Help Students Toward Reading Complex Texts Independently: No More Training Wheels!

Lately there is a ton of buzz around increasing students' capacities to read texts that are considered complex and challenging for their age groups. I'm observing this unfold in various spaces with a critical eye. How exactly do we help students be able to read more complex texts independently? Do we give them texts that are well above their reading levels and apply as much scaffolding as we need to get students through it? Or do we meet readers where they are with more accessible text selections first and build their independent reading skills?

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Educator Goals

Educator Goals
Click on the link above to see your colleagues' goals for the year. If you see a goal that you think you can help a colleague reach through your support or materials or consultation, please let them know that you can help! This is called Professional Collaboration, which is under the Professional Culture standard on the Educator Rubric. And it's good practice!

Literacy Skill: Annotation

I noticed that some of the baseline assessments had instructions that asked students to annotate the text. And yet, we also told them not to write on the test! Well, this is a contradiction, isn’t it? As good readers ourselves, we know that annotating a text is an important way to be active readers.

But do we give our students opportunities to annotate texts? One way to make annotation possible when students don’t have their own books is to give students photocopies of articles or short stories or poems or sections of texts that we want them to read closely.

And do we teach our students how to annotate? Check out these links for some great resources on teaching annotation skills! And please feel free to post in a comment below some great resources YOU may have on annotation skills that you would like to share!

Thinking Notes (video)
Purposeful Annotation: A “Close Reading” Strategy that Makes Sense to My Students (blog post)
I'll Have Mine Annotated, Please (article)
Beyond the Yellow Highlighter (article)
Teaching Student Annotation (lesson plan)
Back to School with Annotation: 10 Ways to Annotate with Students (online article)
Annotation Rubric (borrowed from apsaunders.wikispaces.com)

Try this experiment in the next week: Give your students in one class a text of any kind and ask them to annotate it. See what they do. Give your students in another class the same text and teach them a strategy for annotating the text and see what they do. Let me know how it goes!

Student Error in Writing

"[S]tudents write the way they do, not because they are slow or non-verbal, indifferent to or incapable of academic excellence, but because they are beginners and must, like all beginners, learn by making mistakes.  These they make aplenty for such a variety of reasons that the inexperienced teacher is almost certain to see nothing but a chaos of error when encounter[ing] their papers.  Yet a closer look will reveal very little that is random or “illogical” in what they have written.  And the keys to their development as writers often lie hidden in the very features of their writing that English teachers have been trained to brush aside with a marginal code letter or a scribbled injunction to “Proofread!”  Such strategies ram at the doors of their incompetence while the keys that would open them lie in view."

from Errors and Expectations by Mina Shaugnessy

Pursuing the Depths of Knowledge

Good teachers resist the idea of “teaching to the test.” But aligning literacy instruction with assessment isn’t teaching to the test if that assessment is a valid measure of our students’ performance. If the test is rigorous—if it demands deep levels of knowledge—then alignment means asking ourselves, “How can we plan for this rigor in our instruction?”
Boyles (2016) Pursuing the Depths of Knowledge

Some good resources

Articles Kaitlin Nardi is having her students read...
Why are Stories so important?
"Once the necessities for survival are taken care of, we humans spend more of our free time immersed in story than doing anything else. Stories about things that aren’t true and people that don’t exist, for the most part. Think about it. We watch movies and television; play video games; read books, comics and cartoons; listen to songs; look at art; see performances of plays, dance and operas; and tell each other stories around the dinner table or the campfire. And we have always done this, since we learned to communicate with one another and figured out how to scratch drawings on a cave wall."

Everybody Is a Story: Exploring the Role Story and Narrative Play in Real Life
"Life is a series of moments strung together over time. A scientist might call these moments a “cognitive event.” I call them stories. We compress thousands of stories/moments/events into a meta narrative that defines who we are. The most meaningful, memorable moments are packaged into self-contained stories that give shape to our personal story arc and mark plot points along life’s journey. We use these moments, these stories, as a way to understand and make sense of world around us. "

A resource to which I often refer teachers...
Bloom's Taxonomy of Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities