Middle-School Guided Reading

I'm going to talk a little bit about Guided Reading, an old teaching model that has been used for years in elementary classrooms.  The basic premise is homogeneous groups, working with the teacher, while the rest of the class is working in "stations."

Here are some links to pages about Guided Reading:

Short Summary of the Strategy from Saskatoon Public Schools

Scholastic Publication on Research base for Guided Reading

Overview of Guided Reading from Michigan State University

Here's a quote from the last link (Michigan State University):

What are the Other Students Doing While I’m Teaching Reading Groups? 

There are a variety of options. Students could be reading independently or in small Literature Circles / Book Clubs. Or they could be working in center activities related to reading. Whichever you choose, it is a routine that needs to be taught well in the first few weeks of school in order to be successful.

To me, this sounds a lot like "As long as they're busy, it doesn't much matter."  This is the biggest criticism of Guided Reading as a whole, in my opinion.  I don't think that most teachers do this, but it would be easy to just give the rest of the class busy-work, and focus on the "teacher group."  As long as students were diligently working on the "busy-work," it wouldn't seem to matter much, would it?

There are criteria to keep in mind for stations to be effective:

1. Station work has to be independent work, so it can't be new material or too challenging, or students won't be able to do it without interrupting the teacher (which is bad).  So keep it relatively easy.
2. The work must also be engaging enough to keep students focused for the duration of the station, usually at least 20 minutes.  
3. Some assessment of this station work must occur, and must occur consistently, or students won't put any serious effort into completing it.  

The challenge with middle school students is that they are both less patient and more perceptive than typical elementary students with work that lacks a clear sense of purpose.  For example, unless you have built value into silent reading (or if you have a class full of focused readers, a rarity in middle school), you probably won't be able to get a group of students to focus on reading independently for any length of time with so much else going on in the room, and without the direct observation of the teacher.  Designing a good station can take a lot of time, and it often produces material from the students that requires additional time to read and respond to.  

So, in a middle-school setting, what do you need to do to make this work?  Here are some things that my co-workers and I have found (or have learned from others):

• Create a consistent structure for students to use in the station, and follow it for a long time.  For example, use a Making Words book for a vocabulary station, and have students complete a vocabulary activity several times over several weeks using different words.  
• Pre-teach station activities as much as you can, so that students are comfortable with the work before they attempt to complete it in the stations.  
• Students often enjoy the stations if there is a chance to work with peers, and adding even a small element of "fun" increases the effectiveness enormously.  Having students analyze picture books, for example, can be very effective.  
• Grade only one station, but don't let students know in advance which station will be graded.  
• Practice the procedures as much as possible early in the school year, and follow them consistently.  Follow the same procedure for grouping and rotations.  Groups should change (flexible grouping is important), but the way that you tell the students what group they are in and what they are doing should stay the same.  I also use a timer and a signal to announce a change in rotation (a $5 Wal-Mart bicycle horn).  
• Make sure that you have a procedure for early finishers.  
• Be creative with the stations.  Nonfiction reading, for example, can be a very cool station.  We had success with material from our science books that we never managed to get to - the books were readily available, familiar to the students, and reasonably engaging.  

I'm sure I will think of more to say here, and I'm not pretending to be an expert on guided reading in middle school.  But if you're curious or considering using it in the upper grades, it's a powerful instructional strategy when used well.  It just takes a lot of prep time.  

Web Hoaxes

I taught a lesson not too long ago about reliability of sources.

The web is good for this because there is so much that is unreliable.

Take this for example: http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/

The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus?  Really?  I had students who were ready to believe this.

I also showed this one:

http://www.rythospital.com/clyven/

If you click the other tabs, you'll see the modified photo of a pregnant man.  That usually gets them, even if they accept the notion of a rat with human intelligence.

If they still think the mouse and the man are legitimate, you can google the name of the supposed hospital, and you get articles about the author, including the following from The Daily Scotsman:

Yes, the whole thing – as you will know already if you followed the story at the time – is an elaborate “installation” by the artist Virgil Wong. According to the biography on Wong’s own website, www.virgilwong.com, he is head of web design and development for New York-Presbyterian Hospital and Weill Cornell Medical College, which would explain both his knowledge of medical jargon and the painstakingly professional sheen of the Dwayne Medical Center website. He is also an artist and film-maker whose various projects “all revolve around his interests in medicine, technology and the human body”.

