As educators, we all endeavor to inspire. We want to inspire our students, fellow teachers and if in a leadership position, those that follow us. But have you ever considered the definition of the word inspire, particularly the Latin translation of insperitae, “to breathe”? If we as educators are to inspire and encourage creativity in others, then it’s imperative we prioritize our white space to recharge.
So how do
you carve out time for whitespace as an educator?
5 Ways to
Take a Breath…
Reflection
Consider your daily routines so far this school year. When are you able to have a moment to
yourself without any obligations? Maybe
that’s the car ride to and from school or even those few moments before you start
your day. Choose a time that’s best for
you and commit to reflecting on the present.
This is not a time to mentally run through your ever-growing to-do list,
but rather reflect on what you’re grateful for or what inspires you each
day?
Planning
Just as we have to be intentional with embedding our standards in our lesson plans, we must be just as vigilant in planning white space. A full calendar doesn’t necessarily reflect productivity. Set aside time on your calendar to relax, daydream, and grab a cup of coffee with friends. If you’re worried about those menial tasks that consume precious chunks of your time, like cleaning your house or bathing the dog, consider outsourcing those tasks in order to free up time for yourself.
Family
As educators, many times our families take the back seat to
our students, school and community.
Early in my career, I had to live with the guilt of missing a few of my
boys’ milestones because I was teaching and/or leading. Set clear boundaries
between work and family and plan around those milestones even if it meant
taking time off to attend a field trip or sporting event.
Passions
I absolutely LOVE being an educator and accept the full responsibility of impacting children’s’ lives; however, teaching is not my only passion. I literally turn into Betty White in the Snickers commercial if I go too long without curling in my favorite chair to read or tucked away in my office to write. What is your passion? Better yet, how do you make time to engage in your passion? Through our passions, we can deepen our connection with students.
White Space
provides clarity allowing us to refocus on our purpose: to inspire and ignite
the fire of the next generation and hopefully modeling the importance of taking
a breath.
Marlena Gross-Taylor
is Chief Academic Officer for Douglas County School District in Castle Rock,
CO. She is also a consultant, founder of EduGladiators, and a blogger.
“All we do is read a few chapters and do worksheets. We never ask questions. No discussions. I hate worksheet packets and memorizing vocab for tests. I haven’t heard what my friends are reading. I want to talk about our questions. We never talk about anything much in class.”
Sorel, an eighth-grader, wrote these words in his notebook near the end of the first semester when his teacher, Ms. Walters, asked students: What changes would you like to see in reading? The responses of most students repeated thoughts similar to Sorel’s. To her credit, Ms. Walters heard and absorbed her students’ comments. She had noticed their lack of interest and recognized the need to change. To students’ credit, they were honest and their candid comments nudged Ms. Walters to ask for coaching and risk the challenges of change. At the end of October, Ms. Walters invited me to help her bring inquiry and student-led discussions of different books into her reading curriculum.
Reading and discussing professional materials, watching videos, and having frequent conversations about Ms. Walter’s myriad questions related to planning and observing lessons, supported change. Gradually, she moved from “my class” to “our class” by negotiating with students learning expectations and deadline dates as well as offering choices in independent reading. This short literacy snapshot illustrates the power of questions as a tool that can drive changes and foster a self-evaluative stance.
Why Pose Questions?
Readers and writers ask questions. Scientists and historians ask questions. Administrators and teachers ask questions. Posing questions is a way of understanding information, data, and experiences. In addition, raising questions supports learners as they dig deeper into a topic and text. With practice, wondering can also develop students meta-cognition—the ability to think about their learning, know what they understand, and identify areas that require additional practice
Too often in classes, questioning is actually recitation where the teacher prompts students for the “one right answer” to questions he or she asks. However, to develop independent readers and thinkers, to develop analytical and critical thinking skills, students need to be in the driver’s seat when it comes to asking and answering questions.
When quality, student-generated
questions define a class, meaningful learning takes place—learning that defines
reading, research, collaborative projects, literary discussions, and notebook
writing. As students wonder to learn, they begin to raise questions while
reading and generate questions to solve problems, to research a topic, to
conduct interviews, etc.
When Do Students Ask
Questions?
