 |
 |
|
What is ELS?
Support Expeditionary Learning
Our Publications |
Volume VIII, Issue No.4
In
This Issue: Linking Classroom and Community
Sammy Sosa, Fenway Park, and Literacy By Emily Tuttle That spring Joe DiMaggio died. Catfish Hunter fell victim to Lou Gehrig's disease, and Joe Torre found out that he had cancer. Fans were already beginning to mourn the hallowed grounds of Fenway where the Green Monster towered over a field of dreams in the heart of Boston. A glance at the sports headlines had my students wondering what was this American sport that honored ghosts. "Do all baseball players have cancer, Mrs. Tuttle?" they asked. "Who are all these old, dead guys?" These students had never heard of The Yankee Clipper, Catfish, The Iron Man, or The Green Monster. They couldn't distinguish between the strange names for humans and those for ballparks. These students had never played the game of America's childhood, never watched the game called America's pastime. These students were not American. They came from Rwanda, Cambodia, Russia, Yugoslavia, Iran, The Sudan, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, and even California. They were sixth, seventh, and eighth graders who could not read in English past the second-grade level. Some had newly arrived in the United States. Others had been here since birth. Some had fled the horrors of anarchy and mass killing, while others had escaped ethnic and religious persecution. A couple of students actually liked school, but most did not. These 15 misfits comprised one of the Intermediate English Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) classes at King Middle School in Portland, Maine. I found myself relating to these students in ways that I had almost forgotten were mine. My first language was Japanese, and I came to the United States when I was five. My Okinawan mother gave me the physical traits and traditions that separated me from my classmates. My American father gave me the confidence that I could, should, and would, excel. He taught me that the key to excellence was knowledge, and that knowledge came from avid reading and accomplishment. I had been in between cultures then, and so were my students now. These students were my team. CULTURE SHOCK It was only my second year at King, only my second year in Maine, and only my second year teaching middle schoolers. In most respects, my first year had been a disaster. I had given up lesson-planning because of a school schedule caught between the goal of partial mainstreaming and individual house schedules. Three or four students would leave the room for their math classes in the middle of a literature discussion, while two more returned from their social studies classes and tried to catch up on what they had just missed. While I tried to maintain some sense of order with the revolving door menace, the rest of the school was doing some strange thing called Expeditionary Learning. My students and I were confounded by what was going on. The mainstream teachers tried to include the ESOL students into their expeditions, but the basic concept of cross-curriculum work meant that these partially mainstreamed students were only partially getting the big picture. My students wondered, "Why can't we do that stuff?" What really got to me was that some of the students had stopped asking the question and merely accepted that, "We can't do that stuff." Fortunately, the principal at King, Michael McCarthy, listened to my struggles. In the past, he had grudgingly deferred to the policies of the district's Multilingual staff. McCarthy had guided King toward Expeditionary Learning while the district's ESL program went a separate course. We were ready to bring the ESL classes up to par with the rest of the school. As timing would have it, the district Multilingual Office staff were working on a federal Title VII grant proposal. We used this opening as a chance to restructure the ESL program to reflect Expeditionary Learning. SUCCESS IN THE MAINSTREAM When our proposal was accepted, we started asking ourselves, wouldn't a self-contained program be the opposite of our full inclusion policy at King? Wouldn't the all-or-nothing approach create anxiety in students? Finally, we agreed that accelerated and intensive English instruction would actually speed up mainstreaming. No one believed that justice was being served by keeping students in an ESL program for six or seven years. We kept our focus on figuring out how to teach students to read and write English and to be successful in the mainstream classes. For six years, I wrote for daily newspapers across the country, and I remembered my training as a writer-be clear, concise, correct, and write about what you know. Surely it wasn't too big a leap to apply those maxims to teaching. I knew newspapers, I knew baseball, and I had passion for both. It seemed like an expedition on writing about baseball might pull it all together. I wanted the expedition to help students gain academic skills while they discovered something about success and being American-that you don't have to be born in the United States to be a successful American. I decided our guiding questions would be, What does it take to be a Big League player? What makes baseball so American? We were lucky enough at King Middle School to be on the same block as