It is WKCE week at my middle school. Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination. A time that is loathed by students and teachers alike. Well, I take that back. I kind of enjoy testing, and I feel really guilty about it. The room is so quiet, and I get SO MUCH done! I reorganize my files, respond to emails, clean off my desk, and just catch up on everything. Plus, I don’t have to grade it, right? I’m so sorry for enjoying it, dear students!
I do try to have a bit of fun during testing week too, especially with reading the directions. You know the directions, right? They are so tedious and repetitive. But legally, we have to read every word. Well by about the 4th session, I pause mid-sentence and let the kids guess the next word. Like “make your mark heavy and ___” “DARK!” They shout gleefully 🙂 And I also enjoy reading the directions in various accents – Southern, Jersey, Russian, Micro-Machine Man, etc.
Holy Toledo – it’s NoVeMbEr?!? That’s crAzy!!!
Here are my highlights from week 9.
1. Science Corridor – I broke into the Science Corridor this week. You see, in our school, all of the science teachers share a common hallway between their classrooms. This is where they house all of their special, awesome science equipment, and where they prep for labs. No one is allowed in the back without a special secret password, handshake, security deposit, retinal scan… just kidding. I’ve always been pretty envious of the science teachers – they’re like a special club. Well I started nosing around the Science Corridor, and I couldn’t believe all of the neat things I was finding. I especially love the anatomical figure they have guarding their coffee station 🙂
2. The Real Halloween – Our school actually celebrated Halloween last Friday. I already shared my costume from that day, but when the official Halloween came around, I just couldn’t help myself! IÂ had to dress up again! Here I am, dressed as “Honey Boo-Boo.” It was quite enjoyable watching the students try and figure out this pun-y costume. I eventually had to tell most of them, at which point they smiled and laughed genuinely. My students are very good-natured this year, and I think they’re all so sweet!
3. Data – I feel like I am drowning in data. As I have mentioned, I am collecting data for my dissertation. It is very very very (yes 3 verys) overwhelming at times. But gosh, isn’t it pretty to look at? When I realize I am starting to go crazy and my mind is becoming numb, I guess it’s a comforting thought that I can just look at all the pretty colors… O.o
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4. Reading Interventions – I’ve purchased 2 books this week that I am excited to read. I am intending to use them with my group of intervention students – the students who are currently behind grade level with reading comprehension. After doing some extensive testing and investigating, I have come to find that they aren’t lacking in reading comprehension strategies, but they are actually lacking in foundational reading skills. This is not something that a middle school teacher usually looks for or expects in a 7th or 8th grader, but I see it becoming a more prevalent problem. We are going to wind up going back to basics with phonics, phoneme-grapheme mapping, syllabication, morphemes and word study. I’m hoping that we can give these students the missing ingredients they need to catch them up to their peers with reading fluency and comprehension.
5. New Camcorder – Well, my husband and I decided to crack into the savings a bit and purchase a new camcorder for my school work. As I am working with students who are taking the ORCA, I need to record our conversations and their navigational habits. After doing some research, we decided on this Canon VIXIA HF R42 – Camcorder, and I’m very happy with it. It is simple to use, takes high quality video, allows me to also snap pictures, and the audio is unbelievable. (BTW we found an open item at Best Buy and saved a lot of money!) I’m playing back our recordings, and I can hear what the teacher is talking about in the next room! I wish I had purchased this camcorder when I was working on my National Board Certification, and for all of the other data collection projects I have done as part of my dissertation. I had been using the Flip Video, but this camcorder can record for much longer since I can use SD cards, and the video quality is much higher.
I hope you have had a wonderful Halloween 2013. It’s really one of the best holidays, isn’t it? I’m all about holidays that focus on fun and not gifts. And a chance to dress up? I’M IN!!
Here is my costume for school: Party Cloudy with a Chance of Rain
And here I am taking my niece (Minnie Mouse) and nephew (Ninja – so sneaky, you can barely see him!) Trick-or-Treating. I am dressed as a Fairy Princess, of course!
And finally, my dog Rocket is even dressed to impress – he is SUPER DOG! He got so much attention Trick-or-Treating. Everyone laughed, awww’d, and even asked to take a picture 🙂
Goodbye week 8, and goodbye Quarter 1! Here are the highlights from this week:
1. Our 8th graders have been working on a Rocket unit in science class. This week, we took them outside to launch their final products. Our science teachers are really the best. I love this picture of them all looking up to the clouds.
2. I made it to the top 100 Middle School Teacher-Authors on Teachers Pay Teachers! I was just completely shocked and wonderfully surprised! Yeah, #98!!!
3. One of the best things about our school is that our students have a strong sense of pride and school spirit. You can see it everywhere you look!
4. Yes it is getting colder, and yes my furnace did break this week (grrr!!!), but I am forever looking for the silver lining. I take a walk every day after work – just by myself – to help me clear my head. I listen to audiobooks (right now, I am ‘reading’ Scarlet), and let my eyes take in all of the beauty. The fall colors are just GORGEOUS!
5. We have a special birdseed surprise in our backyard. Underneath our birdfeeder, some seeds have fallen and some really interesting things have come to life! Yes, even this late in the season, we have a corn stalk and a sunflower!
