Author: CCIRAblog

By Georgia Heard, CCIRA 2021 Featured Speaker

A good friend emailed me recently about joining my online poetry writing workshop. He said, “I need to be part of something, Georgia. I feel so disconnected and invisible.” My friend was brave enough to express what many of us have been feeling during the past several months. The need to be part of something. The need to connect with people in community. The need to feel like more than a small image on a Zoom meeting screen. Many of the children who look out from their separate thumbnail screens in virtual classrooms have been feeling this way too — disconnected and invisible — despite all the positive ways teachers are working to help students feel engaged and part of a community.

Those of us who teach writing and reading, and also love poetry, know that poetry has always been an antidote for feeling separate and unseen. Poetry can connect us. Poetry can shake the dust off of the stale and the stereotyped. Poetry can inspire empathy for others. Poetry can inspire change. Poetry can beckon us to look in the mirror and see the truth inside.

Elizabeth Alexander wrote: 

Do you want to know each other? [Poetry reaches]…across what can be a huge void between human beings.

That void has grown more cavernous since the beginning of the pandemic. 

In the past decade, the prominence of high-stakes, high-stress testing has swept poetry further into the corner of the classroom. But since the start of the pandemic, the emergence of “soft skills” such as building empathy, “social and emotional learning,”  and “trauma informed teaching” have emerged as essential for educating the whole child. Why did it take a pandemic for us to realize that without attending to children’s hearts and humanity  — education can be a dehumanizing experience for some children as we pour more and more content into a vessel called learning? 

Joy Harjo the current United States poet laureate says, “Poetry tends to hang out at points of transformation.”

At some point in our lives, whether curled up quietly on a couch, or gathered with friends and family at a wedding, or attending a funeral most of us have had the experience of reading or listening to a poem that touches our being, takes our breathe away, brings tears to our eyes, and affects us in some way that’s deep and, almost, inexplicable. How does a poem do this? 

When we read a poem that stirs us it is a convergence of words humming the same tune as our hearts. The poem whispers I know you. It recognizes us. And in this recognition we also recognize something forgotten in ourselves. Our circle gets wider and connects us to others whom we have never met. It awakens something that may have been frozen inside us. It helps us remember the sky we were born under as Joy Harjo writes in her poem “Remember.”

Poetry is not something you find only in April. Poetry is not a phonics’ worksheet exercise where children circle the double ee and long o sounds. Like a wild horse, poetry resists being corralled in reading test questions: What does the speaker doubt in lines 14-15? 

Poetry is what is present in the voices of people to whom it would hardly occur that this could be so. The way all speak in unselfconscious moments is the very stuff of poetry. The way we speak to our loved ones every day and night: when you tuck your children into bed; the first things you say to your spouse or partner when you wake up in the morning. When we speak in a voice that’s exclusively ours, that’s natural, when we’re not trying to be anything other than ourselves, that’s the stuff of poetry.

In a virtual poetry workshop, right after schools closed in April, fifth grade poets looked around their worlds with poet’s eyes to try to find poetry. Seeing the world with poet’s eyes is more than just trying to find a topic for a haiku or another kind of poem — it’s about polishing the film of familiarity and approaching life with a wide-awakeness, as Maxine Greene says.

“I use the term wide-awakeness,” Greene states. “Without the ability to think about yourself, to reflect on your life, there’s really no awareness, no consciousness. Consciousness doesn’t come automatically; it comes through being alive, awake, curious, and often furious.”

Poetry shimmered all around fifth graders’ worlds. They found poetry in:

Things that sing a deeper history

Doorknobs are like poems. They’ve been touched by so many hands.

Puzzles because there are so many different ways that things connected

but you don’t know until you look at the picture.

The moon

Laughter

Sadness

After they lived and wrote poetry for three weeks, I asked students if they had any advice for other poets who were embarking on a poetry journey. Here are a few words of wisdom:

My advice to other poets would be that everything holds poetry. You just have to take the time to realize it. You should write from your heart and think about the reason for your poem, and the meaning it has to you.

