Reading — Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.
Writing — Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts, using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence.
By coordinating their efforts, a team can provide a variety of contexts for students to practice the skill of citing evidence in both discussions and writing. Finding strategies that work across the disciplines is the first step. Here’s one that Abby Svenson, fifth grade teacher at Harpswell Community School in Maine, uses with her students.
Students respond to a prompt.
The teacher chooses 3 responses – good, better, and excellent.
Students identify the positive aspects of each response.
Then students make concrete suggestions to make the responses even stronger.
The teacher creates a visual summarizing the ideas for students to reference when revising their own work.
The image below shows the visual that Abby constructed.
Notice…
3 columns
The responses are in the center.
Response #1 is the weakest and #3 is the strongest.
Identified positives are in the left column.
Suggestions for making responses stronger by citing additional evidence are on the right.
This particular example is a literature lesson. Imagine the social studies teacher following up with a similar exercise based on a video, and the science teacher adapting the process to fit his needs. As students become familiar and confident with the process, they can focus more and more on the content. Multiple practices and varied contexts builds competence and confidence.
This strategy could become digital by using a wiki or Google Drive. The advantage of using a digital tool is, of course, that the examples are available 24/7 to students working on assignments.
Learning to cite evidence to support a stance or make an important point is not beyond any student. Modeling, multiple practices, and having students work together will provide the scaffolding necessary to build these skills. When teachers collaborate to plan a systematic approach across the curriculum, students benefit.
More snow here in the Northeast today so it is difficult to think about spring being just around the corner. However, the clock leaps ahead this weekend so green grass and tulips must be on the way. In my last post I suggested teams assess how well you are connecting with each and every child as a first step in a spring tune-up. A good second step is to think about skills that students need to be successful in all of your classes:
Identifying the main idea and supporting details
Writing an open ended response
Making inferences
Crafting an argument with sufficient evidence and logical reasoning
Taking notes
Searching the Internet effectively, efficiently, and ethically
Keeping track of assignments and managing time
The list could go on and on, however the team needs to choose one on which to focus. If you could send your students on to the next grade having truly mastered just one academic skill, what would it be? Which one would be the most beneficial to them? (Of course there are many, but you have to start somewhere!) Once you have identified that skill, devise a cross-curricular approach to teaching and reinforcing it:
Who is going to introduce or reteach the skill? When and in what context?
What order are the other teachers going to reinforce the skill and provide additional practices within the context of their curriculum? How will they do it? Share ideas.
How will you assess student progress and then reteach if necessary?
Actually plan it out on calendar.
Hold yourselves responsible. Take time to reflect on this strategy–did you get the desired results? If so, what’s the the next skill you are going to address? If not, figure out what you might try differently next time! Collaborating to build student skills is a powerful strategy for learning.
It’s early March and in some parts of the country the daffodils are starting to bloom, creating waves of bobbing yellow heads that stand out sharply against the greening grass. However, it’s all white in my neck of the woods with snow still piled up two feet high.
No matter the scenery, early spring is a great time for your team to pause and reflect on your progress so far.
There are still at least two or three solid months left before the end of the year rituals and festivities commence. Take time to review what the team has accomplished so far and to prioritize your collaborative efforts for the rest of the year so you can make the best use of this block of instructional time. Focus on those activities that will help your students the most and make sure the team “cylinders” fire in a coordinated and efficient manner.
One aspect of a team spring tune-up ought to include an assessment of how well the teachers are connecting with each of the students. Here are a couple of questions to ask yourselves:
Does each of our students have an adult advocate on the team—someone who knows the student well and with whom the student feels comfortable talking?
Do we incorporate student interests in our instruction?
Does each of our students feel valued?
Here’s an activity for Common Planning Time to help you assess how well you are connecting with your students:
Write every student’s name on an index card.
Spread the cards out on a table, name side up.
Individually, note on the card the interests of the student. For example: Johnny—snowmobiling and water skiing, Maria—singing and composing
When each teacher has finished noting what s/he knows about individual student interests, step back and look at the array of cards.
Are there some students everyone seems to know?