Have a wonderful weekend! I get a 3-day Long Fall Weekend, YES SLEEP!!!!
‘Kids these days are so good with computers – certainly better than I will ever be! They’re whatchya call ‘Digital Natives’. They spend so much time with technology, they know exactly what to do. What could we possibly teach them in school?’
Have you heard something like this before? It’s a popular school of thought. Unfortunately, it’s fundamentally flawed, and research indicates that schools need to start addressing the issues of Digital Literacy: the ability to communicate (read, write, speak, listen) effectively via technology. It’s not enough to simply take students to the computer lab and give them time to do research or type up their papers. Putting technology in their hands does not automatically mean you are using technology effectively in the classroom. We need to actually show them – model – digital literacy skills of locating, evaluating, synthesizing, and communicating effectively online.
Another popular yet incorrect assumption is that reading books and reading online require the same set of reading strategies and skills. I mean – they’re both just information, right? Wrong. There are several key differences between reading online and reading traditional print that educators must understand. First, online texts are multimodal – they consist of media presented in multiple forms, from text to graphics, photographs, audio, video and more. Meaning can be conveyed through size, layout, proportion, and color. Students need to be taught how to ‘read’ these new kinds of ‘texts’ and draw connections between information presented in multiple media. This is hard work for our brain! Multimedia has so much potential for reaching our students with different learning styles and needs, but we must first teach them how to utilize it. Not to mention, there are SO many distractions and distractors online – it can be a real sensory overload!
When we read a traditional book, believe it or not, a lot of the work is done for us. The author has already pre-determined your purpose for reading, the order in which you will read everything, and how the text is organized. When reading online, we get to make all of these decisions for ourselves. We start out with a question or a problem, make decisions, click away, and build a ‘choose your own adventure’ kind of reading experience. Because online texts are nonlinear, this means that no two people will have the exact same online reading experience. And since we – the readers – are the ones with the question/problem, only we can determine when we have fulfilled our online reading purpose and we can stop reading. That’s a lot of pressure!
Students require strong metacognitive abilities (awareness of our thinking) when reading online, as they must constantly reflect on everything they read, whether it is pertinent to their reading purpose, and what to do next. Every single navigational choice or click requires self-regulating reading strategies (planning, predicting, monitoring, evaluation), forward inferential thinking (predicting – what do I expect to find when I click this?), prior knowledge (of both the reading topic and prior experiences with technology), and global reading strategies such as questioning and synthesis (how does this fit in with what I already know? just read on the previous screen?). Phew – reading online is tough! We use more reading strategies more often when reading online, and we use them in unique and creative ways that are distinct from traditional print reading strategies.
So you see, we do need to address these issues in the classroom. We need to model for our students and give them lots of guided practice with reading for comprehension online. Being raised around technology does not automatically make our students proficient online readers.
One tool that is helping to bridge this gap in American Schools is the ORCA: Online Reading Comprehension Assessment. It is a 5-year research project funded by the United States Department of Education. The research team, located at the University of Connecticut, includes Dr. Donald Leu, Dr. John Kulokowich, Dr. Nell Sedransk, and Dr. Julie Coiro. The team has been generous enough to let me use this tool to conduct my own research for my dissertation before the assessment will be made available to schools across the nation.
The ORCA measures students’ abilities with 4 critical digital literacy skills: locate, evaluate, synthesize, and communicate. This is NOT your typical standardized assessment! It is designed to look familiar to students – a lot like Facebook. The students login, create an online profile, then interact with a peer named Brianna who asks questions and gives the students tasks to perform. These tasks range from reading email, searching the Internet, locating specific articles, summarizing (1 article) and synthesizing (multiple articles) the information, copying and pasting, evaluate the credentials and credibility of an author and article, and finally constructing a summative email. The ORCA measures everything a student does from the terms they type into ‘Gloogle’ (the ORCA intranet version of Google), to which links they choose from a list of search results. In the end, there are 16 tasks that are measured.
For my research, I am conducting a 2-Phase Mixed Methods study that is investigating possible variables that may affect student success with the ORCA such as use of reading strategies, time spent on task, prior experiences with technology, and level of confidence. Here are my students taking the ORCA last week:
In my first phase, I administered the ORCA to 123 students in 8th grade. As you can see from the average scores below, we need to adjust our 8th grade Language Arts curriculum to address the skills of evaluating online texts (is this a credible source?) and communicating that information appropriately (constructing email, citing sources, etc.)
Average scores out of 4 (n=123)
Locate: 2.54
Synthesize: 2.91
Evaluate: 1.81
Communicate: 1.33
I can’t wait for this tool to be available nationwide – I think this is going to make a huge impact on students and the way we teach reading comprehension. I’ll be sure to keep you updated on the progress of my dissertation as well – I am actually excited about this project, and I know the results will be interesting and of critical importance.
