January 2015 - Samantha Mosher

The Power of Our Words

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we, as teachers, talk about students amongst ourselves. Quick conversations in the hall, longer ones in the staff room or in a classroom. In full-fledged meetings with our colleagues. The more I think about it, the stronger my feeling that not only does what we say matter, but how we say it matters even more.

The words we use have power. They can color the perception that we, or others we are talking to, have about the student.

And, in the moment we’re having a conversation, we have a choice. And it’s a choice we need to make every time we have a conversation about a student.

We can refer to a student who just plagiarized an assignment as “slick” and ask for him to have 1:1 supervision during the next assessment.

Or we can say we’re worried that a 6th grader felt the need to cheat and ask what’s going on with him. We can ask our colleagues. And we can ask the student.

We can label a student as lazy.

Or we can ask why she’s choosing to do the minimum work required. Are her skills low? Does the assignment not interest her? Is she afraid of failing or putting herself out there?

We can call a student emotional.

Or we can remember that the student is 12, and the mess of hormones that flow through a 12 year old’s body and all the changes those hormones cause makes it hard to regulate emotions. Then we can look for ways to embed social-emotional learning into our curriculum.

We can call a student a know-it-all.

Or we can talk to colleagues about ways to channel that student’s enthusiasm into something that will give them more positive responses from teachers and peers and help make the student a part of the classroom community.

All of that said, I’m by no means innocent of this. We all get frustrated and we’ve probably all at one point or another labeled a student in a way we wish we hadn’t. We’ve complained about a student’s behaviors and attitudes, rather than looking for the best way to help him or her. As teachers, we need to make an effort to shift our mindsets from deficit-focused to solutions-focused. And for those of us who are actively working on that, we need the courage and the grace to offer other perspectives when our colleagues talk about students in ways that may make if difficult to find a way for that student to be successful.

How do you talk to teachers who may be discussing students in ways that you’re uncomfortable with?

Reading Voice vs Thinking Voice

I’ve been working a lot with my 6th graders on close reading for the past few months. We’ve been previewing, reading, annotating, rereading, synthesizing. Or, at least trying. Some of my students took to the approach right away, surprising me with how much they really got that we reread to understand more deeply and annotate to document our thinking or point out specific ideas. But others just thought it was a waste of their time. For these kids, reading wasn’t necessarily about making meaning, it was about getting things done.

Getting to the end.

Getting the questions answered.

Getting on to the next thing.

Getting it all done, so I can do something better.

This is a mindset that reading teachers struggle to change. There are definitely things that help–increasing independent reading time, helping students to choose reading material that they’ll really love, high-interest texts for instruction, authentic tasks–but when you’ve tried all of those and your students who just run a little too fast and are speeding their way through things, having a discussion about reading voice vs thinking voice can be very helpful.

I first encountered the idea of explicitly teaching about reading voice vs thinking voice, was when I read Cris Tovani’s book I Read It But I Don’t Get It very early in my career (probably my first year). This book is an amazing resource for anyone who teaches striving readings in middle or high school. In grad school, we always talked about self-monitoring and using fix-up strategies as one of the keys to strong reading comprehension, but the tools I left with were pretty limited (I am a bit worried this is still the case now that I’m teaching the class, but I’m working on it!). Really, I had one. It was called “The Critter” and it came from one of the course texts from my first semester practicum. It involved drawing an odd looking creature that the students would use to personify their thinking voices. I’m sure you can imagine how this strategy goes over with most middle schoolers. I’ve used and modified Cris Tovani’s lesson over and over again and I’ve had a lot of success with it.

The biggest thing that hooks kids is that I talk about a strategy that I really do use in real life. I can explain, quite vividly, how it works for me. When I’m reading I know that I’m not paying attention if the only thing I hear is my Reading Voice–the words going by in my head with no questions or connections popping up, I’m not engaged in reading and I’m not comprehending. But, if I’m making too many connections… You know how that goes: one connection leads to another and soon I’m thinking about what I’m going to eat for dinner later, or that one time I went to the beach in North Carolina…I’m not reading at all anymore. Well, my eyes are moving along the page, but the only voice I hear is my thinking voice. But, when my reading voice and thinking voice work together, that’s when you’re a reader who is actively engaged in comprehending a text.

