Taking the First Step

One of the many things that I thought I would do when I became a reading coach was write a newsletter for teachers.  Inspired by the strong female characters Lizzie and Lydia in Wally Lamb’s The Hour I First Believed, I started that newsletter today.  My problem is that I have never written a newsletter before and I’m feeling less than confident.  I chose a template,  inserted clip art of books, added information about the book club that will start meeting in January,  added my contact information, and copy and pasted the mission statement from the district website.  Time to write a few articles.  I’m stuck though.  What do teachers want to read?  What should I include in this newsletter?  What can I write that will be valuable to the teachers who read it?  In Lamb’s novel, Lizzie works tirelessly for change.  Because of her work the lives of many women were improved.  Now I realize Lizzie is a fictional character, but I want to be like Lizzie.  I want the work that I do to improve the lives of many children.  I want every child in my school system to know what it means to be a reader, not just a person who can read, but a person who does read –a person who reads, writes and thinks.  I want to creat a newsletter that will help me achieve this goal.  Today, I took the first step.  Tonight I am going to do what Katie Wood Ray recommends we have our students do when preparing to write.  I am going to immerse myself in newsletters.   If you know of a great literacy newsletter that I should include in my immersion stack, please share it by leaving a comment.

Beautiful Inside and Out

I just got around to reading CEAI’s Online Devotional from yesterday. The scripture verse for the day was Luke 11:39-40.

Then the Lord said to him, ‘Now you Pharisees make the outside of the cup and dish clean, but your inward part is full of greed and wickedness. Foolish ones! Did not He who made the outside make the inside also?’

Many times, Kathy Branzell ends her devotionals with a question or two. The questions for this devotional are, “What do we need to do to make sure we are beautiful on the inside?” and “How can each of us carry out the attribute of living from the inside-out in our daily environment (classroom, hallways, meetings, cafeteria, office, etc.)?

I am struck by my quickness to point a finger when reading this verse. My human desire is to label others ‘Pharisee’ and jump on a pedestal above them; however, I realize that as soon as I do I have become a ‘pharisee’ myself. I think an important step we need to take toward being beautiful on the inside is this realization that our insides can be just as ugly as anyone’s. We need to eliminate our own finger pointing and pedestal jumping.

What Does the Future Hold?

“I hate to read.”

“I don’t read.”

“I can’t read.”

“I’ve never liked reading.”

“I’ve never been a very good reader.”

These are all statements I have heard this week. Because I have always been a reader, I find it hard to believe that anyone would say these things. I can’t imagine not wanting to read, not liking to read or not being able to read. Even more surprising to me is that these words are spoken with no shame. Especially when these words aren’t coming out of the mouths of students, but out of the mouths of their teachers.

What does it say about our education system when our teachers are saying things like this? These are teachers who went through the system, graduated from high school, graduated from college and many times have even gotten their Masters degree. How were they able to do this without reading? How can a person spend so many hours of their life doing all the reading that is done in school without becoming a reader? What happens when a person who views reading as something that must be tolerated is given the responsibility of teaching the next generation? I can’t help wondering if this isn’t the problem Rodman Philbrick had in his mind when he wrote The Last Book in the Universe. What is going to happen to our world if we continue to allow ourselves to hate reading? What is going to happen to our world if those who are responsible for teaching children don’t understand why reading is important?

Duncan to Principals: Release Your Inner Warrior!

Just read this article from EdWeek Duncan to Principals: Release Your Inner Warrior! and thought I would practice using the addthis feature to post it to my blog.

I thought it was an interesting article. I really like the comment by Pam Adamczyk.

The National Writing Project has an answer for all of our schools and it doesn’t cost a lot. Get every teacher to teach reading and writing in their subject areas. The basis for all learning is in reading and writing. There are so many fun and engaging ways to get kids to use writing and reading in any classroom. When we start getting kids to read and write (which is thinking) in ALL subject areas, there will be dramatic change in our schools and eventually our society since reading and writing and thinking kids become reading, writing, and thinking adults who will help pass on the importance and fun of reading and writing to their own children. Check out the studies. Check out NWP.

I would only add that in order to get teachers to teach reading and writing, they must become readers and writers.