Hadlock Field where the Florida Marlins' minor league team, the Portland Sea Dogs, played. We were only two hours from Boston's Fenway Park. If the students could talk to real professional athletes and see a Major League game, I knew that reading and writing wouldn't just be a classroom exercise. For their main project, students would produce a program for the Sea Dogs to be presented at a home game. The Sea Dogs marketing director, Mike Gillogly, agreed to the project and arranged for classroom speakers, interviews with the players, free tickets to a game, and a chance for the students to hand out their work to baseball fans at the gate. THE STARTING LINE-UP I had no trouble choosing our primary text: the newspaper. We would learn skimming, scanning, indexing, using graphic and context clues, gleaning from charts, vocabulary, and paraphrasing-the skills I needed to teach for reading textbooks-from the sports section of the Portland Press Herald. Once the students learned about baseball from outside experts and they had chosen a favorite team, reading the newspaper became a morning ritual. They walked in the classroom each day to find the morning's newspaper on their desks, and they turned to the sports section. It took three weeks for the students to understand why we were doing this. Then one morning, I walked in a couple minutes late and found the students with their noses buried in headlines and box scores. "Mrs. Tuttle, did you know that Joe DiMaggio was married to a movie star?" "Mrs. Tuttle, did you know that Sammy Sosa is Hispanic?" The conversations swirled as they checked the standings so early after spring training. "The Yankees are up on Boston by three games." "I bet Mark McGwire breaks his own record this year." A BREAKTHROUGH WITH THE CLASS NOVEL I've always found choosing a novel slightly dangerous. The right one can open worlds to students and pique interest in continued reading. The wrong one can shut down a student to reading. Luckily, In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson, by Bette Bao Lord proved to be the perfect book. The story about a Chinese girl learning English in America by learning baseball seemed tailor-made for my class. Every student read, discussed, and wrote about the book. For most students, it was the first time they had finished a book because they wanted to, and the first time they had written a book report that made sense. Hiwa, an eighth grader from Iran, read In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson without threat of punishment and without bribery. For the first time since he had come to Portland, Hiwa read an entire novel. Hiwa had been in my class the year before and was on his third year of ESOL classes at King. He had been partially mainstreamed for his first two years and knew that other students participated in expeditions, but he usually missed the kick-off event or the experts visiting class and the field experiences. All he knew was the heap of work that an expedition demanded, which he had always failed to produce. At times he would act out in anger and slam books around. At times he would cry in frustration and refuse to talk. Hiwa was bright, he was proud, but he didn't understand what he read. "I can't do it," was his alibi when he failed to turn in an assignment. "I don't know what it says. I don't wanna do it. I don't care if I get an F." But he did care. Because Hiwa was there for every part of the expedition, because he understood the guiding questions and the product we were working on, he realized that the reading was a means to the end. He had to read and become educated in baseball so that he could get the best baseball cards, so that he could talk to the Sea Dogs players, so that he could know what the Red Sox were doing in Boston. What came as a surprise to him was that reading could also be an end, the objective in itself. Hiwa actually enjoyed reading In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson. Out of the class of 15, Hiwa produced the best book report. It took nine drafts, which demonstrated a profound attitude change. All the students knew I expected perfection and didn't care how many drafts they had to write. Some needed only three or four. But Hiwa overcame his tendency to make excuses and to quit before he finished something. Hiwa wrote a wonderful book report. Independently, Hiwa went on to read a biography of his own choosing. This time, he didn't go looking through the library stacks for the shortest book. Hiwa had decided to adopt the Yankees as his team and found a book about a Yankee player. All of the students chose a biography and simply had to summarize, in journalistic fashion: who, what, when, where. Clear requirements also helped Hiwa complete his tasks. Other students experienced their own reading victories. Everyone finished their reading and gained new knowledge and meaning from their books. Some students decided that the theme of In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson was learning how to make friends, or that leaving their own country was hard. Even though they had never heard of Jackie Robinson and were unfamiliar with baseball, they could all relate to Shirley Temple Wong's experience. They knew how ridicule and confusion felt. They saw the humor in their own mistakes in English, and they liked the happy