How I’m Surviving The Earthquake of 2019

Teaching

By: Kimberly Dunbar, Social Studies Teacher at Cane Bay Middle School

There was an 8.2 intensity earthquake rippling through upper elementary and middle schools classrooms in the summer 2019. After years of wrangling, new social studies standards were adopted by our State Department of Education, and there were substantial changes in content for grades 3 – 7. As usually happens, it was now up to the teachers of South Carolina to make everything work. For sixth grade teachers like me, the changes were exactly what we knew were coming but had long been dreading – we were supposed to teach all of human history in 180 days. It was difficult enough to complete when we stopped after the Age of Exploration. The task now felt unattainable.

Part of what has made teaching this content so difficult is that very few students have any background knowledge about the earliest civilizations. If they do, that knowledge is usually limited (Egypt’s pyramids and mummies) or inaccurate (Greece according to Percy Jackson or 300). It’s hard for my students to make connections to material when there is no foundational information to attach to. My dilemma was how to present enough content so learners can connect the dots without overwhelming them.

Introducing Historical Fiction in the Social Studies Classroom

Wendy Garrett, a friend and mentor, introduced me to the idea of using historical fiction to build my students’ background knowledge. She had students participate in a class reading of a book she selected in addition to their daily warm-up questions. The thought was to kindle an enjoyment of reading AND sneak a little historical context in at the same time. Many of our students were academically below grade level and reluctant to attempt a typical novel study. We chose to scrap the usual process and keep things focused on the reading – no vocabulary, no character studies, no plot diagrams. If students ask about the meaning of a word, we’ll discuss it, try to decipher it. If students wanted to discuss things or had questions about the plot or theme, we would talk. Our intent was to present some details about ancient civilizations and historical events while we remind students how enjoyable reading could be. We let student interest guide our actions and activities. Everything was low stakes.

As I included daily readings into my lessons, what I found was encouraging. The first 2-3 weeks were long as I had to demonstrate and promote expected behavior during the read aloud time. When students accepted and started living into these new expectations, all of us could focus more on the information in the book. We were able to take a few minutes to practice using context clues to determine the meaning of new words. Afterwards, it became a game – who could find an appropriate time and place to use these new words. If an actual person was mentioned in our book, a student would give us a 60 second biography of the character. When an historical event was involved in the story, someone gave us a quick recap of what happened. The payoff came when students saw these same people and events in our regular class discussions and were able to recall information we had covered before. I could take another minute and help students put together the cause-and-effect of concepts we were learning. Lots of wins on multiple fronts!!!

Useful Tips when Integrating Historical Fiction into the Classroom:

Explicitly teach your expectations for this reading time. If you are part of a teaching team and your ELA partner has procedures for this activity, try to mirror it. Consistency will make implementation easier. Have an anchor chart to use as a visual reminder of what you want to see and hear during this time.
Save your voice and use an audio reader system when possible.
Befriend your media center person. They are often the keeper of class sets. They know what’s available, what’s on order, what’s popular. They may have connections with other media centers and can arrange a loan of a class set from another school.
Give your students some input about what your class reads. I get single copies of books and let my students “test drive” them. All I want to know is, “Did you enjoy it? Would you recommend it to a friend?” If a student can give you more details, write it down. These details are an invaluable resource in determining what will grab your students’ attention and can guide future choices.
Get comfortable with looking for additional sources of funding. Until schools are better funded, it is hard to get class sets of the “latest and greatest titles” that are more likely to hold students’ attention. I have purchased several class sets through Donors Choose. I have several grant portals bookmarked. I’m always looking for ways to keep my classroom library fresh.

The skills that building background knowledge allows your students to practice, are the ones that will make them more engaged citizens and more valuable employees. Recognizing links between people, events and ideas are a building block of critical thinking. Critical thinkers identify situations, gather information, analyze information, and present solutions. These are the people that will make a difference in the future, if we take the time to teach them to solve problems. Teaching these new and different skills won’t be easy, but giving our students those skills will be worth every ounce of that effort.

About the Author

Kim is a second-career teacher with 13 years of experience. She’s currently working to bring ancient history to life at Cane Bay Middle School in Summerville, SC.

Misery Loves Company or Better Together?

Collaboration

By: Charlene Aldrich, retired South Carolina Literacy Instructor

In education, there are times when it’s a little bit of both. I like to believe that Better Together overcomes Misery so that Company discovers possibilities rather than ponders problems.

Too often educators, unknowingly, develop a silo mindset in their quest to accomplish everything that needs to be done to meet everyone’s needs – the state, the district, the administrators, the students, the parents, and the support staff members. It’s a gradual process and, unlike the business definition of a silo mindset, is a re-action rather than a pro-action. A silo mindset in business develops when co-workers refuse to work together as a team – hoarding resources and hiding ideas that benefit the whole. Personal recognition trumps the greater good. Fear of losing out overshadows building relationships.

In education, however, silo mindsets develop in response to overwhelming workloads, little downtime, and too much paperwork! It becomes easy to say, ‘I don’t have time to collaborate,’ and ‘I just want to get home.’ There’s not even time to contemplate the fact that ‘better together’ results in efficient and effective instruction as well as developing a support network. I’d like to suggest three ways to promote collaboration in a school: grade level, content area, and schoolwide.

Intradisciplinary Collaboration

Intradisciplinary collaboration within a school is big picture collaboration; it involves planning curriculum that has continuity, scope, and sequence from an intro course to the AP offering. Long-term planning such as this happens outside of the regular school year. The biology team or the Algebra team or the Honors ELA team meets at least two times a year: one to look back and one to look forward. Another model is a two-day retreat with the same idea – looking back and looking forward. Priorities include sequenced content area text resources, scaffolded instruction from course to course, and intentional development of disciplinary literacy practices. Collaboration between teachers who teach the same courses should focus on dissecting the course standards into individual lessons to develop content area knowledge necessary to meet them.

