Pushing Our Learning: What Really Matters?

In the last post, Josie once again reminded me about listening.  But she went one step further.  She reminded me to honor each learner’s individuality and uniqueness.  She asked about what was pushing our thinking and learning.

I had to laugh and wonder why we keep coming up with these deep questions?  Maybe because we are both deep thinkers and that’s what draws us together.

But sometimes I really feel stuck.  My thinking has been driven by my curiosity about one single question.  Why can we be successful in one context and not in another?

Fueling my enduring question is the absolute belief that success and happiness are available for everyone and my deep desire to help others achieve this through my teaching practice.

This year I am participating in another embedded professional development program through my first year of training as a Reading Recovery teacher.  As I continue to think about my daily interactions with students, I am reminded that we need to have a reason to want to learn how to read. Does reading matter to me or to them?  Why read?

Marie Clay challenges us to “be tentative, flexible and immediately responsive to the best opportunity for a particular learner to have at this moment.”  

So, just as Josie keeps returning to the idea of listening, I am brought back to listening to my students and helping them to connect reading to their own lives.  Sometimes this seems so far away from the legislative demands of political institutions.  In Ohio, we start worrying about reading success starting in kindergarten.  We are required to send notices to parents predicting progress or lack of progress on a third grade test that fulfills legal requirements of what the State Department of Education has named the Third Grade Reading Guarantee. 

The challenge for me is to try to do things with love and patience, with ease and energy ------

         so that I can listen to my students and what reading means to them.  To do this, I have to remember what reading means to me, not just as a research based curriculum or standardized test, but as a real part of my living.

I wonder if the children experience reading as something similar or different in other contexts, for example, in their classroom or at their home.

I hope that these question matter. I keep asking myself if what I’m doing and thinking about is important enough to do and think about.  We only have a certain amount of time and energy, so our efforts need to matter, need to make a difference and bring some sort of joy and happiness through learning.

And I’m reminded how struggles are a way to learn.  So I will keep on joyfully struggling to define and enjoy reading for my students and myself. 

What is your current problem and how are you learning as you work your way through the struggles and difficulties?

I am finally getting back into reading for pleasure and not just graduate classes!  I am loving my kindle app on my phone.  Here is my current reading candy:

The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate

I am using the annotation feature to capture and share my thinking with a fifth-grade-reading-buddy.  I can’t wait to share this tool with her!

What do I Want to Learn?

In Mary Kate's last post she asked, "What do you want to learn, Josie?"  What a great reflective question, to think deeply about what it is you truly want to learn, it forces me to focus and key in on what will push me the most as a learner, to focus my reading, reflecting, collaborating time.  No wonder when we allow students to determine what they want to learn about, it becomes so powerful - this process is a good reminder for me!

I noticed as I started to reflect on what I wanted to learn, my mind always went to the HOW I love to learn.   I wonder, do I offer enough choices with my students on HOW to learn?   The how for me is the easier piece - I love to learn with people, especially with students.  For me that equates to conferring.  So if I were to choose one thing to focus my learning on it would be the conference piece of workshop.

The conference time could possibly be my favorite part of both workshops. The time that you truly get to see passion in a writer's and reader's plans, passion when the reader or writer reads to you. This is the time you get to share in the excitement for what has been written and what has been read.  This is the time that you get to hear strings of truth that allow you into that reader's/writer's life and bring you closer to understanding choices made in that reader's/writer's learning. 

The same is true during conferences with colleagues as we plan together or reflect on student progress and next steps.  I want to learn how to learn more in all conferences - writing and reading conferences with students, pre-conferences and reflection conferences with colleagues.  I want to learn to listen with more intensity.  Learning to rephrase what is said and then ask for clarification before moving on to a goal or to a next-step plan.


Mary Kate shared her thinking about scaffolding.  This is where conferring and scaffolding come together. Here is one of my favorite new professional books: 

The Construction Zone: Building Scaffolds for Readers and Writers 

By Terry Thompson

Terry Thompson helps us to learn about the feedback loop.  How we observe, reflect and respond.  "Effective scaffolds exist and expand in a responsive feedback loop that continually moves learners toward greater degrees of mastery." pg. 105

With the help of reading material like this and colleagues and students to think about conferencing with, I feel more focused and ready to challenge myself to push deeper and more focused when conferring.  

Reflecting on what I want to learn and how I want to learn has been a true reminder for me to honor both the what and the how with the learners I encounter each day.  What is pushing your learning, thinking, reflecting?

Learning as a reading teacher AND Learning as a PhD student

      Josie asked about our summer learning.  Well summer is at an end and it’s the time of year in education for beginnings.  I always like to greet my colleagues by saying,

“Happy New School Year!”  

For me, it’s a new year of reading recovery training, new learning, and new students.  I think the students are the best part!

But it is also an ending for me.  It’s the end of my candidacy exams for my PhD work.  It signals that I am ready for independent supervised research as a doctoral candidate.

            So my summer was filled with research studies.  I didn’t do any, and I really mean any beach time, light-hearted, summer fun reading.  It was deep thinking, topped off with heaping spoons of intellectual interpretation.  While I am really passionate about pushing the education profession forward, I always miss the delight of children’s smiles and laughter embedded in my daily work as a practicing teacher.

Candyland is a useful metaphor for my summer and the new school year.

Summer was Candyland, but without the candy.  The king of my "Summer Candyland" was the developmental theorist, Lev Vygotsky.  Think the zone of proximal development, not the twilight zone.  Stay with me a little longer.  Here’s a bit of my summer reading:

            Dr. Seth Chaiklin from the University of Bath has a unique perspective on collaboration, Vygotsky, and the zone of proximal development.

