My four-year-old granddaughter Helena and I are alternating skipping and walking on a warm, sunny June day on the sidewalks of Winchester, Virginia. We stop to look closely at a parade of ants marching on the sidewalk and listen to a redbird singing in an oak tree.
Helena is full of questions. Why aren’t mushrooms green like plants? Why do worms stay under the ground? Suddenly she stops, looks up at me and says: “I’m never going to school!” When I ask her why, she says, “Because my brother [in second grade] comes home and it’s homework every day.”
“What will you do if you don’t go to school?” I ask.
In response, Helena spreads her arms out wide and skips around me, shouting again and again, “Play! I’ll play!”
The sorry state of play
Helena, like all young children who play to learn, use their five senses, raise questions that stimulate their imagination, and continually take risks to better understand their environment. However, in kindergartens today, time for play as a way of learning has decreased over the last two decades in favor of explicit instruction on literacy. The ripple effect across the upper elementary and middle grades is profound.
Early childhood expert Erika Christakis, author of The Importance of Being Little: What Preschoolers Really Need From Grownups, points out that during the era of the Common Core State Standards, kindergarten education has changed, resulting in some educators viewing kindergarten as the new first grade.
Instead of improving reading instruction in middle and high school to raise our standing on international and state tests, those educators believe that by teaching much younger children reading skills, their scores will soar in later grades.
As Christakis notes in a recent article in The Atlantic, even preschool programs have reduced time for play in favor of explicit instruction in reading and math. Instead of the social interactions and explorations that are a hallmark of play in early education, in many preschool settings young children sit in seats and complete worksheets that drill phonics and sight words. Gone are the easels, gone are the water and sand tables, and gone are the dress-up centers for pretend play.
What we risk when we eliminate play
Yet, imaginative play and the exploration of concepts (such as why snakes slither and how seeds germinate) have cognitive and emotional benefits to young children that develop their creativity, abstract thinking, imagination, and problem solving abilities.
At the same time, play develops children’s self-confidence, their ability to cooperate, share, and listen to one another’s ideas. With reductions in time for play as a way of learning in favor of “skill and drill,” I fear young children won’t realize the cognitive and emotional benefits of play, which will ultimately affect their ability to imagine, innovate and problem solve in the middle grades and high school.
Play is important at every development stage
Some of the greatest educational researchers and philosophers—John Dewey, Jerome Bruner, Lev Vygotsky, and Jean Piaget—promote play as important for social development, learning, and bridging children’s imagination to reality. Moreover, as far back as 346 B.C.E., the Greek philosopher Plato wrote in Laws that play is a child’s preparation for a future career.
Friedrich Froebel, the German educator who developed kindergarten for boys and girls, agreed with Plato when he explained that a man’s later life has its roots in childhood play (The Education of Man, 1887). For me, children of all ages, not just preschoolers, explore and learn about their world, through play.
To prepare students for college, career, and a meaningful and productive adult life, teachers need to incorporate playful learning that engages and motivates elementary, middle, and high school students. Integrating playful learning into core subjects such as reading, writing, math, science, and social studies can ramp up students’ academic achievement while making learning relevant to their lives.
Teachers in the middle grades are generally not a position to address the issues of play in preschool and elementary. But they can integrate what I call the “Big 10 Student Motivators.” These strategies encourage playful learning, can boost students’ innovative thinking and problem-solving skills, and at the same time engage students in reading, writing, researching, discussing, and analyzing materials in all subjects.
The Big Ten Student Motivators:
Providing choice in independent reading, writing topics, and projects makes students feel invested in tasks and develops their responsibility and independence in learning.
Collaborating to learn invites students to work in pairs and small groups, share ideas, value diverse thinking, and become active listeners who respect one another thinking. Collaboration enables students to develop open-ended discussion questions, plan and execute projects, study for tests, evaluate websites and other sources, have literary conversations, and pool research. And, of course, collaboration invites play.
Integrating meaningful talk makes learning social for a communicating generation in which Face Time, Twitter, and texting are commonplace. Meaningful talk can happen with partners, small groups and the whole class. During student-led talk, teachers become facilitators who enter a discussion to periodically summarize points or jump-start a stalled conversation by posing a question.
Problem solving asks students to be generative thinkers, coming up with a variety of possible solutions to school and community problems and problems related to topics they’re studying. For example, a fifth grade unit on friendship transforms into problem solving when students self-select and read a variety of texts and then collaborate in small group to compose a pamphlet on what makes friendships work and what derails them. Moreover, choice enables students to select materials from which they know they can learn.
Inquiry learning invites students to ask the questions they’ll discuss and/or research for a topic, project, or unit of study. Inquiry learning is social because it requires students to collaborate and support one another. By sharing ideas, they learn to value the diverse thinking of peers. During an inquiry study, students gain control over their learning, develop opinions on topics, and gain a fluency and flexibility in analytical thinking.
Encouraging risk taking creates an environment in which students feel comfortable making mistakes and even failing. Students who can take risks without fear of criticism from their teacher and peers can become better problem solvers and creative thinkers. In a comfortable and safe space, they can learn from their mistakes.
Unlocking creativity occurs when students are put into a situation in which they can think about and create ideas in their own unique ways. Students who think creatively have multiple ways to solve a problem, or interpret a story, painting, or movie. At school student-centered approaches to learning such as collaboration, inquiry, and student-led discussions encourage creative and innovative thinking.
Developing empathy means that students can step into the shoes of others, understand life as they do, empathize with their problems, and share their joys. Social interactions, collaborations, and reading about and watching videos and movies about other cultures and ways of life other than their own develop and expand students’ ability to empathize. In a student-centered, culturally diverse classroom, empathy leads to understanding, respecting cultural differences, and developing social responsibility.
Teacher-student negotiating fosters independence in learning as students and teachers become co-decision makers for setting deadline dates and suggesting projects, test formats, test questions, and the amount of assigned homework.
Going out for recess, enjoying time to play outside,recharges elementary and middle school students’ learning batteries so they can concentrate. Yet many elementary and middle schools have reduced or eliminated recess in favor of more time for reading, writing, and math. In addition, five-minute brain breaks should occur after students have focused deeply for thirty minutes. Students can stretch, move around, chat with friends, and use their renewed energy to concentrate again.
Some playful closing thoughts
The Big 10 Student Motivators are skills for the 21st century and beyond—skills valued and used by government agencies, corporations, universities, small businesses, and school districts that depend on members to know how to collaborate as they solve problems, develop policy, generate an abundance of ideas, and respond to issues and events.
Learning begins with play. If students of today are to become the innovators and problem solvers of tomorrow, then schools need to respond to the call of play in all grades.