Poetry helped me during this hard time as it helped me stay calm, and jot down feelings. I wholeheartedly recommend this for anyone feeling stressed. My piece of advice to anyone would be to NOT RUSH A POEM. Let the words come from your heart, not from your hand.

Wise words indeed!

If you’re wondering how to begin with poetry one doorway is to find a poem you love, or have loved through the years. An aha poem.  Invite your students to do the same – to find a self-portrait poem, an identity poem, a poem that speaks to how you’re feeling. Carry it around in your pocket, in your head, in your heart as you go about your day. Paste it on your computer screen so when you need a break your poem can refresh you. Place it by your nightstand and let it be the last thing you read before you sleep. Reflect on it, and write alongside it as Teshager, a student of mine, did with Langston Hughes’ poem “Final Curve:”

When you turn the corner

And you run into yourself

Then you know that you have turned

All the corners that are left

 “Final Curve” awakened this realization, this truth, in Tesagher :

You too might find that poetry is an antidote for feeling disconnected and invisible during this challenging and sad time. A scientific vaccine for COVID-19 will come, hopefully, soon but poetry can offer a different kind of cure — as the last line of Julia Alvarez’s poem “How Will This Pandemic Affect Poetry” asks, What if this poem is the vaccine already working inside you?

Georgia Heard is a founding member of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project in New York City. She received her MFA in Poetry from Columbia University.  Currently, she is a frequent keynote speaker at conferences and in schools around the United States and the world. 

She is the author of numerous books on writing including: Awakening the Heart: Exploring Poetry in Elementary and Middle School which was cited by Instructor Magazine as one of the “10 Books Every Teacher Should Read,” Finding the Heart of Nonfiction: Teaching 7 Essential Craft Tools with Mentor Texts, Heart Maps: Helping Students Create and Craft Authentic Student Writing and Poetry Every Day (forthcoming). In addition, she has published several children’s poetry books including Boom! Bellow! Bleat! Animal Sounds for Two Or More Voices and My Thoughts Are Clouds: Poems for Mindfulness (forthcoming).website: www.georgiaheard.com   Follow her on Twitter:@georgiaheard1

By Matt Glover

Last week, a teacher emailed me this quote from her child after one of his first days of school.  That night at the dinner table her son Barney said:

“Mr. Harry made me LOVE writing today by just saying ONE WORD. He said we could write ANYTHING!!!”

So much is implied in the word anything.  It’s ripe with possibilities for writing about any topic, in any genre that is meaningful to a child.  Fortunately for Barney, his teacher wanted to capitalize on the power of anything to increase engagement.  And judging by Barney’s reaction, it worked.

For years I have been advocating that teachers start the year with a writing unit of study that allows for choice of genre.  In fact, I believe students at any grade should have several opportunities within a year to experience some units that allow for choice of genre, in addition to plenty of genre studies.  However, I believe choice of genre is particularly important during the first unit when teachers want to maximize student engagement.  If there has ever been a year when we need to think about increasing engagement, it’s this year.

I realize that having units that allow for choice of genre runs counter to the prevailing practice in many schools today.  I work in a wide range of schools across the United States and internationally, and increasingly I’m in schools where students never have the opportunity to choose their genre.  There are many schools where every unit of study in writing workshop, from the first day of kindergarten to the last day of eighth grade is a genre study. This is tremendously problematic, especially in terms of the impact on student engagement.

Let me be careful. This isn’t an anti-genre stance.  I love genre studies.  I spend significant amounts of time finding stacks of mentor texts for specific genres, and I have a wide variety of genres to study. But I also care about student engagement, which means I have to think about the role of choice of genre.  Since engagement is especially important at the start of the year, I would not begin the year with a genre study.

If as educators we care about engagement, then we have to consider the role of choice. Choice and engagement are inseparable.  In any activity, choice influences what we do, how we do it, and our disposition towards the activity. Learners in any area will be more engaged when they have ownership and control over their learning.  In writing, choice manifests itself in many ways, including choice of both topic and genre.