Opportunities
abound throughout the day for students to pose questions. Here are a few:
Mini-lessons: Invite students to jot questions they have while you present a mini-lesson and ask these when you’ve finished. Such questions clarify students’ understanding and help them absorb new ideas. In addition, students’ questions can offer you insights into what they do and don’t understand about a lesson. With this information, you can design interventions based on observed needs.
Teacher read alouds: Pause during your read aloud and invite students to pose questions about conflict, theme, or how events connect. Reserving a few minutes for students to share and discuss their questions shows them how much you value their thinking. You’ll also gather insights into ways students react and respond to the text; this information informs future think-alouds, mini-lessons, and interventions..
Setting goals: Help students understand that raising questions such as, Is there a strategy I should work on next? What do I have to do to reach this goal?” can improve their learning. Such questions can develop independence because they place students in charge of decision-making and developing a plan to reach a goal.
Self-evaluation: Questions can also drive students’ evaluation of their work over time. Ask them to review and pose questions about several notebook entries, their entire process for a piece of writing, several quizzes, and tests, or their participation in collaborative projects. Here’s a sampling of questions that students might ask: Did I improve? How do I know I made progress? Is there something I did that stands out? Why did I struggle? What did I do to cope with my struggles? Did I seek help from a peer or teacher if I couldn’t resolve the issue?
A result of self-evaluative
questions is the development of meta-cognition, the ability of students to
reflect on their written work, assessments, and collaborations. Often, the
result is that students accept the need for additional practice from their
teacher or a peer that can support their growth as learners, critical thinkers,
and problem solvers.
Questioning the Author: Isabel Beck’s and Margaret G. McKeown’s strategy, questioning the author, provides students with questions for fiction and nonfiction texts. The questions help students link words, phrases, and ideas to construct meaning from a passage they find challenging. To question the author, students might ask: Why did the author use that word or phrase? How does the word or phrase connect to the information in the sentence or to information that came before the sentence? How does the paragraph or section connect to the title? The theme or the main idea? The previous paragraph? I suggest you put these questions on index cards that students can access because the questions can develop independence in unpacking meaning from challenging passages. Inquiry-based learning: Before and during a unit of study, students generate questions that drive their reading, investigations, experiments, and discussions. Researchers like Jeffrey Wilhelm and Michael Smith, show that when student-generated questions steer the direction studies take, they are more engaged and motivated to learn. Inquiry fosters collaboration, understanding information, analyzing texts, and researching topics.
Students Write Discussion Questions: Teach students how to pose open-ended, interpretive questions and invite them to work as a team when reading an assigned or self-selected text. Open-ended questions have two or more answers. Verbs such as, why, how, evaluate, explain, compare/contrast can signal interpretive questions. Returning to a text to write open-ended questions deepens students’ knowledge of plot and information, but it also raises the level of discussions to critical thinking. In addition, discussing their own questions motivates and engages students in the reading and exchanging ideas.
The Teacher’s Role
Providing a model for students, one that shows them how to raise questions during diverse learning experiences is what teachers do. For most students, becoming a skilled questioner won’t happen quickly. However, turning the questioning process over to students gives them opportunities to practice and to make their studies more meaningful. Meaningful reflection by teachers and students-–reflection that considers improving questioning techniques and gathering feedback can create a learning environment that values students’ wonderings as a path to progress and independence in learning.
It’s a bright autumn morning in your elementary or middle school classroom, early in the year, so much ahead—nothing quite like those early days of promise. Literacy is first up for the day. You present a short mini-lesson (keep it snappy!) in reading and hustle the children off to read independently. You feel that it has taken too long this fall to get them all into the “right” books, but finally, you are ready to dig into real conferences.
You rush to confer with as many
students as possible. Just two today. You’re wondering about those three
“reading” in the corner. What were they really up to over there? And what about
your friend who has abandoned four books in two weeks? You meant to confer with
her today to figure out what is going on there. You ask the students to share
quickly with a partner as a sort of reflection. Pretty lame, you think. The
kids didn’t take it seriously.
