What Do I Teach Readers Tomorrow? Nonfiction, Grades 3-8

Your Moment-to-Moment Decision-Making Guide

Gravity Goldberg, Renee Houser

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781506351216
• eBook ISBN: 9781506376363
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

"Well, that was a great minilesson—now what?"

For every teacher who has uttered those words, this book is for you. In What Do I Teach Readers Tomorrow? Nonfiction, educators Gravity Goldberg and Renee Houser take the guesswork out of determining students' needs with a moment-to-moment guide focused on the decisions that make the biggest impact on readers' skill development. With the authors' guidance, you put their next-step resources into action, including:

• Tips for what to look for and listen for in reading notebook entries and conversations about books
• Reproducible Clipboard Notes pages that help you decide whether to reinforce a current type of thinking, teach a new type of thinking, or apply a current type of thinking to a new text
• More than 30 lessons on synthesizing information and understanding perspectives, writing about reading, organizing thinking, and more
• Reading notebook entries and sample classroom conversations to use as benchmarks 
• Strategies for deepening the three most prevalent types of thinking students do when synthesizing: Right-Now Thinking (on the page), Over-Time Thinking (across a picture book, a chapter, or longer text), or Refining Thinking (nuanced connections across text and life concepts)
• Strategies for deepening the three most useful types of thinking—feelings, frames, and opinions—when considering perspectives
• Online video clips of Renee and Gravity teaching, conferring, and "thin slicing" what nonfiction readers need next

With What Do I Teach Readers Tomorrow? Nonfiction, you learn to trust your instincts and trust your students to provide you with information about the next steps that make the most sense for them. Teaching students to engage with and understand nonfiction becomes personal, purposeful, and a homegrown process that you can replicate from year to year and student to student.

"Goldberg and Houser – both former staff developers at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project – have perfectly combined theory and practice to help teachers put students first in their decision-making process. Best of all, they've provided the tools necessary to assist teachers in making those decisions become a reality right away."
— Reviewed by Pam Hamilton for MiddleWeb

1 Each Classroom Moment is an Instructional Decision

© Andrew Levine

“The power of knowing, in that first two seconds, is not a gift given magically to a fortunate few. It is an ability that we can all cultivate for ourselves.”

(Malcolm Gladwell)

Maria paused in the front of the classroom and observed her students reading. Each student held a nonfiction book and was opening the pages and beginning to read. Some students had sticky notes out and were marking places, some students were holding photographs up close and looking at the tiny details, and some were scanning the table of contents and thinking about where to start reading. As in most classrooms, some of Maria’s students were on grade level, many were a few levels behind, and a handful of students were well above or well below grade-level expectations. Students were studying snakes, sharks, famous people, life in Colonial times, weather patterns, and a host of other topics. While all of these students made choices about what and how to read, Maria took about ten seconds to scan her classroom, and then she stood up and began making decisions about what to teach each student next. There was no script or magic manual that told Maria which students to focus on in her daily small group work and conferences or what to teach them next. In each moment, Maria paused very briefly, took in the information she was gathering about her students, and made an intentional decision.

Like you, Maria is a teacher, making literally hundreds of important decisions every day, flowing from mind into action, fast and fluid as quicksilver. And if you are reading this book, we can probably infer you are wondering, “Am I making the right decisions?”

Malcolm Gladwell wrote the following description about improvisation in his best-selling book Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking, but when we read it, we were writing about being a teacher: “It involves people making very sophisticated decisions on the spur of the moment, without the benefit of any kind of script or plot. That’s what makes it so compelling and—to be frank—terrifying” (Gladwell, 2005, p. 113). While Gladwell popularized the term, thin-slicing was first cited in 1993 by Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, so it’s a concept with some legs.

As teachers, we are asked to make sophisticated decisions in every moment of the day. Larry Ferlazzo (2014) cited researchers Hilda Borko and Richard Shavelson’s (1990) findings that teachers make 0.7 decisions per minute during interactive teaching. Other research estimates as many as 2,000 decisions a day, a great number of them unplanned exchanges with students. The upshot for readers? We wrote this book because we want you to make those intuitive, improvisational exchanges count, and rooted in a foundation of what you think most supports readers. First, let’s turn to what Gladwell found in his research about these moment-to-moment choices and what we as teachers can learn from improvisers in the various fields he studied. We’ll learn more about how Maria was able to make such quick and powerful decisions about each of her students.

Acting without a Script: Embracing Our Role as Improvisers

Teaching isn’t compared to Second City comedy very often, but think about it—it’s actually very similar. Improv comedy shows such as Whose Line Is It Anyway? on TV and numerous other live performances involve a group of actors working together without a script. There are no lines to memorize or stage directions to get your cues. It works like this: The first actor says a line, and then another actor has to decide who will go next and what to do and say. Since the parts are not preplanned, the actor has to react in the moment to what was just said and done, and help build the scene from there. Likewise, a student asks the teacher, “What does this word mean?” and she must decide what to say right there and then. Comedians are not the only improvisers, though; so are athletes. Many professions rely on a degree of improvisation: emergency room surgeons deciding what and how to treat a patient; fine artists, who are not given directions for how to create their pieces of art; and basketball players, who make split-second decisions. According to an article in Slate magazine, “Improvisational comedy workshops have become a staple at business schools, and in the corporate world in general,” and entrepreneurs are calling improvisation a “must have” skill (Stevenson, 2014). As teachers, we are improvisers who act without a script, based on our moment-to-moment ideas about our students. We know you opened this book hungry to learn whether there is a good order to teach nonfiction structures and features, or how to plan the next day’s lesson based on today’s—but hang in there with this side-door entrance of ours, because it’s a powerful way to rethink your teaching self so that you can more easily redirect your nonfiction teaching.