By Laura Robb

Your core curriculum defines Tier 1 instruction; it’s the curriculum your school expects you to deliver to all students. However, responsive teachers are flexible and make adjustments to their curriculum that meet the needs of individual students. Educators agree that quality Tier 1 instruction can support about 80 percent of the students you teach, enabling them to make solid growth during a school year.

There is no one correct way for building students’ reading and writing capacity using your core curriculum. I suggest that when you plan interventions, you focus them on a specific need and find two to three scaffolds that might work. That way, if one isn’t supporting a student, you have another idea at your fingertips.

There are five kinds of interventions you can use. However, longer interventions require the support of a resource and/or special education teacher. Of the five interventions that follow, the classroom teacher can integrate the first three into daily lessons. By circulating among students when they read, write, work at learning centers or computers, you can gain insights into who understands the lesson and who requires your support.

Intervention 1: Two-to-Three-Minute Conversations

An important purpose of this brief intervention is to decide which students you can support during a two-to-three minute conversation and who requires a five- minute exploratory conference. Observe, listen, and ask students’ questions as you circulate among them while they are reading, writing, or working in small groups. Such daily interactions enable you to check on the progress of students you previously helped and continue monitoring all students as they practice new tasks and work independently.

As you circulate look for behaviors that show students are disengaged from the work: the student isn’t reading, writing, or sharing during a student-led discussion; a student is doodling in his notebook, slumping in her seat, or resting his head on the desk. Have an on-the-spot informal conversation with each student and decide whether you need more than a short conversation to scaffold the learning. Difficulty with applying a strategy, completing a writing plan, revising a journal entry, or taking notes, usually requires a longer conference. However, issues such as changing a text that’s too difficult, figuring out the meaning of a tough word, or getting started on a response to a text can usually be supported during a two-to-three minute conversation. Jot the high points and suggestions of this conversation on a sticky note and give it to the student as a reminder.

While you find the time to confer with a student, have him or her work on a task that he or she can successfully complete independently such as reading a self-selected book or working on a project with a peer partner. If you have time, schedule a five-minute exploratory conference that day or the next day, so you can decide the kind of support that student requires.

