I’ve been struggling with some neck pain for a little over a year.  Several weeks ago I finally went to see my doctor about it.  As I was waiting for him to enter my exam room, I was thinking about conferring with our students.  Weird, I know, but follow my line of thinking here.  I heard my doctor in the room next door and knew he would be coming to my room next.  I heard the door close, but it was several minutes before he came into my room.  Why?  You know the answer—he was taking notes about his previous patient.  Conferring notes!

Think about what doctors do when they meet with their patients:

• Research: They ask questions and run diagnostic tests.
• Decide:  Based on their research, they make decisions.
• Treat: They prescribe a course of action—medication, surgery, physical therapy, etc.

Then what do they do?  They follow up by seeing their patients in X number of days/weeks to see how things are progressing.  They do some more researching, deciding, and possibly more treating.

Does this sound familiar to what teachers do during a reading/writing conference?  We:

• Research: Ask our students questions, administer formal and informal diagnostic assessments.
• Decide:  Based on our research, we make decisions about what to compliment and what/how to teach.
• Teach: We teach the reader/writer a strategy through demonstration, explanation, examples, or guided practice.

Now, let’s go back to those conferring notes.  My last post dealt with whether or not conferring notes are necessary.  If you read that post, you know my opinion on the matter.

Let me ask you a few questions. 

• Is it important for your doctor to keep conferring (exam) records?
• Do you appreciate the doctors that remember what you talked about at your last visit? 
• Do you think doctors really remember trivia about your job or family, or did they just take some good notes to jog their memories and develop a relationship with you? 
• Does it annoy you when a doctor doesn’t keep good records or fails to read what s/he wrote last time and keeps asking you the same questions over and over again? 
• Do you feel valued as a patient/person when each visit seems like you are explaining your situation again as if for the first time?

What implication does this have for our classrooms?  What if we thought of our students as our little patients and if each time we met with them we were researching, deciding, and teaching them to be the healthiest readers and writers they can be?

I can’t tell you how many times I have been asked this question.  Teachers who ask this are not questioning the value of conferring itself, just the notetaking that comes during/after the conference.

Typical reasons I hear against notetaking:

• “If I spend time writing notes, I end up conferring with fewer students.”
• “I don’t know which is the right form to use or the right way to do it.”

Even before I was immersed in workshop teaching, I always believed that it was important to keep anecdotal notes on my students.  That doesn’t mean I was good at it, but I did do it.  I am here to tell you that there is not one right form or method, but I do believe that notetaking is a non-negotiable.  Here are a few of my reasons:

• We are in an age of accountability.  If I don’t take notes on the valuable instruction I am providing during one-on-one and small group conferences, I have no record or evidence of that instruction.  When a parent or administrator asks what I am doing for a particular child, I want to be able to whip out my notes with specifics.
• My memory just isn’t that good. I often can’t remember what I had for dinner the day before.  How can I remember the teaching points for 25-30 students as I conduct ongoing conferences with them?  I use my notes not only to keep track of what I did with a child, but also to note ideas for further instruction.  I simply can’t keep all of that in my head.
• At parent-teacher conference time, I love to be able to show parents what their child has been working on.  A grade on a report card means nothing.  It is the evidence that supports that grade that counts.  I will never forget the time that a parent looked me in the eye during a conference and said, “Thank you for taking specific notes on my child.  That means a lot to me.”

So now that you know my stance that conferring notes are non-negotiable, how can we remove some roadblocks?

First, what is the right form to use? There isn’t one.  I have changed mine often.  I have used something as simple as a piece of notebook paper for each student placed behind a tab labeled for that student in my conferring notebook.  When I did this, I either wrote notes directly on the page or wrote them on computer labels that I carried on a clipboard and later placed on the child’s notebook page.

I have also created and adapted from other teachers a variety of forms.  Here are just a few that you are welcome to use or (more likely) adapt to meet your needs:

Reading Conference Sheet (one student/page)
Writing Conference Notes (15 students/page)
Writing Assessment Sheet (includes 2 pages/student–make additional copies of page 2 as needed)
Reading Assessment Sheet (includes 2 pages/student–make additional copies of page 2 as needed)

If you are techno-savvy and have access to an iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad, you may want to keep your notes with the Confer app (see my blogpost This Seals The Deal for more information.