ending. Maybe they would have a happy ending too. Many of the students shared these feelings in their project journal. Pio, an eighth grader from The Sudan, wrote: I learn that if you don't know English and student are laughing at you I learn not to give up. I think if you came from another country just speak and don't care about others if they are laughing at you. Journals helped both the students and me. I could get a sense of students' comprehension and interest from the journals, but more importantly, the students gained much needed practice in putting thoughts into English words on paper. We tried to write in our journals every day, and we tried to write on every topic and issue, but we did neither. We did manage, however, to write enough to realize that our writing had improved over the course of the expedition. Before they had completed half of the expedition, the students stopped writing for the incentive of earning baseball cards and started writing for themselves. We saw the difference between spontaneous writing and going through a writing process. We saw the value in seeing our own thoughts on the page. The students laughed at their own English mistakes as they reflected on their own journals. TAKING ON THE SPORTS BEAT We had done our homework. We had listened to the experts. We were now ready to produce. After thorough reading of press releases, news articles, and Internet web site updates, students felt confident that they could ask Sea Dogs players questions like professional reporters, but they weren't so confident in the face-to-face approach. We practiced speaking, pronouncing troublesome words, and making eye contact. Once we walked onto Hadlock Field, down and into the dugouts, the students relaxed. They had gone over and over their questions. They knew baseball terminology, and they knew they could write a biographical article on a player. As I ran around snapping pictures, I felt ecstatic. They were doing it-all of the them, not just the naturally confident and overachieving. Every single student armed with pen and pad interacted with professional athletes. We couldn't wait to get back to the classroom and tell each other about the players. By now, the writing process and the understanding that I would accept nothing less than perfection didn't even daunt the students. They worked away on the computers like they had grown up with them. They revised and revised, some of them a dozen times. They knew that they would have bylines just like Jordan, and they didn't want any mistakes. I was only there to guide and to edit. It was their project now, not mine. TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALL GAME When the four-page flyers came back from the printers, students asked for several advanced copies to give to their friends. They couldn't wait for the Sea Dogs' final home stand before school let out for the summer. Finally the day came. Most of King Middle School would be at that afternoon game in June. Laden with batches of their flyers, the students nervously stood at the ticket gates. Several of the students had been mainstreamed by this time after having improved their reading skills by at least two grade levels and having proven that they could write in any expository form, even if it did take a few drafts. Those students were released from their classes to participate in this culminating event. A few new students had joined the class, and the rookies took orders from the veterans. "Are we going to do this next year?" the bush-leaguers asked. Ball park staff and players waived hello like old friends during the pregame preparations. The students beamed, glowed, and positively radiated when the gates opened and bus-loads of school students entered. Success was confirmed when the students saw others in the stands-complete strangers-reading work with their names on it. Two local newspapers published write-ups on the students and the expedition. Three of the students even got their own bylines in the Portland Press Herald. Students continued to read the newspaper long after they finished the project, as they followed their favorite teams into the summer. In the fall when they returned to school, nearly all of them started the year in mainstream classes without any qualms. They found me and discussed the upcoming World Series as knowledgeable fans. They lamented some of the teams' summer performances. They knew the names of many of the players who had made the All Century list. They were not just some foreign students in an ESOL class looking in from the outside. They had become King Middle School students in Portland, Maine, who just happened to be smart enough to know more than one language. Emily Tuttle teaches
at King Middle School in Portland, Maine.
Expeditionary Learning School Designer Patti Smith interviewed
teacher Peter Dubno, an eighth-grade math teacher at the New York
City Lab School, about his views on teaching the "language of mathematics."
Dubno: One of the most challenging things about being a
math teacher is teaching the language of mathematics. Many of our
students are not versed enough in the language to successfully complete
math problems. Second-language learners struggle even more than
native English speakers do. Armed with that knowledge, as teachers,
we need to emphasize mathematical and technical language.
