By Laura Robb
“But what does an inference look like?” This question, posed by a fifth grade student struggling to get a grip on making inferences represents the confusion many students experience with that strategy. An effective way to support all learners as they work to understand and apply a reading strategy is for you, the teacher, to show them what the process of understanding and applying the strategy looks like. You can easily do that by reading aloud a passage from an anchor text, thinking aloud, and making your process visible as you infer and identify unstated meanings in texts.
Teach Reading With an Anchor Text
An anchor text is short and usually complements the genre and theme of whatever unit of study you’re carrying out. If your students are reading biographies, for example, then the anchor text could be a picture book biography such as Wilma Unlimited by Kathleen Krull or an excerpt from a chapter book such as The Notorious Benedict Arnold by Steve Sheinkin. You can evaluate the length of an anchor text by deciding whether you can complete the modeling in about ten class periods by reading aloud each day, two to three paragraphs. The strategies you model should first and foremost give students the thinking tools they need to read well and perhaps help them meet state and Common Core State Standards. Think-aloud and show students how to:
• use context clues to figure the meaning of unfamiliar words
• build prior knowledge by previewing a text before reading
• apply reading strategies such as making inferences, finding themes, and determining important ideas
• link figurative language, literary elements, and informational text structures to a theme or big idea in a text.
• discuss the genre characteristics of the anchor text
• foster collaborative discussions of the anchor text
• answer text-dependent questions
• use close reading to solve reading challenges
The strategies that you model with an anchor text should be the same strategies that students practice applying to books at their instructional reading level. Anchor text lessons can offer students multiple opportunities to build and/or enlarge their mental models of how specific strategies work, so they can use those strategies on their own to become better readers.
Anchor Text Lesson on Figurative Language
The purpose of this lesson for middle school students, which is based on the Emily Dickinson poem below, is to help students understand and identify an extended metaphor and then show how the metaphor enhances a theme in the text.
She sweeps with many-colored brooms,
And leaves the shreds behind;
Oh, housewife in the evening west,
Come back, and dust the pond!

You dropped a purple ravelling in,
You dropped an amber thread;
And now you’ve littered all the East
With duds of emerald!

And still she plies her spotted brooms,
And still the aprons fly,
Till brooms fade softly into stars—
And then I come away.

1. Make sure students understand that an extended metaphor is a comparison between two unlike things that’s woven through several sentences, paragraphs or, as in this case, most of a poem.
2. Read aloud the poem twice. Before the second reading, ask students to listen for the extended metaphor.
3. Think aloud and explain the metaphor. Here’s what I say:
Dickinson compares sunset to a housewife and includes housewife imagery in each stanza. In the first stanza, words like sweep, housewife, and dust conjure pictures of a woman cleaning. However, instead of cleaning house, she’s cleaning away daylight and preparing for sunset.
4. Invite students to turn and talk and identify housewife imagery in the second and third stanzas. Here’s what students say:
Second stanza: ravelled, littered
Third stanza: brooms, aprons
5. Next, pose a question that can help students connect the extended metaphor to the poem’s theme: Why does Dickinson compare sunset to a housewife?
6. Ask students to turn and talk to explore that question. Here’s what two students said when I carried out this lesson recently in an eighth-grade classroom:
• A housewife never finishes her work—like with nature always having to do sunset and sunrise.
• My mom’s got routines—like she does stuff around the house on different days. That’s like sunrise and sunset ‘cause different things happen.
7. Wrap up the lesson by celebrating students thinking and recapping what you’ve taught them about extended metaphor.
Suggestions for Using an Anchor Text to Teach Reading
The more you plan and practice anchor text lessons the easier delivering them becomes. You might consider practicing with colleagues to boost your comfort level. Then, plunge into offering your students explicit anchor text lessons using the guidelines that follow.
Process Guidelines for 10 to 15 Minute Anchor Text Lessons
Model a strategy that students are learning in guided reading. When you align your whole-class teaching with what students are learning in small groups, they stand a better chance of understanding and internalizing the strategy.
1. Tell the students the strategy you’ll be modeling for them.
2. Explain the strategy, how it helps readers, and how readers apply it
3. Read a short passage from the text and model by thinking aloud, how you apply the strategy.
4. Involve the students. Have them turn and talk to apply the strategy to a different passage from the text. When they’ve finished, ask volunteers to share their thinking.
5. Wrap up the lesson by retelling students what you and they did. Repeat the strategy’s name and how to apply it.
Present the interactive anchor text reading lesson using different parts of the same text four to five times a week. Start by carrying out the lesson with the whole class and repeat it as necessary in small groups of students who require more time to absorb it. Short, focused, interactive anchor text lessons can show your students what terrific readers do as they unpack a text’s meaning.

 

By Laura Robb

Throughout my career, I’ve observed that the more teachers talk, the less students learn. To help me explore alternatives to teacher talk from students’ perspectives, I recently surveyed students in grades four to eight with this question: What do you think teachers should do to engage students and make the learning more interesting? Below is a summary of their responses:

• Let us choose books for independent reading.
• Have us solve problems and do research with a partner or in a group.
• Let us discuss books in small groups.
• Use podcasts, book talks, journal writing, fan fiction, pamphlets, readers’ theater, and dramatic monologues for grades—not always tests.

