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Of Egg Timers and Sticky Notes: "Fitting it all in"

1/25/2021

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This year, even more than ever, you may be asking, "How do I fit it all in?!" 

We are, of course, in an unprecedented school year with abundant varieties of scheduling challenges. Whether you are teaching face-to-face or virtually, or in one of the million combinations of the two, you can work with even the trickiest of schedules by first stepping back to think about the big picture of your instruction.

There are two common scheduling challenges that can compromise learning in your classroom, and both can be addressed with one, simple strategy. While the solution may not be perfect--there is no "perfect" solution to seeing children only once a week or having only 20 minutes for reading instruction--it will help you keep your focus on the overall goal of your literacy instruction--helping your students become proficient in the ways they navigate the print (phonemes and graphemes) and their ability to construct meaning.


The reality is, you can’t fit "it all" in (and never could), as you are already aware--at least on some level. But each morning we begin the day and we try again to fit all the pieces into that six hours with students--or 3 hours, or 2 hours, or even 40 minutes! Inevitably, when our time is crunched, we end up cutting the same things because we have adopted the inaccurate belief that one instructional context is most important. We feel like word work is more important than read aloud, for example, so when the schedule is cut, so is read aloud. This means that our instruction is incomplete. Over time, this can form a pattern that undermines your efforts with students. In truth, your word work time will, in the long run, be much less beneficial for students if they don't get the glorious vocabulary building from read aloud. 

The second challenge is the temptation to search for a silver bullet or to put all your eggs in one basket; choose your cliche. The tendency to favor an instructional context makes us human, but fortunately we can be systematic in planning how we spend our instructional time. For example, usually when you ask someone who teaches guided reading how they teach reading, they respond by saying that they teach guided reading. The problem with such a response is that it shows an imbalance in instruction. Guided reading was never intended to be a program. It isn’t the core. Guided reading was designed as part of a larger context, which includes independent reading, shared reading, read aloud, and word work. Guided reading is not more important than these other pieces. The tendency is to set up guided reading and let the other pieces fall into place as they do, if they do. 

A relatively simple (albeit not perfect) solution to both problems of incompleteness and imbalance--which are really just two sides of the same coin--is to plan the instructional week rather than the instructional day. Practically speaking, you can plan with sticky notes and we implement with an egg timer. 

Planning
Assign a sticky notes of a different color to each of the instructional contexts you want to include in your classroom. For example, shared reading may be represented by pink sticky notes, guided reading by yellow sticky notes, independent reading by green sticky notes, etc. Now do the math! Figure out a balance of instructional contexts that really works, in order to give your students a complete learning opportunity. You may only be able to teach guided reading three days a week in order to also read aloud three days a week and engage in shared reading three days a week. In fact, in some of the hybrid models teachers are grappling with right now, you may have to really narrow the amount of time you spend on each instructional context in order to teach all of them. This is, of course, less than ideal, but most of us don't get to decide the limitations on our instructional schedule, only how we spend the time within it. 


While these kinds of trade-offs may seem scary (and they are when you are trying to teach five instructional contexts in thirty minutes!) they can actually make you more efficient and give you some relief from the guilt of never feeling as if you can fit "it" all in. As you experiment with this shift, you may discover, for example, that much of what you previously accomplished in guided reading may be more efficiently taught in shared. Or you may find that you were teaching every student in small-groups when some don’t need that level of scaffolding.

Once you have a week's schedule arranged, look at it as a whole. How balanced are the colors? Of course, this isn’t a rigid strategy. The time doesn’t have to be divided up into exactly equal portions. Things will vary based on the age of children, the point in the school year, etc. In general, however, does the schedule look relatively balanced and relatively complete?


​Implementation
Once you have a plan, you face the challenge of implementation. Of course, your schedule will vary from day-to-day. Now really concentrate on working within the timeframes. Use an egg timer and stop when you had planned to. This is really challenging, but if you do it a few times you will begin to really think about instructional time. If you know that you can’t run over the allotted time for guided reading, you will find ways to stay on schedule. Also, planning to stop, even if you aren’t finished, means that read aloud, independent reading, etc. don’t get neglected. 


Of course, this is not meant to be a militaristic implementation. I am not suggesting you teach robotically or become a rigidly driven by the clock. I am suggesting, however, that if you want to fit everything in, you will have to do a bit less of some things and a bit more of others.

These kinds of changes in practice requires a shift from the frustrating mental model of fitting everything in every day. You can begin developing a new, kinder mental model with a few pads of sticky notes and an egg timer.