As teachers, we improvise based on our moment-to-moment ideas about our students.

© Daryl Getman, DAG Photography

How Spontaneity Is Born

What Gladwell found in his research about what makes improvisers so successful has to do with breaking down some of our common beliefs about our decision-making practices. One of his claims is that spontaneity is not random, like many of us believe, but instead involves training, rules, and rehearsal. Those basketball players who look so fluid and spontaneous on the court can only do so because “everyone first engages in hours of highly repetitive and structured practice—perfecting their shooting, dribbling, and passing and running of plays over and over again” (Gladwell, 2005, p. 114). Jazz musicians share similar experiences about their process. While the actual performance is improvised, it only works when each musician has first spent time learning to play well, keep a consistent cadence, and listen attentively to others. Then the group of musicians can learn to predict and quickly react to what each other will play and create an entertaining musical experience. One foundation for improv seems to be time spent practicing so you can make the rapid decisions in the moment. When Maria was able to walk over to a student, sit down, and decide what to teach next, she made it look easy, but it was based on countless hours of looking at student work, studying her own reading practices, and listening closely to what and how students discussed their books.

Another element of becoming a successful improviser is to know the “rules” of your field. In improv comedy, there is one main rule—always say “yes” and follow the lead of the person who came before you. In teaching students to read nonfiction, we have some rules or tenets we suggest you use when you are making instructional decisions, too; for example, only teach one skill at a time so students are not overwhelmed and have time to focus.

What all of these improvisers have in common is a focus on answering the question, “What next?” without the luxury of time to sit back and ponder the answer. “What chord should I play next?” “What move should I use to get around the opposing team’s player next?” “What skill should I teach this reader next?” Luckily, we don’t necessarily need as much time as we think we do when making our decisions.

How “Thin-Slicing” Helps Us Make Decisions

As we said, one of the most memorable parts of Gladwell’s book Blink (2005) is the concept of thin-slicing, which “refers to the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on a very narrow slice of experience” (p. 23). Thin-slicing entails getting a very small amount of information and being able to use it to make a sound judgment and decision. This stems from what cognitive psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer calls being “fast and frugal” with our decision making. The part of our brains that can use small amounts of information to draw a conclusion is called the adaptive unconscious. It involves not overthinking and using our conscious effort to analyze information, but also using our “gut instincts” and our intuition about something in those first few seconds of being presented with information. Gladwell explains that adaptive unconscious is not the same as Sigmund Freud’s view of the unconscious and instead is seen as “a kind of giant computer that quickly and quietly processes a lot of the data we need in order to keep functioning as human beings” (p. 11).

Some examples of thin-slicing include art experts being able to know a forgery in the first few seconds of examination, tennis coaches being able to know whether the player will fault on a serve in the half a second before it is even struck, and a salesman reading someone’s emotions and future decisions based on three seconds of observation (Gladwell, 2005). It is knowing something in just a few seconds—in the blink of an eye—without consciously stopping to consider all the facts. We are all able to use thin-slicing as a decision-making tool once we have sufficient experience in that area. Gladwell (2005) explains that “when we leap to a decision or have a hunch, our unconscious is . . . sifting through the situation in front of us, throwing out all that is irrelevant while we zero in on what really matters” (p. 34). We need lots of experiences to use thin-slicing, and we need to develop our filter to know what to sift out and what to zero in on.

Think about the last time a student came back from the library and you had only five seconds to observe him, and somehow you “just knew” he had trouble and was disappointed he did not get the book he really wanted. We often “just know” something about our students based on thin slices of information. Renowned authors and researchers John Hattie and Gregory Yates (2014) explain thin-slicing as “the system that enables you to look at complex situations, to perceive them as an expert, and to respond with speed, accuracy, and nuanced sensitivity. . . . As a professional teacher, you have the ability to look at a classroom situation and read it quickly, within microseconds” (p. 297). They go on to explain how this ability allows teachers to rely on feedback cues from students to inform what strategy they teach next.

There are many examples we likely have all experienced with thin-slicing as reading teachers. You graze a review on Goodreads.com of a new young adult novel; twenty-four hours later, you hand the book to the student you had in mind; and forty-eight hours later, he comes to you, literally with tears in his eyes—it was that good. Or you are in the midst of a whole class read aloud, and students seem quiet, and their comments are way off. You know to change gears, so you say to them, “You know what? Let’s try something different,” and you start reading aloud another book, and the energy in the room comes alive. In each of these everyday teaching decisions, you are thin-slicing.

We often don’t call it thin-slicing, but we do have other names for this skill in our society; for example, in basketball, we call it having “...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Acknowledgements
• Acknowledgements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Videos
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• A Quick-Start Guide for Easy Access
• 1 Each Classroom Moment is an Instructional Decision
• 2 Decisions About Book Selection
• 3 Decisions About Reading Notebooks
• 4 Decisions About Discussion
• 5 Decisions About Synthesizing Information
• 6 Decisions About Understanding Perspectives
• 7 Becoming Confident and Intentional Decision Makers
• Appendices
• References
• Index
• Publisher Note