Improving technical reading is one thing that we have to strive for in the mathematics classroom. We have children who can read 500-page novels in one, two, or three days, but they struggle through technical material. For example, students struggle with vocabulary. We have students who don't know the meaning of words such as exceed, diminish, increase, decrease, divided by, tripled or halved. They don't know how to read the words and translate them into mathematics. Students have a hard time comprehending word problems. They make assumptions about a question without thoroughly reading it. Students also struggle with description. If I let them, they would say, "First I did this, then I did that, then the thing went over here and I put it over there, and that's how I got the answer." In my classroom, I am the model. The students hear me use descriptive language and they are asked to read, write, and present with technical proficiency. For example, they did the writing assignment, "What is zero? Is it something or nothing?" Some students came up with very, very good writing. Some of it was very technical. Others needed a lot of help. This year during the learning expedition Westward Expansion, the math project required students to gather statistical research information about their state, to write a technical description using the collected data, and to present the data in front of the class using technical language and illustrations. In grading the students' work, they know I look for good technical language and appropriate usage. Smith: What are some of the techniques that other teachers could use to help students speak math language? Dubno: I would suggest that teachers develop projects that help students use vocabulary that is descriptive and technical. In my room I have a poster of math vocabulary for each unit and I often refer to it during lessons. I think teachers should routinely post vocabulary words. Second, give the students things to read where they have to think on a mathematical, technical level, and understand things on a mathematical, technical level. My students actually write out word problems. I ask them to read them to themselves so they become familiar with the language and the spellings of the technical words that we use. Then I will often have them read the problems aloud to the class. Give students the opportunity to present their work orally, and expect them to present all the technical aspects of their projects, including equations, drawings, diagrams, and whatever else is assigned. This way they have to learn to be technically proficient in their description of what they are presenting. In my class, students frequently come to the front of the room and present. That is a very big step in becoming proficient in technical speaking. The more they see, the more they write. The more they read, the more products they are involved with. The more descriptions and details they must give in their presentations, the more proficient they will become. In my class, students can now present their projects in a detailed fashion. They are using better mathematical language and technical language. We have to help them experience the beauty of talking intellectually and technically. Smith: How could you facilitate an expedition on technical terminology? Dubno: Students could bring in different appliances with their technical guides, and be required to read the manual and demonstrate different aspects of the appliance to the class. They could then develop a manual for their own invention, or even an existing invention. This type of expedition would help them in developing their language, and give them a topic to write about. It would make them look for, understand, and use technical language correctly. The Reader's/Writer's Workshop
The Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound Literacy Platform calls for time, choice, and explicit instruction, and the Reader's/Writer's Workshop model provides the template necessary to take those initial steps from the platform to the classroom, from theory into practice. TIME A Reader's/Writer's Workshop requires a regular, uninterrupted, long block of time for literacy instruction, and it provides daily opportunities for teacher modeling, independent work, and shared learning. While some teachers see reading and writing as inseparable components of the same process, others choose to set aside separate chunks of time for Reader's Workshop and Writer's Workshop. Ideally, a teacher will devote as much as 90 minutes each day to literacy. Although a workshop can be fit into a 45-or 50-minute block of time, increasing time on task has proven the single most effective way to improve both reading and writing. The workshop usually begins with a mini-lesson, a brief segment(5-20 minutes) during which explicit instruction takes place. The teacher explains and models a strategy or technique, using think-alouds to reveal her thinking to the students. Students then practice what they have learned in the mini-lesson during an independent reading/writing time, the longest component of the workshop. Depending on the age of the students and the level of independence that they have achieved, this part of the workshop can last anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour. While students work independently, the teacher confers with them, either individually or in small groups. This independent time can also be used for literature circles or invitational groups based on shared needs or interests. The daily workshop culminates in a time for sharing (5-20 minutes), when students share their writing or insights about their reading from that day. The format for such sharing can vary widely, depending on the purpose. If the teacher wants every student to share and talk about his work that day, she might choose a "pair share." If the goal is to hear every student, however, she might choose a full-class "circle share" instead. The use of time will vary widely from classroom to classroom, depending both on teacher style and student needs. It doesn't matter exactly how much time the teacher spends on each component of the workshop; it simply matters that students spend a great deal of their time every day