I wrote recently that this is the year E-readers are actually becoming a part of my classroom.  I don't have a class set of Ipads or anything but more than a few students ahve their own Kindles, Nooks, HTC' tablets, or Kindle apps on their phones.  I've begun letting students read in class on these devices, and it feels surprisingly natural and normal.

The wonderful thing about the E-readers is that students can write their post-it note responses using the note function on the e-reader program.  There is then a way for me to view all the notes at once.  Normally I have students pass in their actual book and I read through the notes flipping actual pages.  The e-readers makes this a bit simpler.  I can also turn back to the page of text to which the response refers easily to better understand the student's thinking.  

Two students have books on their phones. I was worried about letting them pull out their phones for this, but I had a serious conversation with them about the importance that they use the phone for exactly what they said they would--and it hasn't been a problem.  They understand I'm giving them a freedom, a privelege and haven't abused it.

The only thing missing is a way for students to simply email me their notes through the e-reader. Soon I think we'll probably be reading as a class on electronic devices.  Software developers?  Want to talk to a teacher about functions that would be helpful for classroom use of e-readers?  I'm right here!

[image credit: betwixttween.wordpress.com]

It's now official.  Parents are asking me if they can buy their kids Kindles, Nooks, etc, so students can do their reading and their post-it note responses electronically!  On the one hand, I love it!  I am so happy this day is finally here.

Four years ago I discovered the Kindle.  I showed an Amazon promotional video to students and they were stunned.  I asked them to write on the questions, "How would school be different if every student had a Kindle?"  They wrote thougtfully about the effects this invention could have on student's organization and motivation. Although it was a plausible scenario, it presented as a futuristic dream.  It amazed me that year after year I could recycle the assignment and still, it was a pie-in-the-sky vision.  

Last year one or two students read books on their ipod touches. I found it easier to review post-its, because you can view all "notes" at once without having to flip through the pages searching for the notes. You can still refer back to the page the student is commenting on to better understand the student's thinking.  The students who did this were such voracious readers I didn't worry that they'd be on the internet. I passed by their tables a few times to check and never had an issue.   

Now that E-readers are becoming more available and commonplace, I couldn't be happier about it.  I do have to figure out what changes I will need to make to accommodate them in the classroom.  Clearly, E-readers that have internet and games on them such as Ipads and the new Nooks pose new opportunities for distractions.  There may also be organizational changes to the structures around reading I use, which I designed over the years with real-paper books.

Perhaps the changes will make new fertile territory for student writing--no longer a fanciful exercise, I could truly use students' advice on how to make E-readers work in my program!

[image credit: impactlab.net]

Last week, Jacqueline Woodson, one of my very favorite young adult authors, came to speak to my seventh graders.  Now, if you teach middle school, you know that bringing a guest speaker to 100 seventh graders doesn't just automatically go well.  There is a novelty factor, yes. And though we'd like that to sufficiently ensure that students receive the guest properly, in reality, middle school students pay attention to many more factors than that. So we must too, if we want it to be a positive transaction for all.

Jacqueline Woodson's visit went very well, and students did get the rich experience--of hearing and seeing an author in person share her work with them--that I hoped they would.  In reflecting on the thought and preparation that went into the event, I've come up with a few factors to consider any time I bring a guest speaker. 

Clear Connection To the Curriculum: Students will wonder, why is this stranger coming to talk to me?  The  more connected to their learning or any aspect of the work they do at school, the more appropriate and genuine the connection will be. A guest speaker comes for a quick moment, which can seem unimportant to many students.  But if it is well placed within a curriculum, the guest will be part of a much bigger  conversation and in a sense "last longer."  In this case, we had read and discussed Woodson's novel, From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun, as a whole class. Many students went on to read many more of her books.  She was known to them, but through her writing. We had spoken about possibly communicating with her or bringing her to our school, since she is from Brooklyn. Her finally coming was a way of continuing the conversation about her novels and a point of comparison for the current novels we're reading.

Relevent to Students: Students will wonder, why this, and who cares?  As with any curriculum piece, the content of the presentation should be developmentally appropriate.  It should matter to the students at their age level.  If Woodson came and talked about her college experience, my students may or may not have been interested. But she presented to them about her books which all deal with developmentally appropriate themes for middle school students. 

