Read, Talk, Write

35 Lessons That Teach Students to Analyze Fiction and Nonfiction

Laura Robb

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781506339573
• eBook ISBN: 9781506374260
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

"This book reminds us why Laura Robb continues to be such an important voice in our field: She looks through kids' eyes and sees into their futures. Literary conversations don't just enrich kids days; they offer young people gifts that keep on giving: the ability to take risks, exercise creativity, build empathy, and develop the ability to negotiate."
—from the foreword by Harvey "Smokey" Daniels

When you get right down to it, literacy comes down to this: read, talk, write. But as every teacher knows, it can be hard for students to see and use these three moves in concert—until now. In Read, Talk, Write, Laura Robb lays out the classroom structures that create the time and space for students to have productive talk and written discourse about texts. With Laura's guidance you'll

• Use short texts by Seymour Simon, Kathleen Krull, Priscilla Cummings, and other popular fiction and nonfiction authors to teach students how to analyze and converse about texts
• Incorporate six kinds of talk into your instruction, including turn-and-talk, partner talks, and small-group discussions
• Use the wealth of in-book and online reproducibles to help students facilitate their own comprehension-building discussions 
• Select from 35 lessons that address literary elements and devices, text structures, and comprehension strategies, and then use them to launch student-led talk about any text you teach
• Help your readers get in a read-talk-write flow, and know how to move from reading to talking to writing, to bring about deeper thinking
• Achieve high levels of performance around inferring, comparing and contrasting, summarizing and synthesizing, and other key skills by way of classroom conversations that make these advanced levels the norm

Aim 1 Introduce Students to Six Types of Comprehension-Building Conversations

Chapter 1 Talking About Texts Getting Started

When I teach or coach in classrooms in various parts of the United States, I have noticed that talk and collaboration among students has decreased in the last few years, while the use of workbooks and skill-and-drill activities seems on the rise. The pressure schools are under to do well on high-stakes tests may be largely to blame, because the worksheets I see on kids’ desks and going home as homework often fall under the umbrella of test prep activities. Alas, we are spinning our wheels and wasting precious time bowing down to the tests, for a recent study of 66 urban schools found no correlation between the time students spend taking tests and improved reading scores (Superville, 2015). In fact, the results of the 2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the nation’s report card, show that scores in reading have dropped in Grades 4 and 8 (Heitin, 2015).

To me, lower scores in reading are the canary in the coal mine, warning us of a more pervasive issue: More students are disengaged with reading.

So how do we turn things around? Well, there are about hundred answers I could give, but for this book I’ve chosen one, just one, because right now I think it’s the easiest and most powerful platform on which to rebuild our students’ relationship with reading.

Talk.

Really? You might be thinking that there can be nothing new to say about instructional conversations. After all, two types of talk, literature circles and book clubs, thankfully have a placehold in many schools (Daniels, 2002)—but not in enough schools, and in this digital age and test prep craze, it’s critical that we make sure our students know how to talk to learn, and do so every day. Some research has shown that teachers talk a full 80% of the school day; our goal has to be to reach a 50–50 split and then work to make it so that student talk predominates.

Lessons and Texts to Take Students From Talk to Literary Conversation

I remember the time as a young teacher I told a group of my fifth graders to “talk about Chapter 4” in a novel they were reading and thought that was sufficient direction. I heard the folly of my ways within 5 minutes, in the form of animated chatter about sports, lunch, and a favorite new game! Learning-rich conversation about books has to be modeled and practiced—a lot. So in this book, we begin with ready-made lessons that provide students with models of six different types of literary talk. What they have in common is that they allow you to step out of the conversation so that students can get good at guiding it. Tech-savvy students who “talk” continually on social media want to be in charge of their literary conversations online and at school. And that’s just what these lessons help you accomplish.

I’ve also included original pieces and excerpts by authors whose work students know and admire, including Kathleen Krull, Seymour Simon, and Priscilla Cummings. You can use them repeatedly for your own instructional purposes, beyond this book.

A section called “Reflect and Intervene” equips you with on-the-spot scaffolding tools. And you don’t have to design assessments; they’re in every lesson and include reproducibles for students and checklists that are reminders of what you heard and observed.

Yes, talk matters, especially when student talk becomes a literary conversation. With time and practice, these conversations develop and improve analytical and critical thinking and ultimately ramp up students’ reading comprehension, helping them become the critical readers and thinkers they need to be.

Five Benefits of Student-Centered Talk

Our students love to talk, and they arrive at school with talking experience and expertise. A powerful form of thinking and communicating, talk also brings social interactions to learning. The kind of talk I’m proposing for students to engage in is literary conversations. Conversations are literary when the talk is about high-quality fiction or nonfiction and powerful movie and video clips. Such texts draw students into familiar and unfamiliar worlds that can spark emotional reactions and prompt them to think about themselves and others. Such texts have multiple interpretations, and the literary and personal experiences a reader brings to a text start an original conversation between the reader and the text. These conversations initiate deep thinking about characters, people, plot, conflicts, and information (Rosenblatt, 1978).

My hope is to build on these literary conversations between readers and texts by inviting students to have similar conversations with a partner, a small group, and the entire class. To illustrate the benefits of bringing literary conversations to your classroom, I have identified five key reasons for integrating this student-centered approach into daily lessons.

