Featured Speaker:
- Heather Howlett, Director of Professional Learning, Reading Apprenticeship, WestEd
Heather Howlett:
Thanks for joining us today. This session is designed to share ideas for cultivating connections within classrooms and authentically engaging students in literacy activities. We’re gonna discuss some practical ways to create a learning environment where every student feels valued, heard, and motivated to read and learn. We’ll offer you some ideas and techniques that can be implemented immediately, and the strategies discussed will be applicable across various educational settings. My name is Heather Howlett, and I’m the director of professional learning for Reading Apprenticeship coming to you from Michigan today, and it’s great that you’re here. Thank you so much. Let’s get started.
First, we’d like to invite your expertise and experiences into the conversation. So, using the chat, if you could please share, what are some ways that you establish a welcoming classroom, school, and district, and build relationships with students? Feel free to go ahead and add your ideas to the chat. Jeffrey, very cool, make it feel like a homey atmosphere. Kimberly, mission statement, nice. Yeah, what are we here? What are we doing? Oh, Sharon, interesting. Yeah, picture of the class and post in the room, nice. Like, this is our space, this is who we are. Love it. Kind of interesting to think about this right now. It’s typically the beginning of the school year kind of things, right? But here we are towards the tail end, maybe some of you at the very tail end of your school year, but we’re still wanting to have that collaborative environment, right, and have everyone involved and not all checked out.
Oh, Maryanne, nice. Yeah, plants and having areas. Oh, okay, very cool, I really like that idea. Thanks, everyone. That welcoming space. Well, an important part of establishing a welcoming environment is supporting student-to-student collaboration, right? And as students begin to collaborate, a set of student-developed classroom agreements can be a valuable touchstone to encourage open communication and active participation. For students whose past experiences have made them skeptical that their ideas matter, it can be really important to see the agreements are student-driven, that they’re the authentic result of their ideas about what they need in order to engage in challenging learning. And when those agreements are posted and frequently revisited, they help students share the responsibility of creating that productive learning environment. And they serve as a set of agreements for which students can hold themselves accountable.
But it’s important to have students add to those agreements over time to normalize the practice of being responsive to the needs of their peers. So, even though it might be something we typically do at the start of the year, important at different intervals to check in on those agreements, perhaps maybe towards the end of the year when kids really are having a hard time staying engaged and/or on task. Checking back in on those agreements. What do we need to amend here to kind of keep ourselves in the work, right? Having those conversations are important, and it’s part of the learning community. So definitely worth the couple of minutes of time that it might take. Another idea to build that classroom culture and welcoming environment is to think about those personal connections. And seeing oneself in a new light is often initiated by reflecting on experiences.
Now, a personal reading history is one activity that involves students reflecting on their lives to identify events or individuals that have helped or hindered their growth as readers. In this activity, students are asked to think back over their reading experiences and identify key moments in their development as readers. Then, they’re paired up to share those experiences. And in doing so, they really build those peer relationships that support the collaborative work ahead. And finally, by going whole group and sharing some of those supportive and discouraging experiences, students can start to see how everyone has evolving reading habits, including their teacher, who’s also sharing their personal reading history. Now, teachers have used different variations of this personal reading history activity to draw out students’ positive and negative experiences in particular subject areas as well.
Tailoring the prompts to focus on experiences of reading and learning in science or math, for example. Another outcome of these conversations can be for students to recognize the variety and range of texts that count as texts in a discipline. A class brainstorm of what counts as reading and science, for example, might include things like, well, of course, articles and websites, but also manuals, virtual simulations, science fiction, topographical maps, and so on. And so students who may have proclaimed that they don’t like reading science or that they never understand what they read realize they actually are reading some science texts, and that they might enjoy and actually learn from them, too, that their reading is more nuanced than what they’ve been allowing themselves to believe, and that they have room for expansion.
When we have a collaborative classroom, teachers frequently ask students to work in pairs. And partnerships give every student in the class a collaborator. The partnership structure creates an accountability opportunity for every student to learn and contribute, right? Everyone brings something to the table. Many students benefit, though, from explicit instruction and support in learning how to carry out those academic conversations. We can’t just assume they know how to talk to each other in this way. And brain research tells us that talking is critical to learning. So through modeling and reinforcing student behavior during class discussions, you’re teaching students how to participate. You also actively demonstrate that each student’s ideas, experiences, and thinking are valued and contribute to the learning of the whole group. This is important. This is an important job of teachers.
We need to turn around the intellectually crippling misconception that already knowing something, rather than being confused or wondering, is the only thing that’s valued in an academic setting. Students need to understand that confusion is actually the perfect and natural starting place for learning. So one way we can create an opportunity for this might be to begin a class discussion about a text by asking students not about what was in the text, but more of: What were they confused about, or what questions came up? And start there, right? Asking them to be explicit about where in the text they got lost or why they thought something was difficult for them to understand. When we invite students to share their questions, we have the added benefit of giving students an authentic purpose for digging into the reading. They wanna find the answers to the questions that they’ve raised.