Intervention 2: Five-Minute Exploratory Intervention

The purpose of this one-on-one intervention is to help you decide how much support a student needs to move to independence with a task. It’s possible that you can clear up the student’s confusion in one to two conferences. However, there will be times when your observations of the student practicing a task such as finding text evidence or comparing and contrasting two characters indicate the need for a series of three or more short conferences to move that student to independence.

Intervention 3: A Series of Five-Minute Interventions

If your exploratory intervention reveals the need for more in-depth scaffolding, schedule a series of five-minute conferences. Hold five-minute conferences in a quiet place in the classroom while other students are completing work independently. Set up a small table or a student desk away from other students so you have privacy while conferring. A student will be reluctant to share his or her feelings and concerns if everyone in the class can hear.

By spending five minutes a day with a student you gain the time to model, have the student practice and think aloud in front of you, then gradually release responsibility for competing the task to the student. These conferences support students if you focus the task. If students need help with text structure, decide what genre you’ll focus on and identify exactly what the student needs to understand.

Most five-minute conferences are between the teacher and one student. However, if there are two to four students practicing the same strategy with you, you might bring them together once they are close to achieving independence. Often, at this point in the scaffolding, asking students to practice together and share and discuss their process can quickly move them to independence.

Intervention 4: Ten to Fifteen-Minutes

Use if you observe little to no progress during a series of 5-mnute conferences. A longer intervention conference offers you more time for modeling , building student’s background knowledge, and observing what the student does. Extra time also provides students with an opportunity to ask questions, to reflect on progress, to pinpoint parts of a task the student does and does not understand.

This longer conference works best with one student and you can usually return to 5-minute conferences once the learning has been absorbed and you are releasing responsibility to the student. However, if you have two to three students working on the same strategy, then you can intervene with the small group.

Finding time is difficult. This longer conference doesn’t work n a short class period. You can meet with the student before school starts, during lunch, or ask a teacher to release the student for 15 minutes so you can work with him or her during a planning period. The goal is to return to shorter conferences.

Intervention 5: Twenty to Forty Minutes

Usually, a resource teacher works with students who require more time to understand a strategy and move to independence. This long intervention is usually for students reading two or more years below grade level. In addition, these students usually score below the 25th percentile on standardized tests.

The purpose of this intervention is to provide the time students need to improve. The goal should be to move students out of these interventions into support the classroom teacher can manage. These students, like proficient and advanced readers, need to read self-selected books at their independent reading level in order to accelerate their progress.

Once you move beyond the two-three minute repair conversations, you need to document all conferences on the form provided in this newsletter.

By Laura Robb

Meta-cognition is often defined as thinking about thinking. However, a three-word definition does not explain the benefits of becoming meta-cognitive to students in elementary, middle, and high school. Three words—thinking about thinking– are not specific enough to help teachers show students how to be meta-cognitive. When students are aware of what they understand and don’t understand, they can clarify their thinking on their own or seek their teacher’s help. The combination of being self-aware, taking action, and experiencing success leads to independence in learning.

Defining Meta-cognition

Meta-cognitive learners are tuned into how they process new information, what they do and don’t comprehend, and the emotions they experience while learning. Dr. Immordino-Yang and her colleagues at the University Southern California’s Brain Creativity Institute have drawn conclusions about the relationship between emotions and students’ learning capacity.

1. If students emotional associations with tasks are positive, feelings of “I can do this” and “I enjoy this” develop and accelerate their learning.
2. However, if associations are negative—“I’ll never be able to figure this out” and “I hate this work”—it becomes difficult for students to succeed. The replay of in-the-head negative thoughts prevents students from taking the risks that are characteristic of meta-cognitive learners. The possibility of failure negatively affects their lack of self-confidence and self-efficacy.  

Meta-cognitive learners welcome new learning tasks and have  life experiences that enable them to access strategies for learning. Taking risks and risking failure don’t affect their willingness to keep  trying.  

So, two big questions for us as educators to wrestle with are, How do we teach students to be meta-cognitive? How do we transform negative emotions toward learning tasks into positive ones? The answers may lie in encouraging students to do four things: plan work, monitor comprehension, confer frequently, and self-evaluate.

1. Planning Work

When students plan their work—drafts, revision, book talks, projects, speeches, and group presentations, etc– they think, select, discard, and research to learn more. The planning process supports thinking before taking action and reveals to students what they understand and don’t understand, and what they need to do and don’t need to do. Learners who grapple this way are using their meta-cognitive skills.

