Beyond the Classroom

Collaborating with Colleagues and Parents to Build Core Literacy

Nanci Werner-Burke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317743118
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Go beyond the walls of your classroom to build literacy and achievement. In this insightful book, you'll discover how you can better meet the rigorous goals of the Common Core by opening new lines of communication with colleagues, parents, and students. Each chapter centers around an action project that was designed to help teachers improve literacy by moving beyond the typical class lessons and worksheets. The projects include...

• A book club for families of kindergarten and first grade students, to help students build foundational literacy skills
• A book club designed to engage middle school students with young adult literature using digital forums
• "Write with your child" evenings to help parents connect with their middle school children
• An instructional team's challenge to use a range of mentor texts in their classrooms
• And much more!

As you read each project, you'll come away with ideas and inspiration that you can apply to your own teaching. By challenging yourself to connect with parents and colleagues on a deeper level, you will be better able to align your work, adjust for your students, and achieve your teaching goals.

Chapter 1
Extraordinary Measures

Nanci Werner-Burke

Magical Beginnings

Before you start to read this book, let’s write. You can use the margins, a piece of scrap paper, or your journal. Take at least 10 minutes to write your response as you consider the following:

If you had a magic wand and could make three educational wishes, what changes would you make for/to

1. your students,
2. your colleagues, and
3. your community?

This prompt is one I have used, with variation, in professional development sessions with fellow educators. Always, we answer it in writing, and usually, in the ensuing discussion, after a bit of sharing and some griping and complaining, we move to a place in the conversation where we start to discover ways to move these changes from a wish list into reality.

It was one of these sessions that grew and morphed into the collection of seven action research projects that make up this book. Teachers tend to gripe and worry about the three things that are at the heart of the writing prompt: how they can engage and motivate their students, have more effective relationships with their colleagues, and strengthen how their community views their school.

It is an easy trap to get caught up in: lamenting in a dire tone that students don’t care because their parents don’t do enough to support the school’s mission or that you are only one teacher and can only do so much. It’s also self-defeating. Argue for your limitations and sure enough, they’re all yours. In our workshops, after allowing an appropriate amount of time for venting, we take a right turn and move away from seeing these issues as problems that can never be solved. We begin to look into the reasons and causes behind them, and start to look for steps that will lead to positive change.

Our answers may not be your answers. The authors who have contributed to this collection are all teacher consultants (TCs) for the Endless Mountains Writing Project, a site of the National Writing Project (nwp.org) that is hosted by the Department of Education and Special Education at Mansfield University of Pennsylvania. These projects do not come from a sense of desperation over the state of education. These projects come from a place of strength. They are models of what is possible, of what leadership looks like.

These projects came at a point when these TCs had been involved with the Endless Mountains Writing Project for a number of years and had been working steadily on revamping and enhancing their classroom practices. All have earned graduate degrees in areas related to their fields, and they are truly master teachers in their classrooms. Writing is prominent in their pedagogy, classroom practices, and work with students. While their teaching techniques did not become static while they were working on these projects, it is worth noting that they were challenged at the outset to identify a need and undertake a project that would push them in some way to make an impact on literacy outside of the traditional classroom setting and schedule. This book was aimed at the outset at finding ways to think outside the classroom box and move their work beyond the door of their classroom settings.

So, to be clear, these are the voices of real teachers. They stand in front of (and behind, and next to) their K–12 students each school day (and after, during extracurricular athletics and clubs, in the grocery store, in church, and at the movies). Their projects have unfolded in public schools in the Canton, Northern Tioga, and Southern Tioga School Districts—strong districts in northeastern Pennsylvania that have empowered their teachers to build core literacy skills across content areas and grade levels. Rather than being asked to follow a prescriptive program, these teachers were charged with finding ways to think beyond the parameters of classroom instruction and build connections with students, parents, and other educators. If you are looking for a quick collection of activities to try out with your own students, you won’t find that here. This collection is focused on how teachers can improve student learning by going beyond the teacher-student paradigm and building connections in places and spaces not previously utilized.

This book goes past the context of the classroom and explores how teachers can open new lines of communication with colleagues, parents, and students. The goal was to improve achievement by developing the communication and cognition-based foundations for literacy though multiple aspects and outreach. Our site projects represented the opportunity to step back and look at our schools and students with fresh eyes. Each initiative developed from efforts that were purposeful and goal-driven, but those efforts centered on responding to the different needs and opportunities each teacher saw. Our projects allowed these teachers, who were already identified as being innovative, successful educators constantly honing their craft, to re-envision their roles as teachers and recognize other paths to student success. This text delineates how these plans unfolded and spread in impact.

