Laura Robb

Though we are social beings who crave relationships and meaningful interactions with others, we also relish having time alone.  And that’s a good thing. Alone time cultivates reflection, the ability to raise questions and to look back at an experience, think deeply about it, and gain self-knowledge.

Recently, Gracie, a fifth grader, and her group finished reading Stone Fox by John Reynolds Gardiner. Gracie closed her eyes for a few moments, hoping more pages would pop into the book. “There has to be more,” she blurted out. “It can’t end. I want to know what happened after Searchlight died.”   Gently, her teacher reminded Gracie that she could imagine what happened by extending the end of the story in her mind, and she could continue to think about what she had learned from the characters and events.

Gracie and her teacher illustrate what reflecting about reading looks like, and how reflection can boost students’ connections to characters, conflicts, problems, and new information. But it can also do more. Gracie and her group developed empathy for being an orphan and little Willy shouldering adult responsibilities.

Defining Reflection

Reflection is the act of thinking about something and can be a personal experience like planning a vegetable garden, mulling over a book during and after reading or thinking about a movie or play. A powerful learning and imagining tool, reflection enhances experiences by deepening our insights, helping us make sense of new information, and making it possible to use prior knowledge to create new understandings.  Those who reflect experience joy in reading, learning, and daily life. They also develop agency and the capacity for positive change.

A solo activity, reflection is unique to each person’s experiences and prior knowledge. It’s also meta-cognitive, providing a learner with knowledge about processing information, connecting to past experiences, and transferring learning to new situations.  However, reflecting is individualized thinking and learning that requires modeling and practice.

Promoting Reflective Classrooms

Teachers who squarely see the benefits of questions and reflection in their lives can become the intermediary in developing the habit of raising questions and reflecting among students.  When teachers reflect on lessons, observations of and conferences with students, they collect stories and information that can support scaffolding learning and provide insights into students’ behavior and attitudes.  It’s helpful to set aside ten to fifteen minutes each day to think about what worked and what you can do to increase students’ engagement and desire to learn.

Reflecting on Teaching:  For me, the level of success in a class has everything to do with students’ engagement in the work and their motivation to work hard and learn. By cultivating the habit of thinking about each teaching day, you can celebrate successes as well as repair areas that require attention.   The questions that follow encourage reflecting on teaching:

• How can I help students become more involved in their learning?
• Why were most students engaged, and a few disengaged?
• How do I involve students in planning learning experiences?
• Do students offer input and feedback on using technology on the classroom?
• Why is it important to invite students to help decide how to arrange our classroom for project-based learning, book discussions, genius hour, collaborative planning?
• Am I giving students feedback that helps them improve?
• Are students doing most of the talking and work? If not, how can I flip this?
• Is choice a part of independent and instructional reading? Of collaborative projects? Of presentations?
• Does the way I use technology enhance students’ learning?
• Am I effectively modeling how to reflect on reading, on a discussion,  a collaborative project, and on the use of technology?

Nurture your curiosity and ask questions to examine your teaching and students’ learning. Your questions can help you resolve issues independently or more likely, send you to colleagues for suggestions. When you wonder why a student didn’t absorb a lesson or why a child misbehaves or can’t complete a task, you’ve taken the first step to explore ways to scaffold and support.  Be curious. Wonder. Find the path to help yourself and students grow.

Students Reflecting on Learning

To help students actively reflect on a lesson or work they’ve been doing, first invite them to silently think about their work.  To guide students, make your inner voice visible and think aloud to show them how you might consider the task. You can say something like: I wish I had set aside more time to work on projects today because 20 minutes wasn’t enough; I’ll do better tomorrow. Or We don’t seem to get to independent reading every day, I’m considering starting the class with it.  Doing this builds students’ mental model of what reflective thinking is like. Point out that frequently reflection can lead to a decision that improves learning and use of time.

Have pairs generate and share questions, write these on chart paper, and invite students to choose one or two. The goal is for students to integrate reflective questioning while working on a task or project, and after it’s completed.  What follows is a list of some learning experiences for student reflection. You and students will pinpoint many more.

• Writing Tasks
• Reviewing Notebook Entries
• Participating in Small-Group Discussions
• Preparation for Lessons
• Contributions to collaborative learning projects
• Book talks
• Taking notes
• Project-based learning
• Genius Hour
• Active listening during discussions
• Silent reading
• Stamina
• Quarterly review of portfolios

Reflection as a Tool for Change

Reflective questioning deepens understanding and can lead to positive changes.  When you and your students reflect and then express what you learned, thinking moves beyond the experience to self-knowledge and transfer to other learning and life situations.