Who are the students with blank cards?
Do the students with blank cards share any characteristics? What do these shared characteristics tell us about our team? Are there some things we need to address?
Low grades?
Behavior issues?
Special ed?
Very quiet?
Eat lunch alone?
Create a plan. How will you connect with each of those students whose cards are blank?
Informal conversations?
Advisory, homeroom or class activity?
Eat lunch with them?
Conversations with parents?
How might we use student interests to connect with our curricula?
Set a date to review your progress in making personal connections with these students.
We know that relationships are a key element is a student’s motivation and achievement in school. Sometimes connections naturally occur among students and staff, but there are always those students left out. It is imperative that middle grades team teachers be intentional in building relationships:
Student to student
Staff to student
Staff to families
Taking time to check on the status of the connections between you and your students is a first step in a Team Spring Tune Up . Do not let any of your students leave the team at the end of the year without feeling they were known, appreciated, and valued by their teachers.
A sanctuary that has survived 10 years of civil war.
A desperate need for money.
These are the ingredients of a service learning project that will intrigue and inspire middle school students. On a recent trip to Sierra Leone in West Africa I visited Tacugama, a sanctuary for chimpanzees. Their goal is to reintroduce the chimps back into the wild, but it is a long and expensive process.
These chimps are in the enclosure that helps them learn to socialize with other chimps. Many have not had that experience in captivity.
Chimps live in family groups in the wild–socialization is a survival skill.
Over 20,000 chimpanzees roamed the forests of Sierra Leone in the 1970’s, but now there are only 3,000. There are a variety of reasons why the numbers have dropped drastically:
Their habitat has shrunk.
They are captured for medical research or to be sold as pets.
They are considered ‘bush meat” and when times are tough they are hunted for food.
They are highly susceptible to human diseases like HIV.
These chimps are almost ready to be released to wild!
The Sanctuary rescues chimps that are often in dire circumstances. Baby chimps are adorable and so human-like that people often want them as pets. However, a full grown chimp has 5 times the physical strength of a man, so the cuddly baby grows into a unruly adolescent that can wreck a home in minutes and into an adult that is dangerous. Hence they are often chained and caged under deplorable conditions. The Tacugama staff works hard to rehabilitate these chimps so they can live free. Click on this link to read about the history of the Sanctuary: http://www.tacugama.com/history.html.
Sierra Leone’s civil war was tough on the chimps as well as humans. They were terrorized by bombs and gunfire and suffered physically and emotionally just as humans do.
It takes about $1000 to support one chimpanzee for a year. However, smaller donations are welcomed. Schools, teams and/or advisory groups might find supporting this haven for battered and endangered chimpanzees a worthwhile project. More information about supporting Tacugama can be found at this link: http://www.tacugama.com/support.html
If you look closely at the trees you will see dark clumps of leaves–these are the chimps’ nests where they sleep at night.
Finally, there is a blog that students may find interesting (http://tacugama.wildlifedirect.org/). The posts explain what is happening with individual chimps; the photos are wonderful! Readers will learn a lot about chimps as well as the Sanctuary. We often never know what inspires our students to make specific career and life choices — reading about the chimps of Tacugama may just be a catalyst for future decisions related to international travel, non-profit work, or veterinary work!
Who is watching whom???
The one in the back whose face we cannot see was not impressed with us–s/he threw rocks at us.
PS–Feel free to use these pictures for your own use.
We are obsessed with numbers as they relate to learning–data points, standardized tests, and grades. We miss other aspects of what it means to learn–passion, depth of understanding, creative expression, emotional response, and a life changed forever by an experience. Even the best rubric would be hard pressed to quantify these things.
This video provides an alternative lens to view how we “do” school.
Watch together as a team.
Have a conversation about how the conductor’s message relates to the team’s mission.
I follow a couple of former students on Facebook, and one evening there was a flutter of posts about homework, tears, and frustration. The conversation took me back to many parent conferences that focused on the topic of homework: Why it wasn’t being done? Whose responsibility was it to make sure it got done? What its relationship was to grades? Rarely did we have a conversation about the worth of homework.