2. Monitoring Comprehension

Students who read independently at school and home feel a range of emotions while immersed in a text. They also can step into the shoes of the person they’re reading about and experience life from his or her perspective. They visualize, predict, infer, and pause to savor words, phrases, figurative language, and their feelings about and reactions to texts. In a nutshell, those students are monitoring comprehension while reading. An effective way to determine whether students are monitoring comprehension while reading is through bookmarks.

Bookmarks for Monitoring Comprehension

Bookmarks help students track in-the-head-conversations they have during reading. To create a baseline bookmark, ask students to write what they think and feel while reading. Then, have them read and respond using a specific strategy such as predict and support, infer, visualize, determine important information, or name specific feelings they have about a person, character, event, or conflict. What students write or don’t write–offers a window into their thought process while they read. Avoid over using bookmarks or asking students to record their thoughts and feelings for several pages of text.  

When you assess students’ bookmarks and then coach them in frequent, short conferences, you can help students experience success with learning tasks and develop a rich and rewarding personal reading life. Kahmariah’s story below illustrates this.

 

Kahmariah’s Story

Fourth and fifth grade teachers at the Discovery Charter School in Rochester, New York, have been meeting with me on the telephone about using bookmarks and conferring to improve students’ instructional and independent reading.  Fourth grade teacher Jean Hoyt recently emailed me Kahmariah’s story. A reluctant reader, Kahmariah, slightly below grade level with instructional reading, had difficulty making inferences and recalling details. During independent reading she would “fake read” and was unable to retell the text.   

What helped Kahmariah begin to “real read” were the conferences and coaching sessions that followed Jean’s assessment of her bookmarks. Jean moved Kahmariah from quoting text phrases and “fake reading” to making predictions, showing empathy for characters, and connecting the story to her own life. Kahmariah now reads a variety of genres, has read five books during the third quarter, up from only one book the first half of the year.  Kahmariah sees herself as a “reader” who chooses to read at school and at home. Independent reading combined with Jean’s support ramped up Kahmariah’s instructional level to mid-fourth grade!  

The message here is that bookmarks alone won’t help students find meaning and joy in reading. Teachers must analyze students’ bookmarks to figure out how to support them. That means conferring with students, coaching them, modeling for them, pointing out their successes, and encouraging them to self-evaluate.

3. Confer Frequently

Coaching students for three-to-four minutes during a conference enables you to help them apply a new strategy, concept, or task—and enjoy the feeling of success. During conferences you can show students who aren’t meta-cognitive how to reflect on their learning and point out any progress they made. Conferring with students briefly and frequently allows you to turn negative feelings and attitudes toward learning into positive ones–gradually.

Jean Hoyt told me that through continual but short conferences she was able to develop students’ self-confidence and feelings of self-efficacy—“Yes, I can reach that goal!” After several months of conferring and teaching students how to reflect on their work and progress, Hoyt observed that positive feelings toward reading and writing among students she coached outnumbered negative feelings. And equally important, students were able to express feelings of pride in writing and pleasure in reading.

4. Self-Evaluate

Self-evaluating progress in reading comprehension invites students to call on their meta-cognitive skills. They study their readers’ notebooks and reflect on what they did well along with how to improve comprehension.

Coaching students to be meta-cognitive requires us to raise students’ awareness of what they do and don’t understand about reading. This is a tough task for teachers and students, but one that’s important because meta-cognition creates independent learners who find pleasure in reading and writing about reading and have the fix-up strategies necessary to comprehend what they read. And after all, developing students’ independence in learning should be the goal of every teacher!

Independence in Learning

During conferences, engage students in planning, monitoring comprehension, and self-evaluating their work so they can pinpoint strengths and needs. Then, think aloud and coach them to show how reflecting on their reading highlights what they do well and points out areas that need improvement. In addition, help them be positive about their needs so they understand that learners take risks and work hard to make progress. By developing students’ meta-cognitive skills, you put them on the road to lifelong learning.

By Laura Robb, Author and 2016 Literacy for All Conference Featured Speaker

“I never thought that Josiah would need help,” Mrs. Kensey said. “He’s one of my best readers and he works hard. But he struggled to make inferences with informational texts.”  Like Mrs. Kensey, many teachers believe that students who work hard and excel at school won’t require interventions. However, if we look at our students through the lens of independent and dependent learners, we can adjust our view of intervention. Independent learners have the confidence, skill and strategies to solve learning problems while dependent learners lack self-confidence and the skill and strategies needed to support completing challenging tasks on their own. Students (and adults) move back and forth between being independent and dependent learners. Let’s understand this swinging pendulum by looking at a two examples:

• When teachers present a new strategy such as inferring with informational texts, there will be students who can infer with fiction but can’t transfer the skill to nonfiction.  However, by modeling the process of inferring with nonfiction in an intervention conference and asking students to practice, you can observe their strengths and needs, scaffold their learning, and move them to independence.
• If students lack the vocabulary and background knowledge to read and comprehend new information such as space geometry, nuclear meltdowns, or the Cold War, they will need interventions—scaffolds that build vocabulary and background knowledge so they can comprehend  unfamiliar information.

