Lingering thoughts

I was going to call this post “Final thoughts” but then changed my mind, because I don’t like thinking of this (this culmination of many things) as final.  I’m caught up with a whole bunch of strange feelings at the moment, not really sure where to turn myself, my thoughts, and my energies.  The school year is done (for me, it was Friday), and our cohort’s three years together has come to a close.  And those two things bring a mix of emotions.  My first thoughts are to want to do NOTHING… to just sit and enjoy not having to do anything or be anywhere (which isn’t entirely true but much more so than in previous weeks), but I know that will get boring really quickly.  

Our cohort has been such a foundation, a support group in many ways, over these past three years – and, I must admit that it’s a little frightening letting that go.  I hope that we will continue with one another in some way because the support you all give, whether you realize it or not, is invaluable.  Before joining our cohort, I taught in an environment where I felt continually surrounded by many others who shared my beliefs about children, school, learning, and literacy.  When I transitioned to a new school environment where I felt I no longer had that, I had all of you – and have for the past three years.  So, letting go is feeling a little scary!  I’m not sure where my support group is going to be, or if it will just be in pieces in many different places.

As I watch all of your “We Believe” digital stories, I am struck by the similar voices and messages that are carried through each of ours.   We have shared so much together and built such understandings among us.  As I watch the videos, I realize our audience is not ourselves, but I also don’t think they’re just for politicians or those outside of education.  There are many teachers and school leaders who don’t necessarily share these beliefs…. and I’m beginning to feel more and more in the minority, which is very frustrating and disheartening.

I’ve had a rough couple of weeks at the end of the school year, really just questioning and feeling quite unsure of what many of my colleagues really believe about children, school, and learning (not any of you in the cohort!).  I want to remain positive and hopeful, but I’m struggling with how to do that at the moment.  I need to be surrounded by people and voices that build me up, inspire me, energize me, and give me hope.  So that’s what I’ll be seeking in the weeks and months to come.

I realize this post is a rather rambling one, so thanks for bearing with me if you made it this far.

Another article

I know that many of you get the NCTE Inbox email weekly, but I thought I’d post this article for those who may have missed it.  I know that many of us have talked about technology enhancing “old fashioned” reading and writing, not replacing it… and this article discusses kids’ views on that.

New Study: Kids Age 5-17 Believe Technology Will Supplement — Not Replace — Book Reading
A new report finds that 62% of kids surveyed (age 5-17) say they prefer to read books printed on paper rather than on a computer or a handheld device. The national survey also found that kids who go online to extend the reading experience are more likely to read books for fun every day.  CNN Money, June 11, 2008

Candidate positions on education

I received this email as part of a list I am on from VEA. (I’m not a member, but I signed up to get emails about issues.)  I thought you all would be interested in reading, if you won’t get to see the article (in Education Week) or don’t receive the emails.

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Candidates Are at Odds Over K-12 But McCain and Obama Both Back NCLB Goals

By Alyson Klein and David J. Hoff

The presumed November matchup produced by the long presidential-primary season that ended last week offers contrasting approaches to K-12 policy, along with some common ground on the basics of the No Child Left Behind Act. 

Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican nominee, and Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, who last week secured enough delegates to claim the Democratic nomination, both express support for the NCLB law’s goals and its use of testing to measure schools’ success.
But Sen. McCain would promote market forces as a way to spur school improvement, and would likely seek to freeze education spending as part of a review of the effectiveness of federal programs.

Sen. Obama, meanwhile, promises to search for new ways of assessing students and to invest significantly in efforts to improve teacher quality.

Although education wasn’t a prominent issue in the Democratic or Republican primaries, it could emerge more clearly in the general-election campaign, one political scientist said last week. He pointed particularly to the potential for a sharper focus on where the candidates stand on the requirements for testing and accountability under the NCLB law.

In the past two presidential elections, the Democratic and Republican nominees supported the idea that the efforts to improve schools should include regular assessment of student progress and measures to hold schools accountable for increases in student achievement, said Patrick J. McGuinn, an assistant professor of political science at Drew University in Madison, N.J., who has written extensively about the politics of the NCLB law.

“The country hasn’t had a great debate about the costs and benefits of test-driven accountability,” Mr. McGuinn said. “We’re ripe for it right now.”

Changes in Testing

On May 28, in his most extensive education speech of the primaries, Sen. Obama reaffirmed his support for the goals of the 6-year-old federal law, saying they were “the right ones.”

“More accountability is right,” he said at Mapleton Expeditionary School for the Arts in Thornton, Colo. “Higher standards are right.”