After discussing and modeling, I ask students to add post-its to the anchor chart with examples of their reading voices and thinking voices to the anchor chart using post-its. I prompt them to add more information after they’ve done a few sessions of independent reading. It’s amazing what they begin to notice. I’m hoping we can keep revisiting this strategy, especially for my students who would really rather that reading was over with as soon as possible.

How do you teach self-monitoring and other metacognitive skills when you teach reading?

Checking-in in the New Year

Skyview Atlanta — The second-best picture I took in Atlanta. Again, there’s a metaphor here. I’m sure of it.

At the beginning of the school year I set goals for myself as a teacher. Right now I’m asking my students to check in on their progress toward their goals in their digital portfolios and the teachers I coach to reevaluate the goals they set at the beginning of the year, so I’m checking in on my progress as well. I also have finally set a coaching goal for myself after attending Pete Hall’s Building Teachers’ Capacity for Success workshop through ASCD.

Improve my behavior management for my “challenging” class

This is hard to admit, but I haven’t done a great job following through with this one. I’ve done many of the things that I said I was going to do, but in the more short term. The problem is, I know exactly (or at least partially) why things I’m trying aren’t working. I’ve been so focused on finding strategies to manage behavior and making those strategies work, that I’m not focused enough on planning engaging lessons to meet my students’ needs. I’m not walking into class with no plan, but I’ve been so focused on anticipating behaviors and what strategies I would use to manage these behaviors, that the content and concepts in the lessons I’ve been planning have been, well, less than stellar. So when my strategies work, the activities I have planned aren’t enough to hold the students’ attention and keep them on that good track. It hurts to admit that I dropped the ball here, but it happens and I can fix it. For the remainder of the year I want to keep implementing the strategies that are working, but refocus my efforts on lesson planning so that my students can be successful.

Better integrate the technology I have available to me into my lessons, including finding more ways to leverage “regular” technology as assistive technology for my students.

Here I’ve done much better. I’ve implemented digital portfolios for my students and I’ve been slowly refining them so they become spring-boards for student self-reflection and learning. Yesterday a student exclaimed as he had realized that our work with SRSD and Close Reading had been just as much about improving his ability to manage and regulate his attention as they had been about his reading and writing skills after going through a variety of digital and paper artifacts showing his work. I also am now able to very easily share student work with a parent who has moved back to Denmark ahead of the rest of the family.

I’ve also curated a number of resources for students on my Schoology pages for my learning support classes, including videos and interactive games (usually created by others), as well as graphic organizers (usually created by me). What’s even better is that some students are seeking out and using these resources. I think my next step here is to add more content that I’ve created (or that my students have created) to these resource pages, using podcasting, screen capture, and other methods.

Finally, the coaching goal: Go into classrooms regularly (1-2 times per week) for either very quick (30-45 seconds) or brief (5-15 minute) visits and follow up on these visits with teachers.

Or actually doing what Pete Hall calls “Rounds” and “Walk Throughs”. This goal sounds simple, but it involves a lot: coordinating schedules, figuring out “look-fors”, etc. But the biggest reason I haven’t done this is that I haven’t felt comfortable. I wasn’t given a clear description of what I would be doing as a coach at the beginning of the year, nor was it explained to teachers, so I spent most of the first semester in meetings with teachers, talking and building relationships. Now that I feel like I have a job description (even if it’s self-created with the help of a workshop and a book) and have built up fairly good relationships with many teachers, it will, I hope, be easier. The short workshop I led on Tuesday afternoon about checking in and reevaluating goals from the beginning of the year will also provide context for my visits.

How are the goals you set for your own teaching at the beginning of the year going?