Also, the event should be as culturally relevant as possible, whether that means direct identification with students' culturally or through exposing students to worlds different from the one they know.  Either way, identity is a big factor for middle school students, so we need to consider how students will identify or not identify with the guest and the value that could have for them.  One thing that made Jacqueline Woodson's presentation great was that she was a black woman speaking very candidly and confidently about issues of race and  to a group of diverse students who were themselves hungry for fresh perspectives on this aspect of their growing identities.  She also had the attention of many committed student writers, looking to understand the practice better.

Doing Our Homework: It was really important that we did our homework and discovered that Jacqueline Woodson has a great website designed for kids and teachers, which answers the questions she most often is asked by readers.  She also has many interviews available on the web. We took a day in class to explore the website, watch an interview with Woodson about her writing, and create questions we'd like to ask her in person, that hadn't already been answered in the resources available to us.  I encouraged students to ask questions about her use of literary elements, something we'd been looking at in all the novels from this year, to keep.

Participation & Accountability: On the day of the visit, students understood what they were expected to DO during the presentation.  In class we went over the fact that they would receive a grade for ther participation in the event (Yes, I was willing to use any and all measures of control to make sure they did not make fools of themselves or us in front of a guest. I also justified this because it is actually an important life skill to be able to make a good impression on others, especially those who are successfu at something we are learning to do).  The grade was be based on

• active listening throughout the event
• asking appropriate questions at appropriate times
• taking (some) notes on points of interest

Students received a clipboard with a packet as they entered after lunch.  The front page outlined these expectations again.  The next page had all of the questions (with some editing) they had created in class typed up.  This was a great resource for students.  When Ms. Woodson asked for questions, practically every hand went up. The questions were not superficial, and Woodson was also excellent in her ability to respond.  She clearly was practiced at speaking to kids about her work.  She provided a great mix of humor and depth, and had some witty comebacks to occasional seventh grade silliness.  Students were also, quite obviously doing their best to avoid possible distractions (ie. each other;). 

Timing & Space: I spoke to Ms. Woodson before she came, and she aptly noted, "90 minutes for 100 seventh graders in June could be a long time to keep their attention..."  The only scheduling option for the assembly was for the period directly after lunch....groan. I talked over the timing with my principal, and we decided that the whole grade would stay for 60 minutes, not 90, and then students who were interested in more Q & A would stay for the extra half hour.  We also decided on a large meeting room instead of the auditorium, so that she could speak without a mic (more intimate) and where students would not be too spread out and therefore hard to monitor. 

It worked just about perfectly.  Students were just starting to get squirmy at the hour mark, but left wanting a little more, not bored yet--always a good thing.  The self-selected group that stayed for more time was a great mix of avid writers, voracious readers, and students who were just plain curious, for whom this visit sparked something new.

Teamwork & the Teacher Look: It was important to coorinate with a lot of people to make this run smoothly. The admin team helped organize the schedule and the flow of students from lunch to the room, and made sure our tech. director was there to record it and shoot photos.  The other seventh grade advisors each walked their advisees to the event and seated them together.  I gave each advisor a clip board and instructed them to mark down the names of any of their students making any kind of disruptions.  I asked them to tally up the number of times said students disrputed. Students also knew these would become points deducted from their grade (out of 10). I don't do this sort of thing for regular class activities, but when the stakes are high, like during a student poetry reading, or an event like this, and each individual's self-control at that moment really is crucial to the experience of the entire group, I am all for taking points off for talking, humming, poking, etc.  Advisors also did a stellar job of applying the "teacher look" aka "side-eye" to students who may have been tempted to do any of the actions listed above. The united front supported by the system for teachers to share the task of keeping tabs on individual students was effective. 

Follow-Up: We're working on a creative thank you card.  I hope Ms. Woodson will come back next year!  I highly recommend her as a guest speaker for NYC teachers, who read her books with their students. 

[The image above comes from ncte.org only because I don't have my hands on the real pics of Woodson speaking to my students!  Soon!]

