Build a Culture of Reading

Reading is to the mind 

what exercise is to the body!

You can help build a culture of reading here at Everett! 

If you haven’t built independent reading into your classes yet, consider doing so, even just once a week. Require students to have a book on their desk so that when they’ve finished a task, they can open up the book instead of the phone. Read aloud - not just for academics, but for enjoyment. Talk up books you are reading or books you recommend. Don't forget to be a good reading role model - you may be the only adult your students see reading.

If you don’t have a little classroom library, I encourage you to start one: library book sales are a great place to stock up cheaply, and https://www.donorschoose.org/ is another great source of support. Search for Everett on Donors Choose and you’ll see some of your colleagues’ requests out there!

There is a lot of research on the benefits of free reading:

Vocabulary development: The major determinant of vocabulary growth from about 3rd grade on is free reading.

Background knowledge: Differences in background knowledge account for differences in text comprehension, especially for low- and middle-income children. However, reading helps students develop background knowledge.

Reading achievement: Amount of free reading is correlated with reading fluency and comprehension.

Success in school: Student success in school is correlated with the amount of independent reading they do.

Attitude and motivation: Students who do a substantial amount of voluntary reading demonstrate a positive attitude toward reading and school than students who do not.

You can read the first chapter of Building Student Literacy Through Sustained Silent Reading by Steve Gardiner for free.

You can read this article about the value of free reading from Language Arts, RealTeachers’ Classroom IndependentReading Practices by Sherry Sanden.

You can read the entire book Revisiting Silent Reading: New Directions for Teachers and Researchers by Elfrieda H. Hiebert & D. Ray Reutzel online for free.

Happy reading!

Plagiarism: Some Resources and, I hope, an Ongoing Conversation

“An act of plagiarism would seem to be easy to recognize based on simple criteria: Is the work the author’s own creation and written in the author’s own words? If not, does the writing provide appropriate credit to previous work? Increasingly though, the lines of what constitute plagiarism are blurring as the Internet reshapes culture and education.

The Web’s more interactive “Web 2.0” evolution has created an environment that encourages information sharing and values the remixing and remaking of original content. In this environment, plagiarism is easier to commit and originality more difficult to define.”

From a great resource you can find here:

"The Plagiarism Spectrum: Tagging 10 Types of Unoriginal Work"
Download the full report on this page to read the full study behind the resource.

And here is a good read for parents/guardians:

Skills and Strategies: Understanding Plagiarism in a Digital Age

By Lionel Anderson And Katherine Schulten

MCAS 2.0

Click here to access information about the "Next Generation MCAS" test this year!
Just grades 3-8

If students are given many opportunities to read and write without direct instruction or feedback, will that make them better or worse readers/writers?

This question most directly relates to how I teach my Sports Writing elective, a class that every year presents extreme classroom management challenges due to its appeal to, and high concentration of,  "reluctant readers and writers" (a bit of a euphemism on my part), as well as the perceived appeal it presents to guidance counselors looking for places to put "reluctant readers and writers."

Somewhere along the line, I got this theory of "miles on the page" in my head, referring to the idea that, simply put, the more students read and the more students write, the better they will get at reading and writing.

And in order to make as much room as possible for students to read and write, assuming the tough ones, at least, will do little to no reading and writing outside of class or school, I as the teacher needed to clear as much space as possible for them to do this.  This has resulted in a routine structure that includes little to no lectures or direct instruction, and in which, on one day, students do SSR reading from recent Sports Illustrated articles on topics they choose, for 20 minutes, followed by a generic set of reading response activities, and on another day, students write their own sports article, on a topic of their choosing, and are graded purely on their word count at the end of class. Rinse and repeat.

Easy to plan for me, and gets the students doing reading and writing as much as possible.  Under this system, Sports Writing students (some of whom are "extremely reluctant") have on average (I have data to support these numbers) spent 500 minutes reading high interest nonfiction and have written 5,000 words of expository writing.  That sounds really good to me.