Benefit 1: Talk Supports Recall and Comprehension

As a reading or content teacher, you know that students’ ability to recall plot and text details is the key to using this information to infer and identify main ideas and themes—in other words, to engage in analytical and critical thinking. If your students are like mine, then you also know that this kind of thinking poses a challenge to many students. The good news is that during literary conversations, students must organize and present their ideas in ways that listeners can understand and follow. You can teach listeners how to ask questions that prompt speakers to clarify and extend ideas and provide evidence from the text. In this way, students support one another as they apply strategies, analyze texts, and think through an idea or position. In addition, talk about text builds vocabulary, enlarges listening capacity, and exposes students to peers’ divergent ideas and the stories peers use to think about and discuss texts (Newkirk, 2014)—all skills that facilitate comprehension of complex texts.

Benefit 2: Talk Engages and Motivates

We’ve all heard our students say things like “Yeah, that’s what I was thinking” or “Man, I never thought about that person like you’re doing” or “I gotta reread that part—I missed that idea.” Such comments are indicators that students are engaged in the literary conversation, listening closely and comparing their ideas with peers’ ideas. Participating in whole-class, small-group, and partner discussions gives students opportunities to interpret texts independently and explore questions they’re interested in.

When students are in charge of leading discussions, when they use questions that they composed, and when you encourage them to explore a range of interpretations the text supports, the motivation to engage in these discussions is off the charts. Harvey “Smokey” Daniels (2002), in his book on literature circles, put it this way: “Working with our kids over weeks, and months, and years, I feel grounded in a new way. Now I will never underestimate what kids can do in peer-led groups, because I’ve seen what our students can accomplish” (p. 15).

Benefit 3: Interactive Talk Becomes a Model for In-the-Head Conversations

What does it mean to engage with a story? What does deep engagement really feel like? It’s important to drill down into these often-used terms, because that’s how we know exactly the kind of emotional state we want our students to achieve. Yes, emotional state. I want students to feel angry about a character’s poor decisions and silently yell at the character. I want students to fall in and out of love, feel grief, frustration, fright, acute loneliness, profound joy—to be so involved with the characters’ journey they can’t stop reading. This happens when students can step into a character’s or person’s shoes, experience his or her life, and have conversations with themselves while reading. Robert Coles (1990) calls this being in “cahoots” with a character. The irony of the concept of getting lost in a novel is that the truth is, through narrative, we find ourselves. Someone once said, with informational texts we know how to live, but with fiction we know how to be.

Such a deep level of involvement can happen with nonfiction texts, too, as long as these texts use stories to present information (Newkirk, 2014). An important and reachable goal of teaching reading is to develop students’ ability to have dialogues with themselves about a text they are reading. I call these “in-the-head” conversations.

As students participate in literary conversations in different settings, they cultivate the modes of thinking and the language needed to engage in internal conversations while reading, listening to, and viewing texts. Having conversations with oneself while reading is the heart of metacognition, which can improve visualization, recall, understanding, and critical analysis.

Benefit 4: Talk Activates Ideas for Writing About Reading

Throughout this book you will find guiding questions. These questions are like lighter fluid for student conversations, and the goal is to have them ignite students’ own questions (see How to Craft Guiding Questions, page 9) and responses that delve into layers of meaning. View these discussions as a rehearsal for deeper independent thinking and writing about texts. We want our students to explore interpretations in a situation where peers support them as they test the validity of their ideas (Rosenblatt, 1978).

This rehearsal is like trying on five pairs of jeans until you find the right pair—no one criticizes the jeans that don’t fit. You are in charge of deciding which to purchase. It’s like this for students trying to find valid interpretations of texts. It works best in an environment that encourages students to try on interpretations without worrying if they’re right or wrong. It encourages divergent thinking about a text and then invites students to further explore ideas that the text can support. Rehearsal—trying on ideas during discussions—can scaffold writing about a text and support students as they develop their ability to move from thinking through talk to thinking on paper.

Benefit 5: Talk Changes How Students Think and Feel About Fiction and Nonfiction

As students become more skilled at conversations, they move beyond recall of plot and information to critical analysis, making inferences, finding themes, and, most important, arriving at an interpretation of a text that “works” for them, and in a sense is tailor-made for them. In a very real sense, four students sitting at a table talking about the same novel will negotiate a shared understanding (almost like lawyers in an amicable negotiation!), but each person will stand up from that table with a take on the novel that is uniquely her or his own—and that’s what we want. Writing in the By Heart series in The Atlantic, novelist Ethan Canin asserts, “At the end of a story or novel, you do not want the reader thinking. Endings are about emotion, and logic is emotion’s enemy” (Fassler, 2016, para. 14).

Having multiple opportunities to develop their ideas helps students independently apply reading and thinking strategies as they work toward using stories to build knowledge that matters to them (Newkirk, 2014). To accomplish this, students can draw on other texts, personal experiences and stories, and their knowledge of genre to construct their understanding of a specific text or an issue raised by a guiding or essenti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Acknowledgements
• Half Title
• Acknowledgements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Reproducibles for Teachers and Students
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Aim 1 Introduce Students to Six Types of Comprehension-Building Conversations
• Chapter 1 Talking About Texts Getting Started
• Chapter 2 Lessons for Teaching Six Types of Talk
• Chapter 3 Lessons That Build Comprehension Skills in Any Genre
• Aim 2 Teach Students to Read, Talk, and Write About Fiction
• Chapter 4 Taking the Plunge How to Talk and Write About Fiction
• Chapter 5 Going Deeper How to Analyze Literary Elements
• Aim 3 Teach Students to Read, Talk, and Write About Nonfiction
• Chapter 6 Taking the Plunge How to Talk and Write About Nonfiction
• Chapter 7 Going Deeper How to Analyze Nonfiction
• Chapter 8 Reflecting on the Process of Read, Talk, Write
• List of Top-Notch Books for Instruction and Class Libraries
• References
• Index
• Publisher Note