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 #30
Jeffrey Wilhelm: The Joy of
Discovering a Clear-Thinking Expert!
Here's what every person in pursuit of health and happiness needs: a few
clear thinking experts, a sense of humor, a positive attitude, a good job
and astute canine companions. Here's what successful reading teachers need:
to make friends of a few clear thinking experts as they plow through the
literature about how to teach reading in a Reading Workshop.
As I sat in front of my TV the other day, Jeffrey Wilhelm came to visit.
He was a participant in Envisioning Literature: Conversations in Literature,
a series
of professional development workshop videos produced by The National Research
Center on English Learning & Achievement (CELA)
and Annenberg/CPB.
Watching the second in the series, I "sat in" on a literary conversation
about Gary Soto's poem, "Oranges." What a refreshing professional
development experience!
Wilhelm's name sounded familiar, but I needed to be reminded that he was
the author of You Gotta Be the Book, Teaching Engaged and Reflective
Reading with Adolescents. You
Gotta Be the Book is about encouraging engaged, middle school readers
and getting rid of literary instruction that turns them off. Using drama
and art to respond to literature, it focuses on helping all readers to "take
on the strategies and stances of more expert readers -- and to reconceive
of reading as a personally meaningful, pleasurable, and productive pursuit."
That word "pleasurable" particularly appeals to me.
While researching other books he has written, I found a new one called Reading
Don't Fix No Chevy's: Literacy in the Lives of Young Men. What a fascinating
title for such a hot topic! Having worked to engage boys as readers in Reading
Workshop, I found the study, on which the book is based, and its emphasis
on the importance of choice, in line with my own experience.
Building their findings on their understanding of the powerful
and engaging experiences boys had outside of school, Smith and Wilhelm discuss
why boys embrace or reject certain ways of being literate, how boys read
and engage with different kinds of texts, and what qualities of texts appeal
to boys. Throughout, the authors highlight the importance of choice, the
boys' need to be shown how to read, the cost of the traditional teaching
of difficult canonical texts, and the crucial place of meaningful social
activity.
From the "Foreword" by Tom Newkirk
Then, just in the nick of time, Wilhelm's Improving
Comprehension With Think-Aloud Strategies arrived in the mail.
He's written many other titles, but I chose to order this one. Thank heaven!
Stuck between a rock and a hard place while teaching inferring in
Reading Workshop, I used this book to sort out my own confusions.
I followed his steps "to plan and use think-alouds to teach some general-process
strategies" on pages 42-50. Then, as I wrote in Journal #29,
"we taught explicitly using Think-Alouds to make applying the strategies
more comprehensible. It worked like magic."
STEP 1: Choose a short section of text (or a short text).
Fables, by Arnold Lobel, is the book we are currently using for
mini-lessons. Each fable is one page in length, and we use one fable for
each Think-Aloud.
STEP 2: Decide on a few strategies to highlight.
We've decided to highlight "making predictions" as the strategy.
We're using it to "create hypotheses and continually adjust them in
light of new information" in order to infer meaning and outcomes. The
fables also help us tie in the concepts of author's message and main idea
since having a moral at the end makes the author's message very concrete.
STEP 3: State your purposes.
We explained to our kids that we'd be reading fables and doing Think-Alouds
to learn how to use predictions to build our understandings when we read.
In addition, we discussed how the moral helps us understand the author's
message.
STEP 4: Read the text aloud to students and think-aloud as you do so.
We've used these "Prompts for Making Predictions" (p. 63)
in our Think-Alouds.
1. Local Level predictions
"I'm guessing that _____ will happen next."
"I wonder if _____."
2. Global Predictions
"I think this fable (book) will be about _____. I wonder
if _____. I imagine the author believes _____. I think the tone of the fable
(book) will be (sad, happy in the end, pessimistic) about human beings _____."
STEP 5: Have students underline the words and phrases that helped you
use a strategy.
This means that students need to have a copy of at least the first part
of the text, often typed, which they can annotate.
STEP 6: List the cues and strategies used.
This proves a little tricky for our kids. We still need to provide lots
of assistance and scaffolding
here.
STEP 7: Ask students to identify other situations (real world and reading
situations) in which they could use these same strategies.
They loved to do this and came up with some creative predictions. Their
suggestions included: predicting the weather, whether their girlfriend or
boyfriend will want to eat lunch with them, how many eggs are in the pigeon's
nest by the office door, and whether or not they will enjoy what we choose
to read aloud.
STEP 8: Reinforce the think-aloud with follow-up lessons.
That's where we are right now, doing more lessons to cement the strategies.
If you think of books about how to teach reading as recipes, some writers
do all the work for us. There's nothing left to do except add students and
simmer. Many of reading's most valuable writers, however, invite readers
to be active participants in the creative process. Jeffrey Wilhelm, an inspiring,
practiced and clear thinking expert, fits in the latter group.
"Good reading requires good teaching," he writes, "the more
reluctant the readers we teach, the better and more powerful our teaching
must be."
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