Teaching in a Consumerocracy

The latest English Journal issue is about the role of English teachers in our age of consumerocracy. Most of the good articles in this issue are not about specific teaching strategies, but more about teaching stances and the choices we make about what to teach and how to frame the conversation. Additionally, some of these articles have implications for our teaching of social studies content. In short, it is effectively a very "humanities" issue. Articles that stood out and worth a read:

• "The Ebay-ification of Education: Critical Literacy in a Consumerocracy" by 5 authors... This is a broad-view look at schools as conforming to the consumerocracy and makes its point by mixing argument, theory, and memoir. It rouses the college student within.
• "From the Editor" by Ken Lindlom... Lindblom's introduction to the issue provides a rationale for teaching about our culture of consumption as English teachers and provides an example of a good lesson plan called "Who are you wearing?"
• "The Story of Stuff: Reading Advertisements through Critical Eyes" by Shannon Cuf and Heather Statz begins by retelling the story of the trampled Black Friday shopper in 2008 and asking what happens to us in our "quest for stuff". The authors suggest a number of good resources, including documentaries and print ads.

Two other articles deviate from the issue's theme, but deal with the issue of writing and how much structure we should or should not impose on our teaching of writing to students:

• "Rethinking a Writing Teacher's Expertise: Following Students under the Kitchen Table" by Maja Wilson uses the extended metaphor of a nurse "going with the mother" to deliver a baby rather than forcing the baby out on the nurse's terms. Yes, even Wilson acknowledges that this is amusing... However, she is an advocate of a holistic and authentic approach to assessing writing and meeting kids where they are. Not into rubrics.
• "Persistence of the Five-Paragraph Essay" by Jeanetta Miller... Miller wonders why this kind of writing, which "does not exist in the real world" still holds so much sway in our schools.
  

Useful DOE Curriculum Resources

The Department of Education released a short manual to complement the new middle school library we received one copy of at the beginning of the year. After thumbing through it I think that it can provide solid support for developing the ELA side of our curriculum. The "core texts" identified in the guide come with a wealth of teaching ideas, essential questions, and strategies, and in some cases complement historical units we are studying. This may be something you want to take a look at and something we can discuss as a team for our future planning.

In addition, the DOE has posted sample units of study based on "trade book units" for Social Studies. Schools had the option of purchasing textbooks or trade books a few years back as the basis for SS curriculum. Here you can find examples of units, which may be helpful for thinking about how you plan a unit and the considerations you make when planning. These units also offer various templates that may help you get started.

Some other helpful resources from the DOE will be archived on the right sidebar.

Blog 3.0

Welcome to the third incarnation of the Humanities Team Blog. I think this is the best one yet. On the right sidebar you will find links to the best of the edublogs, which have the latest news and updates on a variety of different topics. Above that are "curriculum resources", which will link to "delicious" pages of links for text and other resources pertaining to a particular unit of study.

You can post about anything and apply an appropriate tag to it. We can see how it goes. The more we post the more we grow'st.

Practice, Practice, Practice (Or: Homework, Homework, Homework?)

A good summary of Marzano's main points about the purposes of homework and what makes good homework. The homework debate continues to simmer and one of the main issues these days seems to be about the perceptions the community holds about homework and its relationship to "rigorous classrooms". Experts generally agree that homework does not hold purpose if it is not practice and if it cannot be assessed (or if students cannot receive feedback on it), yet many parents and even some educators still believe that if homework is not coming home with students in a given class, then that class is not providing a rigorous enough academic experience. What do you think?

Free Book Online About Independent Reading

Tony Stead's new book, Good Choice!, is a comprehensive guide for creating lifelong readers through independent reading and response. You'll discover how to:

• establish routines to make independent reading a natural part of each day;
• excite your students by providing a range of reading materials—including magazines, newspapers, maps, and computers—based on their interests and abilities;
• make the best use (and avoid pitfalls) of leveling for independent reading;
• use mini-lessons and conferences to expand kids' reading repertoire;
• help them discover the many purposes for reading, become active participants in the selection process, and read more at home;
• assist students as they respond to their reading, for both engagement and assessment.

Throughout the book, Tony provides classroom transcripts and student samples for grades K-2 and 3-6, with special sections that tailor ideas to kindergarten and grade 1. You'll find dozens of graphic organizers and reproducible forms and rubrics, as well as a list of useful websites for independent reading and research.