Madeleine Ray, my mentor from Bank Street College, has been teaching teachers how to create rich, student-centered experiences in classrooms for many years. Many of my best curriculum pieces and teaching practices come from her teachings.  She is indeed, one of the giants, on whose shoulders I stand when I work with students. 

This is an activity she designed around teaching poetry to kids is derived from the important idea that poetry is an oral art and that it is meant to be heard more than read.  She advocates for spending plenty of time reading poetry aloud and listening to it before involving students in analyzing or writing poetry.  They have to experience it and live in it first, and if they do that fully, she says, they will spontaneously, at their own point of readiness, begin to write their own poems.  I have found this to be 100% true in my own practice. 

Nancy Toes Tangel, a wonderful teacher of 8th grade English in Newark, NJ, was filmed here doing the tubes activity with her class.  Notice that she, like me and many other of Madeleine's students, teach with a meeting area in middle school, and use it often for reflecting on the events of the class each day (ash shown at the end of the video). Also notice that they begin with a packet of poems, from which students select poems to read aloud with each other to hear and begin to experience, but not, at this point, to discuss.  

Nancy, Madeleine, and a few other collaborating teachers and I will be giving a workshop at Bank Street on Saturday, March 5th about using dramatic play in the classroom to teach elements of story and writer's process.  If you're in the NY area and interested in innovative ways to teach English Language Arts, please join us! Stay tuned for more information.

[image and video credit: Kelsey Toes Tangel http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDDn2sXCVVw]

Recently, education consultant Grant Wiggins made the suggestion that we might be better off banning most fiction books from schools, because they don't prepare students for careers and they apparently bore boys.  Though I do believe that reading non fiction is important for male and female students alike, I disagree with both assertions about fiction.  In this post, I'd like to share my confusion at the notion that fiction bores boys.  

Does fiction bore boys? Not the boys in my classes!  Boys are some of my most voracious readers.  Series like Percy Jackson & the Olympians, Artemis Fowl, Secret Series, Pendragon Series, A Wrinkle In Time Series, and even Diary of a Wimpy Kid, are hugely popular with the seventh grade boys in my classes. So, I just find Wiggin's comment to be an untruth.  

Have I met boys who appear to be bored by fiction... who would rather read nonfiction books about bears, wars,  skateboarding, etc?  Yes. Should they have the opportunity to read the non fiction they are interested in reading? Yes.  

Do I believe that these boys are actually bored by fiction because they say most every fiction book they pick up is boring? No.  

Why? Because these same boys love stories.  How do I know? Well, let's look at their taste in movies.  Are they more interested in watching documentaries about nature, World War II, or skateboarding than they are in watching the latest action flick?  No!  Do these boys get bored when I show a dramatic, character-driven film (like "Smoke Signals") that may as well be a novel, in visual form?  No. Do they get bored when I tell the class a folk tale, asking instead for non fiction?  Absolutely not!  They are riveted by stories.  

Every boy I've ever taught--every adolescent, in fact--loves stories. There is a developmental need for stories.  Research shows that reading fiction is an subjective experience in which the reader has an active role in the co-construction of the story in his or her imagination.  

The problem with boys and reading (girls too) is that in school we so often take away that subjective part of the experience--we take away the students' power over the stories they read (there are several ways in which we do this to stories--more another time).  We turn reading into something else: a series of skills to be mimicked, learned, regurgitated, measured, evaluated.  The teacher takes a very active, exhausting role in this, but the student's imagination is marginalized. Reading becomes a passive activity, and for many boys that is a problem.

The way we interrupt a student's experience of stories, imposing right and wrong answers and mandatory strategies is a problem when it comes to fiction, because fiction is meant to be an alternate universe, lived for a prolonged amount of time through the imagination via the written word.  

Nonfiction, however, is read mostly for information.  The interruptions, the checking for understanding, the strategies, the right and wrong answers, do not pose a problem in the pursuit of the goal of gathering information.  In fact, they help many readers feel more power over the texts they read.  Thus, students who are most concerned with power, especially those who've been made to feel powerless throughout their schooling, often times boys, may prefer reading non fiction.  But this is because of how we've defined and designed "reading" experiences in school.  It has nothing to do with boys' lack of love for stories.

[image credit: creativeeducation.co.uk]