Purposeful Ramblings Through My Mind

I had a parent ask me if her daughter could come in for some extra help after school.

Um, no, and here's why.

First, she doesn't need extra help - she needs encouragement to use her own judgement on her work to improve it. She knows what she needs to do, and doesn't do it because she's relying on me to point it out to her. This particular kid needs more independence, not more dependence.

Second, and more to the point, is the concept of "extra" help.

How much help is extra? Where do I draw the line between the help I'm required to offer my students, and the help that is extra? Clearly, some kids will "get it" quickly and not need very much help at all. If I expect them to be in that group and it turns out they're not, is the help I offer them extra? How about a kid who usually has trouble? Is it "extra" help when she gets more of my attention than the kid who usually gets it right off the bat?

The idea of extra help is rooted in a concept of education that is out-dated. It's a view of children as passive receptacles, whose job is to soak up learning that the teacher tells them they need. If they're not soaking it up, it's their own fault. They need to seek out extra help to soak up what everyone else is soaking up. This is the view of education that gives us sentences like, "I taught it - it's not my fault if they didn't learn it!"

If they didn't learn it, then how well did you teach it?

My job is to teach, which means my job is to get kids to learn. If they aren't learning, part of my job is to identify and overcome the roadblocks to learning. Their responsibility is to be honest with me about what they can do and participate to the best of their ability in their learning. Asking for help during the school day is part of that - as is me offering suggestions as they're learning. That's not extra. It's integral.

So what does it look like when I'm doing my job? First, there's a pre-assessment. Do they already know the skill I'm setting out to teach? What will it look like if they already know it? For that matter, what is the skill I'm setting out to teach? I need to have it laid out and so do they, so they can start to develop the metacognitive awareness of when they've learned it. So, we do a pre-assessment, and I figure out some loose groups - who gets it completely; who gets it sort-of and is going to need enrichment, or to prove that they can do it on a higher level of material; who can see what the concept is but doesn't know how to do it; and who can't even formulate the questions to figure out what's going on. With any luck, most of my kids will fall in the last two groups, with four or five in the second group.

Since the material I'm teaching is about strategies for comprehending and communicating, it's rare for a student in my class to truly get it right off the bat. Pretty much all of them can benefit from practising the skill on reading materials that are at their level, because the questions I'm asking are the same big questions they're going to get in every class right up through university. What is the main idea? What is the author's message or theme? What does the author want us to think and feel about the topic/characters/themes? What are the clues to that? What techniques has the author used to get us to think or feel these things? How effective was the author at communicating their message? What can I learn from the author's techniques, which I can then apply to my own writing/media creations? Even gifted students can apply these same techniques and become better readers, writers, and thinkers, by using them - on material that interests them and is closer to their level.

So, I have the pre-assessment in hand, and I know where my kids fall on the rubric related to this specific skill set. I have tentative groups. I also have a specific goal for each kid. Not every kid is going to get it at the end of the unit. That's unrealistic. But my goal is for 75-80% to get it, and for every kid to make progress in at least a couple of the sub-skills involved. They can't articulate the author's message? I'll concentrate on getting them to pick out the main idea and some supporting details, because that's an important background skill for evaluating, and it can be taught as part of my regular lessons.

Now I design my whole-class lessons, which introduce the topic and provide an example. I do a read-aloud, I think aloud as I'm reading, and I write down my thoughts on chart paper. I focus on one or two of the questions for the unit - at the moment, I'm focusing on, "What does the author want us to think or feel about the topic? How do we know?" I pick a reading selection that will be interesting to everyone, even though the reading level will be too easy for some and too hard for a few others. When we've done one or two of these whole-class lessons, I do another small assessment. This time, I get the kids to talk with their peers about the answers to the questions, then I get them to write their answers. At this point, I solidify the groups. There are usually a couple who have moved and don't need much more direct instruction, and the lowest group should by now have a way to frame their questions.

Now I assign practice work to the kids who are ready for it, according to their reading level, and the kids who need more direct instruction come to see me for guided reading. Usually there are two levels of this - those who only need a bit of help to be ready for independent practice, and those who are barely able to grasp the meaning of the question. I take the first group first, while assigning different (busy) work to the lowest group. When I work with the lowest group, it's intensely. The other kids have probably finished their independent practice at this point and are doing independent reading, or the assignments related to independent reading. I work with the lowest group on a subset of the skill in question - probably main idea and supporting detail. This process generally takes a couple of days.