Teams ought to be talking about homework–regularly. What’s due this week? Let’s not all schedule tests on the same day. What’s the project load for the month? But more importantly, we ought to be talking about why we assign homework and what we hope it will accomplish.
Kohn reviews a recent study from the Indiana University School of Education that looked at the relationship between time spent on homework in science and math and grades and achievement tests. Here are the main findings plus Kohn’s editorial comments which I have put in italics:
“Even assuming the existence of a causal relationship, which is by no means clear, one or two hours’ worth of homework every day buys you two or three points on a test. Is that really worth the frustration, exhaustion, family conflict, loss of time for other activities, and potential diminution of interest in learning?” Kohn goes on to say, “Thus, a headline that reads “Study finds homework boosts achievement” can be translated as “A relentless regimen of after-school drill-and-skill can raise scores a wee bit on tests of rote learning.”
“There was no relationship whatsoever between time spent on homework and course grade, and “no substantive difference in grades between students who complete homework and those who do not.”
Hmmm…these findings are certainly worth discussing at a team meeting. Questions come to mind:
Are there other studies out there with the same results?
What else do we need to know?
Why do we value homework?
Can we get past our own beliefs about the value of homework and really look at the topic objectively?
I decided to take the summer off and not post here. Out of habit, out of sight, out of mind! Result: it has been very difficult to get back into writing regularly. Not only has my habit of posting been disrupted, but my ease with the writing process has been adversely affected. Words don’t flow as easily, and my new idea generator seems stuck in neutral. It occurs to me that the same thing happens to our students when we don’t expect them to write on a regular basis!
The ability to communicate is a life skill. It’s one of the 4 C’s in the 21st century skills set and encompasses several standards in the Common Core. Furthermore, developing students’ abilities to communicate effectively is just common sense–it’s an every century skill!
Teams need to work together to build their students’ ability to communicate in a variety of ways, including writing. Here’s a terrific article about one very low performing high school that tackled writing together and found improvement in students’ skill levels in other areas: “The Writing Revolution” in The Atlantic.
Everything students write does not need to be corrected and graded. Sometimes the assignments are just practices–like shooting hoops on the school playground. Providing students opportunities to try out new words, sentence structures, and genres will have dividends as students become more comfortable with the written word.
A few ideas to get started as a team…
An idea from the article above–have students summarize in writing the big ideas from the lesson of the day (in any class) using sentence structures they have studied in Language Arts class. Write a compound sentence summarizing ratios.Write a sentence beginning with “although” that explains the process photosynthesis.
Use journals or writing logs in every class.
Summarizers
Discussion starter prompts
Practices for citing evidence in an argument piece
Creative writing (The creative economy generates personal income & revenue for state and federal governments–we shouldn’t ignore this aspect of our students’ education)
Write sentences using words from Word Wall
Keep a team blog that informs parents and the community about what is happening on your team. Have students write the different posts.
Plan interdisciplinary units where students synthesize information from several disciplines–have you looked at the Webquest site recently for ideas?
Browse ReadWriteThink together to identify ideas for working as a team on literacy skills.
Our students will not improve as writers unless they write. Working as a team to provide daily opportunities for students to experiment with words, sentence structures, and different genres is an important educational goal.
Additional sources on writing across the curriculum in middle school:
Teams ought to take time to read Peg Tyre’s article, “The Writing Revolution” in the October 2012 Atlantic Magazine (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/the-writing-revolution/309090/2/). She focuses on the journey of a high school that seemed destined for closure, yet found its way to success. Although the article is about an entire school, the lessons learned could certainly be applied to a middle grades team.
Here’s the story in bullets:
New Dorp High School was one of the 2,000 lowest performing high schools in the country.
Led by a determined principal, the staff identified poor writing as one of the reasons students were doing so poorly.
The staff was reluctant to look at their own practice. The answer, they thought, was that the students were just lazy.
With the help of a persistent consultant-coach the staff dug deeper into what was holding students back.
They learned students couldn’t put together sophisticated sentences or coherent paragraphs.
