Margin Notes

DESIGN FOR BELONGING BY SUSIE WISE

Sep
19

In Design for Belonging: How to Build Inclusion and Collaboration in Your Communities, Susie Wise explains the importance of belonging:

Belonging helps us to be fully human. It gives us permission to share our talents and express our life force. It enables cooperation, collaboration, and the ability to work across difference. It emboldens our creativity and our problem-solving abilities. When people feel like they belong, they are able to be their best and do their best.

According to Wise, we can all design spaces that help people feel they belong, and she represents this intersection of belonging and design as “belonging + design = new ways of bringing people together, or new ways of people being together.”

Belonging means that we feel accepted and that we can show up as our authentic selves; we also feel that as a member of the community we can raise issues and challenge ideas. In contrast, othering is treating people who belong to a different group or community as inferior.

We can shape belonging and avoid othering by using what Wise calls the levers of design. These levers are tools that help us move toward the goal of creating spaces where people feel safe to participate fully. They help us experiment with new ways of engaging with others.

  • Space: cues us to what, how, and who we can be
  • Roles: because they are designed as part of systems, they can be redesigned to create belonging
  • Events: designing an event is crafting the experience, so belonging must be a through-line
  • Rituals: help us focus on personal, interpersonal, and communal meaning-making
  • Grouping: to foster belonging, be specific about what you hope to achieve by designing group structures
  • Communications: be aware that all communications send explicit and implicit messages about who belongs and who does not
  • Clothing: can act as a symbol of belonging
  • Food: is sometimes an opportunity for coming together
  • Schedules and Rhythms: can play an important role if they are designed to support people and their needs.

No matter what role we play, we can be reflective about whether or not our interactions create belonging or othering. When we become aware of the levers of belonging in our own communities, we can begin to use them with intention. Although this book is not specific to education, there are countless spaces educators can apply these principles to design and redesign spaces within our classrooms and school communities to foster belonging.

TEACH LIVING POETS BY LINDSAY ILLICH & MELISSA ALTER SMITH

Apr
18

If you are familiar with the Teach Living Poets website or the #TeachLivingPoets community on Twitter, you will want to get your hands on this professional resource. If you aren’t already acquainted with the work of Teach Living Poets, be sure to spend some time with it this month!

Lindsay Illich and Melissa Alter Smith have created a professional resource that celebrates the work of contemporary poets and the incredible thinking students will do when we put compelling poetry in their hands and create the conditions for them to grow their understanding about it together. As they write in the introduction:

To quote Kevin Akbar, we are living in “a golden age of poetry” (“The Rumpus”). We hope this book helps us open up the world of contemporary poetry and renews your passion for language and literature, which is so vital to engaged teaching. Indeed, in our own writing and teaching lives, reading and engaging in this world has opened us to a flood of generosity from writers and other educators, invaluable gifts that led us to write this book. We hope it will lead you to your own projects that will be gifts to others.

Teach Living Poets is overflowing with ideas for bringing contemporary poetry (and poets) into the classroom. It features lessons and resources that you can implement right away as well as examples of student responses and written work. I especially appreciate the way the classroom snapshots highlight many teacher voices by incorporating activities shared by contributors to the website. Each chapter includes dozens of recommended poems—so be warned it can be a slow read if you, like me, stop and google every title and poet, but I promise it will be totally worth it.

If you are looking for ways to incorporate contemporary poetry into your reading and writing workshop, I highly recommend adding Teach Living Poets to your professional resource library.

BEING THE CHANGE: LESSONS AND STRATEGIES TO TEACH SOCIAL COMPREHENSION BY SARA K. AHMED

Mar
31

Last spring, literacy coach Sonja Wright and I participated in a virtual book study with several teachers in ASD-W on Being the Change by Sara K. Ahmed.

While this book focuses primarily on building personal identity, awareness, and classroom community, it does so through a wide variety of literacy activities that span all strands our English Language Arts curriculum.

Ahmed organizes the text through a collection of 6 chapters beginning first with personal identity and then moving outward to understand the acts of listening, being candid, informed, as well as personal responsibility. The book ends with the process of working together. Each chapter provides real world classroom activities curated by Ahmed illustrating possible discussions, teacher samples (anchor charts), student work, and recommended literacy “stacks” to engage students with each big idea.

Lessons and activities allow for multiple literacy connections; from the implementation of a writer’s notebook, and personal reflections through quick writes, use of mentor texts for poetry writing, opportunities for speaking and listening with think-pair-share activities and multiple inquiry activities . This list does not begin to scratch the surface of the possible literacy learnings that could arise when implementing Ahmed’s strategies.