Our work brought us together, for face-to-face meetings and online work sessions, for well over a year. During that year, in true Writing Project fashion, it was a combination of passion for our work, a love for our students, and professional and personal fellowship that kept us going. Whether slogging in through snow to make use of a school holiday to make progress on the manuscript or closing the window shades in the computer lab in an effort to ignore the beautiful summer weather that tempted us away from our keyboards, each of these teachers persevered to make their projects successful. Meeting together helped us share our successes and address our obstacles. Karaoke-rapping about topics, canoeing across Pine Creek, and roller-derby style basketball helped us get past the stress and take ourselves a little less seriously over the years we have spent working together.

And, yes, there has been a great deal of stress. Change is a constant in many fields and areas, but in education, it sometimes seems as though there is a competition to see how many changes and course-reversals it will take to push good teachers out of the profession. It is worth acknowledging that this book may not have been written and the projects not undertaken if we had waited a few years, as the pressure has been mounting on teachers in unprecedented ways and from multiple directions.

Our State of Change: A (Common)wealth

While we all place pressure on and push ourselves to move forward in our teaching craft, the amount of external elements that also function in this role are increasing, both in our state and across the country.

Pennsylvania is a state with two high-stakes tests; the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) is currently administered at checkpoints in the elementary and middle school grades, and encompasses the areas of reading, math, writing, and science. Passing the Keystone Exam, which focuses on specific content-area knowledge, is currently an exit exam for the high school level. The PDE (Pennsylvania Department of Education) recently has made student scores on these exams a part of how public school teachers and districts will be evaluated. It is perhaps a natural consequence of the digital information age that our society has become focused on collecting data and performance metrics. However, it is easy to lose balance on the slippery slope of analysis and become so focused on raising test scores that we lose the bigger picture of helping students to think and feel and process their worlds.

This book was undertaken with the perspective that educators benefit from having a common framework of goals to work toward, and that collaboration and communication can only benefit teachers. We believe that these goals must be in line with what our students will need to think and communicate effectively, to get the most out of their lives, contribute to society positively, and make a living. When our state adopted the Common Core (www.corestandards.org), and set a timeline to integrate it into all public school districts, we realized that we would need to dive into the Common Core documents and educate ourselves on what they were and said, and to see if there were overlaps with our beliefs or a total disjuncture.

When we unpacked the actual Common Core ELA standards, we began to recognize that many of the core goals are an extension of what good teachers have been striving for all along. Others are questionable, perhaps unattainable at the grade levels to which they have been aligned, but have at least functioned to open the door to professional discussions and debates that would not have otherwise occurred.

If you already made your peace with the Common Core, you are aware that the standards set high goals that require students to problem-solve by reading multiple, increasingly complex texts capably, and by formulating cohesive written responses. The importance of these skills is hard to argue with in our text-drenched, information-heavy society. To make progress toward these goals, teachers must be empowered to explore teaching methods and practices that will align their efforts and overcome obstacles. They must reach out and connect with real-world home and community resources, and build capacity and support structures there. In this way, our work in this book is aligned with the Common Core.

If you are not a fan of the Common Core, well, okay. Some states and districts have responded to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) by adopting heavily scripted programs that support the notion of commonality in terms of providing homogeneous instruction targeted at preparing students to perform on standardized assessments. While we recognize that standardized assessment can be useful for comparing districts and states, our work was aimed not specifically at raising test scores or standardizing our approaches. This is one reason you will not find black-line masters or fill-in-the-template handouts in this book. Just as we are asking students to think at new levels and problem-solve with evidence and creativity, the bar is being raised for teachers to do this, as well. You will not find scripts with a “sure fire” claim that if you replicate exactly what these teachers did, your work will be a slam-dunk success. Such a claim would not be credible when working with real people, in real settings.

Each teacher looked carefully at their own situation and context, and utilized surveys and other means of data collection to help shape their steps throughout the process. Our examples serve to help you find your own departure point and set your own path, which is, after all, what real teachers do. Mine the data and keep the people in mind and you will have a plan that is best-suited for making a difference at your own site.

What Else Can I Do?

Good teaching in the classroom makes a difference. But… what happens in the classroom space and time is only one aspect of educating a child. In our projects, we covered seven strands of action research that were designed to explore how these educators could move their students toward high-order thinking and literacy development by going beyond the constraints of the traditional classroom. Our goal in undertaking these projects was to develop a framework of options that teachers and administrators could utilize as they revamp their work for a 21st-century world. Each chapter provides a protocol of guiding questions and points for educators to consider as they read about the different projects and consider what choices fit best with their own students, schools, and communities.

