As a high school English Language Arts teacher, I am responsible for creating a literacy program for my students. Underlying principles guide my choices on instruction, materials, assessments, and organization / environment. I teach high school underclassmen who range from the transitional to refinement stages in their literacy development. My school practices heterogeneous grouping for all students except those considered “advanced,” so my class periods are made up of individuals with a variety of needs. The principles that guide me in creating and maintaining my literacy program allow me to meet the needs of all these students.
One of the most important principles that guides my instruction is the concept of gradual release as described in Regie Routman's Reading Essentials as the “optimal learning model” and also called “zone of proximal development” by Vygotsky. Gradual release, which is also supported by Debbie Miller, starts with teacher demonstration, then moves to demonstration shared by teacher and student. Next, students partake in guided practice where the teacher assists the student before moving on to independent practice, the final step where the student preforms the skill alone. I use this principle to guide my instruction often with reading and writing. For example, even though my students are older, I still preform read alouds to illustrate how I make meaning from text or how I take notes on a text. During the writing portion of my class, I often share with my students how I gather ideas, form a paragraph, or revise. After modeling, I can then ask students to collaborate with me by adding their input while I lead and explain as necessary. Then it is time for the students to try this work on their own. As they work, I move around the room observing and helping. Most recently, guided practice in my classroom focused on finding subjects and predicates in sentences. I often redirected students when they asked for affirmation by asking questions like “Can you do that word? Is it an action?” or by re-explaining how compound subjects and predicates are linked together with “and.” After guided practice, my students are ready for independent practice, but the length of time it takes to get to this stage varies from student to student and skill to skill. By using flexible grouping during class work time, students are able to work on different stages of gradual release simultaneously (Tomlinson, 1995, 1999).
Gradual release has two important benefits in my classroom. First, it allows me to support my students as they gradually make skills and concepts their own. Before I learned about this method, I would often move from a lecture straight to independent practice that would be assessed for a grade. Only the students with natural talent in ELA or who had learned the content before would be successful. Now, I introduce my content giving ample time for students to explore and experiment with the material and get assistance before they are assessed on their own. With models from me and fellow students and many sessions to practice together and alone, far more students are successful. Secondly, gradual release allows me to work with students at varying levels of mastery. Students who understand quickly from my demonstration lead during shared demonstration while others who still need more modeling can watch. Later during practice, students who struggle can receive more attention during guided practice, while those who feel confident can move into independent practice at varying levels of complexity or begin to receive guided practice on a different skill.
Prior knowledge is another principle that guides my instruction, and is supported by David Pearson and Debbie Miller. I first read about activating prior knowledge through Chris Tovani's Do I Really Have to Teach Reading (2004). I later learned that prior knowledge is just the first step in the principles of comprehension, which also include connecting new and old information together and organizing or classifying information to improve recall. In my classroom, I often check or activate prior knowledge before starting a larger lesson or text. For example, when I used to teach Ann Rinaldi's A Break with Charity about the Salem Witch Trials or Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, we would often complete a KWL chart about the Puritans prior to starting the book to help students gather and remember the historical information they would need to understand the text. Sometimes, I would need to build prior knowledge because students would know very little about the Puritans; we would do further reading on the subject such as completing a jig saw using their American History textbook, reading aloud the children's book The Spinner's Daughter by Amy Sugarlittle, or discussing Anne Bradstreet's poem “Upon the Burning of Our House.” Then, as we read the assigned text, we would connect the factual information in these historical fictions back to the earlier readings and KWL. This would help the students to connect the new information they learned about Puritans to the older information they new from history, movies, or our readings, and thus they were able to recall it later more easily. Implementing this principle in my instructional decisions made a huge impact on my students. First of all, I stopped assuming that all my students knew the historical information in a text. By taking inventory of their knowledge before we started, I was able to support their reading instead of always back tracking when they were confused. This principle has helped with all sorts of topics that involve background knowledge, including grammar, writing, and research skills.
Chris Tovani also taught me about metacognition in her book I Read It, But I Don't Get It (2000). Previously, I assumed that high school students would know how to read. However, when two-thirds of my non-honors students were failing my first year of teaching, I realized that they all did not experience reading the way I did. I soon learned to reflect on my own reading to see what good readers do and then pass this on to students, like Nancy Atwell and Richard Allington in their workshops. Thus, I adopted the principle that reading involves complex thinking. My students in my middle level classes who struggled often thought like Tovani did as a teen (2000). They believed being able to say the words would ensure meaning. Or, they would reread multiple times expecting the meaning to magically come to them. These students didn't know how to monitor their reading to determine when they were stuck, and then apply fix-it strategies like questioning, connecting, or using print conventions. Now, I base a lot of my instruction on the concept that reading is complex thinking that makes meaning.