Next, what about the concern that if we take time to keep records, we meet with fewer students?  I say, “So what.”  So what if I confer with five students instead of six today.  I’ve never given myself a conferring quota for the day.  I prefer to shoot for quality, not quantity, and for me, jotting a few notes during/after each conference contributes to the quality of the conference.

I will continue to add to the series of blog posts on the importance of student choice in writing, but today I feel compelled to share on the topic of technology in the classroom.

Recently I have been thinking seriously about purchasing an iPad.  It started about a year ago when a friend showed me her new toy.  With her new iPad she had constant access to her Kindle, her e-mail and Facebook, her to-do lists, and more.  I thought that was pretty neat but just couldn’t justify purchasing a new device when I already had a Smartphone that could do most of what she showed me.  But I still thought it was pretty cool!

This school year, as I have attended many meetings, I have often found myself in the minority (sometimes the ONLY person in the room) of people still taking notes with a good old-fashioned notebook and ballpoint pen.  I must say, that as much as I love technology, I do still love the feel of pen on paper and the overall experience of reading books with pages I can turn.  But, as I looked around, I do admit that I had iPad envy as I watched my colleagues navigate from file to file to add notes, look up resources, etc.  Last week as I participated in a kindergarten teacher lab, I watched the facilitator use her iPad to videotape a one-on-one conference so that she could show it to the whole group during our debrief session.  Again, pretty neat!

Still, I wasn’t sure if I could justify getting a new toy just to keep up with the Joneses.

I have now found my justification!  Last Friday a colleague shared with me an app that is available for the iPad (and iPhone and iPod Touch).  It is called  "Confer – A Notetaking App for Teachers".  It is amazing!  Everything I have always tried to do with my conferring notebook can be done with this app.  Here are just a few:

• keep track of students I have conferred with
• keep records of compliments, teaching points, and future instruction
• group students with similar needs for strategy groups
• use flexible grouping to meet students’ needs
• track reading levels
• sort students for instruction in a variety of ways

I found this video that explains how this app works way better than I can: Confer – A Notetaking App for Teachers Video Demonstration

So that seals the deal!  I am now going to buy myself a new Christmas present just so that I can use this app! (They haven’t come out with a version for my Android phone yet).  I can’t wait to discover all the other ways this tool can help me in the classroom.  I invite any of you who have been using iPadsin your classrooms to share your suggestions!

I work with many teachers who have a strong desire to improve their literacy instruction.  They have committed to teaching reading and writing through a workshop approach and have set aside time for their students to spend extended periods of time reading and writing.  But then they get stuck because they don’t have the resources for teaching the minilessons they know they should be teaching.  Many of them are in districts that have no formal program or are using strictly basals or scripted materials that don’t offer much depth or richness.  This leaves them to fend for themselves and either create materials or pull together units of study from a variety of sources.  For many years, that’s what I did.  I have loads of professional books from which to pull ideas. (You can see my personal professional library here). Currently, many of the schools I am working with are using the Calkins Units of Study for Teaching Writing, so we are generally following the sequence of minilessons prescribed in the units with some of our own lessons thrown in. 

But what if your school hasn’t purchased a resource like this?  How do you know which order to teach your minilessons?  I found a free resource that I would like to share with you.  It is the Wachusett Regional School District website. 

If you click on the Elementary Curriculum tab, a flyout menu will appear:

On this menu you will find resources for both reading and writing workshop, including a suggested sequence of lessons and lesson plans for oodles of minilessons.  Continue to follow the flyout menus until you find your grade level and the resource you would like to download.

This site provides a WEALTH of information, especially for teachers who are struggling with the “where to start?” and “what lesson next?” questions.  I’m grateful for all of the hard work this school district put into making this such a valuable resource.  I hope you will find it helpful, too!

I have heard this question many times during the past several months.  I have been working with a number of teachers who are in various phases of implementing a workshop approach for reading and/or writing.  Most of us who have moved to a workshop approach have at some point asked this question and have had to reconcile  doing what we know is best for kids and fulfilling our obligation to report to parents and administrators where kids stand.

