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Reviewer Marjorie Larner strongly recommends City Kids, City Schools: More Reports from the Front Row. "Whether you are looking for practical ideas for the classrooms; research and statistics; essays from related fields of social justice, politics and history; or spoken word, poetry, memoir or fiction, you can find a beautifully written, relevant and thought-provoking selection."

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City Kids, City Schools: More Reports from the Front Row
Edited by William Ayers, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Gregory Miche & Pedro Noguero
2008 (384 pp./paperback)
The New Press
ISBN: 978-1-59558-338-3
$24.95

Reviewed by Marjorie Larner

If you were suddenly transported to a desert island with your urban school in tow, and you could only have one book, I would strongly recommend City Kids, City Schools: More Reports from the Front Row. Whether you are looking for practical ideas for the classrooms; research and statistics; essays from related fields of social justice, politics and history; or spoken word, poetry, memoir or fiction, you can find a beautifully written, relevant and thought-provoking selection.

This book will stimulate discussion, deepen understanding and inspire further teaching and learning to reach every child in our schools. This is not light reading, nor is it disheartening or tedious. There is a vitality and energy in each selection that leaves me with more understanding of what I can do and why I must continue in the effort— feeling motivated rather than discouraged.

As a collection, it works as a resource where you can search by writer, topic or genre. It is also a powerful read with a cumulative impact if you start at the beginning and read sequentially. I find myself regularly going back and re-reading, finding pieces to share with colleagues, to use in workshops and seminars or to offer to students for examples and inspiration. My copy became so full of sticky notes that I had to start color-coding them.

City Kids, City Schools is a treasure trove for anyone with interest and concern for our children and education, looking for authentic perspectives, information, and real stories from people in the front row, engaged in the everyday struggle of school. The list of well-known authors and everyday heroes is long. You can move from

• Linda Christensen’s account of discovering a way (through a “Curriculum of Empathy”) to get her students involved in a novel by teaching them to “enter the lives of characters in literature, history, or real life whom they might dismiss or misunderstand…”

• to Marion Unas Esguerra’s poem “morning papers,” dealing with “issues of language, culture, prejudice, and assimilation that many immigrant children in urban areas—and their parents—must confront...”

• to Grace Boggs’ call to "root students and faculty in communities…and engage them in the kind of real problem solving in their localities that nurture a love of place and provides practice in creating the sustainable economies, equality and community that are the responsibilities of citizenship.” 

As Ruby Dee writes in the foreword, “City Kids, City Schools holds the banner high for a more rewarding quality of life (by) reminding us of our responsibility as citizens to work for, to insist on, and to ensure a free, quality education to every child. It will not happen without our vigilance, our profoundest commitment—especially those of us whose voices, like mine, like those in this book—have been nourished by some of the great minds that steady and enlighten our lives. This book engages all our sensibilities toward the glorification of our remarkable species.”

If you were allowed a second book on your desert island, consider an earlier and similar collection also edited by William Ayers (and others), titled City Kids, City Teachers (1996), now available in a new edition. In the foreword to that book, the late Ossie Davis wrote a summary that applies to both of these wonderful resources. “In this book, our cities’ students and teachers share their problems, their prospects, and their plans. It is vital that all of us look deep into these pages, to listen and to learn….Look to these pages for guidance and light.”

Marjorie Larner is an instructional coach in the Colorado public schools and a facilitator for the National School Reform Faculty. Also see Larner's recent interview of Managing Diverse Classrooms (ASCD, 2008)

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Middle grades educator Beverly Maddox greatly admired the first edition of Harvey and Goudvis's Strategies That Work and wondered, "How can they possibly improve this book?" They did, Maddox says. "I anticipate that the second edition will be even more useful. It is better organized, the style remains collegial and informative, and the revisions and new lessons enrich the book."

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Strategies That Work: Teaching Comprehension for Understanding and Engagement (Second Edition)

By Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis
2007 (360 pp./paperback)
Stenhouse Publishers
ISBN: 978-157110-481-6
$30.00

Reviewed by Beverly Maddox
AVID Coordinator
Henderson Middle School
Little Rock, Arkansas

In preparation for mail delivery of my copy of the second edition of Strategies That Work: Teaching Comprehension for Understanding and Engagement by Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis, I reviewed my dog-eared copy of the first edition, subtitled Teaching Comprehension to Improve Understanding. Multi-colored text-coded sticky notes sprout like tulip blossoms from its pages, and I wondered, "How can they possibly improve this book?"

They did. Strategies That Work is one of the first teacher resource books recommended for K-8 that proved useful to me, an 8th grade teacher, but I anticipate that the second edition will be even more useful. It is better organized, the style remains collegial and informative, and the revisions and new lessons enrich the book.

Teachers familiar with the first edition will benefit from reading the introduction outlining the changes to the work before plunging into the new version. Goudvis and Harvey graciously credit their previous readers with "pushing our thinking, challenging our ideas, and asking us questions," and the two used what they learned from those educators as they revised.

I applied my two favorite strategies from the first edition as I read the second — conversing with and questioning the text, and using sticky notes to code my connections. This is too rich a book to read in one sitting, despite the easy style. I read it incrementally over ten days, lolling in the summer shade of an unseasonably cool July, often consulting the index to link ideas and pausing to jot down thoughts for my lesson plans. "Active Literacy" and increased attention to background knowledge, the two improvements that engaged me most, were threads that seemed to guide my first reading of the book.