I’ve written at length about the specific benefits of students’ choosing their genre, but I want to zero in on a few of the reasons that impact the beginning of the year. Regardless of whether you are teaching in person, online, or in a blended environment, engagement is more important now than ever.  If your students are learning virtually, they need to be engaged in order to write a lot, which is crucial in becoming a better writer.  If you’re teaching face to face, you may be online at some point and we want to maximize engagement now so it will carry over into an online setting.

Maximizing engagement right from the start should be enough of a reason to begin the year with a unit that allows for choice of genre.  Here are a few that particularly influence the beginning of the year.

Understanding our students as writers

At the beginning of the year we want to understand our children as writers. I want to know what their favorite genres are, as well as their favorite topics.  I want to know who’s the fantasy writer, the comic writer, the how-to writer.  I want to be able to ask the question, “What genre have you chosen, and why?”  That’s an incredibly revealing question and I can only ask it if the child has choice of genre.

Understanding all our students can do as writers

In addition to understanding children as writers, I want to see their best writing so I have an accurate understanding of their strengths.  If I choose to start with a genre, whichever genre I choose will decrease engagement for someone in the class, and decreased engagement will make it difficult for them to show me all of their strengths.

Accelerating Learning

Students will learn more when we study something in depth.  Having choice of genre for a few days before we start a genre study won’t be enough. Instead, by going deep into topics (units) such as revision, peer conferring, illustration, or reading like a writer, we can accelerate student learning and provide them with crucial skills and understandings they can employ in every unit throughout the year.

Now that we are going to start the year with choice of genre, we need to think about the possibilities for units.  A unit of study is simply a collection of days of teaching writing that work towards significant goals. There are at least three types of units we could include in our year.  We could have:

• Genre Studies- Studying a specific genre of writing
• Process Studies- Studying an aspect of how authors create pieces of writing
• Craft Studies- Studying specific techniques authors use to craft effective pieces of writing

Students can meet the goals of a craft study or process study by writing in any genre they choose, thus increasing engagement in writing in any environment.  In craft and process studies, the learning is dependent on students writing in a particular genre.

When working with teachers, I have a list of over twenty craft studies or process studies we consider.  I wouldn’t rule out any of the them for the first unit of the year, and I know grade level teams that have used all of them as their first unit. But, some of them occur more frequently as the first unit. Some of the most common craft studies and process studies used to start the year are:

• Launching Writing Workshop– This process study focuses on helping students become self-directed, independent, and productive in writing workshop each day. The focus is often on the routines and procedures students need to start the year, especially if they are new to writing workshop.
• Launching the Use of a Writer’s Notebook– The key to this process study is that students are using a notebook as a tool to help them produce pieces of writing. Students are learning to use this important tool they will continue to use throughout the year.
• Finding and Developing Independent Writing Projects– When I tell 3^rd to 6^th graders that they can go write anything they want, I am sometimes met with, “What do I have to write about?” Or, “Which genre are we supposed to write?” Those questions indicate that students don’t know how to create independent writing projects, often because they have been consistently directed what to write for years.  A process study on finding and developing independent writing projects teaches students how to choose topics and genres, plan and revise their writing, and how to start new projects.
• Reading Like a Writer– This process study nurtures students’ habit of mind of noticing what published authors do to craft texts well and then try those techniques out in their own writing. This important process skill is one they will need in every genre or craft study throughout the year.
• Author Study– Early in the year we want to support students in creating and maintaining a strong identity as a writer. An author study is a craft study that helps students realize that they can use the same techniques that published authors use.
• Genre Overview– An interesting question to ask your students is, “What genre have you chosen?” Many students don’t answer that question well simply because they haven’t heard it. This craft study helps students answer that question by supporting them in better understanding the concept of genre, as well as being more intentional and articulate about the genres they choose.
• How Authors Find Ideas– If your students consistently say they don’t know what to write about, this process study will provide them with strategies they can use to find meaningful topics throughout they year.

Again, in each of these units, students can meet rigorous unit goals by writing in any genre they find meaningful and energizing.