Now I do another whole-class lesson, this one involving a lot more student participation. I want the ones who have got it to practise in a way that lets the lower-functioning kids listen to their thinking and see what they're doing. This whole-class lesson will usually involve mixed groups at some point, where I send kids off to answer questions on chart paper in groups that include a few people from each of my levelled groups. I get the groups to present their findings; other groups are responsible for coming up with a summary sentence of each group's presentation. The goal of all this talking is three-fold. First, it helps the kids themselves to articulate what they are starting to understand, and it supports the writing they'll eventually be doing about this topic. Second, it provides language for the kids who have trouble articulating it - a hook for their understanding and a vocabulary base for them to talk about it. (This is the point where the Word Wall is updated with vocabulary the kids decide is important to this topic.) Third, it allows for several levels of accountable talk - group talk, paired talk, and presentation-talk - which allows for the use of different levels of language, practice in various group-work skills, and practice in presentation skills and listening skills. This is where my oral communication marks come from, most of the time.

Now we do another assessment, a brief one. By this point, most of the kids who are ready to really get it, are getting it. I give them one more practice assignment for consolidation purposes, and then they have to demonstrate their learning.

The lowest group probably hasn't gotten to the point where they get it yet, but hopefully they can now find the main idea when they look for it and point out some supporting details. I will usually try to get them to begin to practise the skill everyone else has been working on, so that it won't be brand-new to them when they see it the following year.

Demonstrating learning takes several different forms. I usually break up the "understanding" part from the "creating" part, because being able to create using these concepts is a higher level thinking skill than being able to explain the same concept. So there will be a small task where I find out if they get it, and a bigger task that ties everything together. This stage generally takes half an hour a day for a week or two. This is also where I do writing conferences, so I can address any small misconceptions or issues with writing form or style that crop up. I strive to see every kid for at least two writing conferences. Usually, I see every kid at least once and about half of them twice.

The only part of this where I might conceivably feel the need to offer what most parents think of as "extra help" is right at the end, if I don't have time for all the writing conferences I want to do. (See previous post about smaller class sizes - 27 is just too many.) For the rest of it? The scaffolding of learning, the gradual release of responsibility to the kids, the pointers on what to do and how to improve their answers, are built so carefully into each step that 80% of kids won't need any mroe help with the concepts - only with the execution. The remaining twenty percent are probably being pulled by the spec. ed. teacher a few times near the end so that we can get a final product out of them, and they're getting a bunch of guided practice time directly with me. If they're still not getting it at the end, the reason probably has more to do with outside factors than with my teaching - which means extra help might not help them, anyway, at least not right now.

Oh, as for keeping them busy? I've got another smaller topic, text features, coming up the middle between the Big Idea we're just finishing - inference - and the one we're just starting - Evaluating. And of course, it's all tied in even there - how does the author use X text feature to make you think or feel something in particular? Everything is tied together.

Traditional teaching decides what the kids need to know, teaches it, and then evaluates it. It skips the practice steps and scaffolding that are the heart of my program. In a traditional model, yes, extra help is essential - because there was so little help built into the lessons. The smart kids are the ones who play the education game well enough to produce good work the first time they're asked for it, but they never get the chance to go deeper into their topic or Big Idea because they're focused on the fact that they're going to be marked on whatever they produce. My kids know which parts of their lessons are practice and which parts are evaluation, and they know that if they do poorly on the evaluation, I'm going to give them another opportunity to get it right and more teaching first, so there's little stress and absolutely no incentive to cheat.

In the end, I get kids who can talk intelligently about the author's message, techniques, use of text features, attempts to provoke an emotional response, and effectiveness. I was an advanced reader - but no teacher ever taught me that until grade eleven, and even then it was an accident.

x-posted to ontario_teacher.

I've been racking my brains trying to figure out how to do a French program I can live with, without exponentially increasing my planning time or creating too much noise for the environment with which I'm stuck. I think I've found a way.

For those who are unfamiliar with the details, my principal decided last spring to give up the two portables at my school. She was not asked to do so - it was her idea. Our school is open-concept, consisting of two large rooms, called pods, that have classroom areas in each quadrant. Separating these from each other are thin partitions that go all the way from floor to ceiling but do not block off the entire space - there are areas at each end where the classes can see each other, the soundproofing is non-existent, and to get out of the two back quads requires students to walk within sight of the kids in my room. It's a distracting set-up for any subject, but in subjects where noise is a prerequisite - like French and Music, both of which I teach - it's pure hell. The two portables were designed to give enclosed space for the use of whichever class needed them. One had desks and chairs and was set up for French, the other had a carpet and a piano and was set up for music or drama. I used them both at least a quarter of my total classroom time - I like teaching in ways that make for noise, and the kids like learning that way. But with the portables gone, I've had to start thinking about how to do my French program without the portables.