"Active Literacy" doesn't appear in the first edition, but Goudvis and Harvey's notion of the active engagement of readers as they interact with text and with each other, drives the second edition, as the change in the book's subtitle suggests. They've added two chapters on the concept of "Active Literacy" and 20 new lessons, dropping only those that relied on now out-of-print texts. Closely related to "Active Literacy" is teaching students "to monitor their understanding before focusing on specific strategies," and they provided five new monitoring lessons to support this skill development.

Goudvis and Harvey more explicitly tie Background Knowledge to each of the strategies in the second edition, increasing the index entries under background knowledge from eight to 14 (scattered throughout the book) and adding four new lessons to the four they kept for Chapter 7, "Activating and Connecting to Background Knowledge: A Bridge from the New to the Known."

Goudvis and Harvey acknowledge classroom teachers' concern with assessing for learning and differentiation, ending each strategy lesson with a section entitled "Teaching with the End in Mind: Assessing What We've Taught" and an "Assessment Commentary" on representative student examples applying the strategy described in each chapter. The assessment commentaries let us "see" master teachers' thinking as they assess student learning. They make instructive and engaging reading.

Fifty-eight strategy lessons, including 20 new ones, appear in Part II, comprised of Chapters 6 through 11. I was pleased to see that the List of Strategy Lessons, in the table of contents, outlines the purpose, resources, and responses for each lesson and flags the new lessons.

Possibly in response to teachers' questions, Goudvis and Harvey added a Part III, "Comprehension Across the Curriculum." Newly hired elementary and middle school literacy coaches will find chapter 12, "Content Literacy: Reading for Understanding in Social Studies"; Chapter 13, "Topic Studies: A Framework for Research and Exploration"; and Chapter 14, "Reading to Understand Textbooks," particularly helpful as they plan how to assist science and social studies teachers with improving students' engagement with and understanding of reading. Chapter 13 in my copy bristles with post-its and flags; learning to conduct inquiry-based research is integral to the AVID elective class that I teach in a middle school, and I will refer to this chapter throughout the coming school year.

Chapter 15 may be the obligatory nod to teachers and administrators worrying over the state benchmark tests, but it does not encourage holding instruction and learning hostage to "The Test." Citing the work of Zemelman, Daniels and Hyde, the authors state on page 240: "Since reading is about purpose and once a year the purpose of reading is to pass the test, we teach the genre of test reading right before the annual test. We do not teach test prep all year. We begin to prepare kids to take the test about two to three weeks ahead of the test date." The rest of the chapter outlines a reasonable, realistic test prep scenario that "help(s) our kids to read and think, preparing them first to be better readers, but also better test takers." I plan to make sure my principal reads this chapter!

Seven appendices make up Part IV of the second edition, and each is a tool for teachers incorporating the seven strategies into instruction. The appendices have been revised and expanded (websites have been added to Magazines and Newspapers, for instance) and re-organized to be more useful.

At the Stenhouse Publishers website, you can read samples from Strategies That Work, Second Edition, including the detailed Table of Contents, Introduction and Chapter 1, “Reading Is Thinking.” A 19-page study guide suitable for study groups is free to download. What a boon to elementary and middle-school teachers!

The description on the publisher's website relates some of the changes. I read the book before I looked at the website; the publisher's description is perhaps a bit too modest and low key. I downloaded the study guide in the hope that my school's newly hired literacy coach will want to organize a study circle as her first official act of the school year. Even without the aid of a literacy coach, teachers who want to establish "active literacy" in their classes can infuse the ideas and strategies in this book into their instruction. I know I'll be consulting it frequently.
 

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Mesquite Elementary opened as a new school in the Vail (AZ) Unified School District in 1999. Despite its high teacher turnover and transient population (60% of students are from military families), by 2004 Mesquite was one of three schools in Arizona chosen as a "Spotlight School" for best practices. This article at the WestEd website summarizes the K-8 school's "problem-solving approach to educational management." One key ingredient: "Vail School District funds a Student Data Coordinator at every school. Known as the 'Achievement Teacher,' this person is responsible for compiling and preparing student assessment data for use by teaching teams and administrators to inform instructional practices."

Retrieved June 2, 2008 from http://www.wested.org/pub/docs/795

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Public policies that pressure schools to raise test scores, says Alfie Kohn, have the negative effect of encouraging teachers to value some students--the high performers--more than others. In this article from Educational Leadership (September 2005), Kohn offers examples of how teachers may send the message that they value students only if they behave well and meet high academic standards. "If the sole goal is to raise achievement (in the narrowest sense of that word), then we may end up ignoring other kinds of learning beyond the academic. It's exceedingly difficult to teach the whole child when people are held accountable only for raising reading and math scores."

Kohn, A. (2005). Unconditional teaching [originally printed in Educational leadership Sept. 2005]. Retrieved from Alfie Kohn's website 12 May 2008. http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/uncondtchg.htm

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In schools with effective professional development programs, "the very nature of staff development [has] shifted from isolated learning and the occasional workshop to focused, ongoing organizational learning built on collaborative reflection and joint action," says this summary report from the Western Regional Educational Laboratory. In "Teachers Who Learn, Kids Who Achieve," you'll find descriptions of eight schools that have learned what it takes "to translate teacher professional development into impressive learning gains for students." Teacher voices and vignettes "give life to the guiding principles that researchers identified across these disparate sites." The report includes annotated lists of resources that provide concrete help in putting these principles into practice -- and profiles of each school's journey that "demonstrate that extraordinary results can be achieved from even modest beginnings." Click on "view online/pdf" to download a free copy.

Western Regional Educational Laboratory (2000). Teachers who learn, students who achieve. San Francisco: West Ed.

Catalogue retrieved from WestEd 9 May 2008. http://www.wested.org/cs/we/view/rs/179

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