DIY Literacy Chapter 3 & 4

#cyberPD 

Chapter 3

Memory or remembering what is taught is one of the three teaching challenges Maggie and Kate discuss in DIY Literacy. They describe how students are being bombarded with so much learning that their brains struggle to remember in order to apply that new learning. I know this. I’ve seen this in the students I work with. I teach them a new strategy and they immediately default back to what they know when they read. To help make learning stick and help students recall learning and apply the learning, it might be helpful to use a tool.

• Repertoire Chart: Records a list of strategies that help students work towards a big skill (13).
• Bookmark: Personalized list of things that will help students remember past teaching.
• Progressions: A rubric like chart that shows the progress towards higher levels of work. They show examples and list qualities that make up each level on the progression.
• Demonstration Notebook: A collection of lessons that serve to remind students how to use a skill/strategy.

You may need to use a teaching tool to help student remember if (39):

• Students look lost or ask “Uh teacher… what do you want me to do?”
• Students’ work looks the same over and over again.
• It feels like pulling teething when conferring with a student.

I’ve known about making anchor charts to help anchor student learning. They have mostly been large poster size charts that hang around the room. I appreciate how Maggie and Kate have defined several charts and the purposes for each. I can see how important each type of chart is and how they can raise the level of learning in students.

Chapter 4

“Rigor without relevance is simply hard” (55)

The second teaching challenge that occurs with students in a classroom is lack of rigor. Rigor is raised academic complexity along with a mindset of growth; internal motivation; ability to persist and focus; ability to work towards a goal with a strong work ethic and the ability to reach the highest level of performance possible.

Our job is to create “an educational climate that elevates the level of thinking, discussion and performance” (54) in the classroom so we create life-long learners who are intrinsically motivated to want to do better. We can do this by showing students the steps they need to tackle a task and be successful with it. Using teaching tools will help anchor student learning and raise the level of rigor.

Teachers can foster rigor by cultivating intrinsic motivation through:

• Challenge: Students are motivated to reach a goal that is a possibility but not a sure thing.
• Curiosity: When their curiosity has been piqued, students tend to have a greater sense of motivation.
• Control: When students feel empowered by co-creating tools, their sense of control raises their motivation.
• Cooperation & Competition: When kids see they are not the only one tackling a task a certain way, their motivation in increased.
• Recognition: Students who are recognized for their hard work and effort are more likely to be intrinsically motivated to keep working hard.

The authors made clearer to me the definition of rigor. The word rigor has been floating around the education community for a while now. I have always equated rigor with hard. Doing harder work is doing work with rigor. Reading a rigorous text is reading a text that is harder. I appreciate how the authors describe that rigor has two components to it: (1)increased academic complexity and (2)the effort and motivation the student puts towards that task. Essentially, rigor is taking students from doing good work to doing great work. By understanding this I can help my students achieve to the best of their ability.

DIY Literacy: Chapters 1, 2, & the Bonus Chapter

#cyberPD

This is my first experience participating in #cyberPD. I accidentally came across a post a few months ago advertising the book selection and the corresponding schedule for the book club. I am finding this type of PD profoundly enlightening and supportive. I live and work in a rural school district. We have limited access to PD because we are geographically isolated: 2 hours from PDX, 1 hour from state capitol and nothing in between but forest land. I often feel isolated as a reading specialist because we don’t have very many in my district.  We are separated by 40-60 miles of coast highway and each school’s reading specialist has a different grade band (k-2, 3-6, k-6, k-8). This is why I am so thrilled that I have found a PLN.

Here are my reflections for Chapters 1, 2 & the Bonus Chapter

Chapter 1: Tools

Tools are used to “help students work harder, smarter and on their own” (2). They can be used to solve 3 problems that occur in the classroom:

1. Memory: We use tools to help student enhance their memory and be able to do more on their own.
2. Rigor: We use tools to help students get all they can from their learning. 
3. Differentiation: We all learn in different ways. We use tools to help students be “inspired, pushed or helped the way  they need and deserve” (2)

Tools help us do more than we can on our own. In the classroom we use tools to:

• Make teaching clear by organizing a sequence of steps
• Bring big ideas and goals to life by making the abstract more concrete 
•  Help learning stick by helping students hold on to the teaching through the use of visuals, encouraging repeated practice and by breaking a big idea into smaller manageable pieces.

Chapter 2: Types of tools

The analogy at the beginning of this chapter really spoke to me. “Depending on who you are and the way your mind works, your map takes on different forms.” (11) It might be a GPS, a paper map or handwritten directions on a piece of scrap paper. Each tool helps you reach your destination, however each tool matches a specific learner.  I personally struggle with GPS because I never seem to be able to tell which way is north. Kate and Maggie tell us the types of tools we choose to use in the classroom are important and we need to remember that not every student learns the same way. There are 3 different types of tools:

1. Teaching charts: These charts record lists of strategies needed to work towards a bigger skill or breaks down a big skill into smaller steps
2. Demonstration Notebook: This is a collection of interactive charts created in a notebook for the purpose of re-using them as students need them. 
3. Micro-progressions: This type of tool helps clarify how students can clearly improve upon their own work. 
4.  Bookmarks: This type of tool is used for students to create their own action plan. They can decide for themselves which teaching tool they need to be self-directed learners and record them on their own personalized bookmarks.

All of these teaching tools sound like they would be very successful in the classroom. I was having a difficult time picturing how I would use the Demonstration Notebook with students in K-2. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Bonus Chapter: Finding the strategies to teach

I think this is an important chapter. Too often I am finding teachers pulling items from TpT or Pinterest that look flashy, but doesn’t really address a specific strategy that student should be working on or they don’t break a strategy down into a sequence of steps needed to be successful with that strategy. Having resources available so teachers know how to teach strategies is critical. They suggest: 

• Never teach alone: seek out a trusted community so you have people to turn to when it gets difficult
• Hit the books: I personally have The Reading Strategies Book, Mosaic of Thoughts, and Strategies that Work books on my bookshelf. 
•  Go online: You can find just about everything online (including the kitchen sink!. Locate some reputable sources as your go-to sites.

I am not sure what I got myself into as I actively participate in this book club. I have two other book clubs I am participating in and a list of home improvements that NEED to get completed before August rolls around. I am expecting lots of learning!