But, Sen. Obama added, the federal government must provide enough money and other assistance to help substandard schools turn around, and he advocated improving the assessments that are the cornerstone of the law’s accountability system.

“We also need to realize that we can meet high standards without forcing teachers and students to spend most of the year preparing for a single, high-stakes test,” he said.

During the primaries, Sen. Obama never criticized the NCLB law with the same ferocity as Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, his leading opponent for the nomination, or other Democrats candidates. Mr. Obama was not yet in the U.S. Senate when Congress passed the bipartisan measure in 2001 at the urging of President Bush.

‘Good Beginning’

Sen. McCain has said that he considers the NCLB law a “good beginning.”

He adds that the law needs to change to improve the way special education students and English-language learners are assessed. But he hasn’t suggested that he would change the way schools are held accountable for student performance under the law, which requires reading and mathematics tests in grades 3-8 and once during high school.

Sen. McCain has also said he would endorse federal programs that give parents broader school choice, such as vouchers for private schools, including religious schools.

Such initiatives are popular with Republican voters, but Sen. McCain’s strong support for the NCLB law isn’t widely endorsed by voters from either party, said one former Bush administration official.

Sen. McCain “is putting himself in a difficult situation by embracing NCLB so wholeheartedly,” said Michael J. Petrilli, the vice president of national policy and programs for the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, who served in the U.S. Department of Education during President Bush’s first term.

“Everybody has acknowledged that the law needs some reworking,” Mr. Petrilli said, “and he has created this huge opening for Senator Obama, who can now embrace the ‘mend it, don’t end it’ platform, which is going to sound like the common-sense platform.”

Union Action

Still, some important new supporters of Sen. Obama will likely be urging him to recommend significant changes to the law.

On June 4, the day after Sen. Obama said he had the delegates to secure the nomination, the National Education Association announced it would endorse him in the general election. The 3.2 million-member teachers’ union is one of the most vocal critics of the NCLB law’s emphasis on testing.

While the NEA waited until Sen. Obama had essentially locked up the nomination before making any endorsement, the 1.3 million-member American Federation of Teachers was an early supporter of Sen. Clinton and worked actively on her behalf.

Because neither national teachers’ union supported Sen. Obama during the primaries, he may have the opportunity to be a “different kind of Democrat,” said Joe Williams, the executive director of Democrats for Education Reform, a New York City-based political action committee that contributes money to Democratic candidates.

“He’s earned his independence so that he can really decide which of the unions’ positions he really wants to embrace and which ones he doesn’t,” Mr. Williams said. “The conventional wisdom is the time that you’ve got to pander to the unions is during the primary. He emerged victorious without [their help].”

This We Believe

Here is the digital story that Marianne, Amy, Susan, Bethany, and I created.  We do not want to keep it up on YouTube because many of our students are in the photos.  However, the version viewable on storycircles.org is not super.  The transitions get blurred, so photos that are not up for long are hard to see.  I changed the settings on YouTube to private and gave each of you (our class members) access via your email address.  You should have received an email inviting you to be my YouTube friend.   When you accept, you should be able to see our video on YouTube.

Here are the two links, and I sent you the storycircles.org password via email.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBcwg_q8ow0

http://storycircles.org/play.php?vid=150

Student digital story examples

Bethany and I are going to be working with two fourth grade classes this week to make digital stories (like a digital yearbook for each class).  We want to show the students examples, so they have an idea of what we are working towards.  Does anyone have examples of student-made digital stories that we could use as examples to show them?

Multiliterate

“Anstey (2002b) defines a multiliterate person as flexible and strategic and able to understand and use literacy and literate practices

• with a range of texts and technologies;
• in socially responsible ways;
• in a socially, linguistically, and culturally diverse world; and
• to fully participate in life as an active and informed citizen.”

I feel that this quote from p. 24 of Teaching and Learning Multiliteracies encompasses much of what we have learned, discussed, and shared over the past three years together as a cohort.  I feel that this definition is at the center of much of our learning and practice as literacy educators.  However, these definitions and descriptions of literacy and literate people are seldom recognized, acknowledged, or promoted by “the official curriculum”.  This saddens and frustrates me a great deal.  There is so much involved in being a literate person; yet, students today are most often only officially measured and recognized by a single test or score. (I am reminded here of Christy’s blog post about her multiliterate student and his DRA score.)  How is this right or fair or justified???

My questions again turn to… What can we do?  How do we encourage and support others to “teach beyond the test”?  How do we help influence the development and implementation of policies that make sense for students and their lives?  How do we make this definition of literacy a reality for all students in all schools?  These are daunting questions, and the challenges that lie ahead for us as literacy leaders are not small.