There are other units that often occur later in the year, but they could provide a significant benefit early in the year.  For example, a unit on Revision sets students up to have a positive disposition toward revising throughout the year. Throughout the unit, students create pieces of writing and try out the revision techniques they are studying.  This deep dive into a process that they are applying to personally meaningful genres and topics impacts their ability to revise in every unit that follows.

In whichever way we start the year, we have to consider how our actions align with our beliefs.  If we believe that engagement is crucial in helping students become better writers, then we would have to consider the role of choice of genre.  Writing anything will allow our students to write with energy in the first unit, and all the units to come

Matt Glover has been an educator for over 30 years, including the last 10 as an educational consultant. He is the author of numerous professional books for teachers, including Craft and Process Studies: Units of Study that Provide Students with Choice of Genre.  Matt can be contacted at mattglover@me.com.

By Carol Jago

With Covid19 has come upheaval. So much anxiety. So many uncertainties. On many days I feel as though I am in a state of suspended animation. Although I usually read at least one book a week, I recently found myself unable to focus, giving up on a book that I had hardly begun. My eyes might be on the page, but my mind was elsewhere.

That is not to say I wasn’t reading.

I spent hours on Twitter following links to breaking news. I read compulsively, but none of that reading was nourishing me. Upon reflection, I think that I was starved for story ­­– stories that had a clear beginning and end and were internally consistent. Stories that could help me make sense of the news. Stories that could serve to sustain me through these difficult days.

I kept wondering if the same thing was happening to students — not only those who had limited access to or appetite for books but also the most avid young readers. Was it possible that the pandemic was interfering with our capacity for reading? Was the constant bombardment of “Breaking News” getting in the way of sustained attention? In Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in the Digital World, Maryanne Wolf warns that we are all getting into the habit of skimming rather than reading texts closely.

“The possibility that critical analysis, empathy and other deep reading processes could become the unintended “collateral damage” of our digital culture is not a simple binary issue about print vs digital reading. It is about how we all have begun to read on any medium and how that changes not only what we read, but also the purposes for why we read. Nor is it only about the young. The subtle atrophy of critical analysis and empathy affects us all. It affects our ability to navigate a constant bombardment of information. It incentivizes a retreat to the most familiar silos of unchecked information, which require and receive no analysis, leaving us susceptible to false information and demagoguery.” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/25/skim-reading-new-normal-maryanne-wolf

Although I found it difficult to settle down to a book, I didn’t stop buying them. (Habits die hard.) Two of those purchases, one an adult novel by Elizabeth Wetmore called Valentine, and the other middle-grade historical fiction by Ann Clare LeZotte called Show Me a Sign provided me with an onramp to finding my way back to books.

Valentine is the story of how five women survive the rape of a Mexican teenager in the midst of a 1970s boom in the oil fields of West Texas. As in the much-loved Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, the sunbaked setting echoes the characters’ inner landscapes. As in Miriam Toew’s Women Talking, these women struggle together to make their way in a brutally male world. I could not put this story down. When in-person book clubs resume, Valentine would be the ideal choice for your first meeting.

Set in a Deaf community on Martha’s Vineyard in 1805, Show Me a Sign is narrated by 11-year-old Mary Lambert, deaf from birth and living in a community where everyone can sign. In her author’s note, Ann Clare LeZotte, who is herself deaf, explains, “Throughout the story, I tried to highlight the differences between sign language and spoken language. I hope to convey the intimacy, complexity, and expressiveness of sign language.” Like Laurie Halse Anderson’s Seeds of Change trilogy, Mary’s story offers a particular window into post-Revolutionary War years. The island community’s prejudice against the Wampanoag reflects the mainlanders’ view of the deaf as lesser beings. As Mendelian genetics was unknown at the time, hereditary deafness in isolated communities was a puzzlement. I predict that Show Me a Sign will be a serious Newbery Medal contender.

At a time when travel is a risky undertaking, books offer safe transportation. At a moment when loneliness visits daily, reading provides fresh company. In a period when troubles are manifest, stories help us prevail.

