Juli Kendall's Weekly
Reading Workshop Journal
A MiddleWeb Listserv Project
Self-selected members of the MiddleWeb Discussion List are joining
together to explore the Reading Workshop and other ideas about supporting
young adolescent readers. Juli Kendall, a reading teacher/coach in Long
Beach, California, is helping moderate the discussion. Juli is also keeping
a weekly journal of her own Reading Workshop initiative. Find out more about
our project at our Reading Workshop homepage.
You'll find Juli's background article here.
Links to many of the tools created by Juli and her colleagues are embedded
in these journals. Most often, when you click on them, a PDF file will begin
to download. You'll find a list of the downloads here.
Week #17
Using a Rubric
to Improve Literary Conversations
There it is on page 314 in The
Art of Teaching Reading -- a rubric for evaluating classroom literary
discussions.
"How was our conversation?" it says. "Did we listen to one
voice at a time?"
At the very least it seems like an intriguing concept, to be sure, evaluating
conversation using a rubric. But what does it mean and, more important,
will it work? Depends on whom you ask. And of course, most teachers you
ask have never heard of using a rubric to evaluate student conversations,
but even so, we kind of liked the idea.
Conversations fill up our days in Reading Workshop. We have conversations
about Read Aloud books, Independent Reading books, Partner Reading books,
and written responses to text. The Art of Teaching Reading refers
to it as "a curriculum of talk."
To evaluate our work, we decided to use a rubric titled "How was our
conversation?" Adapted from The Art of Teaching Reading, page
314, it was additionally inspired by our students. We like it because it
reinforces these "characteristics of good conversations," the
important things we want our students to do when talking about books.
-- One voice talks at a time
-- We hear from many different people.
-- We stay with one idea.
-- We give evidence from the book.
The idea of evaluating conversation is still new to us, so we were guided
by Lucy Calkins' words on page 319 in The Art of Teaching Reading.
"We are teaching children that talking and writing in response to reading
is a way to think, envision, puzzle over, and open up a story." This
is reminiscent of the work on "envisionments"
by Judith Langer. It comes back again to the idea that reading is all about
understanding -- the circle is unbroken.
The first time was interesting as we explained what we were going to do,
using the language from the rubric. "How many different people did
we hear from? Did they give evidence from the book?" By the end of
that mini-lesson, the rubric was on the wall and stapled into each Reading
Journal. From that day, we have used it regularly. I cannot imagine anything
like this happening so quickly on the first day of Reading Workshop. Our
previous literary conversations must have laid the groundwork.
Like any assessment tool, it has its ups and downs. So, the important thing
about using a rubric to evaluate literary conversations is to keep focused
on the ultimate outcome of improved literary understanding. Instead of being
down on yourself when you have a bad "classroom conversation"
-- and you will --pat yourself on the back when something positive happens.
Download a PDF of the Conversation
Rubric here.
Leti's update
(With winter break, it has been four weeks.since I updated you on Leti's
progress.)
Participating in classroom conversations about reading
Leti's ability to participate in classroom literary conversations is
improving. Since we use a class rubric for evaluating how we are doing with
our conversations, she doesn't have an individual score but she contributes
regularly. She needs to work on staying on one idea and giving evidence
from the book.
What happened as we went along and what strategies we tried
Over the break we encouraged students to read at home. As always they
could take home some books. We also talked about asking for books as holiday
gifts, a number of our students are Buddhist and do not celebrate the holidays,
or going to the public library to find resources. Their classroom teacher
gave them each a packet of sticky notes to use for making connections in
the books that they read at home.
When I talked to Leti about what she read over the break, she told me about
a book called The Woman's Journal that her mother had found for her
at the 99-cent Store. She was very excited about it because she had already
been reading some of the Amelia's Journal books as well as a girl's journal
about traveling to California during the Gold Rush period.
How we adjusted and retaught and what progress we've seen
We encourage Leti to support her comments in class conversations about
reading with evidence from the book. After our modeling during Read Aloud
times, we ask her to practice with her partner during Partner Reading. To
make sure she is listing evidence from the story, we have her write her
connections on sticky notes. She keeps those in her Reading Journal for
a record of her progress.
A lot has been going on for Leti in the last few weeks. Her Reading Journal
looks much neater and better organized. It's now easier to understand the
2 column charts she uses for Making Connections. She has moved to reading
level M books. As a reader, her attitude seems more serious with fewer distractions.
In addition, she pays attention to her reading for longer periods of time.
See Juli's January curriculum map
Read Juli's next journal entry
Read Juli's previous journal entry
Read Juli's backgrounder about her work
Back to Juli's journal index
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