Adapted from a blog post originally written by Jan Burkins and Kim Yaris.
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How we inadvertently teach children not to comprehend or not to decode (Part 2)

12/4/2020

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In part one of this series, I introduced the following model as a representation of how proficient readers are able to make full use of both the print information and the meaning information in a text. 
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I also described two variations on reading process, which illustrate the ways students may be better at using one or the other source of information.
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How we teach children not to comprehend

We can actively teach children not to comprehend (not meaning to of course), which is actually different than not teaching them to comprehend. The latter, not teaching children to comprehend, is an act of omission wherein we offer little or no comprehension instruction at all. The former--teaching children not to comprehend--is the subject of this blog. It involves actively putting students into reading situations where they can't or are not likely to attend to the meaning of the text. 

For example, many beginning reading texts offer children very little to think about. If we give them these texts to cut their reading teeth on, we literally ask them to practice reading the words without thinking deeply about what the text means. Because the text limits their opportunities to comprehend, our text selection preferences reading without thinking. The solution is not shifting from predictable to decodable texts, or vice versa, because "bad texts" are common in both text formulas. For example, a decodable text that would teach a child not to comprehend would be one that makes little to no sense--"The fat rat sat on the bat on the mat." A predictable text that teaches children not to think deeply about what they read would be a text that simply reads like a list-- "I go to school. I go to the store. I go to the library." 

To avoid teaching children not to comprehend deeply, select texts that give students something to think about. This is a challenge with beginning reading texts! In my experience, only about 25% of beginning reading texts--whether "decodable" or "predictable"--offer opportunities to think deeply across the text.
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How we teach children not to use the print

Similarly, we actively teach children not to use the print when we give them texts that don't provide opportunities to practice using the sound-symbol relationships they know or are learning. For example, children learning consonant sound-spellings and the "short" A sound-spelling, should have opportunities to apply this new learning with CVC words in the context of reading. If we are careful with out text selection, this can happen whether the text is officially labeled "predictable" or "decodable." 

We also teach children not to attend to the print on the page, when we prompt them to use context to figure out a word first, rather than using context to cross check after using the print information. While context may help them "read" a particular word in a particular text, it does much less to teach them how print works or to enable them to read that word the next time they encounter it. The ultimate print goal, even beyond figuring out the word in front of them, is that they have full access to all the information in the alphabetic code and that they actually learn the new words they encounter. 
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Closing thoughts

Through our text selection and our prompting we can unintentionally teach readers away from using print or meaning. If this happens enough, children can habituate not using all the information a text offers them, which of course, sets up an unsustainable reading process for them and requires an intervention to interrupt. 

For more on how to teach children to both comprehend deeply while also utilizing all the print system offers them, look for Shifting the Balance, which I wrote with Kari Yates. Shifting the Balance also includes guidance on considering both predictability and decodability when selecting texts for beginning readers. Shifting the Balance will be available in February, but you can preview it now on the Stenhouse website.
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How we inadvertently Teach Children not to Comprehend or Not to Decode (Part 1)

12/1/2020

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As educators, our ultimate goal, of course, is for readers to be equally proficient in navigating the print and in comprehending what they read. In fact, the more we understand about how individual children are doing these two things, the better we can teach them. So the reading process of a proficient reader can be generally represented like this:

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I first represented the print/meaning duality with with this two-circle Venn Diagram when I was a regional language arts consultant in 1999, because I wanted all of the work I did with teachers anchored in understandings of children's reading processes. Literally every workshop I've ever taught across two decades, has been held up by this mental model. 

​Of course, not all children are equally proficient in both print and meaning, and variations on the Venn diagram can illustrate some of the differences. For example, children who are skilled in decoding but don't comprehend well, are represented with the same two circles, but the meaning circle is smaller. This reduction indicates that the stronger proficiency is in the area of decoding/word recognition, like this:
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Children with "small meaning circles" have difficulty with language comprehension. Their spoken vocabulary, general knowledge, and/or facility with language structure are typically limited, which places a ceiling on their reading comprehension. Children who's reading looks like this may rely on context to figure out words with little or no attention to the letters on the page.

Similarly, children who are not skilled with reading the words (vs. understanding the words), are represented with the opposite pair of asymmetrical circles: 
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Children with "small print circles" have limited orthographic knowledge. They don't fully understand how our alphabetic code works. Consequently, if tricky words are not sufficiently supported by context (which happens increasingly as text gets more difficulty) they get really stuck.

You can read about this simplified model in 
Preventing Misguided Reading (Burkins and Croft, 2010), Reading Wellness (Burkins and Yaris 2014), and Who's Doing the Work? (Burkins and Yaris, 2016). ​

There are a number of factors that contribute to children reading in ways that favor meaning or favor print, paying insufficient attention to the other source of information. The most troublesome cause, however, is us, their teachers. If our instruction is biased towards print or meaning, then it is possible for children to learn to rely on that source of information and neglect the other. This is, or course, unintentional. 

In the next post in this two-part series, I will describe one of the ways we can inadvertently teach children not to use the print or not ​to comprehend.
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