My Scholastic Blogs

Follow Laura on Twitter @LRobbTeacher

Check out Evan’s blog posts on ScholasticEDU!

Learn more about Laura’s ideas on reading- check out- Teaching Reading in Middle School

Recently I was in a meeting discussing risk-taking, change, and disrupting routines.  I recall stating dynamic learner-centered classrooms will always be lead by dynamic teachers.  You cannot have an old-fashioned rigid teacher leading a progressive and dynamic classroom. The same parallel is true for a school. Progressive schools have principals who empower staff and students to take risks and grow as learners and thinkers because these principals value:

• curiosity;
• creativity;
• Innovation;
• taking risks;
• relationship building; and
• view making mistakes as information that can support positive change.

 

Why do some schools and classrooms appear so different?  One reason is that through their actions and beliefs, leaders can demonstrate how purposeful risk-taking is important for staff to grow as professionals.  This leading by example can give teachers permission to take risks. A risk can encourage teachers to try something small such as committing to reading aloud every day. Or they can risk disrupting a significant routine by moving from a teacher-centered to a student-centered approach.   Risk-taking can break a cycle of repetition. Permission to take risks is how we grow and become better. It will only happen if staff feel safe and observe you taking risks, missing the mark, but continuing to work hard until you reach your goal.

 

Disrupt what you do.

 

The school principal sets the tone for a school.  A tone of intentional risk-taking and innovation or a tone of rigid compliance.  It is the principal who can stifle creativity, imagination, and risk-taking or empower staff to find their greatness.  Leadership matters. The world we are preparing students for is far different than what we experienced in school. And we educators need to prepare our students for this changing world and the uncertainties and unknowns of the future.

 

Here are my top five ways for a principal to set a tone where taking risks and disrupting routines is part of the school’s culture.  Use these to reflect and then to change. Staff and students deserve it.

 

Model: I have known “leaders” who attempt to communicate appropriate risk-taking, but when staff observes them they don’t see congruence between words and action.  If the principal wants to create a culture where taking risks is acceptable, staff must see the principal doing the same.

 

What are you doing to show staff that you too are taking risks?

 

Define: Taking risks is broad. Effective principals communicate what risk-taking means in their school.  They build understanding through discussion groups and book and article studies. Risk-taking merely to take a risk may not create changes in learning.  However, purposeful risk-taking, evidenced through improved learning, is right on target.

 

Encourage:  Effective school leaders give specific positive praise to staff who are taking risks and growing as teachers. This type of feedback makes a difference.  Specific positive feedback will encourage teachers to continue to try new methods, to take risks, and know if they make mistakes, they can always remedy them.

 

How are you encouraging change using specific praise?

 

Empower:  In the world of business empowered employees bring innovation to a company and can improve the bottom line.  In education, staff who are empowered to take risks and innovate impact student learning. Empowered staff will be more invested in what they do and most importantly why they do it.  Smart risk-taking helps develop empowered teachers who can impact student learning.

 

How do you empower staff to take purposeful risks to improve their practice?

 

Safety: Staff needs to feel safe to take risks, and they need to understand failure is part of taking risks.  If you scold staff for taking a risk or they hear of another staff member admonished for taking a risk, the entire initiative to change can fail. On the other hand, if the principal communicates that failure is a part of risk-taking, he or she lets staff know they can learn from failures and move along the path pointed towards success. When staff have bad experiences and the principal meets trying something new with understanding, they will try again. How you treat staff will spread around the school.

 

Do staff in your school feel it is safe to take risks?

 

Risk-taking involves creativity, innovation, and disruption of routine.  Embrace intentional risk-taking, model it, communicate it, and celebrate it.  Empower staff and give them permission to try. Lead the change. Collaboratively create a culture celebrating creativity and innovation.  Staff and students need and deserve innovative schools. Be the leader who allows this to happen!

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by Laura Robb

Why make time for independent reading? It’s a question schools frequently wrestle with. The answer is simple. The more students read, the better readers they become. Independent reading builds stamina, the ability to concentrate for at least thirty minutes. It also enlarges vocabulary, background knowledge, and provides the practice students need to become proficient and advanced readers.  Equally important is that independent reading develops students’ personal reading lives and sets them on the path to becoming lifelong readers because it nurtures their heads and hearts.