Carol Jago has taught middle and high school for 32 years and is associate director of the California Reading and Literature Project at UCLA. She is past president of the National Council of Teachers of English and author The Book in Question: Why and How Reading Is in Crises (Heinemann 2019).

By Dan Ryder, CCIRA 2021 Featured Speaker

The stress is real. 

Whether we teach kindergarten in pK-3 Reggio Emilia- inspired elementary schools or run library cum makerspaces for young adults in expeditionary learning programs, we are feeling the strain. We are balancing the needs of our students against the expectations of our curricula while responding to the concerns of our communities and challenges of the moment. And if those two sentences weren’t word soaked enough to overwhelm the most verbiage-resilient amongst us, add the terms “hybrid instruction” and “fluid public health conditions” and grab hold of something sturdy.  

And yet, I am hopeful that we may yet manage and — dare I dream — thrive in the rapid response remote learning environments into which we’ve been thrust.  As my good friend and stalwart Pacific Northwest educator, Darren Hudgins points out, Spring 2020 was not a time of distance education.  It was a time of emergency teaching.  How might we reframe the start of a new school year as a place of possibility and potential rather than pessimism and peril?

Because education loves a good acronym and who doesn’t adore a retro-futurism mnemonic, I’ve worked up a 3-D frame through which to look at remote learning instructional design.  It doesn’t require any special glasses or goggles.  (However, lesson planning at the drive-in can be a wonderful way to support local theater owners.)  The goal here isn’t to break new ground but instead to find a more peaceful pathway to planning quality instruction and deeper learning.  And if the alliteration hasn’t driven you from this blog yet, consider how this distill, design, and document framework might benefit you as well as your students and other stakeholders.  

Distill

What really matters? 

When face-to-face instruction went on hiatus during the spring of 2020, many educators started their planning by looking at their typical spring plans and attempted to retrofit the activities and lessons to remote learning conditions.  Other folx dropped familiarity entirely in favor of creating all-new assessments and extended learning opportunities aligned to their students’ current realities.  Both approaches met with success and struggle, with the latter tending to focus on the meaningful now and the former holding tight to the meaningful always.  

What if we just pause for a moment, examine our curricula, survey our students’ world, and ask, “What really matters?”  What if we were able to take our scopes and sequences and simplify them in the service of ensuring screen time is purpose-driven time? What if we were able to prioritize the habits of work valued highest in our communities and the social emotional learning outcomes students’ families need help with most?  And then asking that first question again, “Okay, what really matters?” 

For example, we might throw our hands up and say, “Well, we have to throw away the drama unit.  We can’t get all of the kids together online at the same time and even if we do half of their connections are lousy and I just want to eat cake.”  For the record, there’s nothing wrong with cake.  (Though I’ve learned recently that hugs last longer than cake.) 

Instead we might ask, “What are the skills and understandings students takeaway from the drama unit?”   Memorization.  Tone and inflection.   Relationship between speaker and audience.   Communicating emotion.  Creating a reality.  Collaborating with peers. 

Once that distillation occurs, opportunities emerge.  What if students composed monologues for their peers to deliver, record and publish?   What if those monologues told the stories of undervalued or under appreciated minor characters from well known works? What if those monologues portrayed emotion that character experiences in the story, but the audience doesn’t realize it?  How might such an assessment meet curricular goals and then serve as a bridge to discussions of under-represented voices in our communities and world?  

I’m not here to cast judgement on your conclusions about what really matters — visit my Twitter feed if you want to know how well our edu-values align.  I’m suggesting that the act of paring down helps all of us feel that much more calm and confident in our work during a time when those states are in short supply.  And I’m also suggesting that doing so fuels deeper learning, rather than diminishing rigor.  

Design

How might we meet the needs of students, school, family and community?

Perhaps now more than at any point in recent history, schools are being called upon to meet the needs of stakeholders both in their immediate communities and beyond.  Engaging students in their instruction may have much deeper stakes than good grades or successful achievement of learning outcomes.  Heightened student engagement may well translate into reduced familial stress and increased community involvement.  Providing more real world problem solving experience for students  contributes to the value added and return on investment arguments for supporting schools.  This may be even more true in a time of remote instruction substituting for face to face learning.