Grade Level Collaboration

Grade level collaboration, on the other hand, is an ongoing effort among colleagues to develop ways to build relationships between the content of each other’s courses. In an effort to provide real world connections and context for learning, teachers work together to plan content overlap that is mutually reinforcing. Literature pairs well with history; mathematics pairs well with business and economics. The arts curriculum overlaps with history as artists’ and musicians’ compositions reflect the culture in which they were created. Lyrics in music correlate to poetry in ELA. Sciences and math are mutually reinforcing; construction trades, culinary, and physical education include math calculations, conversions, and statistics. And every content area has significant people whose lives are told through biographies and autobiographies which are just one of the many categories of literature taught by ELA teachers.

Collaborating across a grade level doesn’t even have to be synchronous to be effective. Connected content introduced in one discipline becomes background knowledge in preparation for future content of another discipline; it also serves as a source for applying content knowledge to new learning situations. Long term retention is accomplished as connected content surfaces a variety of courses that review, connect, and extend content for deep understanding.

Synchronous School-wide Collaboration

Synchronous school-wide collaboration is possible several times a year in response to awkward calendar planning. For example, the day of Halloween and the day after Halloween are sometimes void of learning because excitement replaces focus. Thematic collaboration on these isolated days rescue students and teachers from wasted time and potential behavior management issues. Two days of hype and sugar-highs are replaced with inquiry and fact-finding: history, cultural celebrations, economic impact, spending statistics, chemistry, nutrition, poetry, drama, short stories, music, art, and even physical education! All it takes is a little creativity mixed with a lot of enthusiasm to connect content, include a course requirement, and engage students throughout the school around a common theme two or three times a year. I can personally recommend this NewsELA article as a place to begin:

https://newsela.com/read/halloween-spending/id/46288/?utm_source=email&utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=web (It will ask you to make an account to read the article; the article as well as all of their ‘news’ articles are free. Other content needs a subscription. All of their free news articles make great themes for collaboration or connecting to specific lessons in your content area.)

What are the ‘down days’ at your school? There should never be a class day that a student can say, ‘It’s Halloween. The teachers never do anything important on Halloween. I can stay home.’ If you are reading this, then you may be the one who can make collaboration happen in your school! Find the First Follower in YOUR school and do it!

About the Author

After 20 years of growing literacy in under-prepared college students, Charlene retired to focus on state-wide literacy initiatives such as LiD, 6-12 and her R2S approved literacy courses at College of Charleston. She lets her life speak by empowering teachers to have the confidence and competence to implement a literacy model of instruction in any content area and at every grade level. Her best Covid-19 memory is teaching her grandson Algebra 1 via phone calls, Zoom, text messaging, and FaceTime. It was online instruction at its best – synchronously and interactively.

Literacy Coaching During A Pandemic

Collaboration

By: Meagan Wagner, South Carolina Middle/High School Teacher

Coloring pages. That’s what it took, this week, to motivate my eighth grade boys’ book club to read their assigned pages in the novel. Donuts weren’t appealing and candy is lackluster after Halloween. Yes, I bribe students with goodies. Or, in educator-speak, I provide extrinsic motivation for my students. And if you thought coloring pages would be too elementary for teenagers, then you’d be wrong. I am their literacy coach – and they do not receive a grade from me, so creativity is required to engage and motivate. In fact, that last statement pretty much sums up what it is like to be a literacy coach during a pandemic.

In a normal, non-COVID-19 school year, being a literacy coach means fulfilling many duties. Organizer of novel sets. Assessor of reading fluency and comprehension. Analyzer of standardized testing data. Listener to teacher meltdowns. Bulletin board decorator. Book pusher. My daily role also consists of working within English language arts classrooms as a co-teacher of sorts, pulling struggling readers for reading strategy conferences, conducting walkthrough observations in classrooms, and designing/facilitating professional development opportunities for my faculty. This is not that sort of year.

COVID-19 presented unique parameters within my rural school district. First, the last time we saw our students was six months prior to when they returned to buildings on a new alternating-day hybrid schedule. Second, we were quickly distributing devices to students for the first time ever, because our schools were adamantly NOT one-to-one with computers. Third, many families chose our district-provided virtual option. In an English language arts (ELA) class that would normally consist of twenty-eight students, and would benefit from my co-teaching assistance, we might have eight students on a strong attendance day; most days are not strong attendance days. Fourth, my colleagues are balancing the workload like never before: creating in-class lessons that are not allowed to include group work, providing additional work for the students’ at-home days, providing quarantine packets for students sent home, all while learning new technology.

Making Collaborative Adjustments for COVID-19

I knew before walking into the building in August, that this was not the time to be a normal literacy coach. Co-teaching in a group of eight or less might not be the best use of my time. Conducting walkthroughs to identify instructional needs is NOT a good idea right now — this is not a normal instructional year. Professional development opportunities on incorporating literacy into the content areas is obviously not a priority. This does not mean that my role is not important or valuable for teachers during this time. Creativity is required to engage and motivate teachers AND students.

Coaching Priority #1 – Determine the Best way to support the teachers.

In the same way that we differentiate for students, we should differentiate for teachers. My sixth grade teachers wanted help with grammar: so weekly lessons from me are a go. My seventh and eighth grade teachers wanted to be able to reserve times with me instead of having an assigned visit per week because, too often, my assigned time in their class was filled with helping students who came back from quarantine, or organizing a messy student’s binder.

While these activities have their merit, it was not the best use of my time. Therefore, I created a Google Doc schedule and shared it with my department. This engaged and motivated my teachers to use me in new ways. They have booked me for stations and review lessons, re-teaching small groups, book clubs, and read alouds. As a department, we saw a need to help students learn how to pick out books that are good choices for them. A series of stations and book talks ensued. My high school teachers wanted help furthering independent reading interest for students they only see in person twice a week. I began booktalk videos and trailers that they could provide via technology.

Coaching Priority #2 – Be the voice of encouragement

Teachers, not just in English language arts, were reporting burnout and lack of encouragement. I began walkthrough snapshots — as a means to celebrate the amazing adjustments seen in classrooms. I visit the room, take photos with permission, and leave a note for the teacher that lists all the positives I saw happening. Feedback suggested that teachers want to show off the ways they are adjusting — and rightly so. They are doing amazing things with technology, social distancing, and keeping themselves safe all the while. I have since seen my snapshot celebration forms hanging above teacher desks.

