When They Tell You They've Never Learned It, They're Wrong!

Today, three TMS ELA teachers and I visited two elementary schools to see reading and writing in action.  Our goal was to identify where students are coming from and build a better understanding of how to implement workshop models of literacy at the middle level.

However, probably one noteworthy "ah-ha" we was that 4th and 5th graders have anywhere from 110 - 150 minutes of literacy instruction per day.  Then, students come to 6th grade and have 50 minutes of literacy instruction in ELA classes.  That's a huge difference and the reason we stress literacy across the content areas so thoroughly.

Adding literacy instruction to all classes isn't about helping ELA teachers, it's about helping students sustain and develop literacy over time.  The pictures below come with tips that all content-area teachers can use to provide instruction to students.

In the pictures above, teachers are providing guided reading instruction with students.  In each reading group, the focus is non-fiction skills.  Some groups are reading social studies texts (during social studies instructional time) and some are reading science texts.  Teachers are reviewing text features and comprehension with summary and sequencing strategies. This is something that all content-area teachers could do. When students read in your classroom, pull a small group to provide some direct instruction and build their content-area comprehension.  

Here is one of the strategies teachers used with non-fiction comprehension.

Conferencing with students can come in many forms, sometimes it's one-on-one as the charts above show through documentation of student progress over time.  Sometimes, it's in small groups to enhance a specific skill.  The pictures below shows a student briefly conferencing with a teacher demonstrating their self-monitoring skills. The book being read is an independent choice novel, but the student has to apply their skills to this book.

Setting up the classroom to reinforce reading skills provides students with ongoing tools and reminders for thinking while reading.  What makes these even more powerful is that students help to design this "classroom art."

Holding students accountable for independent reading can be a real challenge.  Elementary uses a couple of tools to reinforce reading at home and school.  Below is a picture of a variety of assessments students can chose from to articulate their understanding of reading.  Additionally, students contribute to questions asked on Edmodo to increase reading accountability.  I've seen us similarly use Socrative to gauge student reading completion and comprehension.

And, below is a little math (just to see if you're paying attention ;)).  What I think is noteworthy about the picture on the left is how students used non-linguistic representation to show their understanding of mean, median and mode.  The picture on the right shows student articulation of their learning.

Writing has been a huge focus in elementary this year.  "Just wait until these kids come to you," one teacher noted as she explained the increased rigor and quality of writing instruction.

See how students are directed to work on writing (above left picture) as the student in the yellow (above right picture) uses an anchor chart to free write how she loves cake.  She's including a thesis statement and reasons for her preference.  While some students independently write, the teacher works with individual students to apply their writing skills.

The two pictures above show students evaluating good writing and deciding what techniques they want to use in their own writing.

And, grammar instruction does happen in elementary school!  When kids act like they don't know the parts of speech or fail to apply the mechanical rules of writing, they are fooling us (or more likely, they've forgotten and need just a little reminder).  In the above right picture, students mastered nouns, verbs and adjectives, but adverbs is intentionally missing as that still requires remediation.

Merging reading and writing really helps students to generalize skills and content.  In the below pictures, students have color-marked their non-fiction text and worked in small groups to identify the main idea of each paragraph. Students are then taking these summaries to make a "Write it strong, write it long" paragraph.

Doesn't the below organizer look familiar?  We do SWBSA (or Then) too...again, it's a way to combine reading and writing.

Elementary teachers use anchor charts to help students remember the routines of the classroom; these charts are designed with the help of students and provide reinforcement of classroom expectations.  You'll notice that the skills of inferring and writing thesis sentences are taught in elementary as well middle school.  In the picture on the far right, notice that students have a clear expectation of their role and the teacher's role when independently reading.  

Finally, when students act like all of this is a foreign (or should I say, modern?) language, remind them of what they learned in 4th and 5th grade; the below pictures show their understanding of plot diagrams, author's purpose, and figurative language such as similes and metaphors.

Knowing that students have exposure to these rigorous concepts in elementary school provides us with fuel to increase our expectations for kids.  By providing mini-lessons to review content, we can more quickly get to the rich learning tools of reading and writing where students have to apply skills in order to develop understanding of any, and all, contents.