Traditional Teaching Methods

Recitation, discussions in which teachers ask questions and students provide the correct answers, and lecturing are instructional practices that are prevalent in middle and high school. Occasionally, student-centered practices are mixed in, but in my opinion not often enough.

When I surveyed the same fourth to eighth graders about traditional practices, they described lectures as boring and claimed to “stop listening after fifteen minutes.” They gave low ratings to recitation and to completing worksheets. Their comments raise an important question: How can districts  transition teachers from traditional methods to student-centered methods?

Changing Practice

Even though research suggests that engagement and motivation increase when teachers use student-centered units that invite collaboration and active- learning, there is resistance to change. It may have something to do with the message administrators send to teachers: students’ achievement should be teachers’ primary goal. Too often, achievement means that students score high on standardized tests. In this era of accountability, I find that many teachers fear shifting instructional practices will lead to lower test scores.

Here are suggestions that can fuel positive change and prompt district leaders to rethink the message they’re sending:

• Get the principal and other administrators on board; their support is crucial for success.
• Ask teachers who have developed student-centered units to coach peers during planning times.
• Have teachers design and implement one student-centered unit, adding one to two new ones each school year.
• Schedule ongoing professional development at the building level that includes how to plan units in which students actively learn and collaborate.
• Provide technology support that shows teachers how using digital devices can enhance student-centered learning.
• Enlist the support of a coach or resource teacher to boost the confidence of a teacher embracing change.
• Familiarize teachers with the research on independent reading. Help them understand that when students choose and read thirty-to-forty books a year they can ramp-up their reading achievement.

One Teacher’s Changeover

The student-centered independent reading project described in this section and launched by Ms. James and me dramatically improved students’ engagement with books. By trusting in students’ inherent desire to learn when they designed their independent reading curriculum, we also increased their motivation to read.

Sixth-grade students swarmed the hall, talking as they retrieved books from lockers for their next class. I noticed Diego handing a book to Ben, pointing to it as he talked. (All names are pseudonyms.) Quickly, I jockeyed myself into a position where I could hear the conversation.

Ben:                         Did you finish the book about Merlin yet?

Diego:             Yeah. It’s yours. We gotta talk about it–maybe after the first four chapters.

Ben:             Sure! What are you reading next?

Diego:            The last [book] in the Merlin series. Then, I’ll read the Percy Jackson series. Richie says they’re great.

Independent reading is not a typical between-classes topic for middle school students, but it was for students in Ms. James’s classes. Ms. James teaches two sections of sixth grade English, each with sixteen students, at Powhatan, an independent K-8 school in Boyce, Virginia. Sixth graders experienced a solid instructional curriculum, but students were not required to read independently. In my role as consultant, I invited Ms. James to help me organize a student-centered independent reading curriculum, and she agreed to adjust her teacher-centered style.

Specifically, we transferred the decision of how much independent reading to complete from teachers to students. After surveying students for their reading interests, we gave booklists to the school librarian so she could support students.

Two words describe the new curriculum: choice and trust. Four times a week for thirty minutes, students read or discussed books with a partner or in a small group. Students opted to create PowerPoint presentations about genres or authors and complete a journal entry on a book. Everyone chose one book and composed and presented a reader’s theater script or dramatic monologue. Ms. James and I were always available to listen, confer, and provide tech support.

Students created a classroom culture where they were reading and sharing beloved books in ways that were meaningful to them. Because they had choices and interacted with peers, and because we teachers valued their ideas and decisions, sixth graders were involved in their work! By the second month, everyone was reading at school and at home and recommending books to one another. From January to May, each student logged between twenty and fifty books into their notebooks.

Concluding Thoughts

With the kind of support Ms. James had, teachers can create a coherent vision of student-centered learning and gain the skills and experiences that enable them to transform a class of disengaged and unmotivated learners into engaged and motivated learners.

 

Laura Robb

There is great advertising power in book talks. When you invite students to choose an independent reading book to talk about each month, you improve students’ listening capacity and introduce them to myriad books and magazines. A class of 25 students that presents book talks for ten months introduces one other to 250 books. Yes, it’s a powerful way for students to motivate and engage one another as readers. Each month, reserve about 30 minutes of two or three consecutive class periods for books talks.

Books talks should take no more than two to three minutes and should focus on high-level thinking, not retelling. It’s important for you to model how you plan, take notes for, and practice presenting books talks so you build students’ mental model of the process. In my book Differentiating Reading Instruction, you’ll find an entire section on book talks in the classroom. If you have the binder (Teaching Reading: A Differentiated Approach), you’ll find guidelines for book talking in the section that discusses classroom libraries.

You shouldn’t have students complete a project for each book; this discourages and punishes your best readers. However, book talking is short, beneficial to the entire class, and develops students’ public speaking skills and self-confidence.

By Laura Robb, Blog from Middleweb, March 2016

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’s 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 FaceTime, 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.