SMART..Fired Up... Ready to Learn.

Specific

Measurable

Attainable

Realistic

Timely

adapted from SMART goals for ASCD

We will be writing SMART goals that you are expected to specifically relate to your backward plan.  We will be using the data from instructional practices to create a culture rich in positivity and action orientated results.  It will be our intent to have 100% commitment and work toward 80% fidelity.  THAT is how we will achieve result.

• Specific: Goals must be clear and unambiguous; vagaries and platitudes have no place in goal setting. When goals are specific, they tell you exactly what is expected, when, and how much. Because the goals are specific, you can easily measure progress toward completion.
• Measurable:What good is a goal that you can't measure? If your goals are not measurable, you never know whether you are making progress toward successful completion. Not only that, but it's tough to stay motivated to complete goals when they have no milestones to indicate their progress.
• Attainable: Goals must be realistic and attainable. The best goals require you and students to stretch a bit to achieve them, but they aren't extreme. That is, the goals are neither out of reach nor below standard performance. Goals that are set too high or too low become meaningless,.
• Relevant: Goals must be an important tool in the grand scheme of reaching the school vision and mission. You may have heard that 80 percent of worker productivity comes from only 20 percent of their activities. You can guess where the other 80 percent of work activity ends up! This relationship comes from Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto's 80/20 rule. This rule, which states that 80 percent of the wealth of most countries is held by only 20 of the population, has been applied to many other fields since its discovery. Relevant goals address the 20 percent of worker activities that has such a great impact on performance and brings your organization closer to its vision. (Source: Blanchard, Schewe, Nelson, & Hiam, Exploring the World of Business.)
• Time-bound: Goals must have starting points, ending points, and fixed durations. Commitment to deadlines helps to focus efforts on completion of the goal on or before the due date. Goals without deadlines or schedules for completion tend to be overtaken by the day-to-day crises that invariably arise in an organization.

Creating Interest that Lasts a Lifetime

     A theme I've been drawn to lately in my reading, is one of creating readers.  What does it mean to be a reader?  To some, it's being a person who is simply able to read.  To me, it is not only the ability, but the desire to do so.  Steven Layne calls it, "the skill and the will".  Stop and think about your students for a moment.  How many of them sit down and pull out a book before you ask them to?  How many do you see walking with a book open?  How many have a book with them everywhere they go?  Are they talking about them at lunch, recommending books to one another? Hopefully your answers are, many of them!  I'm afraid that the reality is not as many as we'd like.  We need to give our students the opportunity to crave reading.  Book talks paired with classroom library organization is a great start to creating that opportunity.
     In a nutshell, a book talk is 3-4 powerful minutes of conversation designed to connect readers to books.  Steven Layne records information about each book he reads in an effort to later give kids valuable information that helps them make decisions about books.  He delivers several each day, as does author, Penny Kittle.  They are really very simple and include a few key components; hold the book, know the book, share something from the book kids will connect to, and consider reading a powerful paragraph or page.  If you're tech savvy, like our own Nick Davis, you might even make your own book trailer to invite kids to read.  Anticipation questions can also help spark interest and even friendly debates between students that encourage them to read and discuss their different points of view.  Try one!  I guarantee you'll need to go looking for multiple copies of whatever you promote.  Now that they're excited, let's make sure they can find what they're looking for.
     Imagine walking into Barnes and Noble in search of the recently published science fiction only to find all of the books no longer categorized.  The newest in Marie Lu's, Legend series is next to Shakespeare's, Romeo and Juliet.   How long would you be willing to look for what you wanted?  Barnes and Noble would never adopt that policy because they would never have repeat customers.  Well, because they have their books organized and categorized into sections that have meaningful headings.  We want repeat customers.  Make it as easy for your students to find the books they wants in your classroom library as it is for us to find what we want at Barnes and Noble.  Allow kids to independently navigate your classroom library by sorting books into genre and/or author.   Heck, you can even add a "popular titles" or "books just in" section.  
     In the grand scheme of things, these are two simple, manageable ways to increase engagement and begin to ignite a passion that may just lead to lifelong reading.

Scaffolds in the Language Arts Classroom, Not Just for the Elementary Grades

We teach middle schoolers, right?  So, when we think about the ideas of shared and buddy reading, we might associate them with the elementary classroom.  Maria Nichols challenges us to consider that because not all of our students are functioning successfully with the demands of sixth grade text, these scaffolds may be just what the doctor ordered.  We are reminded that using shared reading after third grade, the purpose is to deepen and improve the quality of thinking through discussion about text.  It supports students in thinking and talking as, what Maria refers to as, text users, text participants, and text analysts", through purposeful talk.  Shared reading allows for feedback and immediate support.  Charting this conversation as you navigate the text with students reminds them later about kind of thinking they were able to do and how they used that text for support.
As far as "buddy reading" is concerned, alone students may have difficulty sustaining reading for a long period of time.  But, with a reading partner, they know there's someone to turn and talk to about the text.  When taught, kids can use the partnership to share ideas, exciting moments in the text, reading preferences, or a last verbal practice before sharing ideas aloud in front of the whole class, a sort of peer coaching if you will.  Remember that this is not necessarily for the whole class.  We have kids who have built enough reading stamina and are so engaged, they don't need a reading partner.  On the flip side, we also have those that are striving to work toward that and need a strong relationship with a peer to help move them toward independence.
Ultimately we must challenge ourselves to think about what is "elementary" when it comes to the needs of our students and not let preconceived notions hinder us from doing what's best.