After I started to use these three principles in my instruction, I then started to work on the materials and environment in my classroom. First, I worked on creating a classroom that is rich in literacy experiences. This started with an extensive classroom like Nancy Atwell, Regie Routmen, and Richard Allington encourage. While funding prevents me from getting the optimal number and range to my library, my library still contains about four hundred texts ranging from a few children's picture books, to texts better suited for transitional readers like Gary Paulsen and Judy Blume, to best selling adult fiction, to canonical classics. However, students rarely looked at my classroom library until I made a few more changes. First, I used Routmen's Reading Essentials to help me organize my library in an inviting way. Then, I added to my instruction and organization three key elements: choice, time, and sharing (all backed by Atwell, Allington, and Routmen). Adding choice, time, and sharing to my instruction has been so important because of the increase motivation and engagement it provides for students both in reading and writing.
I started the 2008 school year with free choice reading being the norm instead of an occasional reward. I really took to heart Atwell's belief that “free choice reading of books should be a young person's right – not a privilege granted by the teacher.” Students at all levels were instantly more interested and engaged with their reading. Next, I added twenty minutes a class period for reading time. With out rotating two day block schedule of eighty minute periods, this equalled between forty to sixty minutes of in class reading time a week for students. Where homework used to be a prescribed chapters, it changed to reading thirty minutes a day out side of school adding an additional three and a half hours of reading time a week. Coupled with choice to read anything they like, students were completing their reading homework and flying through books. Even students who claimed to dislike reading or had failed the course the year before because of not reading were reading silently and sustained for the twenty minutes every class period.
To keep up the momentum once the novelty wore of, I added sharing of reading. Sometimes I shared with students my experiences with reading through book talks. At other times in the year, students shared their favorite books or books that influenced them. About once a month, students posted a on a web forum letter essay, designed after those Atwell uses in her students journals, to allow students to read about each other's reading and respond. Recommendations from peers and me inspired many student choices in reading. And, I always allowed a couple of minutes after silent reading time's conclusion during which I hear students excitedly sharing and recommending their books.
At the same time I introduced time, choice, and sharing in reading, I did the same in my writing curriculum. Highly inspired by Atwell's In the Middle and Vicki Spandell's book The Nine Rights of Every Writer (2005), I devoted the last thirty minutes of my class periods to writing time. Students were allowed to choose their own topics and genres for writing. During writing time, I conference with students and encourage them to conference with each other both formally and informally about their topics and ideas as well as more conventional areas like grammar and spelling. (I know a literacy program includes writing, but to save on repetition I'll explain the rest of the design of my writing program in question 5's answer below). Overall, the introduction of choice, time, and sharing into my writing curriculum, which used to be made of teacher chosen essays, greatly increased the number of writing assignments that were completed and students' enthusiasm to complete them.
When I introduced choice and time to read and write in my class every day, my biggest concern was that there would be less rigor in my class. However, when I read Alfie Kohn's article “Challenging Students ... And How to Have More of Them,” I adopted the principle that rigor does not come from a text choice I make or a creative project I plan. Instead, rigor can come from me letting go of all the control and authority of “being the teacher.” Kohn explains that students can be reluctant to think for themselves, especially when a teacher is there to give them “answers.” However, teachers can create rigor by helping students become critical thinkers. He suggests “taking children backstage” to show them how we solve real problems in our content. To take it even further, he states that “every lesson included chances to wonder, to argue, to criticize, the text and what the teacher has said.” This component of fostering students who challenge what they read in texts and question the status quo is rigor that is more important for the real world and fits well with the freedom of reading and writing workshops.
The most important factor I find in all of my teaching is balance. With so much to cover in my curriculum as well as local, state, and national assessments to prepare my students for, balancing my instruction has been crucial to the design of my program. I need to ensure a balance in the work students do for enjoyment versus academic work. Thus, I have a balance in choices I make and the students make. The majority of the year, my students chose their own texts to read and own writing topics and genres, yet I must make sure that they cover the content needed for all freshmen, primarily essay writing, literary analysis, and research. So, over the course of the year I have chosen (or limited choice on) three texts that students read and we based three essays and a research assignment off of these texts, but still allowed students freedom on the pace they read the texts and the topics of their essays. This ensured that students learned the difference between reading for enjoyment versus reading for more academic purposes such as to analyze or gain information.
Another huge piece of balance in the design of my program is assessment. As freshmen, my students only take one criterion referenced test, the NWEA. Then they complete two local assessments. Everything else throughout the rest of the year is designed by me. I made sure to include variety, basing a lot of my choices on Atwell's chapter on assessment in In The Middle. I use informal reading and writing conferences. I observe students reading, writing, and working in groups. Students reflect on their own work. Then there are more traditional assessments such as polished writing pieces, prompt writing, quizzes on vocabulary or grammar, and oral presentations. The variety in my assessment is important. For example, a criterion referenced test allows the teacher to see if a student can preform at a certain level; particularly, the NWEA breaks data down into specific standards and skills students have master, need more work on, and should move on to next. But, a test like this doesn't represent a real world reading or writing experience. Thus, assessments like teacher observations and anecdotal notes allow teachers to gather data on more authentic experiences. Providing variety and balance in assessment also allows students to use their strengths as well as improve on weaknesses and allows teachers to get data from a variety of perspectives (student, teacher, more objective from a standardized test).
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