Reinvention

poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes,
they are sleeping. They are the shadows
drifting across our ceilings the moment
before we wake up. What we have to do
is live in a way that lets us find them.
~from Valentine for Ernest Mann by Naomi Shihab Nye

Pretty much the only time I write poetry is when the lessons in my sixth grade writing workshop are focused on it; then I work on composing poems alongside my students. My sensibility changes during those poetry writing times. On my morning dog walks, I pick up sensory details like pennies in a parking lot; another time they wouldn't be worth reaching for. I like how it feels to think this way, to sense a potential poem in a twisted locust pod, or the five fingers of a sweet gum leaf, or that solitary hook-armed monkey somehow separated from its barrel mates, but I can't sustain it. When we turn our attention to another genre in class, my poetry sense gradually stops tingling, and the pennies stay on the pavement.

I want to change that.

Back in the Day

On my way home from work today, I heard someone on the radio refer to something "that we witnessed during the early part of the century." She meant this century. Doesn't that sound weird?

10,000 Hours

What English teacher has not received a link to Nancie Atwell's video-recorded response to the NY Times article of August 30 about reading workshop? Either forwarded directly by a colleague, mentioned in a professional e-newsletter, or referenced in an edu-blog, the video has gone what passes for viral in our little online community.

I confess that I have watched it twice already. I'm all about Atwell-- plus, I've been to her school, and I've actually seen those bookcases behind her. (An aside... take a look at the cover of the second edition of In the Middle. Mm hmm... same white book shelves, just filled with quality literature.) Nancie makes a great argument on the video; her reasoning is clear and reassuring, and it will resonate with anyone who's struggled to create an effective language arts program lately. We're lucky to have her as such a rational voice for our profession.

Beyond her defense of "the audacity of kids choosing their own reading," it's her Malcolm Gladwell reference that I've been pondering today. In Outliers, he posits that to really achieve mastery of something, it takes 10,000 hours of practice. Atwell, of course, mentioned it in terms of reading fluency, but I got to thinking about teaching. The basic calculation for teaching time is 7.5 hours a day at 180 days per year. At that rate, with no absences, you can put in your 10,000 hours in about seven and a half years.

Teaching is a complex task, though, and so, with that in mind, I tried to break my time down into student contact hours, meeting hours, and planning and professional development hours. When I look at the numbers that way, I figure I probably hit 10,000 instructional hours sometime at the end of last year, my sixteenth. Mastery? Expertise? Maybe a little.

I have a feeling that Gladwell was referring to more than simply logging your hours at a given task. Diligence alone is not enough; passion and engagement are reliable indicators of the quality of one's practice. As teachers we know this to be true of our students and ourselves; after all, there's more to Nancie Atwell than just 10,000 hours.

Writers Read #1

Today was another in that long list of firsts that comprises the beginning of every school year. My students conducted their first Writers Read discussions. This is an assignment that my teacher-friend originated: each week we choose a focus, one that usually supports the craft or convention that we are working on in writing workshop. The students do a prep sheet, where they answer some questions about their independent reading and pull an excerpt from the text to support their ideas, then they use the sheet to guide their small-group discussions about their books.

This is why I was doing my research about questioning strategies yesterday. Sometimes, the students simply read their prep sheet to the group and proclaim themselves "done" (as in, hand raised, waving vigorously across the room for your attention, only to ask triumphantly when you finally do give them the nod, "What do we do when we're finished?!?"). Last year, I worked with our gifted resource teacher on ways to teach the kids to extend their discussions. We tried some ready-made question models. The results were mixed; some students genuinely rehearsed, and even implemented, higher-order questioning, and some picked questions at random to ask so that they could check that off their to-do list.

Today, I tried a different approach. First, I directed the groups to use a "spiral method" when presenting the thoughts recorded on their planning sheets to their group. Rather than reading through all the questions student-by-student, I asked them to paraphrase one answer at a time, one student at a time, with permission for the others to interrupt politely, should they have a question or comment. Our goal was conversation rather than presentation. In addition, I told them that their conversation had to go "off the page;" the prep sheet was just a starting point. These directions turned out to be a good place to begin-- I think they helped the students conceptualize the task more clearly than in years past.

