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 #29
No Dark Sarcasm:
It's Our Job to Make It Accessible
Time again for music to remind us that sarcasm is not for use in the classroom.
If ever a line were applicable today, it's: "No dark sarcasm in the
classroom." It's what Pink Floyd, the musical group, still sings angrily
(in their latest nostalgic feast for old-school rock and rollers who like
their music loud and dissonant).
While teaching Inferring as a reading strategy in Reading Workshop, we quickly
"hit the wall," and those lines from Pink Floyd came vividly to
mind.
We don't need no education
We don't need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!
All in all, it's just another brick in the wall.
All in all, it's just another brick in the wall.
From "Another Brick in the Wall" by Pink Floyd
"Hitting the wall," as I choose to define it, means there's something
that you can't get beyond. For us it was pure frustration driven by kids'
blank faces and empty looks as we started to teach inferring from text.
We thought we had prepared them for using this strategy, but we still had
lots to learn about how to teach inferential thinking.
Encouraging inference
One book in particular that has been of great help to me, Strategies
That Work, refers to inferential thinking as "reading between the
lines," being able to use clues from what you are reading and the world
around you to build understandings from text. Stephanie Harvey explains
it this way:
Inferring is about reading faces, reading body language, reading
expressions, and reading tone as well as reading text. (p. 105)
Since the beginning of the year, we've used a variety of interactive texts
and games to encourage inferential thinking. Riddles and jokes, several
book ideas from Yellow Brick Roads, Sloane's Lateral Thinking
Puzzlers, and Gordon's Solv-a-Crime, as well as Charades,
all work well; students love the active involvement.
But I was unprepared for the reaction we got when we started teaching kids
how to infer from text. For whatever reason, the kids weren't where we thought
they were with inference. We believed we'd done enough to get our kids ready.
But the lessons we prepared didn't go as planned.
Using short text, like picture books, and two column charts to help students
organize their thoughts, we plowed ahead. After reading aloud books and
teaching mini-lessons, they weren't able to identify places to infer either
in the pictures or the text. They couldn't have a class conversation about
the inferential thinking they were using because they had nothing to say
about the text.
So, what to do? When things aren't going as planned in the classroom, it's
easy to blame it on the kids. "We can't teach this because of those
students" comes to mind. That's what is known as the deficit model
of education. At this point, teachers might be tempted by that "dark
sarcasm." And yet, it is our responsibility to know where our students
are in their learning and be able to teach them what they need to know to
move ahead.
Find another way to do it
"Remember what happened to Harry Potter and his friend, Ron Weasley
in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets?" one of our students
commented as we discussed the meaning of "hitting the wall" in
our Reading Workshop. "When they couldn't get through the magic wall
at Platform 9 3/4 to get on the train for Hogwarts School, they kept banging
into the bricks again and again. They just had to find another way to do
it."
That's exactly right. We just had to find another way to teach inferring
from text. For that reason, we chose self-reflection. We looked at what
we had asked them to do and the texts we had chosen and made major adjustments.
"Teach with easy text" was what came to mind. Specifically, we
dropped the level of difficulty of the text we used. We chose a familiar,
easy and accessible set of books (George and Martha) that draw inferences
with broad strokes through both pictures and text. Then we taught explicitly,
using Think-Alouds* to make applying the strategy (Inferring) more comprehensible.
It worked like magic.
What happened to the level of the conversation about inferences and inferring
that we had with our students? OK, the text was easy. But the level of the
conversation about it was high. They predicted, inferred, drew conclusions
and supported their ideas with evidence from the text. All because it was
accessible to them.
Consequently, no dark sarcasm in the classroom, then or now. But rather,
as Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young sang:
Teach your children well
* Next week: a terrific new resource to help teach inferring and
other reading strategies using Think-Alouds.
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