By Evan Robb

Changing your staff’s attitudes toward educational practices takes time, but it’s something that you can accomplish through continual communication. Staying in touch with your teachers means attending all meetings, sending them short articles that build their educational knowledge base, providing positive feedback after walkthroughs, and meeting one-on-one with staff or in small groups to have meaningful conversations about best practice. The fifteen tips for creating change that followed enabled me to develop a school culture that made independent reading an important part of the middle school curriculum.

1. Share the research: Before asking teachers to weave independent reading into their teaching schedule, invite them to read and discuss articles on the power of independent reading of self-selected books. Without the practice that independent reading provides, students’ progress in reading and their ability to comprehend complex texts will be limited. Moreover, when students regularly read self-selected books at school, they develop a love of reading that lasts a lifetime!
2. Speak at faculty meetings and to individual teachers: Purchase, for teachers, the book whisperer by Donalyn Miller (Jossey-Bass, 2009) and invite them to organize book study groups. Extol the benefits of independent reading: students enlarge their vocabulary, build background knowledge, practice applying strategies teachers model, and find pleasure in reading about people and places from the past, present, and in the future.
3. Set aside funds for books: Each year offer teachers funds for building their classroom libraries because access to books can bring students into the reading life. Encourage the PTO to do one or two fundraisers for classroom libraries annually.
4. Encourage student self-selection of books: Explain to teachers that permitting students to choose their independent reading books means students invest in their reading.
5. Read aloud to students: Make appointments to read aloud each week to a different class.
6. Become a role model: Discuss a book you love at assembly or during a school wide broadcast.
7. Have students share books on the school’s morning broadcast: Invite teachers to choose students to share a great read with the entire school. Peer-to-peer advertising of terrific books is a topnotch way to interest other students in reading.
8. Drop into classes during independent reading: Catch students reading and loving it! Praise students and show them a book you’re reading. If you have time, join the class and read for ten to fifteen minutes.
9. Designate a weekly independent reading time for entire school: This shows students and teachers how serious you are about reading self-selected books.
10. Encourage teachers to read while students read: Explain that when teachers model that they have and enjoy a personal reading life, they inspire their students to emulate them.
11. Invite teachers to share successes: They can do this during full faculty meetings and at department or team meetings.
12. Track reading scores: Do this to show that when students have a rich, independent reading life, their scores in vocabulary and comprehension start to reflect what they do. Share progress with teachers so they feel the changes and adjustments they’ve made are supporting students’ progress.
13. Feature a student’s recommendation for independent reading in school’s newsletter: This lets parents know how much you, teachers, and students value independent reading.
14. Commend teachers and students in writing: Don’t overdo written notes, but when you see independent reading flourishing in a class, write a note to the teacher and his or her students. Noticing positive reading practices inspires teachers and students to read even more.
15. Inform parents: On back to school night let parents know the benefits of independent reading so they can foster it at home.
Evan Robb, Principal Johnson Williams Middle School and author of:
The Principal’s Leadership Sourcebook, Scholastic, 2007.
Follow Evan Robb on Twitter: @ERobbPrincipal
Sign up for the Daily Robb Review—it’s free!
www.therobbreview.org

An example of the good….

Encouraging teachers to continually observe and interact with students during guided reading and independent reading and writing can enable them to pinpoint students who need help with high level thinking. You can support this teaching and learning belief by inviting teachers to share their observations, interventions, and scaffolds at department meetings and at full faculty meetings. Doing this shows your commitment to continually supporting students so they progress as readers. In addition, you can complete walkthroughs (for growth not targeting)during reading instruction in ELA and content classes and celebrate what worked well!  We are always told to lift students up- let’s make sure we do it for each other too!

Equally important, you’ll want to enlarge teachers’ knowledge of interventions and how to determine them by organizing book studies around this topic. Part of growing and being an effective language arts teacher is learning many different strategies to meet the needs of learners.  Differentiating, in my opinion, has been an over used term. But great differentiating is made more effective as teacher learns more and more effective research strategies while maintaining strong personal efficacy. Commit to great instructional reading that integrates the strategies to help students become better readers! Commit classroom libraries and independent reading.  Commit to passing on you passion for reading and writing to students.

Now for the bad…

The counter to this belief and commitment to improving actual teaching skills is the big business of education.  Many of us are sheep as we go into expos or meet with sales reps to be sold kool aide for us to drink. We drink and believe that new programs or new computer programs that will make it all better and good sales people can be very convincing. School divisions pay huge money for such programs and many staff see them as a solve or a fix.  Education is not improved when people have a fix it mentality and a belief that does not honor the most important, our teachers, who work with children every day. Fixing will always be a process- we do not fix by inserting a program. I will admit that some programs can integrate into a classroom but  none can replace the teacher. The often used method of throwing “stuff”on a wall to see what sticks is not in the best interest of students, teachers, and it can be costly.

I have and always will put my belief into teachers coupled with an understanding that professional development is critical as we work improve pedagogy.

Below are two books to investigate:

RTI From All Sides by Mary Howard, Heinemann, 2009.

The Reading Intervention Toolkit by Laura Robb, Shell, 2016.