Every stakeholder in education has made major changes to adjust to COVID-19. Administrators, parents, students, teachers, coaches, secretaries, media specialists, custodians, and so many more. The fact that we have managed to rise to the occasion is something to be celebrated and to unite us. We are all in this together and we will do whatever it takes — even if that means printing coloring pages.

About the Author:

Meagan Wagner, M.Ed., NBCT, is a literacy coach for middle and high school in South Carolina. She is also a doctoral candidate at the University of South Carolina, in Curriculum & Instruction.

The Advantages of Inquiry: Equity and the Economy

Research

By: Dr. Britnie Delinger Kane, Assistant Professor at the Citadel

In education, inquiry has long been considered foundational to all four major disciplines (e.g., Dewey, 1927)—English, social studies, science, and math—and it has been motivated and defended from a number of theoretical backdrops (i.e., critical literacy; social constructivist theories of learning; disciplinary literacy; engagement theory; and on and on). Others might choose a different conceptual framework from which to understand the place of inquiry in classrooms, but—for my money—I prefer to understand its utility from the standpoint of social constructivist theories of learning. This stance helps us to see connections between inquiry-oriented instruction, disciplinary literacy, and even more equitable forms of instruction.

Photo by Josue Isai Ramos Figueroa on Unsplash

The term “constructivist” teaching is often bandied about, but it’s a deeply complex and potentially misleading term. If you have never read Marc Windschitl’s (2002) review of the research on “constructivist” or “student-centered” instruction, you should. It will change the way you think about every piece of educational research you happen across —not to mention every blog with ten tips for integrating into the classroom Chromebooks or SeeSaw or Lucy Calkins’s writing curricula. Windschitl’s main argument in that piece is that the field has been unfair to teachers in advocating for a nebulous idea of “constructivist” teaching. He then, in detailed and clear ways, distinguishes between two broad orientations to theories of learning, cognitive constructivism (think Piaget) and social constructivism (Vygotsky), which continue to inform thinking in the learning sciences.

So far, many of you may be nodding, straining to remember that Ed Psych class long ago where you kept getting the words assimilation and accommodation mixed up and someone asked you to make a poster about Vygotsky’s ZPD (only rarely have I been in a School of Ed that wasn’t plastered with posters of the ZPD). The point that Windschitl (2002) highlights is that humanity can file the articulation of coherent theories about human learning on its list of invaluable accomplishments of the last 100 years. However—and this is the clincher—theories of learning are NOT theories of teaching: Just because we know boatloads more about the ways that people learn does not necessarily mean that we can fill the same boats with our understanding of effective teaching. Windschitl proceeds to outline what—from a social constructivist standpoint—constitutes great teaching. He calls this ambitious instruction—or, how to teach in ways that will support what we understand, broadly, about the social nature of learning. The whole bullet-pointed list could sustain career-long consideration, but here’s my favorite line:

[When students are engaged in rich opportunities for conceptual learning, they are] routinely asked to apply knowledge in diverse and authentic contexts, to explain ideas, interpret texts, predict phenomena, and construct arguments based on evidence, rather than to focus exclusively on the acquisition of predetermined “right answers” (Windschitl, 2002, p. 137).

Windschitl calls such teaching ambitious, because it supports social constructivist forms of learning. Ultimately, Windschilt and other learning theorists seem to agree that ambitious instruction can support the rich forms of conceptual learning that students will need in order to succeed in our knowledge economy. Learning theorists have highlighted that such expertise involves not just memorization of important facts and procedures, but “a deep conceptual understanding of complex concepts and the ability to work with them creatively to generate new ideas, new theories, new products, and new knowledge” (Sawyer, 2014, p. 5). Indeed, it is a repeated finding of educational research that, by addressing complex, authentic, and relevant questions, students can learn to use their procedural and conceptual knowledge flexibly in order to solve novel problems while evaluating and communicating arguments clearly (Sawyer, 2014, p. 5).

In short, rich learning requires that students inquire into authentic and relevant problems, and so bringing inquiry into classrooms can be an important framework for teaching ambitiously. Of course, as a literacy person, I cannot think about discipline-specific forms of inquiry without also thinking about disciplinary literacy. Disciplinary literacy is about apprenticing students into the ways that experts use reading, writing, speaking, listening, and thinking in specific disciplines to inquire into questions of import to particular fields. At the heart of disciplinary literacy is the idea that students must learn both the content and processes through which knowledge is constructed in particular disciplines (Moje, 2007). As Moje (2007) emphasizes, understanding the processes through which knowledge is constructed is central to equitable forms of pedagogy—not only because understanding these processes helps students to reconstruct them and use them in their own lives, but because understanding those processes can support students, ultimately, in critiquing them. To my mind—understanding the processes through which knowledge is constructed in particular disciplines is about…well, inquiry. Spires and her colleagues (2016) agree. They have used inquiry as a means of supporting students’ disciplinary literacy, calling their framework for this work project-based inquiry (PBI). In their framework, PBI has five phases:

ask a compelling question,
gather and analyze sources,
creatively synthesize claims and evidences,
critically evaluate and revise, and
share, publish, and act

Early evidence suggests that, by focusing on disciplinary literacy within an inquiry paradigm, teachers and students are able to deepen their understanding of disciplinary literacy and engage in deeper, authentic, relevant, and engaging content-specific learning (Spires et al., 2016).

As research on disciplinary literacy centrally highlights, however, the processes through which disciplinarians construct knowledge—or, the modes of inquiry they use—are, of course, discipline specific (Dobbs, Ippolito & Charner-Laird, 2017; Moje, 2007; Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008; Spires et al., 2016). A number of articles, including those cited here, have written about this in great depth, so I will limit myself to a single example. In the PBI framework that Spires and her colleagues suggest, inquiry across disciplines begins, of course, with a compelling question. Students then gather and analyze sources. However, the ways in which they analyze these sources are different: literary critics deconstruct literary and rhetorical devices, such as irony and metaphor; scientists attend to an author’s credential and authority within the field; and historians contextualize primary sources, paying attention to both the author, purpose, audience, and time period in which the piece was written or created; mathematicians analyze the logic of an argument without attending as closely to the context of the author (Spires et al., 2016, p. 153). Thus, all disciplines inquire, but they do so differently.