Sorry Madonna...We Live in a Visual, Not Material, World

Look at your phone, look at your windows screen on your computer, look at your tablet...what do they all have in common?  Visual clues to know what's what.  Apps are visual for a reason -- visual supports are a tool for everyone.

Here are some great examples of how we are using visual cues in our school...

Flyertime posters remind students of our purpose and provide a visual clue on our reflection.

Identifying objectives for learning helps students know the direction we are going and the purpose for learning.

Visual cues, like this timer, remind kids of their expectations.

And lastly, what about students making their own visual?  Check out this link of a student-designed app in Digital Literacy.  http://myapp.is/TrumanMiddleSchoolProject  You can actually use it!

Switch Up!

Getting kids to think critically requires that we give them diverse thinking experiences. In one teacher's RAP lesson, she switched it up for kids by making them read the answer in order to determine the question.  Literally, the kids have to understand RAP strategy backwards and forwards.  The below picture shows how students had to comprehend the answer before deciding, "What's the question?"

As a follow-up, students can evaluate the quality of the answer. 

We do Literacy "Write" with Dialogue and RAP

Literacy across the content areas is one of the keys to future success for our students and our schools.  Check out these great examples of literacy, especially dialogue, in various content areas...

Literacy includes debate, specifically dialogue that requires kids to practice speaking and listening.  In this social studies class, students are writing and debating the pros and cons to a caste system.

RAPing it Write:  these students are predicting which parts of the RAP continuum are scored as 1, 2, 3, and 4.  The beauty of this exercise is that students are delving deeply into their writing expectations.

Using the RAP continuum, this teacher has students reflect on their individual progress.

Literacy in Geometry:  These students work collaboratively, communicating with one another about how to solve problems.  The dialogue here is rich and results in greater mathematical understanding.

These Pilots are incorporating great dialogue strategies as well.  In their digital citizenship lesson, they broke students into groups to require increased participation and engagement through discussion.

7th Grade - the Transition Year

We often think of 7th grade as the lost year of middle school, that peak in awkward adolescence that causes us all to cringe.  However, the learning that happens in 7th grade is far from awkward.  See these great examples of rigor and relevance in 7th grade!

Above, students are evaluating writing samples and identifying their purpose; it's a great matching exercise.

Check out these great classroom arrangements.  By having student's grouped in these ways, the expectation of collaboration is emphasized and teachers have much more space to navigate the classroom and conference with students.

Marzano strategies still work -- here students identify similarities and differences to find the matching substance.

Writer's workshop:  students work to improve their memoirs, conferencing with their teacher to expand their writing skills.

Students must learn to evaluate and debate their learning.  In the above pictures, students see five different student summaries about a science concept.  Students choose one of the "arguments" they think is most accurate and prove it through their own connections.  Students group themselves with other "like-minded" students to compile their thoughts and arguments with the rest of the class.

What's Up at Other Schools?

Let's face it, we do things really well here at TMS!  And, we should recognize and celebrate those successes.  But, we also must be continually learning, pushing ourselves to try new things and see how we can be more effective, and even, more efficient.

Below are some things I saw when I visited some local middle and high schools this week.  I'm not sure what I want to do with this new knowledge yet, but there are definitely good ideas worth sharing.

At Parkway West High School, their data wall identifies all students who are at-risk.  The students are then color-coded to identify who they are at risk and interventions are discussed to support those students.

Parkway West no longer has CT classes; instead, each grade level has an Academic Support Lab for each content.  Strong collaboration between special and general education teachers ensures that students are getting their goals met while balancing the work in their core content classes.  The picture above shows the communication that makes this successful.

Objectives are clear for students; not just for this lesson, but for year.

Crestview Middle School has been doing the Leader in Me program for a year now.  This is the program that our feeder elementary schools now use; it teaches kids Covey's 7 habits of highly effective people.

The pictures above show some of the habits ingrained in students at Crestview.  Students apply for school and classroom jobs.  One classroom job is to be the Culture Keeper.  If students are misbehaving in class, this assigned leader gives them reminder and reflection cards (picture 1).  Other jobs include students having responsibilities in the library; the librarian charts student work progress (picture 3).  Additionally, teachers reinforce goal-setting with project goals (picture 2).

I also saw a mock Teen Court at Hardin Middle School.  At this school, students give consequences to peers who make poor choices at school -- very innovative!