. I chose words which rhyme with bug, such as mug, lug, tug, and rug. 

 Moreover, most poems for children are structured around a rhythmic pattern that Nicholas could easily detect.   And, of course, poetry is a joy to read and easy enough that Nicholas could meet immediate success.                       

What a mug of a bug

 he is to lug his rug along the kitchen floor.

Doesn’t he know his rug will tug

           his good things out the door?

Together we talked about the meaning of the poem, found the rhyming words, and finally made illustrations for each poem read. The illustrations for the Mug of a bug poem began using different colored paper to create the bug and its rug, as our enjoyment for learning intensified.

The transformation in our little classroom was instant- no longer did I expect Nicholas to read anything. I read to him. One success led to another. And another. Everyday Nicholas was excited to read and play with yet another rhyme.

“I have a fun poem for you today, Nicholas,” I said.

“The cat in a hat sat on a mat with a rat and a bat.

Well, fancy that!
That is just not possible.

There might be one scratched cat, no rat or bat and one messy mat!” I read.

Nicholas sat, silently; his eyes fixed on the paper.

When Nicholas failed to comprehend, his immediate response was withdrawal.

My mind spun. “What do I have to do?”

“Nicholas, let’s act out this poem. What animal would you like to be?” I questioned. “The cat, the rat or the bat?”

“I think I’ll be,” decisions take Nicholas a long time, “I’ll be the cat!”  he says with a slight grin.

“Okay, I’ll be the rat,” I continued.

“And I’ll get a stuffed toy for the bat,” he says as he ran off to find an appropriate animal.

He returned proclaiming “I’ve got a hat and a mat and a bat!”

Well this showed he was thinking.

“Now we can act the poem out,” I suggested. “What happens if a cat, a rat and a bat were in a hat together?” I asked standing beside Nicholas.

“They would fight!” he replied instantly, laughing. The lesson provided loads of chuckles and giggles.

I was learning about teaching as Nicholas was learning to read. It’s now an enjoyable experience for both of us.

Although the words are easily decodable, inference occurs at all levels of reading. Readers must make inferences in order to comprehend.  We continued to recite our poems from memory as we walked his brothers to and from school. Later in the day we read them from the printed page. 

Each day we worked to retrieve and read those rhymes. His brain was being lined with language and making connections between words and pictures. Using poetry, which at the early stage is short, repetitive, and focuses on rhyming, there is often the clear purpose of creating an overarching image.  This allows the reader to feel they can grasp the image or message, however “silly”, quickly and enjoy the experience through the rhyming sounds they make in speaking the poem. In effect this image or message “cocoons” the reading experience and with repetition strengthens the understanding of the “whole” while building out the letter and word components.

The next step of finding rhyming words, allowed Nicholas to see and hear the pattern and actively encouraged him to recognize and manipulate the spoken parts of words. Finally, poetry allows for easy segmenting of words into their individual sounds. Each interaction with letters and sounds provided opportunities for strong foundational letter-sound associations, and helped Nicholas with many aspects of learning to read, thus the sounds “cocooned” within the whole, the rhyming pattern, and the individual word.

Every day a new poem helped Nicholas make tiny, but significant, steps forward learning to read.

After completing many poems using short vowel sounds, we moved on to more complex sounds — the oo sounds, as in cook, look, and book, captured my imagination. My focus turned to Captain Cook, the last of the great explorers. As an Englishman, he completed the mapping of Australia thereby presuming the founding of yet another British Colony. The words were simple, the ideas complex.

Captain Cook had a notion,

There was a gap in the map in the great big ocean.

He took a look, without the help of any book

Hoping to find a quiet little nook.

Captain Cook had a notion,

There was a gap in the map in the great big ocean.

He took a look and filled a whole book

That caused the world to look.

Living in Oxford and visiting museums, we encountered maps from the 1550s – ones that did not include our homeland – Australia

“Look, Nicholas,” I said, “there’s a gap in the map. There is no Australia.”

Our learning took a turn from writing simple word poems to writing poetry as an inquiry project.

I read books, all kinds of books, and turned my learning into poems for Nicholas. I found this was the best way for him to access information, and poetry made for easy repetition, for questioning and further tapping into his curiosity. Together we began to question – what knowledge did Captain Cook have when he left England for his explorations in the Pacific Ocean?

“Who came before Captain Cook?” Nicholas asked one day.