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Truths

Inspired by The Book of 100 Truths, I started writing truth statements in my journal about a month ago. This is a writing/thinking activity I would recommend. When I first started writing my truth statements, I wrote them at the top of my journal entry. Lately I have found that I like writing them at the end of my journal entry. The writing helps me find the truth. THe first day I did this, I wrote:

Truth # 1 I want to read The Book of 100 Truths now that I have read the back of it.
Truth # 2 I realize that I sometimes make things more difficult than they need to be.
Truth # 3 It is way late and I should be in bed.
Truth # 4 I enjoyed sorting through the crew applications and look forward to doing more sorting tomorrow.

From the looks of these, you might think this is a pointless exercise. If you keep writing them they change though.

Truth # 9 The more you learn, the more you realize how much you don’t know. (I think I’ve actually heard this before, but it is true.)
Truth # 10 It is difficult to know what another person is thinking when you do all the talking.

When I get ready to write my truth statements, I really have to think about what I have learned from the day. I think this would be a cool thing to have students do. If they wrote one a day for each day of the school year, they would have at least 150 truths by the end of the year. How well would you know your students after reading 150 truth statements they had written?

Have You Discovered Voicethread Yet?

One way that I like to get people thinking and talking is by using an opinion exchange. This is an idea I got from choiceliteracy.com. I have adapted it for different situations, but it has always been successful in getting people to think and talk. Tonight I discovered voicethreads and as I was searching for something on my computer that I could upload as a practice voicethread conversation starter, I ran across an opinion exchange that I had saved on my computer. It is a list of quotes on the topic of reading. I got excited when I thought about combining these two great discussion tools. I hope you will click here to check out my Reading Opinion Exchange Voicethread and share your opinion. If you are a teacher, I hope you will think about how you might be able to use voicethread in your practice. You can read about how great it is for PLC’s here on the All Things PLC blog. You can also get ideas for how to use it in your classroom by browsing all the voicethreads that teachers have already created.

Healthy Patients Make for Mediocre Doctors

He had just come from a faculty meeting, and it was clear from his demeanor that things had not gone well.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I listened as long as I could,” he said, “but they could not get off their blame-the-the student shtick. Finally I said that they sounded like doctors in a hospital saying, ‘Don’t send us any more sick people–we don’t know what to do with them. Send us healthy patients so we can look like good doctors.’”

Parker J. Palmer shares this anecdote in his book The Courage to Teach. He carries the analogy further by sharing how it helped him come to this crucial understanding about teaching:

The way we diagnose our students’ condition will determine the kind of remedy we offer.

He goes on to say that we spend little time thinking about the maladies that our teaching is meant to cure and that we allow our treatment to be shaped by the thoughtless stereotypes we have of our students. Palmer’s thoughts on this remind me of the other book I’m reading, Never Work Harder Than Your Students & Other Principles of Great Teaching by Robyn R. Jackson. The first principle in this book is to start where your students are. As I read her thoughts, I couldn’t help thinking about how important it is for us to value our students no matter where they come from. When we don’t value them for who they are, it is much like what Palmer’s friend says. We are like doctors who don’t want to work with sick patients. It is important for educators to stop seeing the students who enter our classrooms as deficient. We should be like House and his team. We should embrace the maladies of our students and work diligently to find cures. When one remedy does not work, we need to try again until a cure is found.

We need to work together to diagnose our students’ maladies and work together to cure them.

Plea for Help

I have been asked to compile a list of must reads for high school honor students. This list will be used as a resource for teachers to consult when compiling their summer reading lists. Since I have spent most of my career in elementary and middle school classrooms, I’m not sure that I am the person for the job, but I know that some of you out there in the blogosphere are high school teachers and you will share your wisdom with me. Please tell me what you think. What books (both classic and contemporary) do you feel are must reads for high school students?

I discovered Wordle today!

If you go to www.wordle.net/create you too can create a cool word cloud like this one I created by copying the kindergarten reading standards from the Tennessee Department of Education website and pasting them in wordle. .

You can also go to the wordle gallery and see cool clouds like this one created by Alicia Lewis from the very informative article Curriculum Theory and Practice. The article can be found at
found at www.infed.org/biblio/b-curric.htm

It is very cool, but what is it good for you ask? Well, if you check out the presentation Sixteen Interesting Ways to Use Wordle in the Classroom by Tom Barrett, you will have at least 16 ideas for how to use wordle. I’m sure you will think of even more.

If you are anything like me, you will find yourself wondering from website to website with your eyes popping out in amazement.