actually engaged in the reading and writing process. CHOICE Introducing student choice into the classroom can be the most difficult change for teachers to make in their literacy instruction. While it is easy to agree that teachers need to spend more time on literacy and that students need as much explicit instruction as possible, it is often hard to give up those deeply rooted notions of which novel every student must read or which writing genres must be mastered for high school or college. Nevertheless, teachers sometimes have to let go of the five-paragraph essay or Jane Eyre in order to achieve real student growth in literacy. In Build a Literate Classroom, Donald Graves encourages teachers to make the switch from literature textbooks (or basals at the elementary level) to trade books. This transition requires teachers to build classroom libraries, so that they can provide a wide variety of texts for their students. Classroom libraries include many different genres of texts (novels, poetry, magazines, picture books, etc.), texts by both contemporary and well-loved authors, texts on topics of interest to students, and texts of varying length and difficulty. As readers, most teachers take for granted the process of choosing a text to read. Many students do not know how to select text, however, and their teachers should model and provide explicit instruction in this process. Teachers can show how they preview a text by examining the cover and reading the first few pages. Graves describes how students can assess the appropriate level of difficulty of a text if they learn how to identify an "easy, medium, and challenge" book. Teachers can model this process by selecting their own texts, with attention to number of words on a page, size of type, number of words that they don't know on a page, etc. Teachers can also demonstrate how they choose a text based on their prior knowledge of the topic and/or author. According to Ellin Keene in Mosaic of Thought, a student's prior knowledge (or schema) is "the single most important influence on the readability of a text." The more a student knows about a topic, author, or genre, the more accessible the text will be. DIRECT, EXPLICIT INSTRUCTION The mini-lessons in the workshop model provide the necessary framework for direct, explicit instruction. At the beginning of the workshop, the teacher introduces the strategy or skill that students will work on that day. She then models the strategy, using read-alouds and think-alouds to show her own application of the strategy. While thinking aloud, the teacher clearly explains that she is doing so in order to show her thinking as she applies a strategy to the text. She also clearly distinguishes that she is thinking aloud rather than simply reading aloud. In In the Middle, Nancie Atwell describes how she use mini-lessons for several different purposes. At the beginning of the year, she employs "procedural" mini-lessons to teach workshop routines, guidelines, and expectations. During "craft" mini-lessons, she addresses "techniques, styles, genres, authors, and works of literature." Atwell also presents mini-lessons about conventions, using students' writing to address the conventions that they "violate" most frequently. Atwell offers mini-lessons about reading comprehension strategies as well, demonstrating what proficient readers do. Atwell's chapter on mini-lessons in In the Middle includes wonderful lists of mini-lessons for each type that she discusses. Within the workshop format, the teacher can employ The Gradual Release of Responsibility Model (Gallagher & Pearson) as a way to move from teacher modeling and explanation of a strategy or technique to independent student use. The workshop begins with the teacher claiming full responsibility for the use of a strategy, as she explains and models it during the mini-lesson. After explicit explanation and modeling, the teacher gradually transfers responsibility to her students by engaging them in guided practice. The teacher and her students practice the strategy together, in both large and small groups, and the students slowly become more confident and skilled. At that point, the teacher finally transfers full responsibility to the students, who now practice the strategy on their own. CONFERENCES In a Reader's/Writer's Workshop, the teacher confers with her students every day while they are reading or writing independently. Through conferences, she gains a sense of each student's progress, and she can respond immediately to their work, offering individualized assistance as needed. The teacher usually moves around the room to confer, spending a few minutes with a student to assess his application of that day's mini-lesson. She will rarely have the opportunity to confer with every student every day, but she can check in with every student at least once or twice a week. Small-group conferences can also be effective to reinforce a skill or strategy with a number of students who are struggling, and book clubs or literature circles are also an option for students to confer with one another. The Reader's/Writer's Workshop provides an effective classroom structure to implement the best practices set out in Expeditionary Learning's Literacy Platform. The "words, worlds, and wonder" that await in a strange land can too often overwhelm once you descend from the platform. The task of implementing all that you have researched can appear daunting, if not impossible. However, armed with a plan of action and a structure for your exploration, you can confidently step off of the platform and into promising new literacy terrain. Mariah Dickson is program director of the Teaching and Learning Center at the Public Education and Business Coalition in Denver, Colorado. REFERENCES Atwell, Nancie. 1998. In the Middle: New Understandings About Writing, Reading, and Learning. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Gallagher, M., and P.D. Pearson. 1983. The Instruction of Reading Comprehension in Contemporary Educational Psychology. Graves, Donald H. 1991. Build A Literate Classroom. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Keene, Ellin Oliver and
Susan Zimmermann. 1997. Mosaic of Thought. Portsmouth, NH:
Heinemann.