“That’s easy,” I replied. “That was Christopher Columbus.”

“And who came before Columbus?” he questioned.

I stopped. I was stunned.

Such a question had never entered my imagination, and for the first time, I knew my son did not have a “low IQ.” His questions told me he was assembling and processing information.  He was “thinking.”

Being in Oxford, with the world of libraries and maps at our fingertips, we searched for answers. Viewing maps in the local antique map shops aided our search. Discovering that Columbus’s travels were based on the maps of Ptolemy, led us to visit the Bodleian Library of Oxford University, hunting for more answers.

Our investigation began in the gift shop, where a lady eagerly awaited our questions.

“Do you know where we could find a Ptolemy map?” I questioned, with an anxious Nicholas by my side.

The lady turned away from us, leaned against the counter, and scratched her head. Her eyes scanned the bookshelf. Finally, she bent down and retrieved a large, blue-covered book.

“This is a new book in our collection,” she said as she carefully placed it on the counter. “It’s a book of Ptolemy’s maps and is only recently printed. Does this work for you?”

Nicholas and I gasped.

“Yes,” I replied as Nicholas grinned and nodded.

Adding positive, enriching experiences to our learning enhanced Nicholas’s curiosity.

Our time in Oxford was completed with a memorable visit to the British Museum to see Captain Cook’s original maps which capped our epic inquiry project.

Returning to our home in Australia, Nicholas once again attended our local school. I was feeling on edge when I met with the school counselor.

“Nicholas learned so much! I wrote poetry and he was so excited by our learning,” I gushed.

“Well,” she replied, “he’s still the worst child I’ve seen in twenty years of teaching!”

Shocked, I left the room with my tail between my legs.

This was not the end of the story, just the beginning of a new chapter.

But what I found from this work with Nicholas was that poetry can be a wonderful entry point to literacy for children, especially the ones who find reading difficult.    Poetry is fun to read.  Poetry is easy to learn to read.  Poetry contains word patterns that lays the foundation for phonics.  Poetry is meant to be performed fluently and expressively, so it must be rehearsed (repeated reading).  Poetry for children is easy to find, it is easy for parents and teachers to write, and it can be a great way to get children themselves into writing.    In addition, poetry can lead to much deeper readings, explorations, and discoveries as it did with Nicholas’s study of Captain Cook.   

Advice for parents whose children are like Nicholas:

Write for your children – write about their everyday experiences – what they see, hear, eat, or watch.

Write where you are with what you have.

Create books about their life.

Place the child as the central character of their story.

Take pictures to complement your writing.

Write in short sentences or poetry format.

Read and re-read to and with your child.

Recite the sentences or poems.

Record their reciting and send it to relatives – if possible, ask relatives to respond.

If a child has a challenge recalling a particular sound, find words and objects which include it.

Write and read every day.

Remember:

Learning is emotional, as well as cognitive.

When learning is painful, sadly, that’s what children learn.

When children are laughing, learning happens with ease.

Once the process begins, one never knows where it ends…

Postscript

Nicholas Letchford learned to read, thanks to his mother Lois and many fine teachers. Indeed, learning to read was only the beginning of his journey. In 2018, Nicholas earned a doctorate inApplied Mathematics from Oxford University in the UK. Lois became a readingspecialist in 1997, teaching children who had been left behind. She has also written about her and Nicholas’s journey to literacy in her inspiring book “Reversed: A Memoir,” which can be ordered through any bookseller.

Grab a copy of Reversed: A Memoir to read the full story at https://amzn.to/3d2cNg5

Reversed: A Memoir is her first book. In this story, she details the journey of her son’s dramatic failure in first grade. She tells of the twist and turns that promoted her passion and her son’s dramatic academic turn-a-round from “dyslexic” to PhD from Oxford University!

By Lester Laminack

One morning at breakfast I noticed Steve, with coffee mug in midair, staring through the windows into the woods behind our house. I sat quietly watching him for a moment. Then, without shifting his gaze, he spoke aloud.  “I’m so impressed by the fearlessness of squirrels. They just run to the end of the branch and leap with no fear of missing the next branch, no fear that branch will not hold them.”