Good Choice! will be released early next week. You can preview the entire book online now:

http://www.stenhouse.com/0732.asp?r=n151

Good Choice!
Supporting Independent Reading and Response, K-6
Tony Stead • Foreword by David Booth
248 pp • $22.50 • Available 11/11
http://www.stenhouse.com/0732.asp?r=n151

The Blog Is Alive!

The UNMS Humanities Team Blog is making a comeback. We can use this space to post the latest thoughts and ideas from prominent researchers and leaders in our fields (and our own thoughts too!).

Stay tuned for more updates.

Ideas for the First Week

Check out the Educators for Social Responsibility (ESR) book Partners in Learning, which you can borrow from me before school starts for great community building ideas and even day-to-day ideas for starting the year.

Here are some other sites:
http://wilderdom.com/games/InitiativeGames.html
http://www.stenhouse.com/8904.asp?r=n119
http://www.education-world.com/back_to_school/index.shtml

Grammar/Spelling Program - Update on Vocab

Hello everyone. I have been working on our 15 minute spelling and grammar program. I'm making alot of progress and I've been getting some helpful input from literacy specialists and fellow teachers. I am excited to introduce the material to you when what I have is more finalized.

In terms of vocabulary, I don't think that it is beneficial to include it in this format. It doesn't make sense to me to choose vocab words to use for all of us when they would probably be chosen arbitrarily from a vocabulary book. I think it probably makes the most sense for us to generate vocabulary from our students' difficult words from their independent reading and from the vocabulary required for our units. If you feel passionately that vocabulary instruction should be included in this program, please do respond and let me know and I will try to find a meaningful way to incorporate it. Otherwise, I think it is probably best for us to plan our vocabulary instruction individually or in grade teams.

Check back for updates on the program! I will be posting the procedures soon.

Best,

Danielle Giusto
dmgiusto@gmail.com

Our Writing Program
Based on the research we have been reading, we will undertake the following actions to improve our students’ writing and academic success:
1. Students will write more. A lot more. They will get a lot more writing practice.
2. Teachers will model good writing. Writing will be taught, not just assigned.
3. Students will have grammar instruction.
4. Students will read and study other writers.
5. Students will have practice with timed writing instruction and test prompts.
6. Students will have choice when it comes to writing topics.
7. Students will write for authentic purposes and for authentic audiences.
8. Students will get meaningful feedback from their teachers and their peers.

Students often don’t get why they have to write so much. We will be teaching them the following eight reasons for writing:
1. Writing is hard, but “hard” is rewarding.
2. Writing helps you sort things out.
3. Writing helps to persuade others.
4. Writing helps to fight oppression.
5. Writing makes you a better reader.
6. Writing makes you smarter.
7. Writing helps you get into and through college.
8. Writing prepares you for the world of work.

Throughout the year we will be focusing on four types of student writing, which we describe below. All four types are essential for developing students’ writing and thinking skills.
1. Writing to Learn: Students will write everyday in a variety of modes to extend their thinking and learning about reading, history, social issues, and their own learning. Writing to learn takes such forms as:
· Note-taking
· Book Letters and reading responses
· Social Studies Skits / Drama
· Social Studies Projects
· Journal Responses to social studies topics or readings
· Graphic Organizers
· Self-Assessments
· All other writing

2. The Writer’s Notebook / Independent Writing: Students will experiment with and practice their writing on a weekly basis. We will teach students how to become independent writers, to use brainstorming techniques, and how to generate and extend ideas. This is the place where students will have the most choice and freedom.
· 5 pages per week will be due
· Mondays (60 minutes)
o 20 minutes – Writer’s Notebook Minilesson and Teacher Modeling
o 20 minutes – Independent Writing + Conferencing
o 20 minutes – Partner and Class Sharing
· Wednesdays (30 minutes)
o 5 minutes – Writer’s Notebook Check-in Minilesson
o 15-20 minutes – Independent Writing + Conferencing
o 5-10 minutes – Partner and Class Sharing
· All of this writing will be the source for larger writing projects (esp. MultiG)


3. On-Demand/Prompt Writing: Students will learn how to develop and organize clear and meaningful short essays in response to academic prompts like they will see on standardized tests, college applications, etc…
· 1 timed, on-demand essay per week (In the first quarter we will scaffold up to this, teaching how to “attack the prompts” before we get into the actual writings.). The lesson and writing assignment will usually be on Fridays for 30 minutes. This will be connected to Humanities content.
· During test-prep, this will become more intensive.

