learning – Page 2 – CCIRA Professional Development Blog

From Read-Alouds to Writing Instruction

by Travis Leech and Whitney La Rocca

The Potential of Read-Alouds

A well-chosen read-aloud can be the lifeblood of a language arts classroom. Teachers can do some heavy lifting in an efficient time frame to ground students in content and prime the pump for instruction. Read-alouds could be reading the entire book to your class. But it doesn’t have to be. We can also read a chapter, a section, or even a page aloud. The important thing is that we use the text as a connection point to both listening comprehension skills and language comprehension as we model how the text is supposed to sound when read aloud. Molly Ness explains this beautifully in her book, Read Alouds for All Learners (Solution Tree, 2023):

“Before students are fluent, independent readers, listening to an expert reader is the most efficient way to build the knowledge and vocabulary that are crucial to reading comprehension. It’s been found that children’s listening comprehension exceeds their reading comprehension through about age 13 on average. That means they can take in more sophisticated concepts and vocabulary through listening than through their own reading.”

We feel that it’s important to interact with the text, modeling the thinking that we do as readers during reading and invite our students to do some thinking with it as well. It’s not enough to just simply read it aloud.

With this being said, we’ve also found potential in using this experience as a jumping off point into other literacy instruction. We’d love to share with you some of the golden nuggets we’ve unearthed, so that you can put them into practice in your own classrooms. We’re going to discuss how we would extract all the amazing potential from a read-aloud we’ve recently done for the book Bugged: How Insects Changed History, by Sarah Albee, a book that highlights important historical connections between insects and humans, both good and bad.

Beyond the Read-Aloud: Grammar Instruction

Now that the text is familiar to students, we can leverage our time and instruction by using the text to teach craft moves through a grammar and conventions lens. For example, we may share this sentence with our students as an entry point into teaching how writers provide additional information with use of parentheses:

At some point in its life cycle, an insect has three parts to its body (head, thorax, abdomen) and six jointed legs.

Using the invitation process from our Patterns of Power series, we begin by asking our students what they notice about the author’s choices in this sentence. Through conversations with partners and then the whole group, students share their thoughts. They may discuss the punctuation such as the commas, or they may share the information the author is providing. No matter what they notice, we honor and name it, discussing why Albee chose to do what she did. There is a strong possibility that the writers will, in fact, notice the parentheses, especially since it’s not something they see in every sentence, therefore sticking out even more for them. We discuss the purpose of the parentheses, why Albee chose to use them and analyze information inside of them. Through this discourse, we discover that one way writers can add additional information is through the use of parentheses.

We may share or create a focus phrase together that can be posted in our classroom and orally repeated often to act as an anchor for our students as they add this move to their toolboxes: “I use parentheses to add information efficiently.”

To deepen the awareness and understanding of this craft move, we can then find or create another example where parentheses are used in the same way and invite our students to compare and contrast this new example with the sentence from our mentor, Sarah Albee.

After this discussion, we give our students a chance to write their own through imitation, beginning with the class writing one together and then writers composing one independently. They may or may not choose to begin their sentence with the opener, At some point…

Below are two examples students wrote independently.

At some point in my day, I have to do chores (clean my room, make my bed, take out the trash) before I get screen time.

My dogs (Millie, Kimber, Ginger) love to go on walks.

We take a moment to share and celebrate their imitations as this makes them feel confident enough to continue to use this move as needed in other writing they do throughout their day and year. For example, one class was writing research reports, and this child chose to add additional information for their reader about gorillas:

Because we started with a text that was familiar to students, our writers are now able to read text as writers and use some of the moves they discover in their own writing.

Beyond the Read-Aloud: Revision Instruction

Another element of writing instruction we can extract from this text post-read aloud is bolstering revision skills through sentence combining. Using a process from our series Patterns of Revision, here is an overview of a revision lesson connected to this text.

First, we would extract a short chunk of text from the read-aloud, preferably one that includes complex ideas mashed up together (like a compound sentence, a list of ideas, appositives renaming a noun, or compound subjects or predicates). Here’s one sentence with potential from Bugged:

Eight-legged spiders, ticks, and mites are not insects.

We like this sentence because there are multiple ideas being organized together into one sentence. Our work behind the scenes would then be to pull apart these ideas into separate, stand alone sentences:

Eight-legged spiders are not insects.

Ticks are not insects.

Mites are not insects.

After we’ve selected a sentence and separated out the ideas into their own stand alone sentences, we can bring these sentences back to our students to facilitate discussion about combining these ideas together. This is how the process would break down, using the acronym DRAFT:

We’d display the sentences for students and read them aloud.
We would discuss any repeated information students see being presented to decide what we could DELETE, allowing us to combine what is left.
Students would prompt us to do work in the moment to combine the ideas:

Eight-legged spiders are not insects.