When I am asked this question, I usually begin by clarifying the difference between assessing and evaluating our students.  For me, assessment takes place every minute of the day as I observe my students, listen to them, confer with them, watch them interact with text and other students, read what they have written, etc., etc. I assess to inform my teaching and to guide my instruction.  Evaluation happens when I put a value judgment on the assessments I have made.  How do I come up with a grade?  I wish I could tell you that I have this magic formula into which I plug a bunch of numbers and out comes a grade.  It doesn’t work that way.  The best I can tell you is that when I am diligent about observing and taking anecdotal notes on my students in every area of their reading development (sight words, fluency, retellings, book chats, partner discussions, written response logs, reading logs, at-home reading, etc.), I have a clear picture of where each child’s strengths and weaknesses are and it is much easier to give a report card grade.  You can read about about some of my assessment tools by clicking here.

In addition to my tools, I want to share with you a book that I just purchased.  When a teacher shared it at a recent  workshop, I knew I had to have it, so I came home and immediately ordered it.  It is called Day-to-Day Assessment in the Reading Workshop Making Informed Instructional Decisions in Grades 3-6 by Franki Sibberson and Karen Szymusiak.  When I saw who the authors were, I knew I would like this book—they are the authors of Beyond Leveled Books and Still Learning to Read: Teaching Students in Grades 3-6. When the book arrived just a few days later, I immediately began reading it.  Here is how chapter 1 begins:

“Good teaching begins with knowing our students.  We can teach wisely and well when we have taken the time to understand them, think about what they need, and plan ways to move them toward independence.  We need to know them as learners and as human beings.  And, of course, as teachers of reading, we also need to know them as readers.”

That’s all I needed to read to know that this would be my kind of book.  It is filled with numerous authentic assessment tools, and yes, the authors even share how they translate all of these assessments into grades.

So if you have been struggling with how to make informed instructional decisions during your reading workshop and find ways to give authentic grades, I think you will find this resource to be invaluable.

It’s a snow day here in Michigan (along with many other parts of the country), so I’m using this opportunity to do some catching up.  One thing I did was register for the spring MRA (Michigan Reading Association) conference which, in my opinion, is such a bargain!  I’m looking forward to hearing some of the country’s leading literacy professionals and children’s book authors next month.  I’m most excited to hear Donalyn Miller the author of my new favorite book The Book Whisperer. Read more about this on my previous blogpost about her.

Another thing I did today was a little web surfing.  I found a site that I haven’t had time to fully explore yet, but just had to share it with you.  It’s called Not For Robots.  Under the title on the homepage is this caption: 

“Writing is hard. People for whom writing is not hard are robots and should go away. Thank you.” 

That alone enticed me to explore the site!  Yesterday I had a conversation with a teacher about how hard writing is for kids and how hard it is to teach writing.  Over the years I have definitely found some strategies that take the mystery out of writing for my students, but it’s still hard work.  Anyone who says otherwise is lying!  The Not for Robots site consists of a series of articles written by a professional writer.  She shares her secrets, insights, techniques, and frustrations with the writing process.  It’s an entertaining, informative, refreshing read about the real journey of a writer.  Lots of wisdom we can share with our young writing protégés in our classrooms. 

That got me thinking about some other great sources we can use to help our students get the inside scoop on the writing process and show them that, yes, writing is hard work, but persistence does pay off.  These are all picture books about the writing process:

My adopted fourth grade class, their teacher, and I recently finished our first unit of Lucy Calkins’ Units of Study for Teaching Reading.  The unit ends with a small celebration that turned out to be a neat experience.  During the minilesson the students were introduced to an excerpt of Paul Auster’s Invention of Solitude in which Auster shares memories of his childhood.  He uses a patterned type of writing in which every sentence begins with the phrase “He remembers…”.

“He remembers learning how to tie his shoes.  He remembers that his father’s clothes were kept in the closet in his room and that it was the noise of the hangers clicking together in the morning that would wake him up.  He remembers the sight of his father knotting his tie and saying to him rise and shine little boy…”

The students were then asked to think back over the read-aloud from this unit of study—Stone Fox—and create a piece of writing using the pattern “He remembers…” or “She remembers…”  After each student had time to reflect and jot down a few rememberings, we did a Quaker read in which students were invited to read one of their sentences if they chose.  It had the feel of a ceremony as students solemnly read their memories without raising hands, just patiently waiting until there was an interval of silence to interject their memories.

After exhausting their memories of Stone Fox, the students were then asked to reflect on our first unit of study “Building a Reading Life” and to write another “remembering piece” about what they remembered from the unit.  As I was preparing to teach the lesson, I started doing some remembering of my own.  I thought about the way these fourth grade readers had already begun to change, how they were connecting with books, and how I was beginning to connect with them around books.  So I wrote a “She remembers” poem to share with them.