I’ve thought about those squirrels and the idea of fearlessness. Squirrels make branch-bridging-tree-travel look effortless. Indeed there appears to be no fear at all. But is it fearlessness that leads them to move quickly, gracefully even, through the trees? Or does that freedom and grace come from another source? Is it confidence? Skill? Practice? Or something else? At what point do baby squirrels become those confident, graceful branch-bridging acrobats? Are they trained by their elders? Is it a matter of natural agility, instinct, and genetics? Or is it that great skill developed over time builds confidence. And that confidence fuels practice which in turn builds competence.  And that competence reinvested in authentic use yields performance that appears effortless, or dare I say, fearless.

My thoughts shifted to both teaching and learning. When we see someone doing something so well that they don’t even seem to think about it, we can quickly fall into the trap of believing that it must be easy. It is likely that you have experienced this phenomenon yourself. Those DIY shows for home improvements are led by individuals with a passion for the work, extensive knowledge, much practice, and experience with both failure and success. Those hosts break the project down into small steps with the camera fading in and out between steps. The episode makes a project appear to be manageable and accessible to the novice. The show gets you engaged and energized so you make the trip to your home improvement store, purchase the supplies, return home and fearlessly begin to make that magic makeover yourself. Then it suddenly becomes more complex than you had imagined. You can’t remember the sequence of steps involved. You watched the show in under an hour but forgot to factor in those captions on the screen signaling a four-hour wait for stains to set and sealers to dry. Your project doesn’t turn out quite right and you have to call in someone to help. You get frustrated. You vow to never attempt another DIY project. You proclaim yourself “not the handy type” or “just not good at this sort of thing.” You become skeptical of those DIY programs. Your experience shapes a portion of your identity, and unless you have a new experience–one with success–that identity may become a permanent thought that limits your willingness to even attempt another DIY project.

Consider the possibility that teachers can be like the hosts of a DIY show. Like those hosts we have a passion for our work, extensive knowledge, much practice, and experience with both success and failure. A competent teacher can make any task seem accessible. A teacher’s demonstration can make something seem easy, effortless, natural. Yet, when the novice student fearlessly attempts the task and is met with less than stellar success there may well be a sense of frustration, even failure. That experience may come with a resistance to make another attempt; an ego protecting wall saying this stuff is useless in the real world. I fear that too often we teachers meet those reactions with an attitude that is less than supportive and understanding. I fear that, as teachers, we forget we are the hosts of the DIY show and our students are the one’s with wide-eyed eagerness who can be easily disillusioned.

Do not misunderstand me here. I want fearless learners. I want us to encourage our students to jump in and have a go, to attempt without fear of failure. But, how do we have that without squelching their desire to try or instilling a belief that they aren’t capable? Consider this again, great skill developed over time builds confidence. Small successes build confidence. And that confidence fuels practice which in turn builds competence. And that competence reinvested in authentic use yields performance that appears effortless, or dare I say, fearless. Now, let’s think about what it takes to reach the point where students are willing to invest time building essential skills, knowledge, vocabulary, and processes that will give them the confidence needed to continue.

It has been my experience that there are at least four essentials:

• Trust
• Feedback
• Vision
• Tenacity

I believe that learning hinges on an established relationship between teacher and student where there is trust. Students must trust that they are allowed to attempt without the expectation of perfection. They must trust that you and their peers will support them in their attempts, no matter how shaky. They must trust that it is natural and expected and accepted that learning is a series of repeated attempts with growth over time.

I believe that trust builds with feedback that speaks to strength. Students need to hear what they are doing well as a context for suggestions for improvement. I believe that students need suggestions in small digestible bits that they can implement to experience growth and success. I believe such experience leads to receptivity to additional suggestions, in fact, they may well seek them out.

I believe that success brings confidence that engenders the competence to imagine more, to develop a vision for the work. The ability to envision allows the student to imagine not only what comes next, but also to imagine how all the steps fit together and become the whole. Vision, in my experience builds and becomes clear with experience, knowledge, language/vocabulary, success, feedback, and trust.

And that leads us to tenacity, the ability to stay with the task and cope with the small stuff along the way.  Tenacity, in my experience, is fueled by vision. One must have a sense of purpose, a sense of the outcome, a sense of how to get there, before the willingness to stick with it emerges.

Fearlessness may be the wrong word for squirrels and learners. But that graceful movement sure looks fearless to me.

Lester’s books are on Amazon!

Learn more about Lester Laminack, check out his website!

Follow Lester on Twitter @lester_laminack