In short, inquiry is a powerful framework for ambitious teaching, and it can be an important vehicle for supporting disciplinary literacy and content-area learning. By bringing inquiry projects into the classroom, students have opportunities to participate in disciplinary work, which can support students’ development of disciplinary literacy, as well as the content and processes that disciplinarians use to build knowledge. There are two major advantages to this: (1) inquiry can support students to develop the kinds of rich, flexible conceptual knowledge they will need in order to find success in the knowledge economy (Sawyer, 2014); and (2) inquiry allows students to participate in approximations of processes of discipline-specific knowledge construction, which is foundational to equitable teaching (Moje, 2007; Behrman, 2006).

References

Behrman, E. H. (2006). Teaching about language, power, and text: A review of classroom practices that support critical literacy. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 49(6), 490-498.

Darling-Hammond, L. (2016). Research on teaching and teacher education and its influence on policy and practice. Educational Researcher, 45(2), p. 83-91.

Dewey, J. (1927). The public and its problems. Athens, OH: Shallow.

Dobbs, C., Ippolito, J. & Charner-Laird, M. (2017). Investigating disciplinary literacy: A framework for collaborative professional learning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

Moje, E.B. (2007). Developing socially just subject-matter in- struction: A review of the literature on disciplinary literacy teaching. Review of Research in Education, 31(1), 1–44. doi:10. 3102/0091732X07300046001

Sawyer, R. K. (2014). Introduction: The new science of learning. The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (pp. 1-18).

Shanahan, T. and Shanahan, C. (2008). Teaching disciplinary literacy to adolescents: Rethinking content-area literacy. Harvard Educational Review, 78(1), 40–59.

Spires, H. A., Kerkhoff, S. N., Graham, A. C. K. (2016). Disciplinary literacy and inquiry: Teaching for deeper content learning. Journal of Adult and Adolescent Literacy, 60(2), p. 151-61. Windschitl, M. (2002). Framing constructivism in practice as the negotiation of dilemmas: An analysis of the conceptual, pedagogical, cultural, and political challenges facing teachers. Review of Educational Research, 72(2), 131–175.

About the Author

Britnie Delinger Kane is an assistant professor of literacy in the Zucker Family School of Education at The Citadel in Charleston, SC. Dr. Kane’s teaching and research focuses on how teachers learn to teach ambitiously. Her work has focused on a number of content areas, including mathematics, writing, and computer science. This focus has led to her interest in disciplinary literacy, to which she brings a learning science perspective. She has studied teachers’ professional learning across their careers, from preservice teachers’ involvement in simulations of professional work to in-service teachers’ participation in teacher workgroups to instructional coaching.

Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash

Data over Assumptions: Determining How Our Schools Engage in Family-School Partnerships

Collaboration

By: Dr. Jennifer D. Morrison

In 2016, the University of South Carolina Language & Literacy faculty members decided to overhaul the Masters in Education degree requirements. The then current program was outdated and focused on very narrow conceptions of literacy, who owned it, and how it was to be taught. Because we all hailed from strong critical theory backgrounds, we knew a social justice thread was imperative. Through this lens, as we examined individual courses as well as the program as a whole, we began to ask questions such as: who owns literacy? How do we want to present this? What about funds of knowledge and out-of-school literacies? This line of questioning led us to realize that nowhere in our program did we account for parental and community involvement in students’ literacy learning. This, to us, was a huge gap that needed to be filled. We decided to redesign a course entitled “Guiding the Reading Program,” changing it from a third assessment course to one on literacy leadership with a focus on developing skills that would assist teachers in employing community and family resources in school and district literacy practices and policies. I was the initial instructor for this course and looked to my experiences, as an instructional coach and administrative intern, to help me build the curriculum and key assessment experiences.

Tough Conversations and Deep Reflection

When discussing family involvement, it is not uncommon to hear educators talk about how many parents attend PTSA meetings, come to Open House/Curriculum Nights, or support the band/athletic boosters. However, it becomes important to really consider which parents are involved and what percentage of the school they represent. It is often eye-opening to realize large swaths of families are un- or under-represented at school events. For example, as the instructional specialist at a middle school in Maryland, I was part of a school leadership team who specifically sought to broaden our parent involvement, not only in how they were involved but also in who was involved. We had a very active and invested community; so, when we collected data about who was coming into our school for social and academic activities and who was not, it was surprising to see we had almost no members of our Latino families represented. This required us to conduct deep reflection and address cultural divides. We thought we were providing appropriate communication with our families by sending home notices in backpacks and posting on our school’s social media and websites. However, when we asked members of the Latino community why we had limited attendance, they indicated to us more personal means of communication were needed. When we started picking up the phone and personally calling families, we found they were significantly more responsive; we had to bridge a cultural divide we did not realize we had built, to ensure all families felt welcome. This is not an uncommon experience that emerges once school leadership teams and teachers delve mindfully, deeply, and honestly into the degree to which families and community members are truly involved in schools.

The Work

In my class, one of the early activities I ask teachers to complete is a pair of inventories regarding parental involvement practices. The first is Salinas, Epstein, and Sanders’s (2012) An Inventory of Present Practices of School, Family, and Community Partnerships. It identifies six ways parents can be involved in schools (called “types” in this instrument) including: parenting, communicating, volunteering, home-learning, decision-making/leadership, and community collaboration. School members are asked to consider the degree to which statements listed under each type are true and in what grade levels. These responses help illuminate both traditional and nontraditional means of involvement and also show if there are patterns or trends in participation. I then pair this inventory with a second evaluation instrument from Beyond the Bake Sale (Henderson, Mapp, Johnson & Davies, 2007). This instrument uses five domains (building relationships, linking to learning, addressing differences, supporting advocacy, and sharing power) to help educators identify which of four versions of family-school partnerships best describes their school (partnership, open-door, come-if-we-call, or fortress). To help them to see patterns, I ask students to identify which version of partnerships their schools represent for each domain and place a sticky note in the appropriate location (see Figure 1). While most people would say they have a partnership school, especially at the elementary level, many individuals are surprised with the results of this survey. There are areas suggested, such as including parents in curricular decisions, many of my students have not ever considered.