In conclusion, I can not recall a professional resource that I have read recently that offers more meaningful and authentic classroom learning connections for students and teachers. To find out more about Sara K. Ahmed and Being the Change click here.

 

 

 

 

HOW TO WRITE SHORT BY ROY PETER CLARK

Feb
22

In How to Write Short: Word Craft for Fast Times Roy Peter Clark advises “if you want to write long, begin by writing short.” This really sparked my thinking on short writing mentor texts that can be used in the service of writing both short and long.

According to Clark: “If your goal is to write short and well, you must begin by reading the best short writing you can find. Start by keeping a ‘commonplace book,’ a notebook that contains treasured short passages from your favorite authors next to bits and pieces of your own writing.”

Christopher Johnson, author of Microstyle: The Art of Writing Little, recognizes that short writing reflects its own conventions—the strategies that make very short messages effective, interesting, and memorable. He explains that “if extended prose writing is like a painting or illustration, microstyle is like graphic design. It employs a subset of techniques used in more detailed arts, and because it serves different ends, it involves techniques and conventions of its own.”

Spending time close reading short writing is time well-spent for writers. Reading short writing through this lens reveals what Roy Peter Clark describes as “the most strategic moves practiced by the best writers.” We grow in our craft (both short and long) when we study the writing of others, name the moves we notice, imitate them, and adapt them to make them our own. Samples of short writing can do a lot of heavy lifting as mentor texts. Students can explore several examples in a short period of time and focus on a specific craft move or element. Their noticings can then be applied to their own short writing or incorporated as a component of a longer piece.

Christopher Johnson captures this practice in his mantra: “Pay attention to the language around you in the spirit of appreciation and curiosity.”

Here are some excellent examples of short writing I’ve discovered (or rediscovered) recently that invite writers to reflect on the craft moves that get, in Johnson’s words, “a lot of idea out of a little message.” I’ve captured many examples from these texts in my own writers notebooks to use as micro-mentors.

 

THE QUICKWRITE HANDBOOK BY LINDA RIEF

Jan
27

Linda Rief has been an educator and mentor-teacher for a very long time. She taught Grade 8 ELA in Maine up until her retirement a couple of years ago. Writing, and the art of teaching writing, are her passions.

Her latest book, The Quickwrite Handbook: 100 Mentor Texts to Jumpstart Your Students Thinking and Writing is simply a beautiful book. The text is divided into four sections: Seeing Inward, Leaning Outward, Beyond Self and Looking Back. In each section there are a myriad of text forms to use as mentors: poetry, cartoons, excerpts from YA novels, essays and short stories written by her former students, as well as examples from Linda’s own writer’s notebook. If you are looking for quickwrite ideas, this book has you covered. Each mentor text has an accompanying lesson idea.

If you are intrigued by the idea of quickwrites, but are unsure how to begin, the introduction of the book will answer all your questions. It gives a great summary of what a quickwrite is, the benefits of using them with your writing community, as well as ideas for teaching with quickwrites.

You can learn more about this book here.

 

TRY THIS TOMORROW: TWO-PAGE SPREAD

Jan
20

In Penny Kittle and Kelly Gallagher’s new resource, 4 Essential Studies: Beliefs and Practices to Reclaim Student Agency, they discuss using two-page spreads as a way to generate student thinking and prepare for discussions about their reading. They begin by giving students no more direction than to ask that students use the two pages to bring evidence of what they were thinking as they were reading. They then used student models to show different ways readers might show their thinking. 

Here are some examples: 

Students used lists and categories.

Students used sticky-notes in their books and transferred them to the two-pager. 

Students organized their thinking with different colors of sticky-notes. 

Students wrote notes and highlighted the main points. 

Students took the guiding questions and created their own charts of character, quotes and craft. Making thinking visible is an essential part of any classroom. I love that these authors discuss how this same thinking model can be used in other content areas, such as this one on anatomy.  

Some students may require support with such an open-ended activity and this resource provides other options that are more guided, while maintaining the goal of student-generated talk. Here are some guiding questions that might help students get started on their two-page spread: 

  • Find a gossipy moment in the book. 
  • Identify the turns in the book. 
  • Discuss a critical decision made in the chapter or book. 
  • Capture a shift in your thinking. 
  • Discuss a minor character of major importance. 
  • Pick a passage and read it the way the author intended it to be read. 
  • Identify and discuss the most important word in the passage, chapter, or book. 
  • Annotate poetry 

You can find more student spreads under “Book Love workshop handouts” on http://pennykittle.net  

Kittle, Penny, and Kelly Gallagher. 4 Essential Studies: Beliefs and Practices to Reclaim Student Agency. Heinemann, 2021.