Ticks are not insects.

Mites are not insects.

To combine what is left, we would consider how we could REARRANGE the words left over, what other words and punctuation we might ADD, and if we could do anything to FORM new verbs. Students TALK it out as they create a newly combined sentence.
Students might suggest something close to the author’s original when combining the ideas together. After we complete the sentence-combining work collaboratively as a class, we compare our work to the author’s original, reflect on any similarities or difference between our combination and the author’s, and discuss how this exercise could help us in our own writing.
We might then go back into a draft of writing we’ve previously created and try looking for ways we could combine our sentences or ideas in a similar way we did so with Sarah Albee’s work.

Concluding Thoughts

Studying grammar and supporting revision are two of the many lenses we could use to revisit part of the text we used for our whole-class read-aloud. We could follow a similar process of illuminating things like figurative language or text structure in a similar manner: by revisiting a manageable chunk of text, displaying that text for students, and asking them to discuss what they notice the author doing in this portion of the text.

We believe it is through this small shift in instruction, offering space for students to observe and discuss what they notice the author does in their work, that we are building students’ cognitive structures for learning. This shift will support them in strengthening this line of inquisitive thinking and observation in their future work as readers and writers in our classroom…and beyond it!

Whitney La Rocca has been a teacher, a literacy coach, and a consultant, working with children and teachers across grade levels, schools, and districts. With a deep knowledge of content, standards, and best practices, Whitney enjoys delivering professional development and coaching teachers to support children as they develop their identities in the world of literacy.

Travis Leech is a middle school instructional coach in Northside Independent School District in San Antonio, TX. He has thirteen years of experience in education, including teaching middle school English Language Arts and as a gifted and talented specialist. He has presented about engaging literacy practices and technology integration at the district, regional, and state levels.

Term Projects: Exploring Choice Writing in a World of Standardized Testing

By Brent Gilson

My early teaching years were in the elementary setting, where I discovered Project-Based Learning (PBL). I loved developing projects and other immersive opportunities for my students to learn and experience choice. Each year, as I moved into new grades, I could provide these opportunities until I found myself teaching Senior High English, and the pressures of standardized year-end exams started weighing down on all of us.

My first few months teaching the seniors were… boring. I was used to choice writing and exploring interests with my students, and I was stuck teaching them form and expectations based on rubrics for a test they would never use again but had a disproportionate impact on their grades. I wanted to find a balance, a way that student could explore their interests and learn the forms of writing required of them. My answer first started to form with a little (or a lot) of inspiration from the incredible Paul W. Hankins.

Paul and his students in the legendary room 407 brought the idea of multigenre projects and multimodal representation to life. They explored various types of writing and built incredible pieces around a theme, something my students needed to learn, and I had only been teaching most artificially. What Paul and his excellent students were creating felt so organic. After seeing some ex amples and getting some text suggestions from Paul, I dove right in. My first multigenre project was titled “Make Your Mark” a multigenre project exploring the theme of legacy.

In my first semester with the project, we had the unfortunate circumstance of COVID-19, which interrupted our time in the classroom. However, it did buy us a free pass from the tests, which were canceled. So, the project became our final. Students embraced the work at the end of the term. I had beautiful tributes written to loved ones and poems that explored the past and were hopeful for the future. Students crafted and recorded songs, built sculptures, and made movies. The creativity was off the charts. The next semester, the exams returned. I followed the same schedule, closing the year with our project, and assumed the students would be ready for their exams because of the volume of writing we were doing. That assumption was incorrect. Projects turned out amazing again, but the heavy focus on choice and joy did not translate as well as hoped to the stale exam format. I needed to make some changes.

I decided to adopt the idea of a term project in the literal sense. We would take time throughout the whole term to complete it. Introducing the project in the early days of the course, building a schedule with checkpoints, setting days throughout the course that would focus on the project, and ultimately having the project due at the end of the term. I asked the students how they felt about this process and if they felt it left them enough time to feel comfortable with their test materials while also being able to give sufficient attention to the project. The general feeling was yes, and the current form of Make Your Mark was born.

This year, I had a new class added to my schedule. The Grade 11 kids, or what I think my American friends would call Juniors? I wanted to incorporate a term project with these students as well, and this time, the answer came in the idea of Project Based Writing from Liz Prather. We started the year talking about the freedom to explore topics that interested them—things they would want to write about. We set up Fridays as our term project day. Something that will be protected so that students can better manage their time. Their first task was to develop a pitch; I explained this as a moment to share their topic, why they had chosen it, and what they envision as a final product so far. This past Friday, students shared ideas, some of the ideas included:

Basketball Coaching Handbook and Instructional Videos
A picture book about the life of a favorite singer
True crime podcast series
Field Guide on Animals of North America
Illustrated Review of MLB ballparks
A Food Network-type show
A Horror Movie

This is just a sample of the creativity. Each project will require written elements such as scripts or episode summaries. Some students will submit chapters of a book after researching different authors’ writing processes. Student inspiration varied from simple interest to spite (this one made us all laugh).