Between these two instruments, my students begin to get a clearer, and more accurate, picture of their schools’ strengths and needs with regard to parent and community partnerships. They are then asked to develop a family and community partnership grounded in the data they have collected from these two sources. I encourage them to think about how they can move their school to a higher version within one domain of the Beyond the Bake Sale rubric while also using some of the descriptors from the Epstein inventory to help frame goals and action steps. The projects that have emerged from this project have been organic, deeply-embedded in individual school needs, centered on literacy, and overall impactful. One resulting project was discussed in this blog by Hannah Kottraba in June when she wrote about her family heritage project. Other examples have included virtual science activities where parents and students engage in disciplinary literacy to solve scientific problems; pre-k students engaging in pen pal writing and subsequently building a garden with members of an assisted care facility (see Figure 2); online interactive math resources (focused on literacy needed for word problems); workshops that coach family members how to support reading with all ages of students; family culture exhibits; writers’ gallery celebrations; and international student shadowing days where high school students serve as hosts for international graduate students learning about America’s education system. Many of these projects addressed family and community populations who are often underrepresented in schools, and several have become multi-year or ongoing events.

It is important to remember that such projects are many times singletons, snapshots that occur once as a result of a course; the impetus being the need to complete a class assignment. I am not so naïve as to think these class assignments have suddenly made every school my students teach at a Partnership School. What is important is the paradigm shift that occurs as teachers undergo this process. They begin to seek out ways to better meet the criteria established by these two inventories; they become more attuned to cultural differences that may be acting as a barrier to some families and making them feel unwelcome with the school space; and they become more appreciative of the funds of knowledge parents and family members bring with them.

About the Author

Dr. Jennifer D. Morrison is an instructor at the University of South Carolina. Her experiences include being a middle and high school English teacher, gifted education resource teacher, and instructional coach. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Nevada, Reno, in Language, Literacy, and Culture. She is a National Board Certified Teacher (AYA/ELA), an alumnus of the Teaching Shakespeare Institute at the Folger Theater in Washington, D.C., and has won multiple awards for teaching and writing including NCTE’s Paul and Kate Farmer English Journal Award and AERA’s Dissertation Award in Research on Teacher Induction. Currently, her research focuses on adolescent, digital, multimodal, and disciplinary literacies as well as narrative and qualitative methodologies.

What in the World Have you Been Doing?

Collaboration

By: Jeni Nix, SC School Librarian, and Rene Harris, SC Elementary School Principal

The Tale

There is a tale of a couple given a cruise as a wedding gift. They were excited and grateful for the generous offering. They embarked on the journey with great expectations. But once on the ship, their excitement and joy reversed mid-trip. For most of the trip, they remained in their cabin.

Near the cruise’s end, they met an elderly couple, and struck up a conversation comparing their impressions of their nautical excursions. The honeymoon couple shared how boring the trip had been, even expressing disappointment. But the elderly couple told how invigorated and engaged their experience had been, looking forward to the opportunity to travel this way again. Intrigued and perplexed by the evaluation of the honeymoon couple, they asked a series of questions. Did you go to the Deserted Island Luau party? Had you enjoyed the night of games in the Vegas lounge? Wasn’t the tropical water slide with exotic drinks at the pool bar amazing? The honeymooners looked at each other with puzzled faces. The wife spoke first and explained that they hadn’t experienced any of these events. The husband chimed in that they were unaware that these activities were options, and questioned the cost of the happenings.

The elderly couple now looked at each other with puzzled faces and smiled. The wife spoke first, “There was no extra cost, these things were included in the cruise package.”

“What in the world have you been doing!” the elderly man blurted out in confusion.

The young couple’s embarrassment was evident. “Well, we’ve mostly been eating, sleeping, and walking along the edge of the ship.” That’s when it dawned on the seasoned pair that the honeymooners had never ventured beyond the edge, never explored the inside of the boat, or pursued all of the amenities their trip had offered.

The Practice

As a young child, I loved to write but hated to read. I spent my entire youthful career on the edge of books, only walking among the book jackets and back covers, creating book reports and projects from a few marketing ads and summaries. Cliff was my BFF. It wasn’t until I was required to take the obligatory “Children’s Literature” course in grad school that I got to experience the joy and delight that an excellent book offers.

As the instructional leader, I want to ensure that no child is left behind on the shore or in their cabin. I am honored to work with talented teachers who embrace our mission to promote reading as a pathway to success. Our explicit, overt attempts to celebrate reading as a choice versus chore have been productive and positive. While I operate at the helm, standing in the bridge of the ship, our media center is the deck of our vessel with exponential and far-reaching impact.

Our library is the center of our boat, helping us to enjoy a multitude of amenities propelled by its creativity and spirit. Our book vending machine, reading lounge, Palmetto Shore amphitheater, and secret garden are all extensions of the media center and its strategies for promoting reading for enjoyment. Icons of “what teachers are reading now” and endorsements of great reads, monthly celebrations of Terrific Readers are all portholes and pathways to the most happening place aboard our ship. I may be the captain, but I know who is driving this rusty bucket… the Media Specialist.

We strive to work together to create a print-rich environment where literacy is organically infused into our learning community. We strive to move away from extrinsic motivational tricks or reading tallies for counting’s sake. We model the importance of reading by being explicit about the value and joy of reading. As we cruise through our reading quest, we strive to ensure that every child enjoys the amenities along the way, so that reading is more than a rudimentary process, and becomes a lifelong pleasure.