We read a great article today from Junior Scholastic titled “IS TXTING 2 MUCH BAD 4 U?” Our learning targets were reading for detail and highlighting with a purpose. We first just read through the article, had a brief discussion, then went back and highlighted the pros and cons in two different colors. Next, we identified the audience and purpose of the article. Finally, I elected a student to be the recorder (nice handwriting, right?) and the class create a giant t-chart of the pros (benefits) and cons (dangers) of texting. I was pretty impressed with the list they generated! In the interest of full disclosure, I must add that they were pretty miffed that the article appeared ‘biased’ to them – too many cons and too few pros. A great discussion though!
In preparation for our Argumentative Writing Unit, tomorrow we will identify the stakeholders in this topic, then write a blog entry that includes a thesis (student’s opinion on the topic) and evidence from the article.
This summer, I participated in a challenge at my gym: attend 15 group fitness classes, collect signatures, and earn a spiffy new t-shirt. The competitive side in me just couldn’t walk away! Who knew this would be the hardest I would EVER work for a t-shirt in my WHOLE life? 15 classes is a BIG time investment. I know, I know, it wasn’t about the t-shirt. But dagnabbit, every time I look at / wear / wash / fold / think about that shirt, I am going to remember all that hard work and commitment.
I tried so many different things this summer as part of the group fitness classes. I did a lot of yoga, but also a cardio club, zumba, kick-boxing, circuit training, and spin. I pushed myself out of my comfort zone, which is a very rewarding thing to do. So there you have it – a $7ish dollar cotton t-shirt that represents perseverance, power, and pride! I will be honored to wear it until it falls apart!
According to Purdue Online Writing Lab, Argumentative Writing is “a genre of writing that requires students to investigate a topic; collect, generate, and evaluate evidence; and establish a position on the topic in a concise manner.”
In a nutshell, what this means to me is that argument essays require you to take a position on a topic and justify your position with evidence (facts, examples, anecdotes, statistics, truths, expert opinions). Before the writer can take a position, he/she must consider different sides of the issue and engage in some research.
If you have been investigating and incorporating the Common Core State Standards into your curriculum, you will have noticed that the word ‘persuade’ has almost disappeared, only to be replaced with the words argument/argumentative writing. I think of persuasion as a more aggressive, one-sided stance on a controversial issue; the writer takes a strong stance on a position and uses evidence and propagandistic language to convince the reader of something. Argumentative writing, on the other hand, defends one position/claim while also addressing and responding to opposing claims. It is also more balanced, logical, and sequential in the way in which it must address and explain multiple pieces of evidence. This is the direction that the Common Core Standards are leading us toward.
A pioneer in the field of Argumentative Writing is Dr. Richard Beach. If you teach Language Arts, you’re going to want to purchase this book:
In fact, he’s written a great deal of poignant, timely texts on Language Arts and the Common Core. Here is a link to his page on Amazon.
I had the privilege of hearing him speak about Argumentative Writing at the Wisconsin State Reading Association Symposium in June of 2012. After reading several articles about his current research, I created my own Argumentative Writing Unit and Instructional Workbook for guiding my students through the Argument Writing Process.
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I will say that this makes a lot more sense to me than persuasive writing. The goal is no longer ‘winning’ a debate, but rather considering the issue from all angles and taking a calculated position. Not to get too philosophical here, but I do think this is a skill that would greatly benefit our politically divided country. Learning to listen to one another and address opposing claims leads us in the directions of understanding and compromising – surely these are much more ’21st Century Skills’ than winning.
Have you incorporated Argumentative Writing into your curriculum?
1. Data Wall – as part of the state-regulated Response to Intervention model, our school is creating a data wall in order to visualize and track student growth. Basically, we have transformed an unused classroom into a data room, in which staff can meet and reflect on student needs, progress, and goals. The chalkboards are magnetized, and we have a magnet for each student. On each magnet, we have colored dots to represent different groups/needs/demographics. We also write the students’ RIT scores (MAP scores for Reading, Language Arts, and Math) on the magnet, and we place them on the board from left to right based on their performance (Low, Low-Average,, Average, High-Average). It’s exciting to see this project finalized! Actually looking at the data laid out like this helps us to see where we need to concentrate our efforts.
2. Oh What A Beautiful Morning – Okay getting up at 5am stinks. I am a morning person, but right now, 5am still feels like ‘night.’ It’s dark and cold and yucky! But as I was driving to work on Tuesday morning, I had my breath taken away by this stunning view!
3. Time to Dance! My husband and I had an absolutely wonderful time at a wedding this past Saturday. It was an at Urban Ecology Center – what a cool venue!
4. All In! My students completed and turned in their Scholarship Letters on Thursday. They are so proud of their final products – they look so professional! For most of them, this is the longest and most important thing they have written in their lives. Before the iPads, I would get about 94% handed in – some kids just couldn’t cross the finish line with this project. Now, with the iPads, I got 100% of the letters. That’s HUGE!
5. Girl’s Night: On Monday, I went shopping with my mom and sister. We hit the mall for about 4 hours after work, then went out for sushi. I love shopping with these ladies! We visited J. Crew, Express, Ann Taylor, LOFT, and White House Black Market looking for a new suit and separates for my sister to wear on her interviews for dental residency program. It was definitely a successful trip! I think we spent way too much money… 🙂