She remembers when Mrs. R. agreed to team teach reading with her this year.

She remembers when a bunch of moms came in to level our classroom  library.

She remembers when Noah remembered to bring his copy of Lightning Thief to lend to her.

She remembers when Andrew’s mom tapped her on the shoulder to tell her that Andrew reads in his bedroom all the time now.

She remembers when Gavin abandoned a book because he realized it wasn’t a “just right” book for him.

She remembers when Lily was honest and said she needed help to remember to fill our her reading log at home.

She remembers when Brendan made a connection to writing workshop when he said that synthesis retellings are kind of like conclusions in essays.

She remembers when three boys greeted her at the door after Christmas break to ask if she had finished Lightning Thief yet.

She remembers when Mallory and Emily were always reading books that have their names in the titles.

She remembers how Keelan and Blake always got excited about their books and would tell her about them.

She remembers when Cassidy volunteered to do a retelling during a table conference.

She remembers the first day that everyone came to the carpet and sat through the whole minilesson without rustling their bags.

She remembers when two partnerships agreed to be a trio so that everyone could have someone to talk to about books.

She remembers when Chaz gave her daily hugs.

She remembers when lots of us were sad and some cried when Searchlight died in Stone Fox.

She remembers when Payton described Stone Fox as a “touching story.”

Before preparing this lesson, I had already begun to reflect on our first unit of study.  But most of my reflections revolved around my shortcomings—how my minilessons were too long, how I needed to confer with more students, how I needed to get some strategy groups going, and the list goes on.  The above exercise helped me change my focus, and I began to realize how many good things have already begun to happen.  We are now well into our second unit of study.  I am working on making my minilessons shorter, on improving my conferring skills, but along the way, I am also taking time to notice our little daily successes.

In order to teach reading using a workshop approach, you simply MUST have a classroom library.  Richard Allington recommends at least 500 books, but I think we need even more than that.  If you do not have a well-stocked library, where do you begin acquiring books?  Here are a few suggestions for getting books into your classroom for little or no money:

• Friends of the Library Used Book Sales: Friends of the Library love to give teachers materials for free or at greatly reduced prices.
• Garage sales: Ask if the seller will consider donating unwanted books to your classroom or giving you a discount.
• Bonus Points from Book Orders: As children read more, they purchase more books, contributing more bonus points which can be used to buy more books!
• Ask parents to donate unwanted books. See below for a sample letter.
• Write a grant: Many school districts and community organizations offer grant money for special projects. Take advantage of these opportunities. Check out Donors Choose www.donorschoose.org for grant opportunities.
• Bookstores: Some bookstores will donate damaged books to teachers. Books without covers provide students with a perfect opportunity to show their comprehension of a story by designing their own book covers. Also ask for old book displays and other promotional material.
• Post Offices: Ask your local post office if they will give you any unclaimed magazines.
• Thrift Stores/Salvation Army/Goodwill: These stores will often give teachers materials for free or at greatly reduced prices.
• Local Businesses: Many businesses will donate materials they do not need. Eg: Ask a carpet store for leftover carpet or samples to put into your classroom library.
• Service Organizations (Rotary, Optimists, Lions, American Legion): Some are willing to provide money to purchase books.
• Craig’s List and Ebay:  Especially watch for retiring teacher collections.
• Nonprofit Organizations: A variety of national nonprofit organizations specialize in providing books to teachers and students in need.
  • First Book: www.firstbook.org
  • Wonder of Reading: www.wonderofreading.org
  • BookEnds: www.bookends.org
  • Reading is Fundamental: www.rif.org
  • Rolling Readers: www.rollingreaders.org
  • Reading Recycling Projects: Nonprofit organization distributes new and used books free of charge (recipients pay shipping and handling). 
    http://www.colorcodedbooks.org/lef/readingrecycling.htm

Danny Brassell, author of Readers for Life says there are just 2 rules for acquiring books: 

1) Ask for donations. 
2) Send a class thank you note.

The class thank you note goes a long way.  Often those who have donated will continue to donate to your cause in the future when they run across more books.

This year I have adopted a 4th grade class to pilot Lucy Calkins’ new Units of Study for Teaching Reading. 

The teacher I am co-teaching with has a decent classroom library, but in my opinion, you can never have enough books!  So we decided to solicit her students’ parents for help in acquiring more books.  We sent home a book donation request to parents (download below).