I tried googling this in front of the students, where the students could see the computer screen projected.  The results are not entirely clear.  Consider, for example, the article in USA Today about this:

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/webguide/hotsites/2003/2003-01-28-hotsites.htm

Dwayne Medical Center is listed first as a "hot site."  Is it true?  You can't really tell from this page.  In fact, I'm not sure if the writers at USA Today realized it was a hoax.

Snopes.com is a good place to go from here - a website that helps you evaluate good (or bad) hoaxes and urban legends.  There are some good examples of phishing scams there.

The focus, of course, is on developing strategies to verify and cross-check what you read on the Internet.  It also segues nicely into persuasive writing and research.

Twitter in the Classroom?

So, I signed up for Twitter a few months ago, and I've become a big fan.  To my surprise, I was also given a school account by my district.  I was at a loss for how to use it at first, but then I thought about the hashtag concept.

If you aren't familiar, the "hashtag" is a way of making your "tweets" - the things you post on Twitter - instantly searchable.  If you tweet something with a hashtag that others are using, people can watch the feed for a specific hashtag, and they will see your contribution pop up as part of a conversation.  For example, a recent hashtag was #5words.  People tweeted a five-word phrase that they considered important or enlightening, and then tagged it.  Then everyone else could search for that hashtag, and follow the tweets as they came out.

So, it occurred to me, why not create a hashtag and use that to have an ongoing, synchronous conversation with another classroom?  I posted something about this on the English Companion Ning, and I had two or three responses almost instantly.  That was cool, but I had no idea what to do about that.  Now that I have the Twitter account, I don't know that I have the time to insert a text or unit that we can collaborate on with another classroom.  (As is usually the case, at this point in the year, I'm dumping cool ideas that I've been putting off, and trying to jam as many cool ideas and new ideas for next year into the classroom as I can before school is over.  Between the required stuff and the stuff I want, I don't have much room left.)

So, since that didn't work, I just started actually using it.  I felt like I had waited too long, and tried too many different propositions, and ended up wasting time.  So, I just started tweeting "cool sentences" on my school Twitter account.  Students volunteered these sentences, and I tweeted them.  I recently tried the #5words hashtag (though I didn't use the actual tag because I didn't want too much unwanted attention drawn to the school account), and that worked really well.

So, with five weeks left of school, I'm thinking about other ways to use this.

I think the goal for the next several weeks is going to be just tweeting as much student work as I can.  It should be - or it seems like it would best serve as - a student publication tool, of very short student texts.  So, I'm going to publish anything and everything that I can, without breaking district rules.

I would love to hear other ideas, if anyone has suggestions.

April is the cruelest month . . .

So I started something on Twitter that represents a kind of mental fungus that I've been dealing with for several years.  It seems like a lot of bad stuff happens in April.  Perhaps we can blame Eliot's The Waste Land for starting the idea, perhaps not.

Anyway, here is the beginning of a list of things (mostly bad) that happened in April.

April 1st
- Beer Hall Putsch (Hitler's first power grab)
- Marvin Gaye shot and killed by his own father

April 2nd
- Pope John Paul II dies
- Argentina invades the Falkland islands

April 3rd
- Bruno Hauptmann is executed for kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby
- the Unabomber is arrested

April 4th
- Assassination of Martin Luther King
- Second Battle of the Somme

April 5th
- Rosenbergs sentenced to death for spying
- Kurt Cobain commits suicide

April 6th
- US Declares war on Germany and enters WWI
- Oscar Wilde arrested
- Black Hawk War begins

April 7th
- Rwandan civil war begins

April 9th
- Civil War ends at Appomattox

April 10th
- Zapata is assassinated in Mexico
- Bataan Death March begins

April 11th
- Napoleon exiled to Elba
- Idi Amin is overthrown
- US troops liberate Buchenwald concentration camp

April 12th
- Civil War begins
- Franklin Roosevelt dies
- Galileo is convicted of heresy

April 13th
- Amritsar Massacre
- Apollo 13 oxygen tank explodes

April 14th
- Lincoln is shot
- Titanic hits iceberg
- US bombs Libya
- Soviets announce withdrawal from Afghanistan
- Major Dust Bowl storm strikes