Thinking and Talking About Reading in Complex Ways

Do you remember learning to, "push back" at an author or text?  Well, I don't! But realizing it has brought to light that it's something we need to teach kids to do in order to be critically literate. Beyond breaking the code of the text we need to consider the roles of the reader as a text participant, user and analyst.  In order to "push back"or challenge text, we have to think and talk about text through these lenses and read with    active, questioning, perhaps even suspicious minds.  As a text analyst and user of fiction, we must question the author and compare their point of view and experience through the characters to our own.  We should be asking, "Should it be this way?, Is this a fair representation of the world?, Does everybody think this way about our world?"  Teaching kids to think like this is necessary for them to participate in the democratic society that is our reality.  We must prepare them to live smartly and justly in the real world.  Questioning authors of nonfiction and what we read helps us develop our own understanding and opinion about what we learn and its application in the world.  Maria Nichols says, "These are ways of reading that begin to build habits of mind."
This is no small task.  With all of the demands teachers have on their plates, we often move at light speed, covering a breadth of knowledge at surface level.  We need to consider the value of slowing down and looking at text closely and balancing that with reading voraciously and widely.
Thinking aloud for students about your interaction and response to the text shows them the metacognition necessary to "be the book".  Showing them and inviting them to engage actively with you in deep discussion about text (PGW) is a great way to get this going in your classroom.  Together, let's begin to build these habits of mind.

Developing the Ability to Talk in Today's World

"Clearly, the path toward creating a future filled with opportunity and choice for our children is paved with the ability to think and talk with others in purposeful ways as a means of generating ideas and constructing understanding."  This quote from this weeks chapter in Comprehension Through Conversation, got us reflecting on the work we did in this week's professional development session.  In that session, we were placed in large groups made up of teachers we were unfamiliar with.  Our discussion revealed struggles to make the time purposeful and walk away with new understanding due to the fact that we were unfamiliar with the members of our group and uncomfortable in the environments we were placed in.  We were not all able to get past the discomfort to get to collective action.  We did not negotiate or construct meaning as a group and ended up feeling frustrated and fractured.  As we shared this, we realized the setting we were currently in was one of comfort and safety, thus talk flowed freely and guards were down.  Listening, acknowledging and disagreeing came naturally because of the familiarity. This understanding led us to think about how we group kids to have conversations and how sometimes we naturally discourage friends who talk from being in groups.  We often place kids in groups with others they are unfamiliar with, have never worked with and therefore not as comfortable with.  The willingness to share and receive messages is inhibited.  Don't get me wrong, we're not going to go and group kids by social groups, but it did cause us to think more purposefully and flexibly about who we put together in order to create the deepest conversations.  Choice about topic and group can give kids a level of support that allows the sharing of ideas and receipt of messages to be encouraged. We might even be charged to think about purposeful grouping as a scaffold for instruction. After all, "Children do not need, nor can they afford, to wait until high school or beyond to learn to use talk in purposeful ways."  After our experience on Monday, this could not be  more clear!

Listening to Learn and Learning to Listen

The 6th Grade language arts team chose to read Comprehension Through Conversation by Maria Nicholas in order to strengthen our knowledge of engaging students in literature discussions.  Since receiving our books mere minutes before our first meeting, we chose to spend the first meeting reading the introduction and foreword, with low expectations.  Well, we're happy to say our expectations were exceeded.  We had no idea three little pages would pack so much power.  Soon after reading, one of the author's questions thrust us into conversation and thought.  "How much time do we spend helping children to understand the power that comes from listening to the thoughts of others, and together building a greater understanding  than we were able to attain individually?"  Not enough, was our response.
We all know and have classrooms filled with students waiting with hands up in anticipation of sharing answers or thoughts. The teacher then listens, confirms or scaffolds, then moves on in an effort to check for understanding from many students. We quickly realized that as we work to implement the workshop model in the middle school, the share time scheduled at the end of the workshop frequently gets cut. It became clear that we were stripping our students of this opportunity to listen to the meaning constructed from text by readers in our classrooms and learn from one another. When students take time to construct meaning from text and consolidate new learning, it's vital they have the opportunity to share, compare and connect that meaning with others. Another idea that resonated with us was that the depth of thinking and student response to the thinking was far more important than the number of students sharing out. This has sparked a call to action to honor that share time and use it a bit differently than we have been. Based on all of the thought, discussion and action from the introduction and foreword, we are encouraged about what lies ahead in the meat of this text. And we will use our discussion time to listen as we share our understanding, questions, confusions, and learn from one another about how to bring this to life in our classrooms.

It is our goal to develop an environment where we are free to share and engage in a culture of excellence.  There will be bumps along the way but we will get through it together.

The Goals of Independent Reading

An important part of teaching literacy is providing daily opportunities for students to read, on their own; books they have selected themselves.  Through independent reading students:

•        Learn to exercise choice as readers, selecting from a wide variety of texts. 
•        Develop favorite books, types of books, genres, topics, writing styles, and authors.     
•        Develop the habit of spending a significant amount of time reading.
•        Build a “reading agenda” that includes books, authors and types of books they want to read in the future.  
•        Gain “mileage” as readers by processing a large number of texts on a regular basis.
•         Engage in fluent reading daily *including well-paced silent reading in which they are processing syntactic structures).
•        Learn about themselves as readers.
•        Become part of a community of readers.

Work with your team to develop accountability for your students.  Remember that minimal competency is four books a month.  Think about methods of differentiation so that less capable readers are successful.