Teachers began to reflect on their own practice.
Writing skills began to be emphasized in every class. Here is an example of how writing skills were approached: “By fall 2009, nearly every instructional hour except for math class was dedicated to teaching essay writing along with a particular subject. So in chemistry class in the winter of 2010, Monica DiBella’s {student} lesson on the properties of hydrogen and oxygen was followed by a worksheet that required her to describe the elements with subordinating clauses—for instance, she had to begin one sentence with the word although.”
Achievement and graduation rates have climbed.
This article details what happens when a staff focused on a common goal, collaborates. They also were willing, eventually, to explore and change their own teaching practices. The result–students with a long history of mediocre skills and motivation began to perform at much higher levels proving they were neither dumb nor lazy.
Certainly a team could use some of the strategies described in this article as a starting point for addressing writing across the curriculum. The bigger lesson, however, is that when educators work together in a reflective manner toward a common goal, good things happen for kids.
School has been in session for several weeks. It’s a good time for us to think about how well we have come to know our students as individuals. A formative assessment on relationship building, so to speak. It is especially difficult for large teams to see the individual faces when 125 + students pass through the doors each morning. Assessing how well the relationship building between our team and our students is going is an excellent use of common planning time. Positive teacher-student relationships are essential to a supportive and challenging learning environment (http://www.schoolclimate.org/climate/schoolclimatebriefs.php).
Try this during common planning time!
Each teacher brings a list of homeroom students
Homeroom teachers go down the list and put a star next to the names of students they know something personal about…
How many brothers and sisters?
Hobbies?
Pets?
How the student likes to learn?
What responsibilities they might have at home–babysitting for siblings each night?
What they like to read?
Trade lists until everyone has gone through each homeroom list and starred students they know something about beyond their grades.
Homeroom List
Spread out all of the lists on a table and look at them
Identify which students no one knows beyond the seat they hold in the classroom. Also identify those students few know.
Design a plan for ensuring each and every student has at least one adult advocate on the team who knows him/her well. Think about the Donald Ducks on our teams–the children no one really knows at all. Imagine how lonely the school experience must be for these children. Some startling statistics:
Individual conferences with students once or twice a month to check in with how things are going– these can be just a 2 minute conversation in the cafeteria during lunch or in homeroom.
Building relationships with students needs to be intentional on the part of the team. Yes, they develop naturally with some students, and with others they need to be consciously cultivated with the teachers taking the lead. Positive teacher-student relationships, even with the hard to teach and reach students, are a critical component of a team culture that leads to higher achievement and healthier social-emotional lives of the students..
45 states and 3 territories have joined the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) initiative. Whether you agree with this approach to education or not, chances are it is coming to your school. Middle school teachers who work with colleagues on a team have several distinct advantages in addressing the CCSS over those teachers who work in isolation:
The literacy standards are for every subject area; teams can develop a systematic approach across the curriculum to ensure their students master the standards through multiple practices in a variety of contexts.
Team teachers who meet regularly in common planning time can easily exchange ideas and strategies.
Team teachers can monitor the progress of their students in meeting the standards across curriculum areas; interventions can be quickly implemented when needed.
Team teachers can identify major skill gaps that affect many students and use flexible scheduling and grouping to craft focused and intense learning experiences that address those gaps.
What should teams do?
Here are 2 steps to get started:
Familiarize yourselves with what the actual document (http://www.corestandards.org/) says. At the very least, take a look at the anchor standards and self-assess how well you are already addressing them in your classes. Be honest–now is not the time to say “Oh yeah, we do that.” when in reality it only happens once in a blue moon. Make a list of practices, processes, lessons, and/or units you feel address these key standards. When meeting about the Common Core, it is better to be prepared with specifics than to talk off the cuff. Specifics help us all be more articulate and less defensive. The anchor standards for literacy and math are listed at the end of the post.
Watch videos together like the one below that show teachers who have been piloting the Common Core Standards. Have a conversation afterwards about what you observed: What surprised you? What validated what you already do? What do you need more information about? What should your next steps be as you develop a team plan for helping your students meet these standards?
