literacy Archives - Samantha Mosher

Student Voice and SRSD

I use SRSD (Self-Regulated Strategy Development) as my primary way of teaching writing to my students. There are a lot of reasons why I love it. It’s research validated. It connects easily to whatever type of writing instruction is happening in their classrooms–workshop models, process writing, etc.–so the skills they learn are easily transferred. It provides just the right amount of structure for students who need it, while not being constricting for students who don’t (check out the article in AMLE Magazine by Pooja Patel & Leslie Laud for more info). The best part, though, is that it’s flexible. We’ve been working on close reading for a while and I’ve asked students, as part of Sunday Cummins‘s model of close reading, to follow up their reading with a written response. Of course, I used the familiar TIDE organizer that we’ve been using all year, but the results weren’t what I had hoped.

We had done everything right. We had discussed the strategy. I worked with them to develop their background knowledge, and made connections between our work with close reading and our work with using TIDE to help us plan and organize paragraphs. We set goals. I modeled, both by looking for the parts of the paragraph in a model piece of writing and by using the active board to model writing a response. I modeled my own positive self-talk as I wrote. And I provided supports and scaffolds. Their writing still didn’t make the connections and inferences I wanted them to make, so I decided to turn it over to them. And they took me somewhere really amazing.

I asked them to make a poster that would teach someone else about how to write about close reading, and to use a metaphor to do it (an idea I got from Pete Hall at the BTCFS workshop). Writing about close reading, they said, was like an iceberg. Above the water, they said, is the main idea, supported by the “pasta words” (what Cummins calls the important details). Under the water, they told me, was the synthesis–the conclusions they draw that can’t be found directly in the text. After they made their iceberg, they added images to help them. A boat called the S.S. Annotation to remind them to use what they had written on the text to help them identify the pasta words and to remind them to use their “I wonder…” annotations to help them make connections and draw conclusions. They also added an airplane (with flaming jet engines, of course), where they wrote what makes a good main idea. They added post-its to explain all of the parts, and then explained their new strategy to a colleague of mine from the ELL department who happened to be walking by the classroom.

The next class when we went to work on writing, it was a huge change. They had ownership of the type of writing I was asking them to do, and of the strategy I had asked them to employ. When we went through the modeling and practice, and the results were so much better than the first time. All because they took over defining the parts of the text themselves. They had the background knowledge, I just needed to find a way to empower them make the connections between the two topics that would help them take ownership of their writing.

They really came up with something great.

How do you empower your students to make connections and take ownership of their learning?

Leveraging 1:1 Laptops for Assistive Tech

Assistive tech is a huge topic. We can find all sorts of solutions for students: “no-tech”, low-tech, or high-tech, ranging from free to prohibitively expensive. The best assistive tech tools, though, are the ones that students can transition with and that will lead to independence. In special education and intervention, our goals are almost always transfer and independence. When we start leveraging the technology and resources that are already in a student’s possession, we can encourage that transfer. I’ve found a number of tools that have worked well for my students (generally students with mild to moderate LD) that are either built-in accessibility features or free apps or plug-ins. So far they’ve been working really well for us. These are a few of the tools we’ve been using for reading and writing. In a future post I’ll talk about some organizational tools and some other accessibility features and apps.

(Note: These are just things that are currently working in my classroom. I’m getting no compensation of any kind from any of these programs. I’m just sharing what’s working of my students and for me right now)

Assistive Tech for Reading

There are two different options we’ve been using for text-to-speech in order to assist students who have reading difficulties. One is a Chrome plug-in called SpeakIt, and the other is just the accessibility feature found in Acrobat Reader.

Speak It

SpeakIt is a Chrome extension that reads text on websites, including within Google Drive. It’s free and easy to use. Students can easily customize the reading voice, which includes options that are much more natural sounding and more fluid than the ones available through the accessibility features within Chrome. It is also available as an iOS app as well. Students have really enjoyed using this app to help them access more difficult texts on websites that have been assigned for class reading, when doing research online, and, I think the best application we’ve found, to have their written work read back to them in Google Docs. This is actually a use that was discovered by a student. We had been talking about how important it is to read your own writing. Realizing that he often missed his own mistakes, this student decided that he would use the extension to have his computer read his writing to him, and then used what he heard to correct commonly confused words and other spelling and usage errors. It was pretty amazing. The one limitation of this extension is that it doesn’t read PDFs that are embedded into websites (like those on our school’s LMS), so those need to be downloaded and read to the student using Adobe Reader.

Acrobat Reader

The other program students have been using, Acrobat Reader, has accessibility features that will read the text of a PDF document (as long as it hasn’t been uploaded using a scanner or camera to PDF app). Students can have an entire document read to them, or select particular sections the voice is definitely not as natural sounding as the voices in SpeakIt, but it works. The only issue I can see is with reading academic texts. For example, one of my students used the text-to-speech function to help him read a textbook entry about the beginnings of Islam. The program had more than a little difficulty with non-English words, but the 7th grader I was working with had enough background knowledge from class to figure out that the pronunciations weren’t correct. It’s not as good as using a program like Kurzweil or Read & Write Gold, but it’s free and a great way to test out if this type of assistive tech will be useful for a student.

Assistive Tech for Writing

My students generally have pretty good keyboarding skills, and we’ve done a lot of work on organization and planning this year, but they really struggle with editing their own work, particularly when it comes to commonly confused words. While text-to-speech is quite helpful for many of them, speech-to-text is a bit too much support. As a group, my students have been very excited by the Chrome extension, Ginger.