I figure, there's no way a person could spend 500 minutes reading and not be a better reader, right?And there's no way a person could write 5,000 words and not be a better writer, right?

Then I listened to a bunch of interviews with athletes, Tom Brady most recently, but also a host of professional basketball players, who insist that if they are practicing something wrong, that if they have "bad form", that the more they keep doing it, they are actually getting worse, not better.  Which also makes total sense to me.

So does this analogy apply to reading and writing?  If a student writes 5,000 words poorly or without a lot of guidance and correction, is that better than writing significantly less (say, 1,000 words, but with a lot of teacher talk and rules and corrections and feedback and down time and chatter included that reduces their total "miles on the page"?

How much credence (I put a lot) do you put into that theory of "miles on the page"? Your thoughts?

Group Work

I had been struggling with figuring out the best way to make all students accountable for group work.   After yesterday's Write Boston session, I was able to collaborate with my group and get some fantastic ideas.  One idea that I loved was to include the daily process work on the rubric, which will contribute to the final project grade.  This would make sure that students are held accountable for both their group and individual participation on a daily basis.

I am going to crackdown on plagiarism after yesterday's PD

Dear English Department,

I had a good talk with my group yesterday at the Write Boston PD. I presented the problem of plagiarism to my group; I wonder sometimes if my students even know they are doing it.  My group advised me to maintain zero tolerance for copying and to do some explicit instructions on what constitutes plagiarism.  Those people are rockstars.

Writing Revision Rubric

I mentioned in some of your groups last night a Writing Revision Rubric that I developed to try to give credit for the revision process. I'm not 100% sure it does what I want it to, but you are welcome to try it out/adapt it/use it as a starting point. You can find it here.

Write Boston dilemmas

Dilemma: students should be engaged with interesting work as many days as possible--not busy work to keep them occupied--but keeping up with timely feedback and grading is a challenge.

Some solutions:

• Allow students to select works for grading after revising.
• In order to hold students accountable for all assignments, directly state "Some writing will be selected at random"--so students do not 'check out' on assignments. 
• Make daily classwork effort a 0/1 assessment grade.
• To expedite the grading process, print a mini rubric in the footnotes of assessments; check off boxes that fulfill criteria or address common problems of practice. 

Other interesting ideas:

• Model what good peer feedback looks/sounds like, using direct instruction and think-alouds.
• Students should have a separate assessment grade for final products vs. rough drafts--so lack of significant revisions counts against them. (Process Grade vs. Product Grade)
• Have students share Google docs with peers for feedback.
• Have tiered prompts for students to prompt differentiation. (For example: Is Macbeth a tragic hero? vs. Is Macbeth a sympathetic character?)
• To prevent plagiarism, give direct instruction on embedding quotes and paraphrasing.

Ideas for Revision (from WriteBoston)

As a follow-up to tonight's WriteBoston PD (Nov. 16):

The dilemma I shared with my colleagues was with the writing process, and the constant desire to get more out of revisions. Like all of us, I struggle with how to receive a draft, offer advice, and then have students revise their papers in a timely manner (and without having to grade 600 drafts). Often I just grade and say, “Do THIS better next time.” Thankfully I got some great advice through our Consultancy Protocol activities tonight. 

I think I’d definitely like to start utilizing Google Docs more in the peer revision process. I use it quite extensively to grade papers myself, but the idea of having students offer feedback TO each other – which I can then view – sounded pretty appealing. In addition, I like the idea of modeling peer revising (I’d always passed out a sheet and told them to just go at it!), then explicitly teaching to patterns. If I’m noticing that most of my students are struggling with intros, then I’m going to model a sample intro (likely a student from another class) and have students work in class to create or revise their own. I get worried about keeping pace with the curriculum, but the feedback I received tonight made it more likely that I’ll take a week or two-week chunk of time to address writing mid-unit. Who says I can't stop in the middle of "Julius Caesar" to work on those papers analyzing Brutus' funeral monologue? 

Overall, tonight was very valuable to me, and I think I’ll employ a few different strategies to help my students improve throughout the process. Thanks everyone!