As my principal so eloquently painted the picture of a childhood spent on the periphery of the journey to immersing herself in a good book it reminds me of the fact that the library fills many different roles in our students’ lives. No matter what the reason for visiting, the library is a safe haven for all children.

Before the pandemic, our students would come in daily seeking a variety of things. Some would be there because they were told to come and it was my challenge to lead them to the book that would finally make a trip to the library a treat instead of a mandate. For others, it was a place they sought out for their next adventure or to find a character or scenario that made them feel a little less alone. A place where they could see themselves between the pages and know there was someone in the world that saw what they saw or felt what they felt. That is why it’s more important now than ever before to strive for inclusive collections that equally represent all of the diversity in the students and families that we serve.

In addition, librarians need to continue reaching out to students through social media outlets, and other platforms, to share new books and help them find the truth in the barrage of information coming at them every day. Our roles may have temporarily changed physical location but the importance and impact of the services we provide as librarians is more important than ever before.

About the Authors

Mrs. Rene Wyatt Harris, Principal- Beech Hill Elementary School Rene has thirty-two years of teaching experience and is the principal of Beech Hill Elementary School.

Mrs. Jeni Nix, Media Specialist- Beech Hill Elementary Jeni has 25 years in education, as a teacher and a librarian in Dorchester District Two Schools. This Nationally-Board certified teacher is serving as the 2020-2021 SCASL School Librarian of the Year.

For the love of literacy

Collaboration

By: Charlene Aldrich, retired literacy instructor

I KNEW from an early age that books had an important place in life. I was adventurous and brave with Encyclopedia Brown. I dreamed about being a nurse with Cherry Ames. I pondered survival instincts through The Lord of the Flies. I cried about Rascal and fell in love on The Island of the Blue Dolphins.

I was always the one who brought every textbook home on the first day of school. I HAD to know what we were going to learn that year. And besides, ‘Library’ didn’t begin until the second week of school!

But I soon realized that magazines were pretty great also: Reader’s Digest, Good Housekeeping, even Popular Mechanics! Whatever my parents had on the table became fodder for my mind. So, maybe it wasn’t ‘books’ that were important; maybe it was just, plain reading!That made choosing a career pretty difficult – Write books? Work in a bookstore? Be a librarian? OR do research? How does someone decide what they want to do for 40 years of his/her life?

Content Area Literacy and the Librarian

Read or write? How about read AND write? Isn’t that what teaching is all about? That and having summers off? So what began in a second grade classroom morphed, over many years, into teaching Content Area Reading and Writing (CARW), first to students preparing for college courses and then to content area teachers who were required to become ‘reading and writing teachers’. But that’s not exactly what the R2S law said; concerning teacher education, the law’s intention was for all teachers to be confident in USING reading and writing in their content area. And who is the best resource for that? The person in the school in charge of the books! The librarian, aka media specialist.

I LOVE providing reading and writing research, literacy resources, and instructional ideas for content area teachers to embrace reading and writing as valuable instructional practices. Even better is when librarians sign up for my CARW courses. You see, I believe that literacy is everyone’s responsibility and that collaborating across grade levels and across content areas improves the probability that literacy is possible.

Librarians are in the perfect position to orchestrate this collaboration. BUT you have to ask. They aren’t mind readers. By becoming partners in literacy, you both can ‘do good things for students’. HOW?

Parallel Reading suggestions connecting content areas
LMS Embedded Librarians for immediate and ongoing student access
Direct Instruction for efficient research

What does the number one provider of research information say about librarians?

“The primary purpose is to support the students, teachers, and curriculum of the school or school district. Often, teacher-librarians are qualified teachers who take academic courses for school library certification or earn a master’s degree in Library Science” (Wikipedia).

South Carolina only employs ‘teacher-librarians’ in the schools. Yes, their duties overflow into media, but first and foremost, they are your partners. They can connect content to reading resources; they can connect reading resources to students.

Overall literacy proficiency is grown within the classroom; through the collaborative efforts of teachers and teacher-librarians, it overflows into students’ out-of-classroom learning experiences. But the best indicators of overall literacy proficiency are the graduates/adults/employees/employers/parents who model lifetime learning through reading and writing. They value the ability to apply their literacy to listen, read, analyze, evaluate, and respond to the plethora of messages that the 24-hour media services produce.

PS: Summers off – the joke was on me. I found out that improving reading, writing, and math literacy is a year-round gig. And it was my pleasure to serve.

References

Wikipedia contributors. (2020, May 18). Librarian. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 20:32, May 26, 2020, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Librarian&oldid=957428603

About the Author

After 20 years of growing literacy in under-prepared college students, Charlene retired to focus on state-wide literacy initiatives such as LiD, 6-12 and her R2S approved literacy courses at College of Charleston. She lets her life speak by empowering teachers to have the confidence and competence to implement a literacy model of instruction in any content area and at every grade level. Her best Covid-19 memory is teaching her grandson Algebra 1 via phone calls, Zoom, ztext messaging, and FaceTime. It was online instruction at its best – synchronously and interactively.

We Need S’More Literacy from the Library!

Collaboration

By: Amanda Harris, South Carolina High Media Specialist

I love reading books, cataloging and shelving books, shopping for books, and placing books in readers’ hands, but as a high school media specialist, all that fun with books is only a small portion of my actual job. As a highly qualified educator who shares my literacy instruction skills with students and colleagues every day, my role goes far beyond the library stacks.

Since it’s summertime and I’m a girl who loves chocolate, indulge me for a few minutes and let me explain the library’s role in school-wide literacy instruction as an ooey, gooey, warm, melty, delicious s’more.

The Graham Cracker

The foundation of a s’more is the graham cracker, providing support and structure on both sides to hold the entire concoction together. My goal as a media specialist is to provide resources and support for all content areas so that all teachers can be more effective in guiding students to content-specific literacy. Even though my district has 1:1 Chromebooks and students may think they can just Google everything for research, someone still has to teach them how to wade through their search results! One of the most important items on my to-do list in this graham cracker part of my job is to actively recruit teachers to share their classes with me. Once I have led them to realize how desperately they needed to schedule time for co-teaching (sometimes with free coffee involved in the persuasion), I make a point of threading my info literacy standards and skills over and over through every unit I teach across the curriculum.