THANKS FOR THE FEEDBACK BY DOUGLAS STONE AND SHEILA HEEN

Dec
07

In Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well (even when it’s off base, unfair, poorly delivered, and frankly, you’re not in the mood), Harvard Law School lecturers Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen define feedback in this way:

Feedback includes any information you get about yourself. In the broadest sense, it’s how we learn about ourselves from our experiences and from other people—how we learn from life…so feedback is not just what gets ranked; it’s what gets thanked, commented on, and invited back or dropped. Feedback can be formal or informal, direct or implicit; it can be blunt or baroque, totally obvious or so subtle that you’re not sure what it is. (p. 4)

Although it is directed toward the feedback receiver, Thanks for the Feedback offers a wealth of information for educators to consider when creating the conditions for feedback to be both given and received effectively. Because they define feedback so broadly, and because we are all givers and receivers of feedback in various contexts, Stone and Heen, have written a resource that will help every reader improve their communication.

According to Stone and Heen, there are three kinds of feedback:

  1. Appreciation “is fundamentally about relationship and human connection. At a literal level it says, ‘Thanks.’ But appreciation also conveys, ‘I see you,’ ‘I know how hard you’ve been working,’ and ‘You matter to me.’” (p. 31)
  2. Coaching “is “aimed at trying to help someone learn, grow or change.” (p. 32)
  3. Evaluation “tells you where you stand. It’s an assessment, ranking, or rating…Evaluations are always in some respect comparisons, implicitly or explicitly, against others or against a particular set of standards.” (p. 33)

It is important for both the giver and receiver to be aware of three potential triggers that can block feedback:

  1. Truth Triggers “are set off by the substance of the feedback itself—it’s somehow off, unhelpful, or simply untrue.” (p.16)
  2. Relationship Triggers “are tripped by the particular person who is giving us the gift of feedback. All feedback is colored by the relationship between giver and receiver, and we can have reactions based on what we believe about the giver…or how we feel treated by the giver.” (p.16)
  3. Identity Triggers “are all about us. Whether the feedback is right or wrong, wise or witless, something about it has caused our identity—our sense of who we are—to come undone.” (p.16)

Recognizing our feedback triggers helps us manage our reactions to feedback and approach it with a stance of curiosity. Knowing our tendencies to react to certain feedback in certain ways allows us to engage in feedback conversations as learners, even when we don’t agree with the feedback.

Here are a few of the key takeaways from Thanks for the Feedback for educators to consider when creating optimal conditions for giving and receiving feedback in the classroom:

  • It’s essential to align the type of feedback with its purpose and for both the giver and receiver to be aligned on the purpose for feedback.
  • Before we can determine whether feedback is right or wrong, we have to understand it.
  • Strong reactions to feedback often result in “extreme interpretations” of feedback (for example, a suggestion to change one thing is heard as “change everything”).
  • Identity is the story we tell ourselves about ourselves and when feedback contradicts or challenges our identity, it can cause our identity to unravel.
  • Even if feedback is accurate, timely, and communicated well, if it involves too many ideas or suggestions for change, it’s unlikely to be received.
  • Feedback isn’t only about the quality of its content; the quality of the relationship between giver and receiver is just, if not more, important.

Thanks for the Feedback is not specifically for educators, but many of the ideas are very applicable to feedback in the classroom context. I found the information fascinating because it sheds light on strategies to make any interaction—professional or personal, formal or informal, planned or impromptu—more effective.

TO KNOW AND NURTURE A READER

Nov
18

There is great grace in the teaching profession. Kind, giving, thoughtful, persistent, and devoted are some of the descriptive words that come quickly to mind about the many teachers I have worked with. It has been a privilege to work with so many gifted professionals and to watch what might be called love in motion, in the service of the many wonderful students in our schools.

Reading To Know and Nurture a Reader: Conferring with Confidence and Joy by Kari Yates and Christina Nosek suggests these qualities of an effective teacher as the authors gently scaffold the learner through a carefully constructed methodology of how to have an efficacious reading conference. It is apparent that they have spent thousands of hours thinking about and creating this method, and at the root of it all is the care and concern they have for their students and the desire to offer them the joy of becoming lifelong and passionate readers.

It struck me that this book could be taken both as a life manual and a methodology for how to hold reading conferences with students. Advice such as “Loosen up, have some fun and trust your instinct,” “Approach students with tenacity and heart,” and “It’s not helpful to be hard on yourself, so give yourself a little love,” create a hopeful and gentle space to learn or deepen the skill of working with a reader in the most effective way possible. It encourages the reader and supports the learner to take this risk.