 

Evan Robb, Principal Johnson Williams Middle School and author of:

The Principal’s Leadership Sourcebook, Scholastic, 2007.

Follow me on Twitter: @ERobbPrincipal

Sign up for the Daily Robb Review—it’s free!

www.therobbreview.org

By Laura Robb

“Build prior knowledge.”

In the Common Core era, these three familiar words of advice cause frustration in teachers, and their frustration trickles down to students. Why? Because many state education departments have requested that teachers not build students’ prior knowledge before reading.

The Common Core recommendation that supports this stance is that students need to engage in close reading to comprehend unfamiliar, complex texts. “Let students read a text three or four times—even more if necessary—reading closely until they can unpack its meaning.” That’s the advice teachers hear today.

This strategy, reading without prior knowledge, developed because the Common Core’s goal is for students to be able to read grade-level complex texts by the end of the school year. But it is untenable. As P. David Pearson points out:

“It is not as though prior knowledge was an ‘optional’ cognitive move that one could turn on or turn off at will. A reader cannot build a text base or a situation model without invoking relevant prior knowledge; there is nothing voluntary about it.”

(from “Research Foundations of the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts, p. 255, In Quality Reading Instruction in the Age of Common Core Standards, Newman & Gambrell, Editors, 2013, International Reading Association).

To Build or Not to Build Prior Knowledge

Catherine E. Snow, professor of education at Harvard Graduate School, calls reading unfamiliar texts with no prior knowledge “cold close reading.”

Dr. Snow tried cold close reading on an unfamiliar topic. Here’s what she said about her experience:

“…cold close reading was often unproductive. It was discouraging. I found I couldn’t read about the unfamiliar topics for more than a few minutes at a time, and that I was exhausted at the end of such efforts.” (Reading Today, June 6, 2013).

If Catherine E. Snow – a brilliant researcher, teacher, and writer – had difficulty with cold close reading because she lacked prior knowledge, why have the framers of the Common Core recommended this reading practice for elementary, middle, and high school students?

Having taught middle school students for more than 40 years, I recognize that if a task is too difficult and the material is not relevant to students’ lives, their attitude becomes “Why bother?”

Moreover, a close reading of the students in any public school classroom across the United States reveals a diversity of experience and reading expertise. Mandates among states for cold close reading not only frustrate and greatly diminish motivation and engagement for grade-level readers, but they are particularly damaging for English language learners, special education students, learning disabled students, and students reading two or more years below grade level.

I am all for raising the bar; I am for helping students think deeply about texts and explore multiple layers of meaning. I am not for discouraging students by pushing them to “read” texts with vocabulary, content, and syntax demands far beyond their instructional reading levels.

If we want to stretch students’ reading ability by developing their reading skill, then it’s important to set the stage for reading complex, unfamiliar texts by helping students build prior knowledge before reading, so close reading becomes a positive and engaging experience that’s within their reach. Snow calls this a “warm close reading.”

For our students, a warm close reading should also mean that they are reading complex texts at their instructional level—texts they can comprehend. Because we teachers know that if students can’t comprehend a text, they can’t learn from it.

Teach Students to Activate Their Prior Knowledge

After Common Core proponents announced that teachers should not spend time activating and/or constructing students’ prior knowledge, I felt frustrated and angry. Why? Because teachers and educational researchers recognize that prior knowledge and experiences, stored in the brain as schema, improve students’ comprehension.

Once my anger and frustration over the CCSS cold close-reading recommendations abated, I directed my energy to developing a method that would put students in charge of activating their own prior knowledge. As I tested the method among students, I learned from their reactions that they prized the strategy because it developed independence and supported the reading they did on mandated state tests.

Tips For Modeling the Prior Knowledge Lesson

Use an anchor or teaching text to think aloud and show students how you activate prior knowledge. Anchor texts are short and relate to the theme or topic you’re teaching. You can use a picture book, a short text such as a myth, or an excerpt from a long text. Throughout the unit, you’ll be able to return to the anchor text to review a skill or strategy you’ve modeled with students.

Follow the steps for activating prior knowledge listed below; you’ll also find a handout for students at the end of this article. I suggest that you immediately engage students in the lesson so they invest in the strategy and listen to your think aloud. Here’s how you can involve students in the model lesson:

• Read the title out loud. Ask: “Do I know anything about this topic?” If you don’t, then tell yourself to slow down the reading and reread confusing parts.
• Read aloud the preview sections: the first two paragraphs and the last paragraph if the text is nonfiction.
• Organize students into partners.
• Have partners turn and talk about all the details they recall from listening to the first two paragraphs and the last paragraph.
• Start writing the prior knowledge notes on chart paper or a whiteboard.
• Ask students to volunteer to add details to the prior knowledge notes.
• Have partners use their prior knowledge notes or the title of the selection to set a purpose for their first reading.

Model the process for students until you feel they can build their own prior knowledge with an instructional or independent reading text. Ask students to turn and talk about details recalled from the preview for three to four months.

Next, tell students that talking to a partner is a dress rehearsal for in-the-head conversations with themselves because that is what they will do on mandated reading tests.