Photo by Autumn Mott Rodeheaver on Unsplash

When I’m handing out the metaphorical graham crackers for the s’mores, I have to be intentional with teacher relationships, creative with my curriculum ideas, and even a little bit repetitive with teaching the skills to students, but without these graham crackers, the whole s’more falls apart and students lose opportunities for big-picture literacy application across the curriculum.

Mmmm…Chocolate

My favorite part of the s’more, of course, is the chocolate, and my favorite part of being a school media specialist is definitely the fun library offerings: student book clubs over Chick-fil-a lunch boxes, faculty book clubs with grown-up conversation over breakfast snacks, author visits, makerspace crafting days, games and Legos out on the tables, and independent choice reading checkouts. These are the pieces of the school-wide curriculum puzzle that make the whole idea of literacy more enjoyable.

The obvious sticking point here is that by the time students reach high school, very few of them are going to seek pleasure reading opportunities or spend their free time hanging out with a book club. How do I offer chocolate for the s’mores of students who are reluctant readers? I’m grateful to have some fantastic colleagues (not just in the English department!) who value choice reading enough to bring their students to me for independent reading checkouts. Sometimes they have target genres, sometimes they have target themes, and sometimes they want students to just pick anything that looks interesting.

During this past year, we blocked off a weekly time with some of the English 1 and 2 classes to just come into the library for a routine sustained reading period. Their classroom teacher, my fellow media specialist, and I all sat down with them on the couches and modeled reading for fun, too! (Well, that was the plan. I actually spent more of my time up out of my seat, in the stacks, helping students find their next books to read, but that was fine with me!) When we suddenly switched to distance learning, I missed all of my students, but these two classes were the ones I most desperately wished to see.

Pleasure reading and finding a book to enjoy is the chocolate in the middle of the school-wide literacy s’more, and while I do love chocolate with all my heart, seeing reluctant readers find books they like and seeing students come to the library for fun in their free time brings me more joy than an entire one-year supply of my favorite Harry & David dark chocolate truffles.

Sticky Marshmallows

Finally, I must address the sticky, fire-roasted marshmallow that holds everything together between the graham crackers. At my school, this is the part of my media specialist role that doesn’t exactly fit the typical mold, but it just makes sense. If the library is the heart of the school and the media specialists should be dabbling in teaching with every department in the building, why not have your media specialist(s) serve as writing instructional lead teachers?

I’m on a flex schedule and my teaching calendar does fill up with research projects and other library lessons. However, because there are two of us serving as full-time media specialists, we are able to schedule time to actively help teachers with writing instruction. We conference with teachers during their planning periods, or we go to their classrooms and help with a writing lesson or student writing conferences. The best part about this role is that sitting down to brainstorm a writing assignment with a teacher gives me an easy opportunity to market the library’s resources.

I’ll be honest: Writing can sometimes be the stickiest part of school-wide literacy. Sure, everybody can fit more reading into their classrooms, but writing? Writing takes time to assess! Writing takes time to actually do in the classroom, precious time that is also needed to teach content-specific skills! Some students just don’t want to write, and it’s just more painful for everyone involved! Yes, yes, and yes. I totally get it, especially after 10 years in the English classroom and many hours of sleep lost to essay grading, but that doesn’t mean that writing instruction can just be swept aside. Writing = thinking, and it’s a critical part of the learning process.

Helping teachers regularly include more quality writing in their daily classroom routine has challenged me. I have had to study and learn more about how content literacy should look different across the departments, and I have had to lead some tense meetings, but I have also been able to see the exciting success my colleagues are having. To return to the marshmallow comparison, sometimes I accidentally drop my actual literal marshmallow in the fire, so I have to toss it and try again. Sometimes I don’t leave it in the fire long enough, so I have to try again. In the big literacy picture, writing instruction is the marshmallow, and sometimes we have to toss what we did and try again. Isn’t that what drafting and revising is all about? In the end, while the marshmallow is challenging to get just right, the finished s’more just isn’t complete without it.

Are you ready to go make some s’mores yet? If you want to get started on some figurative s’mores, go ahead and email your media specialist to get started on ideas for collaboration this year. If you want literal s’mores, keep the campfire far, far away from the library books.

About the Author

Amanda has twelve years of teaching experience and is beginning her third year as a high school media specialist at Walhalla High School.

The School Librarian and You

Collaboration

By: Kelley Rider, South Carolina School Librarian

I believe that the library should be the heart of the school. It is usually the largest academic space in the building. The librarian is trained to meet the curricular and non-curricular literacy needs of students. The library has books, technology, and other materials that students and teachers can use and enjoy. However, sometimes the library doesn’t get used to its full potential because teachers and students don’t realize the wealth of resources that are available there.

The school librarian can be a resource for teachers and students. The librarian is a teacher who is trained to teach, collaborate, find resources, and support literacy. I’d like to encourage any educator to reach out to their school librarian to collaborate and enhance student achievement.

Ways teachers can collaborate with the school librarian to enhance learning in content area classrooms:

Bounce ideas around with your librarian.

Once the AP biology teacher came into my school library. She looked like she needed someone to talk to, so I approached her and asked if she needed help. She had been teaching about cell membranes. She felt like the students had recently hit a wall. She needed to mix up the next lesson so she didn’t lose their attention. We talked for a bit about what she had done in the past and what her learning objectives were for her students. Then, I gave her an idea to try a different approach. Together we came up with a plan to have the students divide the cell into four sections and each student had to draw and label the cell in their quadrant. Then the students had to collaborate, help each other, and rationalize to the group what he/she had drawn. The teacher just needed some inspiration to try a new strategy.

Procure resources from your librarian.

Many of the English teachers in my building require students to read a book of their choice independently for a unit of study. Each teacher’s requirement for this assignment looks a little different than the next. They will often ask if I can pull appropriate materials for this assignment for the students to browse through. As students are browsing, I often tell them about selections to help them make their final decisions. Additionally, the school librarian can share information about non-fiction materials for research, Discus databases, and technology available to students.