The contributors have taken care to share their personal experiences and firsthand knowledge of their schools, students, and communities. This feature makes the work accessible, and asks you, the reader, to come into our worlds and stay there awhile. Each author’s goals are clearly stated, and they provide an overview of their context that allows you to compare and contrast important elements with your own situation. In keeping with that aspect of the text, each chapter contains a section that provides connections to literature and research that delineates what the published work in our profession has to say about the related topic. Just as these authors share the successes and setbacks of their work, they have built their initiatives on what others have found and tried, and the literature review connects these pieces. The research review is your invitation to the larger professional conversation, and we hope that you accept it.

In each chapter, you will find the specific steps each investigator took, supported by actual examples from the different projects. The foundation is also laid for taking the work to a more complex level, and there are guiding questions and points for educators to consider as they read about the different projects and decide what choices fit best with their own students, schools, and communities.

It may be useful to think of the chapters in terms of the connections that are made in each one, and the prompt items they address. The first three in the collection document outreach to families and reaching out of the traditional teaching space and time as a means to engage students, families, and community members in the educational conversation.

Jessica Spencer focused on an outreach program for families of kindergarten and first grade students, in order to reach parents very early in the reading and writing process. Through a family literacy children’s book club, teachers, students, and families were given an opportunity to connect with each other and specific texts to build a foundation of literacy skills. This project is delineated in Chapter 2, “Reading Connections: Building a Partnership Between Families and School.”

Melissa Morral also implemented a book club, but connected middle school students with young adult (YA) literature using digital forums, which brought her work outside of the classroom and into extracurricular time. In Chapter 3, “Digital Connections: Turn Ravenous Readers into Sophisticated Discussion Leaders,” she outlines her efforts to promote higher-order thinking and deepen reader interaction with YA texts by modeling increasingly complex questioning techniques. The result was not only better-prepared students, but also approaches that she was able to utilize in her in-class teaching time.

Chapter 4, by Bobbi Button, is titled, “Writing Connections: The Not-So-Secret Mission of Parental Involvement.” This project combines the family outreach thread with a middle school demographic, but with a focus on connecting participants specifically through writing. Button reflects on her own experiences as a student and then as a teacher, and works to bridge the gap between the two, so that the parents of her students have the resources and tools to better engage with the direction of the school district.

The final four chapters collectively shift direction and focus on building teaching capacity through professional collaboration and curricular alignment. It seems particularly appropriate, given this focus, that Chapter 5, “Connecting the Curriculum: Some Book on Cambodia,” represents the work of two authors, Stacey Segur and Karin Knaus, who teamed up to collaboratively investigate how research writing was being taught across the content areas in their respective buildings. This chapter follows their processes of identifying an area of need and working together to address it, despite differences in how their schools and schedules were structured.

Jane Spohn continues the cross-curricular approach in Chapter 6, “Connecting Teachers with Authentic Texts.” Her chapter includes the steps she took to further engage an existing instructional team and motivate its members to experiment with using a range of mentor texts in their classrooms. In Chapter 7, “Connecting Content: The True Story of Dead End,” Cindy Lisowski also reaches out to a variety of content-area teachers, but with the intent of rallying them around one common mentor text: the award-winning novel, Dead End in Norvelt, by Jack Gantos.

Finally, Julie Weaver brings the collection to a close. Chapter 8, “Connecting Teachers: Teaming up for Essential Vocabulary,” chronicles multiple teacher-development projects that have unfolded in her school since she became a teacher consultant for the Endless Mountains Writing Project. While each of these projects demonstrates what teachers can do when they are supported in their efforts to break new ground, this last chapter best exemplifies our Writing Project mission of bringing good teachers together and building capacity across classrooms, schools, and districts. What began as a five-part series of professional workshops at Julie’s school gathered momentum and set off successive ways of te...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Meet the Author
• 1 Extraordinary Measures
• 2 Reading Connections: Building a Partnership Between Families and School
• 3 Digital Connections: Turn Ravenous Readers into Sophisticated Discussion Leaders
• 4 Writing Connections: The Not-So-Secret Mission of Parental Involvement
• 5 Connecting the Curriculum: Some Book on Cambodia
• 6 Connecting Teachers with Authentic Texts
• 7 Connecting Content: The True Story of Dead End
• 8 Connecting Teachers: Teaming up for Essential Vocabulary
• 9 Conclusion: Let There Be Light: Where Will You Connect?
• Appendix A: In November Newsletter
• Appendix B: Animalia Newsletter
• Appendix C: All the Water in the World Newsletter
• Appendix D: Teacher Questionnaire
• Appendix E: Parent Questionnaire
• Appendix F: EUREKA Flyer