#CyberPD 2017 - Week 1 - Dynamic Teaching for Deeper Reading

My brain is full. Between this amazing, thought provoking text and my first PD read of the summer, Disrupting Thinking: Why How We Read Matters  by Kylene Beers and Robert Probst (reflection blog post to come soon) I am rethinking ways I can support teachers as they grow their literacy practices and respond to students' needs. Focusing on the first few chapters of Vicki Vinton's book, I am finding myself thinking about ways to incorporate problem-based approaches in all of my coaching cycles - whether they are math, science, social studies or literacy based. 

Our job as educators is to discover what our students need to grow as independent learners, help them determine their goals, guide them through a process of creating or co-creating a learning path to reach these goals, and then send them off to practice and attain their goals with our support. In my experience, the most challenging part of this process is when we send students off to practice. How do we know if what they are doing in small groups or independently is on target and helping them move closer to their goal? 

BALANCED LITERACY - Planning Instruction Focused on Readers

The school district that I work in practices a balanced literacy approach. The basis of our instructional scope and sequence is responsive to students' needs, but also relies on the expertise and structure from Lucy Calkins Units of Study for reading and writing in our elementary schools. We use the workshop model as a structure to plan our days and our time with students. I appreciated Vicki Vinton's mention of the components of reading workshop and how they may need to be adapted or repurposed to meet the complex needs of our students and their ability to think about the texts they encounter. (page 24) I have briefly summarized the ideas in the text and put my own thoughts/questions after. I have a lot of thinking to do about this area. We are finishing our 2nd year with the reading units of study. The first few years, teachers needed to get used to the scope and sequence, expectations for our readers, and gain an understanding of how the teaching points outlined in the units support our readers as a whole reader. We needed some time to see the big picture. How are our readers being set up to grow across K-5?

Components of Balanced Literacy

My thoughts and/or questions as I support teachers to make a shift in their thinking

• Read-Aloud and Shared Reading become a shared interactive read-aloud where all students have access to the text. This will take a lot of practice for the teacher to make this time efficient, yet intentional in teaching and talking points. What does shared reading look like in the intermediate grades? It is not as common in my building to see shared reading in the upper grades. Is this the place where you incorporate your teaching points from the Units of Study? 
• Read-Aloud becomes a time for students to practice the problem solving of making meaning with the text. Essentially, this has morphed into the "active engagement" of the mini lesson in our units. 
• The Mini-lesson is replaced with a reminder of what students have already done and experienced during the read-aloud. We will invite students to try this work in their independent reading. I understand the shift of the mini-lesson to the shared reading/read-aloud. I hope that teachers don't see this as an opportunity to give up their read-aloud time. I firmly believe that students need to be exposed to various texts through read-aloud that may or may not be connected to your reading units of study. I want to make sure students are still hearing multiple genres, content area texts, poems, songs, amazing picture books, etc. 
• Small Groups. This is a place to give students more time to practice solving particular kinds of problems that readers face in accessible texts.   I am beyond pleased with the amount of PD we have devoted to small group instruction. With the support of Kate and Maggie Roberts, the teachers in my building have embraced the DIY tools and idea that all students have their "side missions" to work on. 
• Independent Reading Conferences are places to give students the support they need to determine and attain their own reading goals. Hands down - this is the best part of the day. It is what I miss most about having my own classroom. I need to practice making conferences brief. Determining a teaching point for each child can be daunting and overwhelming, especially when you know you have 20 plus students to do this for. I think with the efficiency of aligned balanced literacy, it is manageable. 

This is just skims the surface of what I am thinking about the teaching of reading. At this time the structure of the mini lesson and seems to be where many teachers need support. But after reading this, that's not where we need to be putting our focus. Our focus needs to be on our students and how they think about a text. We need to be flexible in how we reach our students. We need to be intentional with every text we read. We need to include students in the process at all points. I will continue to reflect and think about how to get these messages to the amazing teachers in my building. 

I am looking forward to the conversations to be had with teachers, members of #CyberPD, coaches, and principals.