As we work through the term, we have days where students will share progress and get feedback from me and their peers. We will keep a close eye on how the project is going, culminating in a gallery walk where students will have their work available for peers to experience.

I have loved the energy that term projects bring into the classroom. They are a moment to breathe in a world of testing. Students get to write about what matters to them, share their hopes and dreams, or even just their creativity. Through choice students learn to share their voice and write with one. It might not be the perfect tool to prepare for exams, but we have time for that; it just can’t be all that English Language Arts is about. Writing is about telling our stories and sharing who we are. That is often lost when we only think of ourselves as numbers.

Brent Gilson is an English Teacher in Alberta, Canada. He is in his 14th year of teaching, having spent time in grades 3-12. When not teaching, planning, or marking, Brent can be found attending student sporting events with his wife, Julie, an Elementary Principal. Brent has had the opportunity to present at various conferences in Canada and the United States, namely NCTE and ELAC (Alberta’s NCTE equivalent). If you are looking for more of his work and thoughts, check out LiftingLiteracy.com

Student (dis)engagement

By Dr. Scott McLeod, 2024 Conference Presenter

Hi friends.

Over the past five years, some research buddies and I have visited over 90 innovative schools all across the country (and a few overseas). Fueled by learning equity and college / career readiness concerns, new technologies, and state policy changes, numerous new ‘deeper learning’ schools are emerging that aim to prepare ‘future ready’ graduates. Deeper learning schools are a small but quickly-growing number of institutions, constituting perhaps 1,000 or so schools out of 129,000 total schools in America. Although deeper learning can be defined in numerous ways, most of the schools that we have visited tend to share the following characteristics:

an emphasis on applied creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving;
high levels of student agency, control, ownership, voice, and choice;
opportunities to engage in authentic, real-world work in local and global communities; and
robust technology infusion.

A fifth characteristic that deeper learning schools share is that they are incredibly energizing and inspiring places to visit. For example, at any given moment, students in a deeper learning school might be investigating connections between their backyards and inland water ecosystems, creating kinetic art sculptures, learning about the relationship between chocolate-making and forced labor overseas, or building video game controllers for peers with disabilities. Students are thinking deeply, problem-solving collaboratively with peers and outside partners, and making significant impacts in their local communities, while still learning important, foundational course content and academic skills. As they find meaning and relevance in their work, students are excited and engaged learners rather than bored and apathetic.

What I love about the deeper learning schools that we have visited is the sheer energy and enthusiasm that students have around their learning. They’re eager to describe what they’re working on, what they’re mastering, and how they’re positively contributing to the world around them. It’s not just I’m excited to see my friends energy or I can’t wait to do my electives or extracurriculars today energy. It’s delight in the learning itself.

This learning engagement stands in sharp contrast to what we often see in more traditional schools. We’re so worried about ‘learning loss,’ we often engage in practices that feel fairly unproductive: Let’s add more reading and math blocks! Let’s extend the school day or calendar! Let’s create an intervention / remediation period during which students can catch up on the basics! Let’s require kids to attend summer school! Let’s force children to repeat a grade! We don’t actually change how we teach or what we do with students during this additional time. We simply double down on what they didn’t like in the first place.

Post-pandemic, we continue to see a great deal of student boredom and apathy. Some students are opting out physically, and we see many schools struggling with chronic student absenteeism. Other students are opting out mentally: even when they do show up, many of them don’t care much about the work that we ask them to do. The students who are compliant aren’t exactly excited about their learning either. They’re mostly checking off boxes and playing the game of school. If we’re honest with ourselves, we will admit that even our most academically-successful students often struggle to find meaning in the learning tasks that we put before them.

While there are no easy answers here, deeper learning schools show us that that leaning into

greater student ownership of their learning,
depth of student learning (beyond recall and regurgitation), and
student meaning-making (not just academic but also real world and applied)

can be powerful levers for student engagement. And just to be clear: This is not a teacher issue, it’s a systems issue. Together, we could create new visions for student success, establish structures and processes that treat our humans with dignity and respect, and redesign instruction in ways that are more interesting and engaging. We’re not helpless victims, trapped in systems that will forever perpetuate student boredom. We can do better.

How many of us are tired of constantly cajoling or disciplining students, pleading with or forcing them to do work that they don’t want to do? Me too.

SCOTT