By Carol Duehr and Christina Nugent
The turkey vulture's
egg is creamy white like whipped cream with red sprinkles.
This is not the typical topic sentence of a reluctant fifth-grade boy. But during our interactive study of birds and their ecosystems, Eric became enthralled with studying about birds. Our studies motivated him to describe the turkey vulture's eggs accurately and to eagerly apply writing skills taught in class. We think that students learn to their greatest potential when immersed in a topic all day. For this reason, during this expedition we do not just study science during one 45-minute class period a day, but throughout the day. We read books about birds during reading class, we pull spelling words from our expedition, and we learn grammar, English, and writing through the writing and editing of our bird books. Fifth-grade students in the Dubuque Community Schools in Dubuque, Iowa are expected to learn personal narrative and nonfiction report writing. At Fulton Intermediate School, daily journal writing is one way we give students the practice they need to become good writers. They might choose to elaborate on the daily prompt on the blackboard or to pick a topic of their own choice. The journals alert us to areas of grammar, usage, and mechanics we need to stress in mini-lessons and in daily oral language exercises. We find, however, that students learn best when they are writing for a purpose and for an audience. We try to create these opportunities by assigning the class to write thank-you letters to a guest speaker or by asking students to write letters requesting information pertaining to the expedition. Or, for example, as a creative writing exercise, students write a "For Sale" ad for a bird's home as part of a study on birds' nests. The ads are humorous, creative, and very descriptive. Another creative writing opportunity comes when our baby chicks hatch. Students are especially motivated to learn about eggs because we hatch chicken eggs in an incubator in our classroom. After constructing a three-dimensional egg model, we ask each student to become an "expert" on a specific egg part. Students then visit the experts and identify the part and explain its function. This prepares students to creatively apply their knowledge in a fictional narrative, "A Newborn Chick's First Day." These narratives introduce descriptive adjectives and first-person narrative. The assignment also helps students assimilate their knowledge about the incubation period as well as the parts and functions of an egg. We assign the narrative after the class has spent every available moment observing the chicks hatch in an incubator, and watching them grow after they are moved into a heated container. The class discusses and writes in their journals about each exciting new development. The fictional narrative writing allows students to examine their world from a different perspective. It encourages them to scrutinize what they take for granted. This description piece also allows them more creativity. To start writing this piece, we model the writing on a large piece of chart paper. Then after carefully examining our group writing, the students build a rubric. The rubric focuses on using descriptive adjectives and phrases, describing hatching in a correct sequence, and using the first-person narrative and correct mechanics. The students take off from there. In the personal narrative, students have an opportunity to express their observations of the incubation process in a creative, fun way. Fifth grader Andy wrote from the perspective of the chick inside the eggshell, "Am I getting bigger or is this thing getting smaller?" The personal narrative fosters expression in a way that students thoroughly enjoy. They are invested in the writing because they have first-hand experience from watching the incubation and hatching of the chicks. Through our interactive study of birds we enable our students to reach their potential as readers and writers. Instead of teaching skills such as similes and metaphors in isolation, we choose to apply them to the in-depth topic of study. Not only are we broadening their knowledge base about ecosystems, but we are also teaching them valuable life skills, such as creative writing, researching, and the value of quality work. Carol Duehr and Christina
Nugent teach at Fulton Intermediate School in Dubuque, Iowa.
|