Collaboration is key to a sensible approach to integrating the Common Core into our teaching.
Anchor Standards for English/ Language Arts and Literacy standards for history/social studies, science and technical subjects:
Key Ideas and Details
1. Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.
2. Determine central ideas or themes of a text and analyze their development; summarize the key supporting details and ideas.
3. Analyze how and why individuals, events, and ideas develop and interact over the course of a text.
Craft and Structure
4. Interpret words and phrases as they are used in a text, including determining technical, connotative, and figurative meanings, and analyze how specific word choices shape meaning or tone.
5. Analyze the structure of texts, including how specific sentences, paragraphs, and larger portions of the text (e.g., a section, chapter, scene, or stanza) relate to each other and the whole.
6. Assess how point of view or purpose shapes the content and style of a text.
Integration of Knowledge and Ideas
7. Integrate and evaluate content presented in diverse media and formats, including visually and quantitatively, as well as in words.*
8. Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, including the validity of the reasoning as well as the relevance and sufficiency of the evidence.
9. Analyze how two or more texts address similar themes or topics in order to build knowledge or to compare the approaches the authors take.
Range of Reading and Level of Text Complexity
10. Read and comprehend complex literary and informational texts independently and proficiently.
Writing
Text Types and Purposes*
1. Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts, using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence.
2. Write informative/explanatory texts to examine and convey complex ideas and information clearly and accurately through the effective selection, organization, and analysis of content.
3. Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, well-chosen details, and well-structured event sequences.
Production and Distribution of Writing
4. Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.
5. Develop and strengthen writing as needed by planning, revising, editing, rewriting, or trying a new approach.
6. Use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing and to interact and collaborate with others.
Research to Build and Present Knowledge
7. Conduct short as well as more sustained research projects based on focused questions, demonstrating understanding of the subject under investigation.
8. Gather relevant information from multiple print and digital sources, assess the credibility and accuracy of each source, and integrate the information while avoiding plagiarism.
9. Draw evidence from literary or informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research.
Range of Writing
10. Write routinely over extended time frames (time for research, reflection, and revision) and shorter time frames (a
single sitting or a day or two) for a range of tasks, purposes, and audiences.
Speaking and Listening
Comprehension and Collaboration
1. Prepare for and participate effectively in a range of conversations and collaborations with diverse partners, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively.
2. Integrate and evaluate information presented in diverse media and formats, including visually, quantitatively, and orally.
3. Evaluate a speaker’s point of view, reasoning, and use of evidence and rhetoric.
Presentation of Knowledge and Ideas
4. Present information, findings, and supporting evidence such that listeners can follow the line of reasoning and the organization, development, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.
5. Make strategic use of digital media and visual displays of data to express information and enhance understanding of presentations.
6. Adapt speech to a variety of contexts and communicative tasks, demonstrating command of formal English when indicated or appropriate.
Language
Conventions of Standard English
1. Demonstrate command of the conventions of standard English grammar and usage when writing or speaking.
2. Demonstrate command of the conventions of standard English capitalization, punctuation, and spelling when writing.
Knowledge of Language
3. Apply knowledge of language to understand how language functions in different contexts, to make effective choices for meaning or style, and to comprehend more fully when reading or listening.
Vocabulary Acquisition and Use
4. Determine or clarify the meaning of unknown and multiple-meaning words and phrases by using context clues, analyzing meaningful word parts, and consulting general and specialized reference materials, as appropriate.
5. Demonstrate understanding of figurative language, word relationships, and nuances in word meanings.
6. Acquire and use accurately a range of general academic and domain-specific words and phrases sufficient for reading, writing, speaking, and listening at the college and career readiness level; demonstrate independence in gathering vocabulary knowledge when encountering an unknown term important to comprehension or expression. grammar, usage, and mechanics
Standards for Mathematical Practice (content is by grade level):
1. Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.
2. Reason abstractly and quantitatively.
3. Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others.
4. Model with mathematics.
5. Use appropriate tools strategically.
6. Attend to precision.
7. Look for and make use of structure.
8. Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning.