Making a quick list of needs for each of those four domains based on available information can put us into a more empathetic posture for our lesson designs.  Now, authentic empathy only comes from intentional and multi-faceted observation and inquiry into another’s point of view, and few of us have the capacity to do that sort of deep work in such tumultuous times.  Still, we have local surveys and news articles, social media and public polling.  We have conversations with our neighbors and communication with our students.  What if we take a moment to glean insights from those sources and apply those insights to our assessment design?

What if students read from a wide selection of poetry and lyrics related to social justice?  What if they then identified challenges of social justice facing their local communities, whether they be matters of systemic racism, multigenerational poverty, economic opportunity, LGBTQ equality, or such and similar?  What if the class  partnered with local non-profit organizations such as the United Way or community public health networks that work to address those issues?   Students might then compose poetry and lyrics that demonstrate both their understanding of poetic elements and the issues at hand.   Students could then design digital anthologies of their peers’ pieces, illustrate them with original artwork, and then publish those anthologies.   Along the way book editors, self-published authors, and social entrepreneurs might join video conferences for expert perspectives as those anthologies might be sold online with proceeds going to support a local cause.  Consider the layers of learning and understanding that one project might present.

The length of the preceding paragraph illustrates how easily one can get caught up ideating when passion and purpose overlap with pedagogical potential.   However, we should always take what the National Equity Project calls an “equity pause.”   Take a moment to consider our own unconscious and implicit biases, the impact they may be having on whatever work we are doing, and make a mindful effort to challenge those biases.   

Document

How might we track process, provide evidence and unpack intention?

Without our typical face-to-face classrooms, we not only miss out on the rapport that builds from informal interactions with students, we miss out on the nuances we rely upon as we assess their understanding.   The body language that lets us know there is something bugging them and that is why they aren’t willing to share their drafts for a peer writing workshop.   The tendency to look longing out the windows and flip pages absent mindedly during reading sessions, while still logging those pages as “read” in their journals.

During remote instruction, it proves increasingly helpful to implement strategies that build routines and provide similar information about the context of student work.   Consider using color coded spreadsheets where students might track a variety of metrics about their daily reading experience.  To what extent did you feel your mind wander during reading today?  To what extent do you think you will need to re-read when you next sit down to dive into your book?  How excited are you to return to this book when you next get a chance?  

How often do we look at a piece of student writing or answers to a series of comprehension questions and say, “Oh, I know what they were trying to do here.  I get it they just . . . Oh. . . . I can hear them saying this.  I know they get it even if it doesn’t look like it right here to the untrained eye?”  Few of us likely use that many words, but I still believe it is a common pattern of thought amongst my fellow educators.   What if students created podcasts or audio journals explaining the intention and purpose behind each of their choices for a paper or project?   I often suggest the music podcast, Song Exploder, for older students as an example of creators breaking down the choices they made along the way to an artistic product.  For younger students, episodes of Mythbusters Jr. or clips from Master Chef Junior can serve a similar function.  

And if those approaches feel daunting, consider a fairly simple graphic organizer divided into three columns.   What did you do?  Why did you do it?  What might you do it differently next tme?  Ask students to identify three pieces of evidence of learning featured in their product.  This becomes increasingly valuable in projects and creative endeavors as so often students’ visions outweigh their capacities to execute.   When we hear that they were striving to achieve and where their thinking was headed, we often find that the learning is intact even if the demonstration was lacking.  

Remote learning has enough stresses and worries associated with its effective implementation, the last things any of us need is to be fretting about are complicated lesson plan design protocols and expansive curricula.   Try looking at our work through this 3-D lens of distill, design and document.   Despite its relative simplicity, just as much depth and excitement awaits us and our students alike.

Dan Ryder is a high school English teacher by title, idea wrangler, design thinker, improviser and educator by practice, co-author of Intention: Critical Creativity in the Classroom.  Dan has taught for nearly 20 years at Mt. Blue Campus in Farmington, Maine.  Follow him on Twitter @WickedDecent.