Time for writing. You are determined not to forget writer’s workshop this year! Last year it seems that writing always took a back seat to reading or, when kids did write, it was all response to text. So, you roll out a carefully planned writing mini-lesson which, incidentally, is unrelated to the reading lesson. You tell the students that it’s time to apply what you’ve taught in their own writing. You try to make it sound like they’re standing on the precipice of greatness as writers. They look skeptical. Most stare at their writer’s notebooks. You dig in to confer with a student and there is so much work to be done in her writing. You’re overwhelmed. 15 minutes later, you look up and realize that the literacy block is nearly over. No time to reflect on writing today. Determined, you think, “Okay, I really will get that in tomorrow!”
You walk the students to lunch feeling
that the class didn’t accomplish nearly as much as they would have liked and
that time is too short to address standards requirements, much less lead
students to a sense of spirited inquiry. The next day, the process plays out
again in exactly the same way. Sound at all familiar? There has to be a better
way.
Rethinking Readers’/Writers’ Workshop
The Readers’/Writers’ Workshop
structure described above has been used for nearly four decades, yet as early
as 1983, Rob Tierney & David Pearson suggested another approach. In
“Toward a Composing Model of Reading” (1983), they argue that
“one must begin to view reading and writing as essentially similar processes
of meaning construction.” They question the wisdom of teaching reading and
writing as separate processes and suggest that we view reading as a process of
composing, much as we think of writing, and that whenever possible we integrate
reading and writing instruction. In most classrooms, their call has gone
unheeded.
In today’s literacy world, packaged
programs proliferate and nearly always lead teachers down paths to separate instruction
in reading and writing. Isolated reading and writing and teacher- or
program-driven learning targets are the norm; students rarely set their own
goals and are lucky if they have choice in what to read and write, let alone when to read and write. Too often,
students experience diminished engagement and teachers know that this is hardly
the way to provoke inquiry, engagement, or agency.
I’d like to offer a proposal (get it?)
in which reading and writing get married. (And live happily ever after.) Following a lovely ceremony, they adopt the
name Literacy Studio!
In a Literacy Studio:
Most reading and writing instruction is integrated.
If a reading learning target relates to, say, character traits and how they affect the plot, there is one whole group lesson (called a Crafting session) that incorporates reading and writing each day that the class is focused on that objective. The teacher models in mentor texts and writing, cutting in half the instruction time and offering it in a more efficient and integrated way.
Students choose whether they will read or write following the Crafting Session.
During independent work time (called composing) students may choose to apply their understanding of character traits in reading and/or writing.
Some may write during the first half of composing time and switch to reading for the second half or vice versa.
Some may choose to read (or write) for the entire composing time but will choose the other for the next day’s work.
Students keep simple records to show whether they chose to read and/or write during a particular composing time ensuring that all spend a roughly equal independent work time on each during a given week.
Whether they are reading or writing, they are focused on the class learning goal, in this example, character traits.
Teachers confer and convene small groups.
During composing time, teachers have an extended opportunity to confer and meet with small groups. They have planned one lesson, there is one independent work time and one reflection. There is time to get to those kids in the corner, figure out why our friend isn’t sticking with a book and meet with a small group of students who aren’t yet applying, for example, what they know about character traits in their writing.
Small groups (called invitational groups) are needs-based and may include children reading and writing at a wide range of present performance level as long as they have a need in common.
At the end of composing, students reflect.
In small groups, pairs or with the whole class, the students discuss how they focused on the learning target as readers and writers, sharing their insights with each other so that when, for example, a reader switches to writing the next day, he will have his classmates’ stories of writing to develop characters to propel him forward.
Let’s marry reading and writing this
year!
When reading and writing get married,
there is:
One Crafting Session a day
focused on reading and writing!
One longer Composing Time for
independent work and time to confer each day with readers and writers! An
Invitational Group as needed!
One Reflection Session a day
that focuses on reading and writing!
Learning reading and writing together
makes sense to kids. Students develop perspectives as readers and writers
simultaneously leading to a dramatic increase in the quality of their thinking
and work in both.
And, teaching reading and writing together makes sense for us. We gain enormous efficiency and time to focus on individual students, but most importantly, we can help kids understand the critical synergy between reading and writing—that’s a gift that will serve them for years.
