Mindsets and Moves

Strategies That Help Readers Take Charge [Grades K-8]

Gravity Goldberg

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781506325057
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Step back so readers can step forward

When it comes to teaching reading, Gravity Goldberg declares there is a structure, one that works with your current curriculum, to help readers take charge. The way forward Gravity says lies in admiring, studying, and really getting to know your students. Easily replicable in any setting, any time, her 4 Ms framework ultimately lightens your load because it allows students to monitor and direct their reading lives.

• Miner: Uncovering Students’ Reading Processes (Focus: Assessment)
• Mirror: Giving Feedback That Reinforces a Growth Mindset (Focus: Feedback)
• Model: Showing Readers What We Do (Focus: Demonstration)
• Mentor: Guiding Students to Try New Ways of Reading (Focus: Guided Practice and Coaching)

CHAPTER ONE Reading on One’s Own What We Really Mean by Take-Charge Independence

“Wait. What are we supposed to do?” a student asked her teacher, who had just finished teaching a minilesson. Many students were opening their books and beginning to read, but a few sat there waiting for the teacher to tell them exactly what to do. Flash forward an hour to our planning meeting where the teacher asked her colleagues, “Wait. What are we supposed to do?” as she expressed concerns about student engagement and next steps for instruction. Many of us—both students and teachers—are asking this same question aboutwhat we should be doing.The complexity and ambiguity of teaching reading can lead us to feel overwhelmed and confused about what is right. While no one can answer the question about what you are supposed to do, I wrote this book to help answer the question, What can we do? This first chapter is meant to open up a conversation about what we and students really mean when we seek independence. What does independence really look like?

Teaching in general, and teaching reading in particular, is always going to be in flux as we seek to understand the relationships that support learning. We as practitioners are continually adapting and deepening our practice, and on a bigger canvas, new research findings influence classroom instruction. This research comes into our profession from the four corners of neuroscience, social psychology, science, and economics. As I write this book, I lean on findings from inside and outside the education field, as well as my own field research, and am aware that ideas I contribute are part of an ongoing conversation about which practices matter most for readers and learners.

John Hattie actually researched the research to identify the keepers. Hattie’s 2012 study encompassed more than 240 million students; he identified qualities that did and did not support student achievement. To discover this, in essence, Hattie combed the prior research to pinpoint those instructional practices that really moved the needle on students’ academic growth. One such finding is the degree to which effective teachers were able to identify student learning as opposed to mere compliance. He states, “For some, learning occurs if the students complete the task . . . and ‘pass’ the tests. Moving towards understanding learning, however, means starting with the private world of each student” (Hattie, 2012, p. 37). He goes on to say, “The key is to understand what is going on in each student’s mind”(Hattie, 2012, p. 37). In other words, student compliance reveals who did and did not do the assignment, and who could and could not do it well. But understanding what students have learned reveals far more, because we really don’t have clarity about what to teach next if we only see the end products of our assignments.

Hattie’s language is evocative, and his findings are striking to me because teachers have this front-row seat from which to observe their students’ processes, yet many of them struggle to know how to observe, how to access the “private world of each student.” And with good reason—trying to understand students’ learning process can feel like trying to find a secret door to the student’s inner learner.

What are the mindsets and moves we need to find that door? This is the central question I seek to answer in this book. The short answer? We do a few things at once. I’ll first talk about stepping back so students can step forward. When we step back, we can become admirers, and it’s this vantage point that I want you to picture in your mind’s eye as you read this book.

To admire means to regard with wonder and surprise(more on this in Chapter Three). In order to accessstudents’ thinking, choices, and process, we need to take the time to get to know them well.We can’t just get the gist of who they are. Each day, we have the opportunity to study them. This means we approach readers as admirers with a few beliefs in mind:

• All students are worthy of study and to be regarded with wonder.
• All students are readers, yet their processes may look different.
• All students can learn to make purposeful choices about their reading.
• All students can develop ownership of their reading lives.

These beliefs help frame what it means to use an admiring lens as teachers. Our actions and beliefs—and, perhaps most significantly, our mindsets—can help usget in our students’ minds and better understand what and how they are learning. The most effective reading teachers I know use an admiring lens when approaching students, and this lens impacts the roles they play.

Independent reading leads to engagement and achievement. Decades of research have proven that time spent reading has a significant impact on reading ability.

Gravity Goldberg

What Does It Really Mean to Read on One’s Own?

Parts of a Reading Workshop

A group of literacy coaches and I stepped out from a fifth-grade classroom coaching session. Typically, when we finish classroom coaching sessions, we are bursting with lots to talk about, but this time we were all silent. At the time, I could not pinpoint what was going on, but I knew we all were a bit puzzled and confused. The classroom we worked in was one that uses a Reading Workshop model for instruction (see the Parts of a Reading Workshop visual below). Each day, the teacher offers a brief minilesson where she shows a strategy; then the students go off to read on their own and use the strategies that have been taught. As the students are reading, the teacher has individual or small group conferences to check in with students, assess their progress, and offer feedback. This particular fifth-grade class had all of the structures of typical Reading Workshop classrooms in place. The minilesson was short, there were anchor charts, the students had books of their own choosing, the teacher moved around the room having conferences, and she even took notes on each one. If we were using a workshop structures checklist, we would have checked off every box. These students read for thirty or so minutes on their own. This is what we had just observed:

Parts of a Reading Workshop

Gail sat at the class meeting area in front of her class of twenty-five fifth graders. She took out a familiar book and showed the students how she inferred the main character’s conflict. She opened up the book and explained the strategy. The students smiled and turned to tell their reading partners what they had just seen in the minilesson. The teacher finished her explanation and said, “Now today you are all going to go back to your seats and infer the character’s conflict in the novels you are each reading.”