Plan lessons or units with your librarian.

A little over a year ago I was introduced to a teacher who had just been hired for the upcoming school year. She came by the school library to introduce herself and see what my library collection looked like so that she could prepare for the fall. I enthusiastically showed her around and sincerely told her that I would love to help to find resources or even teach lessons when appropriate in the next school year.

A couple months went by, summer came, and then I got an email from her asking me to review a list of books she was interested in purchasing for her classroom library. She was worried that some of the novels would be too mature, and she wanted to get my opinion on how our community would react to themes in the books. These exchanges have led to this teacher and I having a great working relationship where she comes to me for help planning lessons and units.

She wanted to embrace the teaching of Penny Kittle and Kelly Gallagher’s work which encourages teachers to allow students choice in what they read. What began with this teacher creating a more robust classroom library turned into me encouraging her to go with her gut to create a literary choice unit. The students selected a book from a teacher made list and then worked in small reading groups (lit circles) to complete assignments in class. I helped her facilitate this by helping to choose appropriate books and by teaching a couple lessons to her classes.

The unit was such a success that she tried it again in the second semester. The instructional coach and I helped her procure books to facilitate themed lit circles. I added those new books to the library collection so that we could better track lost items.

About the Author

Kelley Rider is a third year high school librarian and former English teacher in Anderson, SC. She is Pendleton High School’s 2020 Teacher of the Year. She serves on the Advocacy and Awards committees for the South Carolina Association of School Librarians.

Who Needs a “Media Specialist” When Google’s Got It All?

Collaboration

By: Betty (BT) Bouton, South Carolina Teacher-librarian

Right off the rip, I prefer the title teacher-librarian (TL). That’s what we are, and “media specialist” sounds inflatedly special. And as for whether TLs have anything to offer teachers in the world of unlimited access to almost everything, “Dang right, we do!”

Given the ongoing COVID-19 changes in instruction, I’ve divided my comments into two parts, like the vinyl 45 records that were THE medium in my youth.

Side A (also known as the “Big Hit”): Dream Dream Dream

Side A is the big hit — what your teacher-librarian is itching to do to help embed literacy skills in your classes in the “normal” school environment. (Warning: focus on SS, science, ELA, arts, and exceptional children. Math, I need help.) TLs truly “dream” of ways we can help our colleagues plan, gather resources, teach, and evaluate, using our standards along with state curriculum standards.

Resources

Teachers need resources to deliver personalized and differentiated instruction, and Google supplies LOTS of results. Your TL is popping to be your teammate in selecting the BEST sites and sources.

We will curate the open-source material; but even better, we can guide teachers and students to powerful information resources and student-friendly tools (leveled articles, translations, audio, built-in dictionaries, and citation creators) available in databases, which are not the natural go-to sources for students and many teachers. For example, Charleston County School District provides access to SC Discus and additional databases through MackinVia, and our Destiny library system allows for TLs to create resource collections (on any topic/standard) that include books, websites, and database articles — all available to teachers and students. Ask, and we will collaborate!

Collaboration

But even Side A has its challenges: teachers create and assign great projects, but then are disappointed with students’ underwhelming results. Again, TLs are classroom teachers’ backup when it comes to down-and-dirty teaching: collaborating in direct instruction to guide students as they form research questions, evaluate sources, process information, and synthesize their results. TLs can also help with innovative methods for students to “publish” their work.

Some of my most productive teaching experiences recently have been in science classrooms, collaborating on DBQs. As a co-teacher in an eighth-grade science unit about travel to Mars, the classroom teacher was the “science,” and I was the “search, source, cite.” Together, we addressed the needs of a range of students: the high fliers, students with IEPs, students with English as their second language, and struggling learners. The science teacher and I together planned, delivered instruction, created the scoring rubric, and graded students’ work.

Technology

But there’s more! I’ve just begun using MakerSpace projects to support literacy, admittedly late realizing how powerful hands-on activities are in improving literacy and learning. This year I hosted Maker lunches for 6th graders, using simple, fun activities to complement content standards. In a session on electrical circuits, students watched a short BrainPop video twice: before and after I led them through directions for a pre-made activity (with their hands on the supplies and directions). Then we let it roll. The light bulbs went off literally, and also figuratively for several at-risk students: “Hey, this is what we’re doing in science!”

And the possibilities for Ozobots in HS history and MS SS, especially for interactive timelines! Here’s an elementary-level project provided by Ozobot – substitute your content and start dreaming of teaming with your TL.

Side B (also known as the “Flip Side”): Hang on Sloopy

Photo by Victrola Record Players on Unsplash

Well, this side of the vinyl is not yet a hit. The 12 weeks of “online learning” were a cipher and challenge to me as a TL. As I try to plan for the new school year, some days I can’t even get my Side B to spin on the turntable. That chipper “song” writer for Side A has been replaced by this less confident, but still hopeful TL.

On the plus, I did district-wide read-alouds of Some Kind of Courage by Dan Gemeinhart, my school’s guest author in 2019. Dan participated in one of the first sessions, trading time reading with me and talking about his next novel. But student engagement was low, as it was for most of our district-sponsored read-alouds for MS and HS.

On the minus, I struggled to find my traction for how to help content-area teachers. I created/updated a spreadsheet with online resources that supported the Quarter 4 standards for each subject/grade level; worked with some Related Arts teachers to set up Google classrooms (which they had not previously needed), and trouble-shot teachers’ and students’ technical issues. But I did not establish new and meaningful ways to support literacy. Shame on me.

But even during this summer limbo, TLs are spinning the turntable: sharing ideas about supporting literacy with new instructional models. As we teachers “hang on” to learn what instruction will look like, your school’s TL is ready to jump in to make the new model work for you and your students. With collaboration, Side B has the potential to be a chart-topping hit!

About the Author

BT has been teaching for 36 years, the last 12 as a teacher-librarian at Camp Road Middle School on James Island, SC.