Multigenre

In Chapter 9 of Teaching the Neglected “R”, Tom Romano says: “As students move through school, they write fewer and fewer poems, metaphors, images, stories, and narratives.  Exposition becomes their sole writing diet: reports of various kinds, summaries, essay exams, traditional research papers.”

This was my experience as a student.  In fact, I don’t know if I ever got much practice in those other genres, other than forced, contrived, formulaic writing.  I never really got to develop an identity as a writer or feel what it was like to be a writer.  Until maybe college… but then it was all “exposition” writing, as Romano has called it.

The students in the elementary schools where I have worked (as a reading specialist, classroom teacher, and student teacher before that) are fortunate to developing identities as writers in multiple genres.  The ARE writers and they feel like real writers.  I am wondering if this trails off somewhere in middle school or high school… or if “the official curriculum” and/or teachers still encourage students to write in multiple genres at those levels of school, in FCPS or other places.  (I also know that while “writing workshop” is “the official curriculum” for FCPS elementary schools not all classrooms in all FCPS schools necessarily employ a workshop approach…)

I also wondering what the multigenre approach that Romano describes would look like in an elementary classroom, particularly a primary classroom, where students are beginning to or still learning about different genres of writing.  Do students need to have an understanding of individual genres (whether basic or sophisticated) before they can approach a multigenre project?  Or is it possible to teach multiple genres at once to students who don’t know the genres individually?  Thoughts?  Examples? 

Voicethread

I was trying to figure out Voicethread in preparation with an attempt to share with some first grade teachers tomorrow… but I am getting an error message when I try to load photos on ed.voicethread.com.  When I try to load pictures from my files on my laptop it tells me: “You are trying to load non-education content on ed.voicethread.com, which is not permitted.”

Does anyone have any idea why this is happenening?  What am I not doing right?

Conferring challenges

I agree with the challenges that many classmates have already posted on their own blogs.  Since my response is not to one particular person but to everyone, really, I thought I’d just post my own.  I agree that TIME is a huge challenge… time to confer with all students and time within an individual conference.  I think that my greatest challenge is getting into the heart of the conference quickly enough to make the conference efficient (teaching-wise and time-wise).  It takes much practice and establishing of routines with students to get to this point.  If we want students to take an active role in writing conferences, we have to build this over time.  I don’t think I get to the important stuff quickly enough, considering the number of students in a class and wanting to get to them all.

My conferring mentors

Yesterday, while I was reflecting on the readings for the week and writing about them here, I was thinking about my prior knowledge and mentors on the topic of conferring.  I think that the authors/texts that have influenced my knowledge and practice of conferring the most are Lucy Calkins and Carl Anderson.  I highly recommend both these books, if you have not yet had the opportunity to read them: One to One: The Art of Conferring with Young Writers by Lucy Calkins and How’s It Going? by Carl Anderson.  I wanted to refer to these books as I was reflecting on Murray over the weekend, but they were at school.  So, this morning, I took a peek to refresh my memory of exactly what these authors say, the literature base on which my knowledge and teaching of conferring is primarily built.

In One to One, Calkins reiterates what she’s written in other places.  Here is the “conference architecture” she promotes:

• Research: Observe and interview to understand what the child is trying to do as a writer.  Probe to glean more about the child’s intentions.  … Name what the child has already done as a writer and remind the child to do this in future writing.
• Decide: Weigh whether you want to accept or alter the child’s current plans and processes.  Decide what you want to teach and how you want to teach it.
• Teach: Help the child get started doing what you hope he or she will do.  Intervene to lift the level of what the child is doing. (guided practice, demonstration, explicitly telling and showing an example, or inquiry)
• Link: Name what the child has done as a writer and remind the child to do this often in the future.

She also suggests there are different types of conferences: content conferences, expectation conferences, process and goals conferences.

While the underlying purpose and method of the conference as a teaching tool seem to be shared, I think there are some distinctions between what Calkins suggests and what Murray said in the chapter we read this week.

In How’s It Going?, Carl Anderson actually quotes some of what we read from Murray, referring to conferences as conversations… which I think all three of these authors agree upon.  Anderson suggests:

• Conferences have a point to them.
• Conferences have a predictable structure.
• In conferences, we pursue lines of thinking with students.
• Teachers and students have conversational roles in conference.
• In conferences, we show students we care about them.

I wanted to attach a scanned image of the pages where he describes the roles of teachers and students in conferences, but I can’t figure out how to do that here.  Any suggestions of how I could post that document here?

So, I am trying to merge and negotiate what these authors say, who have been my primary mentors in the art of conferring, with what we’ve read this week.