Ginger

Ginger is not your typical spell checker. It looks for commonly confused words (like homophones or words with very similar spellings), and even makes suggestions for comma usage and grammar. It is a Chrome extension and can also be downloaded as a keyboard app for Android and iOS, as well as desktop version that integrates with Word. Unfortunately for us, it’s only available for PC in that form. I’ve found it to work much better than the spell-check that is integrated into Chrome. It has the option to correct one word in the sentence, the entire sentence, or ignore the suggestions. AND I can tell Ginger that, yes, my last name (or other words that I use frequently that spell-checkers don’t recognize, like “metacognitive” or “multisyllabic”) is indeed spelled correctly. And it will remember. Which is not just amazing for me, but also for my students who are from around the world and often have names that aren’t recognized by spell-check (and, being middle schoolers, are often offended by this). I also like that it highlights possible errors in blue, rather than with a red underline, which seems to make my kids anxious (especially if they experience a lot of difficulty with spelling). It’s not perfect, but I’ve found its suggestions to be much better than most. It’s great for when we’re working on our digital portfolios in Weebly. What’s not great is that it doesn’t seem to work within Google Drive. Students can copy and paste their text into a Ginger window, but most of my students aren’t going to take that step (mostly because they’re worried that they’ll accidentally delete the entire thing). I would love it even more if we could integrate it with one of the word processing programs (Word or Docs) that we already use.

What programs to you use to assist your students with reading and writing?

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?

Close Reading for Intervention

Close reading guided practice — Guided practice with close reading on the interactive whiteboard

I mentioned in some earlier posts that this summer I did a workshop with Pooja Patel on integrating close reading strategies with writing from sources. One of the great things about doing presentations like this is the amount of research one does beforehand (especially when one has the opportunity to just say “I want to learn more about this. I’l do a presentation). I had dabbled in close reading, the way you do in a middle school English class, but mostly in large group settings, but hadn’t really approached it in a systematic way. In order to prep for the presentation, I delved further into the book Close Reading of Informational Texts by Sunday Cummins and into the article from Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, Close Reading as an Intervention for Struggling Middle School Students by Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey. Before reading these texts, I didn’t really see how close reading could benefit everyone. I had focused on it as a strategy for general education classes, rather than one that could have significant benefits for ELLs and students with LD. Now that I’m implementing it, my struggling readers have really taken to the strategy, and are beginning to synthesize what they read.

I started the year by slowly and intentionally introducing and then integrating the strategies that Dr. Cummins discusses in her book: accessing and applying prior knowledge of text structure and content vocabulary, setting a purpose for reading, self-monitoring for meaning, determining importance, and synthesizing. I’ve just introduced students to determining importance, and we’re working our way toward some explicit instruction in synthesis. We’re working on reading through our first short texts integrating these skills now. I thought they would be more resistant to repeated readings, but they have been enjoying reading about unusual animals and keep getting more out of the text each time they read.

Close Reading Skill: Questioning

After the quick overview of synthesis Dr. Cummins recommends, I began by teaching questioning as a way to support students’ self-monitoring skills. I decided to deviate from her sequence for a number of reasons, but most importantly, because self-monitoring was a skill that came up over and over again in my students’ IILPs (like IEPs, but for International Schools), and I noticed from my initial assessments that students experienced difficulty differentiating between explicit and implicit questions. After an introduction to QAR and a great deal of guided practice with asking, classifying and answering questions, students were beginning to use questioning to help them monitor their own comprehension. A few even transferred (!) the strategy to classes outside of learning support.

Close Reading Skill: Previewing

Using TELL to preview a text before close reading — Anchor chart for the TELL strategy (Cummins, 2013)

We used the strategy TELL (Cummins, 2013) to help students tap into their knowledge of text structure and to help set a purpose for reading. Both skills were taught explicitly in separate lessons. I’ve used previewing strategies before and have spent time with struggling students teaching text structures, but teaching it with the goal of close reading in mind opened up the strategies in ways I hadn’t considered. Students aren’t just using text features and structures as a guide to help them build schema and organize facts from the informational text, they’re actually starting to have conversations about why authors would choose specific text features or formats. For example, in a text by Nic Bishop that we read, they pointed out that it seemed like a journal because there were dates in the subheadings. As we read, they even asked a really insightful question: “Why does the author use I instead of writing it like a ‘normal book’?” After some discussion they decided that the author wanted to let us know that he had really experienced these things, and that maybe he had wanted to draw the reader in and make him or her more curious about animals.

Students are also better able to set purposes for reading after previewing, which helps them to decide what is important. They made their predication about what the text would be about individually and then we discussed the different predications and came up with one that worked for all of us (see below). Using this, we were able to set a purpose for reading as a group.

Close Reading Strategy: Determining Importance

Our most recent lesson focused on determining importance. I love Dr. Cummins’ introductory lesson about separating the “pasta” words from the “water” words. It actually worked quite well with my students. Using our purpose as a jumping off point, I modeled how to pick out the important information (see above). Today, students worked on finding it independently and we shared our annotations on the interactive whiteboard and made our first try at composing a summary. Again, I found it really interesting the things that showed up in their summaries. We’ve worked on summarizing before, but this is the first time that they’ve written in response to a text that contains more synthesis than summary. Their description of the glass frog was peppered with statements like “We wonder how it eats moths and flies if it is only the size of a bean,” and “We think it developed this adaptation to hide from predators.” Granted, this was a scaffolded, guided task, but I’m seeing changes in the way they look at texts.

Have you used close reading with your classes? What advice would you have for next steps?