Ellin Oliver Keene
September 2019
Ellin Oliver Keene has been a classroom teacher, staff
developer, non-profit director and adjunct professor of reading and
writing. She directed staff development initiatives at the Denver-based
Public Education & Business Coalition and served as Deputy Director and
Director of Literacy and Staff Development for the Cornerstone Project at the
University of Pennsylvania. She serves as senior advisor at Heinemann,
overseeing the Heinemann Fellows initiative and is the editor of the Heinemann
Catalogue/Journal.
Ellin consults with schools and districts throughout the country
and abroad. Her emphasis is long-term,
school-based professional development and strategic planning for literacy
learning.
Ellin is author of Engaging
Children: Igniting the Drive for Deeper Learning (2018), is co-editor and
co-author of The Teacher You Want to Be:
Essays about Children, Learning, and Teaching (Heinemann, 2015); co-editor of the Not This, but That series (Heinemann, 2013 – 2017); author of Talk About Understanding: Rethinking
Classroom Talk to Enhance Understanding (Heinemann, 2012), To Understand: New Horizons in Reading
Comprehension (Heinemann, 2008), co-author of Comprehension Going Forward (Heinemann, 2011), Mosaic of Thought: The Power of Comprehension Strategy Instruction, 2nd
edition (Heinemann, 2007, 1st edition, 1997), and author of Assessing Comprehension Thinking Strategies (Shell
Educational Books, 2006).
Breathe in, Hold for 10, and Try These 5 Techniques that Ensure Students Do the Talking
by
Laura Robb
We all know the statistics and, well, we talk right over them! Teachers do far too much talking in the course of the day, and students do far too little. I don’t say that to teacher-bash, but rather as a way to invite you to hit the pause button on over-explaining and over guiding, and try these techniques that lead to student-driven, amazing discussions about the content you teach.
Model the mindsets. You gotta be all-in! Fully commit to the goal of your students controlling the learning conversations. Talk about and co-construct charts of the characteristics of productive dialogue. The key characteristic? Active listening, which means students concentrate on what the speaker is saying and push aside distracting thoughts. Active listeners learn to respect theories and conclusions that differ from theirs—as long as the text provides adequate support for the assertions.
Remember, old habits die hard. Raising hands doesn’t cut it during student-led conversations, so you’ll have to wean students off of that tradition. Instead, students talk, one at a time, while peers listen and process ideas. Once a student finishes, a peer jumps into the conversation. Tempted to rescue the conversation? Hold your breath, count to 10, trust your students. With practice in whole group, small group, and partner discussions, your students will thrive in a month or two.
Equip students with question types. Model what it means to arrive at a guiding question, and then coach students to develop their own. Guiding questions are those that can go broad and go deep, and align with students’ authentic curiosities about an issue. For example, fourth-graders were investigating self-selected books on natural disasters. Students agreed on this guiding question: How do natural disasters affect people’s lives? Even though each student read a different book, the guiding question was broad enough to stimulate rich conversations. Interpretive questions are also open-ended and have more than one answer. Have students consider verbs that will help them pose interpretive questions: analyze, examine, compare and contrast, evaluate, show, classify, I hand out lists of prompts to keep the discussion flowing to each student, so they have this concrete support at first.
Find your new niche. During discussions, especially as students are just getting the hang of purposeful dialogue, listen from the sidelines and every once in a while, and only when absolutely necessary, pose a clarifying question—one that nudges students to get back on course or go deeper in some way. For example, maybe the question gets a student to say more, define a term, go back to the text, or think about whether he or she still believes his position. Author Renee Houser reminds us that a lot of this nudging can be done without our even talking! Think about non-verbal gestures and facial expressions that might work.
Be a listener. One of the many benefits of student-led discussions is that they allow you to listen and look at your students in new ways. Ask such questions as: Who is doing most of the talking? Which kids are obsessed with the same authors or topics? Who is particularly adept at active listening or posing questions? Which students have natural rapport? Who might I pair that may be in different groups of friends, but I now see will be great talk partners?
Give Yourself the
Gift of Time
Changing to student-led discussions won’t happen
overnight! There’ll be bumps and roadblocks along the way. That’s a natural
result of taking risks and putting students in the discussion driver’s
seat! It’s comforting to make the
changeover with a colleague so you can chat, support one another, observe each
other’s classes and move steadily forward. Be daring. Start today.