There are many aspects of this book to like. The methodology these teachers have created appears straightforward on the surface but, like many skills worth learning, it has layers upon layers of complexity as one reads further into the skillfully crafted chapters. It is not overwhelmingly complex, however, with a careful learning scaffold that demonstrates master teachers and writers at work, spiraling back again and again to remind the reader of what has led to this point both with visual and textual reminders.

Teachers are presented with a decision-making map to follow while doing a reading conference with students. The first decision relates to determining what is going on with a reader (the know part of the conference) and whether it is related to 1) book choice 2) healthy habits 3) strategic process and 4) authentic response. More than ample details are provided on how to ask the right questions or use the right listening skills to determine what is challenging a reader. Once this information is determined, the teacher is encouraged to nurture the reader via their response which can be via 1) affirming 2) extending 3) reminding and/or 4) taking notes for future teaching.

Each chapter of the book delves into one of the eight aspects mentioned above with the first four chapters focused on the “how” of conferring, the next four on the “what” of conferring, and the last few chapters revealing the behind-the-scenes preparation work to bring it all together. The appendix provides reproducible templates to make the whole process easier. The authors remind us more than once that we are always dealing with the reader in front of us in this moment and of the consequences of over-teaching.

The book is explicit and provides very easy-to-follow questioning guides. It is so precise that it even has reflections on non-verbal cues that can be used by the teacher and what they might signal to a nervous student. It is repetitive in a helpful way when a lot of information is being provided. For example, the decision-making map is provided at the beginning of the book and reappears again and again with an intentional “you are here” arrow to help the reader move with ease throughout the landscape of the methodology.

“See it in action” videos, accessed via a QR reader, and previewing questions to focus the viewer help consolidate the techniques. It is reasonable to expect that a teacher new to readers’ conferences would be able to implement it successfully using this thoughtful manual.

“We want to be crystal clear that this is not offered as a checklist, a curriculum or sequence for teaching reading. It is simply a format for organizing all the complex and boundless possibilities, in a way that allows us to tidy up our thinking and proceed with more clarity and intention.” Reading conferences are challenging and sometimes it can seem difficult to record all that needs to be recorded. To Know and Nurture a Reader returns the focus to the heart of the matter.

 

Elizabeth Ann Walker is a life-long educator with a background in performance arts and wellness. A certified yoga teacher, trained sound therapist and meditator, Elizabeth has spent many years teaching literacy in Quebec and New Brunswick.

THE WRITER’S PRACTICE BY JOHN WARNER

Nov
11

As someone who struggles with developing a writing habit, I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about a book called The Writer’s Practice: Building Confidence in your Nonfiction Writing. Honestly, it sounded like work. And I was not expecting to be enthusiastic about reading it. But, because John Warner is also the author of “Why They Can’t Write”, which was a book I really enjoyed, I was willing to give this one a go. And I’m so glad I did!

Warner has written an entertaining and engaging book that is a roadmap for how to write non-fiction well. He developed this book through years of teaching freshman writers, most of whom couldn’t write anything beyond a five-paragraph essay.

If you teach high school ELA, I would highly recommend this book. I can envision it being a great addition to the writer’s workshop. And, at the back of the book, Warner gives you a possible sequence of the activities that you could use as mini-lessons and guided practice over 15 weeks.

As Warner says, “This book is for anyone who wants to improve their writing, which is everyone because everyone is a writer.”

You can find out more about the book here.

 

NOTICE AND NOTE: Strategies for Close Reading by Kylene Beers and Bob Probst

Oct
28

Kylene Beers and Bob Probst are two educators who have influenced my teaching greatly. Their book “Notice and Note: Strategies for Close Reading” is, in my opinion, a game-changer when it comes to strategy instruction. The pair, through many years of thinking, observations, teaching students and having conversations with each other, developed a set of “Signposts” that upper elementary to high school students can use as strategies for close reading.

Here are Kylene and Bob discussing their book:

In my role as a Literacy Coach, I have co-taught the six Signposts in many classrooms, and I can attest to the fact that they work! Students embed these strategies and use them in their own independent reading. They are also fantastic tools to support students as they discuss their reading in small groups and for book club discussions. Students can also use them to respond to text.

If you are looking for mini-lessons for strategy instruction, I encourage you to check out this book. The Signposts are strategies that students can use throughout the school year to support reading comprehension. More information about this book and the authors is available here.