Now, I knew that if I had to, I could simply go to the book room, pick out a pre-fabricated unit about families, or food, or clothing, or some such, and do a half-decent job of teaching French just like any other subject - lists of vocabulary, spelling tests, contrived mini-dialogues, little cartoons with sentences that serve as reading material for those with almost no vocabulary - that kind of thing. I hate those units, for several reasons. The first is that they take a fair amount of preparation. They require having CDs, photocopies, booklets, little listening sheets, and a host of other materials, most of which are included in the bought unit but which must be assembled before each class. I prefer to work more simply than that. The second reason is that they don't work. Kids need to hear words and phrases in contexts that are meaningful to them, and they need to hear, see, use those words and phrases in that context over and over and over again in order to acquire them - that is, about thirty times to really get it, for an average student, and about fifty times for a lot of kids. The units don't allow for enough repetition, they don't present enough context or basic sentences, and they aren't very good at giving reasons why kids should put those words into what few sentences they present as possibilities. In short, it's taught with the same methods used for science vocabulary lessons, and while that might work for science in English (doubtful - I don't teach it that way in English, either) it sure as hell doesn't work in a second language.

When I had an enclosed classroom, I achieved this with stories and plays. We would spend the first ten minutes of class on vocabulary practice - calendar, numbers, prepositions of place, and other things that are easy to learn by rote and take very little time. It's amazing how even the kids who have ants in their pants can manage to focus on a lesson that teaches over, under, up, down, beside, etc, by making the kids move over, under, up, down, and beside their desks. :) Then we moved into one of three kinds of activities. Either we were working on a play, or we were working on a storybook, or we were learning new vocabulary that would lead to one or the other. Sometimes I'd throw in a song or game to keep them on their toes, and if the week went well, I always left Friday to be games day. Most of the time, it took months for them to notice that all the games we played were teaching them to ask questions in whole sentences and use a bunch of vocabulary words until they didn't have to think about them.

To start with, I would choose a play with a story they knew. There was the Three Little Pigs, or Goldilocks and the Three Bears, or the Little Red Hen. I would go to the library and get a picture book of that story, and I'd tell them the story using the English picture book and the words from the French play. I'd act it out, and I'd use hand gestures for most of the big lines. (Their favourite is always, "Tu n'entres pas, Monsieur le Loup! Je ne suis pas fou!" The last word is accompanied by one finger circling in the area of the temple, and rolled eyes. I've never yet had to translate it.) Over the next few days, I'd tell the story several more times, getting kids to act out the lines they knew, getting the rest of the class to chime in whenever possible, and generally getting them comfortable with it. When I was sure they knew most of the play, I'd divide them into groups and let them begin rehearsals, always going over the entire play once per day so they could hear it and correct their pronunciation. (This was the really noisy part - twenty-five kids divided into five groups in one classroom, all rehearsing the same play, is not a quiet activity.) Periodically, we'd break up rehearsing for a day or so to do some written activities or draw some pictures. The rehearsal phase generally lasted about two weeks, and then they'd present their plays, first to the class for marks, and then to another class in the school. If I didn't think they'd give that one their best effort, I'd tell them that one counted for marks, too.

The story activities were much simpler. I have a set of photocopiable booklets with a simple sentence at the bottom of the page and space for the kids to do a picture above it. We would memorize the booklets by reading them all the time, the kids would draw the pictures to go along with the sentences, and they'd be marked on their understanding and on their pronunciation and effort in the drawings.

Well, I'm going to combine the two activities. I have three weeks, and I have had those plays memorized - all three of them - for several years now. A brief memory session should have me recalling them without difficulty. I'll make up booklets with the lines from the play, and I'll have most of the kids working on their booklets while one group rehearses. I'll let two groups each get in fifteen-minute rehearsals each day, so each group should get two rehearsals per week. Meanwhile, the other kids will do their illustrations. They'll be left with a booklet I can "mark" - though the booklet is almost a throwaway mark compared to the performance, their read-alouds, and the questions for understanding - and they'll still get to do the play. One group rehearsing at a time shouldn't put unbearable strain on the noise level, and the whole system will run itself, almost, after I set it up and teach the story. I'll do my well-rehearsed song-and-dance routine every day for two weeks, then have two weeks of managing their song-and-dance routines, and then go on to a week-long interim unit (clothing, probably - it's easy and fun, and works well with "I spy.") Then I'll do the whole thing again with a different play.

All of which means I need to get cracking and make the prototype booklets before I go back to work. If that's done, the actual prep per lesson will involve writing down which group is rehearsing on which day, and what illustration the class should be at by the end of each week. That's about ten minutes of prep per week, and that is pretty much ideal for an effective unit.

Want to know if it's effective? A teacher i worked with at my last school was teaching grade seven there last year, and she had the kids who had been in my first grade four class, where I first taught the Three Little Pigs.

In the first week of class, five of them got up and spontaneously performed the play for their new teacher, almost word-perfect. They hadn't seen or heard it in two and a half years, and they weren't all doing the parts that they'd done with me.