4. Extended Writing Projects: Students will go through the writing process to develop real world modes of writing in mandated discourses, such as expository, persuasive, narrative, and instructional. We will teach students the craft of writing through revision, including voice, organization, clarity of ideas, sentence fluency, presentation, and word choice. We will also teach students how to edit the conventions of their writing.
· We will have 1 – 2 extended writing projects per unit…
o A Narrative Account: Students will write a narrative account from the perspective of a turn-of-the-century immigrant as an “immigrant journal”.
o A Persuasive Essay: Students will write a persuasive essay related to the topic of war and questions about why we fight and if it’s ever worth it.
o A Functional Document: Students will write an instruction manual for sixth graders on an aspect of good test-taking.
o A Comparative Literary Analysis: Students will write a literary analysis comparing two short pieces of literature. This will be test-prep based.
o A Literary Response / Book Review: Students will write a book review or literary response to a work of historical fiction about the Holocaust.
o A Social Action Letter: Students will write a letter to someone in the community related to a civil rights issue of their choosing.
o A Multigenre Paper: The culminating writing project will be a multigenre paper of roughly 10 to 15 pages, in which students explore a social issue of their choosing.

· Minilessons and time to write for extended writing projects will take place throughout the unit, but will become more intensive toward the ends of each unit to support the completion of each unit’s performance task, which will be writing-based.

Our Plan for Teaching Reading

After much thought, reading, and discussion, Reena and I have come up with the following plan for incorporating the teaching of reading into Humanities:
Each day, except Wednesday, we will set aside 30 minutes for "Reading Workshop", which will include 5 minutes for either a systems minilesson or a booktalk, 20 minutes for independent reading with conferencing, and 5 minutes for partner talk and class debriefing.

• Systems Minilessons are very short reading minilessons that address the systems of reading in the class, such as how the library works, how to read and conference quietly, how to choose a book, strategies for talking with a partner, how to keep track of books read, how to write "book letters" to friends and the teacher, and how to give booktalks.
• Booktalks will be performed by the teacher and/or the students. All students will need to give one or two booktalks per quarter. Initially we will have to scaffold the teaching of how to give a booktalk. The purpose of the booktalk is to grow enthusiasm for books in the class and "sell" books to the right kids.
• "Book letters" will be written responses to reading on a book of their choice. Thus, we are not saying they will need to respond in writing on a daily or even bookly basis. Writing these letters effectively will also require good scaffolding and modeling.
• The teaching of comprehension, fix-up strategies, literary conventions, etc... will take place both during conferencing (one-on-one), through responses to book letters, and in the "humanities block" (i.e. the other 90 minutes of the class)

During the "humanities block" we will teach comprehension strategies through the short story read alouds or nonfiction read alouds we are using in the class. For example, we are beginning our immigration unit with a short vignette called "Orientation Day" about a Chinese-American girl who is questioning her identity. We will think-aloud about the author's purpose, main idea, and analyze her character, in addition to having students journal responses to it to scaffold their understanding about "what it means to be American". When we are reading nonfiction we will pay attention, thinking aloud / marking up / chart, the textual structures. There is a great book that is a great synthesis between teaching historical thinking as well as good reading strategies for learning history / social issues called "Making Sense of History" by Myra Zarnowski.
We are going to focus on the following reading strategies the most in the beginning because they are most important for test taking: main idea / determining importance; author's purpose; word study; text structure; and inferencing (which we will do through character analysis: theories with evidence). In conferencing we will focus mostly on the struggling readers who need the most explicit teaching in terms of visualizing, fix-up strategies, and prior knowledge activation.
There's more.
Mondays we would like to set aside for extended reading and writing workshop. So, on Monday, we would still have our 30 minute structure for reading as described earlier, but we may extend the class discussion about our reading, and add time for students to actually work on and get help with their book letters and booktalks. The same would go for writing. Students would get extended time to "play" in their writer's notebooks and share their writings with the class. Mondays would be a time for us to take stock, as a class, of how we're growing as readers and writers. It would set the stage for the week in terms of minilessons and independent reading and writing foci.
Spelling and grammar would reserve a 15-minute place every day of the week except Mondays. The 30 minutes on Wednesday, normally reserved for Independent Reading will be taken over by Independent Writing.
We have also developed some more planning templates, including conferencing guides, conferencing assessment sheets, yearly and daily reading logs, and unit and daily planning sheets that you may find useful, which we will post in the next few days.