It’s important that teachers understand that independence is not a fixed point on the achievement scale. Instead, when a student who is a high achiever faces a learning roadblock, he or she will ask for and accept help without losing self-confidence and self-efficacy. It’s the student who lacks self-confidence and has negative feelings toward school and learning who teachers must continually observe and interact with because they are unlikely to ask for help when they encounter difficulty. To observe whether students have absorbed and can apply the strategies and tasks you’ve modeled, embrace and use the three interventions that follow.

Intervention 1: Two-to-Three-Minute Conversations

An important purpose of this brief intervention is to decide which students you can support during a two-to-three minute conversation and who requires a five-minute exploratory conference. Observe, listen, and ask students’ questions as you circulate among them while they are reading, writing, or working in small groups. Such daily interactions enable you to check on the progress of students you previously helped and continue monitoring all students as they practice new tasks and work independently.

As you circulate look for behaviors that show students are disengaged from the work: the student isn’t reading, writing, or sharing during a student-led discussion; a student is doodling in his notebook, slumping in her seat, or resting his head on the desk. Have an on-the-spot informal conversation with each student and decide whether you need more than a short conversation to scaffold the learning. Difficulty with applying a strategy, completing a writing plan, revising a journal entry, or taking notes, usually requires a longer conference. However, issues such as changing a text that’s too difficult, figuring out the meaning of a tough word, or getting started on a response to a text can usually be supported during a two-to-three minute conversation. Jot the high points and suggestions of this conversation on a sticky note and give it to the student as a reminder.

While you find the time to confer with a student, have him or her work on a task that he or she can successfully complete independently such as reading a self-selected book or working on a project with a peer partner. If you have time, schedule a five-minute exploratory conference that day or the next day, so you can decide the kind of support that student requires.

Intervention 2: Five-Minute Exploratory Conference

The purpose of this one-on-one intervention is to help you decide how much support a student needs to move to independence with a task. It’s possible that you can clear up the student’s confusion in one to two conferences. However, there will be times when your observations of the student practicing a task such as finding text evidence or comparing and contrasting two characters indicate the need for a series of three or more short conferences to move that student to independence.

Intervention 3: A Series of Five-Minute Conferences

If your exploratory intervention reveals the need for more in-depth scaffolding, schedule a series of five-minute conferences. Hold five-minute conferences in a quiet place in the classroom while other students are completing work independently. Set up a small table or a student desk away from other students so you have privacy while conferring. A student will be reluctant to share his or her feelings and concerns if everyone in the class can hear.

By spending five minutes a day with a student you gain the time to model, have the student practice and think aloud in front of you, then gradually release responsibility for competing the task to the student. These conferences support students if you focus the task. If students need help with text structure, decide what genre you’ll focus on and identify exactly what the student needs to understand.

Most five-minute conferences are between the teacher and one student. However, if there are two to four students practicing the same strategy with you, you might bring them together once they are close to achieving independence. Often, at this point in the scaffolding, asking students to practice together and share and discuss their process can quickly move them to independence.

Pre-Plan Five-Minute Conferences

Pre-planning asks you to carefully reflect on your observations of a student, focus the conference, but also develop several possible scaffolds. It’s beneficial to have several scaffolds ready to try because there is no one sure fix-up strategy for a student. This way, if one scaffold derails, you can immediately try another on your list of possibilities.

The conference form that follows provides you with a written record of what transpired during each scheduled meeting. Use this documentation to decide on your next teaching moves and to point out progress to students. As students experience success and learn to associate positive feelings with solving learning challenges, they will develop the self-confidence and self-efficacy needed to be independent learners—most of the time.

*All names are pseudonyms.

Five-Minute Scaffolding Conference Form

Student Name_____________________Date____________

BEFORE THE CONFERENCE

Focused topic:

Teacher’s preparation notes:

AFTER THE CONFERENCE:

Student’s comments:

Outcomes:

Negotiated goal:

Check one:

___schedule another conference

___have the student work with a peer

___let the student work independently