I recommend that teachers stop paired conversations about three to four months before the state tests and have students practice in-their-head discussions independently. (You can also find the following handout on page 9 of this PDF.)

Closing Thoughts

Students can build their own prior knowledge and set purposes when reading longer texts as well. With fiction and nonfiction, they read the title, study the cover illustrations, and read the first chapter.

Not only does the strategy develop independence with learning, but it also offers students a way to build prior knowledge on a topic they know little to nothing about.

You’ll find guidelines for this lesson, 45 complex texts, teaching units for seven genres, and much more in Unlocking Complex Texts: A Systematic Framework for Building Adolescents Comprehension by Laura Robb (Scholastic 2013). See a MiddleWeb review here.

Laura Robb is a Literacy Coach at Powhatan School in Boyce, Virginia where she coaches teachers in grades K to 8. She also teaches students all year in public schools in and around Winchester VA. Robb is a veteran educator with over 43 years of teaching experience to her credit. Her many books weave classroom strategies with research-based practices. Visit her website.

Our #1 Reading Problem: Persistent Inequalities
Originally Appeared in MIDDLEWEB ·

By Laura Robb

In early March I spoke about reading in the era of the Common Core to a group of administrators in an urban US school district. During my visit, I had lunch one day with English teachers at a school named after President Obama to discuss the teaching of reading.

We met in their library, a facility both uninviting and unused. With no librarian, neither teachers nor students can check out the few available books. I learned that most of the books had been ordered by a third party, not by staff who would have made wiser fiction and nonfiction selections.

Sorry-we-are-closed

During our conversations, I also discovered that there are few books in teachers’ classroom libraries — ten to fifteen is typical. As a result, the largely African American and Latino student population of this school does not have access to high quality texts written by multi-ethnic authors about diverse characters and topics.

Because of the lack of resources for students, the school has far too many developing readers — learners who lack the skill to unpack meaning from complex, grade level materials. I was told that many students are reading three to five or more years below grade level. I believe a major cause is the lack of access to motivating and engaging print and e-books.

In addition, English classes that aren’t special education have 35 to 45 students packed into classrooms. Teachers are sad, worried and deeply concerned. Sad because they know their students can’t meet the requirements of the Common Core. Worried because they recognize that based on students’ test scores, they will receive poor evaluations. And they’re deeply concerned about sending students on to high school without the necessary skills to read, write, think, and thrive.

Who cares about these kids?

When I returned to my hotel room, I wrote to the governor of the state and to President Barack Obama. In both letters I mentioned that, in 2013 alone, states spent 3.5 billion dollars to develop tests for the Common Core – leaving little available funding to actually improve schools.

The teachers I met with that day gave up their lunch to learn; they are hungry for professional opportunities to grow. They desperately want wonderful books that can engage and motivate their students to learn how to read complex texts and find pleasure in reading. They care deeply about their students.

This school is not a lonely outlier in our nation’s public school system, but one of many schools in such distressed, heartbreaking circumstances. Visit schools in the rural South or in large urban centers such as Detroit and Chicago and you’ll find conditions very much like those I witnessed in this school.

So what do the leaders in charge say? The Governor has not yet replied to my letter of concern, even though I requested an answer.

I naively believed that since the school I visited was named after President Obama, my letter might catch the attention of a knowledgeable person assigned to sift out such correspondence. By including my website and the fact that I’ve written 20 books on reading and writing and have over 40 years of classroom experience, I felt hopeful that I would receive a thoughtful response.

I was mistaken.

I received a canned reply “from” President Barack Obama—a reply that never even addressed the situation I discussed in my letter—a reply filled with promises like “investing in our teachers” and the President’s agenda to “fund our schools, revamp our classrooms, uphold high standards, train the best educators, and stand behind them.” Achieving better schools, the letter said, “means providing pathways to excellence that allow teachers to practice their craft with creativity and passion.”

It was discouraging to receive this platitude-filled response in light of the plight of high poverty schools throughout our nation.

There’s something very wrong

Obama’s initiatives have done little to close the gap between schools in poor urban and rural areas and those in middle and upper class areas. To level the learning field in thousands of schools in the United States, all children need access to outstanding books and materials, and class sizes of 40 students and more need to be reduced significantly if we expect teachers to improve students’ literacy skills.

There’s something very wrong with our priorities when states give over 3.5 billion dollars to companies designing the Common Core tests (and the test prep programs to go with them) and then don’t have the funds to lift children out of poverty through education that knows how to engage, inspire and empower students to learn .

Perhaps the administration’s vision needs to move beyond educational initiatives that focus on testing, competition, and computers to tackling these issues:

► attracting to and keeping the best in the teaching profession;

► funding ongoing professional study that prepares teachers to effectively integrate technology into instruction;

► providing the professional books and research on how children learn — and the time teachers need to explore and apply best practices with colleagues.

But it’s the children themselves who need to be at the center of educational initiatives. We must insure that students from diverse economic and cultural groups also have access to the finest books and reading materials, attend schools with inviting central and classroom libraries, and are not packed into classrooms where the sheer numbers exceed any teacher’s ability to support all learners.

How can we move beyond platitudes?