“ Vygotsky often uses the term collaboration in his discussion about assessing the zone of proximal development.   The term ‘collaboration’ should not be understood as a joint, coordinated effort to move forward, where the more expert partner is always providing support at the moments where maturing functions are inadequate.  Rather it appears that this term is being used to refer to any situation in which a child is being offered some interaction with another person in relation to a problem to be solved” (Chaiklin, 2003, p. 54).

Citation from: Chaiklin, S. (2003). The zone of proximal development in Vygotsky’s analysis of learning and instruction. In Kozulin, A.,Gindis, B., Ageyev, V. S., & Miller, S. M. (Eds.), Vygotsky’s educational theory in cultural context, (pp. 39-64). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

            

            The biggest take away for me is that collaboration is not just with teammates and colleagues (the adults), but with the students also. We are not always showing them; sometimes scaffolding involves doing it together.   I am excited to learn with and from the children and add some candy to my "School Year Candyland!"  

            If I am successful with my exams, it also signals the beginning of a new type of collaboration with Josie and other willing teammates on what it means to be a reader and a writer.  What will we learn this year?  Join us on our journey by leaving comments on what you want to learn this year.  What do you want to learn, Josie?

Building Trust

Mary Kate asked in her post long ago, "What tools can you share?  How can we show patience, kindness, and respect with these tools?"

Thank you for your questions Mary Kate, there was a little voice in the back of my head that has recently grown into a scream - START WRITING.  You have been patient - months worth of patient, you have been kind and respectful.  Never once reminding me that I had not posted on our shared space.  Thank you for that.

All three of the qualities you mention, patience, kindness and respect, for me add up to trust.  So my hunch is that you built a lot of trust with your students and others over the past school year. 

I started thinking about how we build trust with students. Most of us don’t just quickly handover our trust.  We ease into trust over time, through shared experiences, and usually through some confidentiality that has not been broken.  It is the same with our students and teams; trust takes time and reassurance. 

 Mary Kate asked – What tools can you share?  Well here is my confession. I don’t really have many tools.  Yes, I do use tools like Google docs to communicate and create shared thinking spaces with colleagues.  I am really thankful for those tools.  But all in all, I don’t have many tools.  I guess I am thinking that the best tools we have are those honest moments of conversations, the tool of listening, the tool of taking the time to reflect and then respectfully responding or many times to be silent, to be that listener. 

I am trying to earn trust.  Trust so that I can truly work side by side with my teammates.  To let them know that I will work hard to not let them down.  Trust from them to allow me to share the students under their thoughtful care.  Trust that I don’t have answers rather I have the patience to learn and time to try out plans together. 

I may never know if I am truly making a difference in my collaboration with others but I do have the control to be kind and patient and respectful.    For me right now those are the true tools I am trying to develop.

Mary Kate, what are you reflecting on this summer that will impact your collaborations with others in the new school year?  Readers, we would love to hear your thinking on new collaborations and tools. 

Learning to Listen

It has taken a long time to respond to Josie’s question: What would change in your classroom if you challenged yourself to listen more closely to those strong voices of the adults and children around you?

I didn’t get it.  I also think that I didn’t want to listen.  Or maybe I only wanted to listen to voices that echoed my own ideas and sentiments.  This was harder than I thought and has taken me many months to process.  I wanted to listen to the voices cheering me on, not questioning my viewpoint. 

So it’s a new year and I decided to write at my monthly writing retreat, but I found myself distracted and listening to another writer.  She bounced in with a warm and welcoming smile and a beautiful baby bump leading her way.  She shared how she struggled to have her first son and is now pregnant with her second baby.  And the lady across the table shared how her daughter was struggling with infertility. 

The incredible part of this story is that this pregnant writer’s purpose was to publish a blog on her experiences and help others.  She wanted to make something positive come from her struggles, to be someone else’s guide and cheerleader.  How lucky I was to be a part of this discussion.

And so I went back to teaching on Monday with the sole task of listening to my colleagues and students, for stories of courage and triumph.  But instead, I encountered a child’s story of shame.  I entered his classroom, as usual, with the intention of being a reading resource for the students.  The class activity was to compare an early and a later piece of nonfiction writing.  A rubric was provided to help the students with this process.  As I glanced at this students’ paper, I saw one word repeated over and over in each box.  The word was, ‘horrible.’  He covered it, so I asked him what he was working on.  He gave me short answers and I heard him silently saying, “Leave me, alone.”  So I gave him space and I gave him time.  But this is another piece of building evidence of an up and down cycle of this student’s engagement and self-confidence as a reader and writer.   I am his reading teacher who is supposed to support him in his classroom, but I often get this silent dismissal.  I did tell him that I was learning a lot from him and he made an emphatically shocked facial expression and asked what.  I shared that I am learning about humorous books and graphic novels, but my answer seemed to fall short.

So how does this relate to collaboration?  I need your collaboration. How can we change his story to one of triumph?  I have to admit that I am stumped and concerned.  I will be listening to any wisdom, Josie and our readers can offer.

                    

And here is a reminder about the basics of working together.  I found this children’s book, Let’s Work Together, on the online book website Big Universe.  It is also available in print.  Here’s what it recommends after finding a project to work on together.

1. Listen to the other person’s ideas.
2. Take turns talking and listening.
3.  Share your tools, such as glue or paint, with everyone in the group.

The book finishes with these words of wisdom, “Most importantly, be patient, kind, and respectful towards your teammates.”  It’s your turn.  What tools can you share?  How can we show patience, kindness, and respect with these tools?