I have a plan for supporting higher-level questioning in the next couple of sessions, too. I want to do it in context, so we're going to continue with this approach to the discussion, but with a few minutes of follow-up to ask the students to jot down which questions extended the conversation most. Then we'll take a look at those questions and analyze them together to figure out what made them so effective.

That's the concept, at any rate. We'll see how it goes.

That's a Good Question

I was doing some research today on teaching kids questioning skills. I confess that I did not find the perfect resource, for there's quite the hodge-podge of references out there that will give an interested party a bunch of information on that topic. Also, the more I searched, the later in the day it became, and the more my thoughts got all meta-cognitive on me.

Can you really teach questioning strategies? I wondered. Don't authentic questions come from within?

Most of the websites I found were directed at teachers, but some seemed to have "business managers" as their main audience. That made me laugh a little. I free-associated to Steve Carell and The Office, and I imagined Michael using some of the "higher order questioning prompts inappropriately, as he would. For example: Synthesis-- "What would happen if you combined...?" (Regular viewers, you know you can fill in the blank.)

To be honest, that scenario wasn't much of a stretch, because I'd heard my own students asking ridiculous questions out of context last spring when the gifted contact teacher was in our room. She brought along a class set of flip-charts that had a series of question-starters based on Bloom's taxonomy. We directed the kids to use them to prepare for their weekly small-group literature discussion. How silly and stilted some of their conversations seemed, yet I kept listening for the break-through that would move the whole group to a higher intellectual order.

By June, I gave up, but I thought that if I started earlier this year, I might have more success. That was until today, when I questioned my questioning instruction, and I'm sorry to say that I haven't found any definitive answers (no worries: we all know that good questions don't have those), but I will continue this line of inquiry and report back, mostly because I really want to know.

Focus

So, the kids in my class were working on their writing sample, and a little girl raised her hand. I went over to her seat. "Yes?" I whispered.

"I'm having a lot of trouble with this writing prompt," she told me, shaking her head.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because I only write animal fiction," she said with dismay.

I'm pretty sure I tilted my head and raised an eyebrow. "Animal fiction? That's a pretty narrow genre," I said. "Are you any good?"

"Oh yeah," she assured me, "I'm good."

"Well," I shrugged, "I think if you can write animal fiction, you can write anything, right?" We made eye contact, and I continued. "So, go ahead-- give this one a shot."

She sighed, but she set her pencil to the page, and soon she found her way into a response, no talking animals involved.

Ready or Not

Yesterday we were planning to have a congratulations-you-survived-the-first-week-of-middle-school-! picnic for all the sixth graders. It was really only going to take about an hour and a half, time during which the kids could socialize with us and each other, have a hot dog and a bag of chips, and go home happy. At first we planned to have short classes in the morning to accommodate the schedule swing, but then we decided to use that time for the writing sample instead of disrupting instruction again later in the month.

Earlier in the week, the weather looked a little iffy, and our plan for rain was to postpone and reschedule, expanding the short classes to full ones. By the time we switched to the writing sample activity, the weather forecast looked good, so we didn't have a rain contingency. Sure enough, "an area of low pressure stalled just off the coast," and yesterday dawned dreary and damp. At 7:30 am, I was urgently conferring in the hallway with not just my team teachers, but the leader of the other sixth grade team, too.

The picnic was out; even if the downpour stopped, the grounds would be drenched. What to do? I was in favor of going to a regular schedule, but there were enough teachers who objected, on the grounds that they weren't prepared to teach, to make that unfeasible. In the end, we did the writing sample, and we used the block of time after lunch to do some homeroom activities, things we would have done anyway. It was fine, but not ideal.

As team leader, I should have asked everyone to be prepared to teach in the event of rain. It was my mistake not to do that. I was a little surprised, though, at the whole notion of feeling unprepared to teach. Later that afternoon, when we were planning for next week over the phone, the teacher friend with whom I collaborate expressed some skepticism, as well, until we laughingly agreed that the two of us are probably never really ready to teach. It's impossible in a student-centered, workshop-organized language arts class to know exactly what will happen; you have to think on your feet.

"Hey," I said, "if you're never ready, then you're always ready, right?"

Rrriiiiight