April 15th
- Pol Pot dies
- Sacco and Vanzetti receive national press

April 16th
- Virginia Tech massacre
- Lenin returns from exile to Russia

April 17th
- Bay of Pigs invasion
- Ben Franklin dies
- Khmer Rouge seize power in Cambodia

April 18th
- Great San Francisco Earthquake
- Bombing of US Embassy in Beirut

April 19th
- Warsaw Uprising
- David Kuresh and the Branch Davidian compound burns
- Oklahoma City bombing
- Lord Byron's untimely death in Greece

April 20th
- Columbine High School massacre
- Ludlow massacre of striking workers

April 21st
- Battle of San Jacinto

April 22nd
- Germans are first to use poison gas
- Pat Tillman killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan

April 23rd
- Easter Rebellion
- Failed hostage rescue mission in Iran

April 25th
- Invasion of Gallipoli begins

April 26th
- Chernobyl nuclear disaster

April 27th
- Afghan president is overthrown and murdered
- First multiracial elections held in South Africa

April 28th
- Mussolini executed
- Mutiny on the HMS Bounty

April 29th
- Rodney King trial verdict announced leading to riots in LA

April 30th
- Hitler commits suicide
- Monica Seles stabbed
- South Vietnam surrenders

Research

Ah, research.  How the months have passed already.

I think that's the problem.  Other things happened, and now I'm rushing to finish teaching research methods and still have time for students to synthesize something from the research.

From this point, I'm starting to think about next year already, and planning how to start teaching research sooner.  Like most schools, sometimes there's a crush of teachers and students vying for computer lab time, and plans have to be modified.

I think the lesson here, for me, is that research is something that needs to be separated from computers, at least in part.  Too often research is seen as solely the province of computers, as if it can only be done with the aid of a computer.  Of course that's not true, since it was occurring long before we had these tools.  It does seem a bit cumbersome, though, to a generation of young people who conduct computer-based "research" so often, for so many things, on such a wide range of scales and projects.

Adding another layer to this shifting concept of "research," it seems, takes a little more careful planning and adapting than I had thought.

Andre Norton Nominees Announced

Here are the nominees for this year's Andre Norton award (an award from the Science Fiction/Fantasy Writers of America for the best Young Adult Fantasy and/or Science Fiction book from the previous year):

Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and FantasyBook

• Akata Witch, Nnedi Okorafor (Viking Juvenile)
• Chime, Franny Billingsley (Dial Books; Bloomsbury)
• Daughter of Smoke and Bone, Laini Taylor (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers; Hodder & Stoughton)
• Everybody Sees the Ants, A.S. King (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers)
• The Boy at the End of the World, Greg van Eekhout (Bloomsbury Children’s Books)
• The Freedom Maze, Delia Sherman (Big Mouth House)
• The Girl of Fire and Thorns, Rae Carson (Greenwillow Books)
• Ultraviolet, R.J. Anderson (Orchard Books; Carolrhoda Lab

Usually these are good.

Here's a link to the SFWA site where this is posted.  You can also see the adult books that are nominated this year.  (Hate the innuendo there - stupid "adult book stores" have ruined that phrase.)

DIVERGENT by Veronica Roth

I just read this book, and it was pretty good.  I didn't love everything about it, but I was engrossed within a few chapters and wasn't able to switch to a different book.

It's a dystopian future, with a factionalized community living in the Chicago area, divided into "tribes" or groups based on the virtues that they prize above others - Erudite, Dauntless, Amity, Candor, and Abnegation.  The main character, Beatrice (who renames herself Tris), lives among the Abnegation, but switches to Dauntless when given her choice.  She struggles to survive the training, and succeeds in the end, only to uncover a plot to disrupt the factionalized system and take over the community.  It's kind of an interesting twist, the way that the community is divided.  I also like the bizarre and cruel way that the Dauntless faction trains its recruits and prepares them for the life they will lead.  I like that there are a lot of unanswered questions left for future books, and I might be curious enough to pick up the second book and continue reading.  But I'm not sure that this is anywhere near as interesting as the books that are becoming the gold standard for me - Hunger Games, the Chaos Walking series, and Fablehaven.  (Maybe Lightning Thief and Harry Potter belong in there too, but on a different level.)

It's surprising how many YA authors are trying to recreate this kind of book - I don't know if it was Harry Potter, Hunger Games, Twilight, or some other series that really pushed publishing and authors to consider this genre.  But it's exploding.  I can't keep up.