Shortly after sending home the letter, she received the most unexpected response  from one parent in the form of this e-mail: 

“Please provide me a list of books that you would love to have.  I have a certain amount of money that I try to donate each year to charities, and those charities which benefit a family member are best.  Education is definitely important to me so your cause is a worthy one that not only benefits my children, but the potential for 100’s of children. Don’t be shy putting the list together.  If you don’t ask, you will never receive.”

Incredible!  I guess Danny Brassell was right—we need to ask.  Of course, most of us will never receive such a generous offer, but if we don’t ask, we won’t receive any at all.

Do you have any creative ways of acquiring books for your classroom?  I invite you to share them here.

This morning I shared with a group of 4th grade readers that when I read a good book, the very first thing I want to do is tell someone about it.  Well, I just finished reading the most amazing book and I just HAVE to share it with you.  It’s called The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child by Donalyn Miller.

It is sort of a professional book, but it reads more like a fast-moving novel. It’s written by a sixth grade teacher from Texas, but it’s applicable for teachers of all grade levels.  As I read this book, I felt as though I were reading my own life story as a reading teacher.  I could have written almost every word (except not nearly as well as Donalyn).  Some of you may recall my blog posts called Breaking the Cycle and Breaking the Cycle Part II in which I shared my frustration with the way I was teaching reading.  Donalyn had a similar experience when she began her teaching career.  In this book she shares her journey as a reading teacher.  She takes you inside her classroom as she describes how she turns virtually every student she meets into a reader who reads an average of 40 books during their year with her, who passes the state reading exam, AND becomes a lifelong reader.  Be prepared to be totally inspired and maybe even shed a few tears.  It’s the only “professional book” that has ever had this effect on me.  Once you read it, I would love to hear your thoughts on it.

This week I had the opportunity to spend a whole day listening to Lucy Calkins talk about the teaching of reading.  It was such a rich day that I left with 11 pages of handwritten notes and a mind full of even more thoughts and ideas.  I often say that if I get one great idea at a workshop, it is worth attending.  This day left me with too many ideas to count.  I wanted to try to convey some of them to you, but as I look over my notes, I don’t even know where to start.  So I am going to just pick one thing to share today and save the others for some future blog posts.

Partway through the day Lucy asked if there was an accomplished musician and an accomplished athlete in the room of several hundred people.  Two male teachers came forward and Lucy proceeded to interview them.  She asked questions such as, “How did you get good at your music/sport?”  “Who helped you get good?”  “Did anyone ever give you feedback?”  “What did you do after you were given feedback?”  “What kind of feedback helped you get better?”  What came through loud and clear during the interviews was that both the musician and the athlete spent incredible amounts of time practicing and that they received specific, targeted feedback from an expert (music teacher/coach) about their performance. After receiving this feedback, they went back and practiced some more.

The point was that we don’t get good at something without spending time on it.  Reading is no different from any other skill—if children are to become expert readers, they need to spend large quantities of time reading, and they need specific, targeted feedback from their teachers.  There is nothing we can do from the front of the room that can ever take the place of time spent reading.  Lucy said that children should be spending at least 90 minutes of their school day reading.  This 90-minute recommendation is for time spent actually reading, however—not on reading-related activities.  In her book A Guide to the Reading Workshop, she writes, “the single most important thing we can do to turn schools around, making them into places where youngsters thrive as readers, is to clear out the time and space so that children can learn to read by reading.”  Richard Allington warns that we need to be careful that we aren’t replacing real reading with what he calls “crap.”  He says, “Crap is the technical term reserved for all the non-reading and non-writing activities that fill kids’ days—the dittos, dioramas, papier-mache maps…all that chases real reading and real writing out of the school day.”  In addition to the 90-minute in-school reading, children should spend additional time reading for pleasure at home daily.

Are you not yet convinced that kids need to spend this much time just reading?  Let me share some statistics with you.  Here is a table that shows the results of a study which examined how amount of reading affected achievement scores of fifth-graders:

Reading Volume of Fifth-Grade Students
of Different Levels of Achievement

Source:  Anderson, R.C., P. Wilson, and L. Fielding. 1988. “Growth in Reading and How Children Spend Their Time Outside of School.” Reading Research Quarterly. 23 (3), 285-303.

Clearly, children who read more attain higher levels of achievement in reading.