Gail pointed to an organizer that was projected and discussed during the lesson. “Remember to fill out your copy of this chart when you find the character’s conflict. Now please go begin your independent reading.” She smiled and stood up to show the students it was time to begin working.

Immediately following the minilesson, the students arose quietly, walked to their desks, and took out their independent reading books. Each student made sure to pick up a blank conflict organizer on the way to his or her seat and began by filling in the title and author. Gail walked over to Tyler first. Tyler is a tall and lanky boy who was just beginning a new book that day. He was reading the back blurb and looking at the cover when Gail approached him.

“Tyler, are you thinking about the conflict?” Gail asked.

“Not yet,” he responded. “But I will as soon as I start reading.”

“OK. Great. Thank you.” Gail stood up and walked across the room. The entire class was pin-drop quiet as students read.

Gail stopped and squatted next to Sam. “Sam, can you tell me about your book?” she asked. Sam began to retell important parts of his book. He was almost at the end and seemed to want to quickly get done with his conversation with Gail so he could finish the book. “So I noticed you have not written anything on your conflict organizer yet,” Gail noted.

“Yeah, well, I just want to finish my book, and then I will go back and do that,” he explained.

“Do you know what the conflict is? Can you tell me so I know that you understand?” she asked.

Sam began explaining several conflicts in the book and how most of them were resolved and how he just wanted to see how it would all end. Gail checked off the box “infers character conflict” on her conference checklist and then thanked Sam and stood up to work with the next student.

By the end of the reading period, Gail had conferred with five students about character conflict, knowing she would meet with five more per day until she’d conferred with each student. Before the period ended, she said, “Now readers, please find your reading partner and use your organizer to explain the conflict.” Each set of students found one another and began sharing their organizers and telling about their books.

At the end of the period, during a transition time, I had a few minutes to speak with some of Gail’s students. I was curious to hear their perspectives on reading.

“So how is reading going for you?” I asked a triad of students.

All three students shrugged their shoulders.

“What have you learned about how to read?”

“We learned how to infer the character’s conflict today,” Tyler explained.

“I noticed that was today’s minilesson topic. How did it go for you?” I inquired.

“I was just starting the first page of my book today, so it was kinda hard to figure out the conflict,” Tyler acknowledged.

I thought about what he had just said. It was not really applicable or helpful for Tyler to be asked to infer conflict as he was just starting a novel. At the start of a book, most readers first need to figure out who the characters are and where they are, and then get into the world the author has created. Many books do not start off with the conflict on the first page. The assignment felt forced. Tyler tried to use the strategy because the teacher told him to and not because he needed it right then.

“What about you, Sam?” I asked. Now I was curious as to whether this strategy helped him today.

“I already knew the conflicts in my book because I was at the end. I wrote them down on the worksheet after I finished the book. I loved this book!” he replied.

“So did the conflict worksheet help you with your understanding of this book today?” I tend to ask these sorts of reflective questions of students to figure out not just what they did but also how it went. I noticed that rather than an organizer he called it a worksheet—something to prove to the teacher he did his work.

“No. I just wrote it down because the teacher told us to. I already knew the conflicts,” he honestly answered.

By the time I spoke to the third student in this group, I was really starting to think about how the students in this class can follow directions well, but they may not actually be fully owning their reading processes. I asked Carla, the other student in this group, “What did you work on today in your reading?”

“I worked on character conflicts too. That was the minilesson. I got the assignment done quickly, though, so I could get to reading and enjoying my book,” she proudly stated.

“So, the work you did, the assignment, did not help you enjoy your book?” I wanted to clarify.

She actually rolled her eyes at me and smirked. “No.”

“Hmm,” I thought. Something was getting in the way of students driving their own reading experiences. I had at least one idea to discuss with my colleague Gail.

A few years earlier, prior to implementing Reading Workshop, the students in this district had a very different instructional reading experience. At that time, most of the students’ reading materials were chosen by the teachers or from an anthology, very little reading was done in class, and every book was tested after completing novel guides and worksheets. There was one period a week where students “just read” a book of their choosing. This team of literacy coaches had worked tirelessly alongside energetic and enthusiastic teachers who all wanted to get reading instruction right. They spent a few years putting structures in place so students had much more time each day to read on their own in school. They had read Allington’s (2012) research on increasing the time spent with eyes on text, matching students to appropriate-level books, and the importance of comprehension instruction. They brought me in as a literacy consultant to help them create a reading curriculum that aligned with standards and used a balanced literacy model. We had been rolling up our sleeves ove...