When I return to area schools to teach, I ask students this question: What do you think and feel while reading?  The responses that follow are typical of students who avoid reading and those who enjoy it.

• Jerome, an eighth-grade student wrote “0” and added “nothing.”
• Ricardo, a seventh grader, wrote: I learn good stuff about cars when I read. Sometimes I laugh and feel sad from books.”

Jerome dislikes reading and explained why during a conference: “I hate it.

Boring. Got better things to do.” Students like Jerome feel disconnected and alienated from reading. Stories and informational texts don’t affect their heads or their hearts.

In contrast, Ricardo enjoys reading fiction and nonfiction. An independent reading book is always on his desk. “If I have time, it’s [the book] there,” he tells me.  “I like to keep three or four books in my locker. If I finish one, it’s easy to get another [book].”

More than 1500 years ago, Aristotle, the famous Greek philosopher wrote: “Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.” His words help explain why some students love to read and others dislike and avoid it: Unless reading affects mind and heart, students are merely decoders, saying the words on a page. That’s. Not. Reading.

To support students’ independent reading, first, reflect on and evaluate your classroom culture and environment by asking yourself, Does my teaching show how much I value independent reading?

Create a Class Culture That Values Independent Reading

The class environment you create can encourage students, even those who struggle with reading, to enter the reading life. It’s important to have a rich classroom library with books on a wide range of reading levels and diverse topics that offers access to books for students. Display books on your desk, under the chalkboard, on windowsills and advertise books that will motivate students to browse and choose one. In addition, it’s important to:

• Reserve time each week to present a brief book talk on new arrivals and invite students to book talk their favorites.
• Set aside class time for students to self-select independent reading books and find a comfortable place to read for twenty to thirty minutes.
• Share books you’re enjoying and read aloud every day.
• Invite students to share their favorite books on a class blog and/or a school website.
• Have conversations with students about their books and encourage them to discuss their books with a peer partner. Try questions such as: Why did you choose this book? Explain how did the book make you feel? What about the book did you enjoy? What did you learn from this book? How did the book connect to your life?
• Invite the principal and other guests into your class to read aloud.

You’ll want to have books on a wide range of reading levels and topics so all students choose books they can read and understand—books that affect head and heart. In a class where the teacher values independent reading, students develop the motivation and engagement to read more and read widely.

Motivation and Engagement Matter

Motivation comes from within a student and is visible when you observe students choose to read for the pleasure the experience offers. Students past reading experiences affect their motivation to read. If they struggle with texts used at school or find reading tasks such as completing worksheets boring, their motivation or desire to read diminishes.

In contrast, students who are voracious readers have positive and joyful past experiences with reading. Their motivation to read is consistently high because they’re always engaged with the books they choose and the reading experiences teachers offer. Motivated and engaged readers choose to read self-selected books at school and at home.  A sixth grader put it this way: “if I’m into a book the only thing that can get my attention is if my pants are on fire.”

Assessment: The Elephant in the Room

Avoid grading independent reading. Grading dioramas and nightly summaries of completed pages will turn students away from reading. Instead, have students write the title and author of completed or abandoned books on a book log form and choose a book to discuss with their group every six weeks. Encourage students to present short book talks once each month.  In a class with twenty-eight students who present monthly book talks, students will be introduced to 280 books over ten months. Trust. Your. Students. To. Read.

Closing Thoughts

Instead of saving it for the end of class and frequently omitting it, start your class with fifteen to twenty minutes of independent reading. Encourage students to keep a self-selected book on their desks so they can read it when they complete a task early. Make sure the centerpiece of your homework is thirty minutes of reading each night. If you make time for independent reading at school and celebrate books, then a transformation from “I hate reading,” to “Can we have more time to read?” surely will occur.

Follow Laura on Twitter @LRobbTeacher

Check out Evan’s blog posts on ScholasticEDU!

Learn more about Laura’s ideas on reading- check out- Teaching Reading in Middle School

 

 

Timothy Rasinski, Ph.D.

 

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

 

What is Reading Fluency?

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

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

 

How Should We Teach Fluency?

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

 

How Does Reading Speed Fit into the Fluency Equation?

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

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

  

Fluency is More than Automaticity

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

References

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

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

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