So when we create opportunities for students to notice and share their thinking in authentic ways, that means their unique insights and knowledge and perspectives can become resources for everyone’s learning. Explicitly highlighting the wealth of knowledge that students bring to academic work is a huge part of creating a classroom in which students work together to read and understand a variety of challenging texts. So, how do we get there? Well, when students learn to be metacognitive about the mental and affective processes they’re going through as they read, and as they hear how their peers and their teacher work through challenging texts, they can begin to notice when and where their concentration lapses. You know, when does their mind wander? ‘Cause it happens to us all. Or maybe where their comprehension breaks down. And from there, they can learn to be strategic about using cognitive tools to refocus or solve reading problems.
And they become active agents of their own learning. It’s through such talk that members of a classroom naturally make their thinking visible to each other. So we’re gonna take a look at two specific routines that support that metacognitive approach to reading. Think Aloud and Reading Strategies Lists. Metacognitive routines like Think Aloud give students structures for monitoring their comprehension and consciously interacting with text. Students come to realize that academic reading is characterized by active problem solving and that they can be successful at solving those problems. We can approach texts as objects of inquiry, kind of like puzzles to be solved and explained that we can kind of pick apart. And so it’s critical to provide tools and scaffolds to support that reading and sense making.
We cannot expect our students to just know what to do when we put a text in front of them. And Think Aloud is an important routine that teachers can use to model the ways in which reading requires thinking. It’s an active process. What does it look like to be mentally active when reading? What are the specific ways of thinking that are needed to make sense of a text in a course? And on the slide, you see an example of a tool. This metacognitive bookmark can scaffold the work we ask students to do with text. It supports the learning task, but isn’t the task itself. The task is to make their thinking visible. Think Aloud helps students to learn how to focus on their thinking process when they read, and then how to name what they’re doing, those mental moves that they’re making. And if we ask students to think aloud in pairs and we use the metacognitive bookmark, we can ensure student engagement.
One student can be reading and thinking aloud, and the listening partner has a job to know on the text what they hear their partner saying. And when we introduce Think Aloud, the teacher’s role is to model with a brief segment of text what they do to make sense of it, and then invite students to comment on that model. And then there’s a little back and forth, where teacher models again, students kind of jump in, but the key is that the teacher has to turn it over to student pairs to practice. That’s how they’re gonna get better at it is with practice. The teacher can then bring the class together after they’ve had time in pairs to practice a little bit and discuss what are students discovering, and they can capture those strategies students are using on a Reading Strategies List. Building and continually referring to a Reading Strategies List is an important routine to help integrate literacy into your teaching.
By probing students’ thinking and reasoning and asking them to share specific examples of their reading processes, teachers help students develop a type of metacognitive and inquiry-based conversation that students can apply to any text. And this is what embeds the literacy work into your content teaching. It becomes how students learn as well as what they learn. A Reading Strategies List that a class begins with one text will continue to grow over time as they encounter new and different texts and genres. So the list should be seen as a living document, right, one that is posted and always being added to and revised. It’s likely that the list won’t only just grow longer, but maybe get more elaborated.
So, for example, if students in a history class have nominated the strategy of asking questions to their list, they may, at some point, want to go a little deeper with something more discipline-specific, such as asking questions about the author’s point of view, or ask questions about whose point of view is not represented in this text. And when students have opportunities to contrast the reading processes they use with different types of texts and for different purposes, then they start to gain greater control over when, why, and how they read. They start to own it. But the true power of the Reading Strategies List is that it showcases the strategies that students are finding helpful. It’s not a predetermined list from the teacher that just goes up on the wall and just kind of stays as a decoration. This is something the students own. This is what they’re saying works for them, and then they can refer back to it and apply it to other things going forward.
So, I wanna pause again and check in with you all. I’d like to invite your expertise and experiences. So, what connections are you making to things you do in your classroom around literacy and building relationships with students? Or maybe what’s a new idea that might extend your practice? Let’s just take a moment and chat. What are some thoughts? Jeffrey, I give them excerpts from secondary sources, highlight the claim, underline the piece of evidence. Yeah, usually two or three. Personal reading history. Oh, Maryanne, interesting. Integrate into a cyber school setting. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. That would be a great conversation to follow up with. I’ve got some ideas for that. Thank you for raising those questions.
All right, folks. Well, all the ideas shared today come from Reading Apprenticeship, so maybe you’ve heard of us. It’s a research-based approach for classroom instruction, and it’s proven to develop student engagement, subject area knowledge, and disciplinary literacy. It’s both an instructional framework and a model of professional learning. The professional learning has been designed in iterative cycles of research and development for over 29 years now. Most of our work is with middle and high school teachers, and we also work with college faculty as well. So lots of different contexts, in-person, hybrid, cyber, et cetera. In Reading Apprenticeship classrooms, we see increased reading in class, improved student engagement, deeper collaboration, and improved confidence for both teachers and students. Teachers are helping students to do the work, instead of doing it for them.
Many of us experience stand-and-deliver classrooms where the teacher might assign reading and then deliver a lecture about the reading, what the reading said. But the aim of Reading Apprenticeship is to turn this around. We know that the ones doing the reading, thinking, and talking are the ones doing the learning. And the teachers already learned the content. The students need to learn it. So during Reading Apprenticeship Professional Learning, teachers learn new ways to get their kids and their students reading and talking about questions, relevant experience, applying it to what they’re learning about in class be it solving a math problem, or understanding the context around a historical event, or analyzing a literary work. Reading Apprenticeship isn’t a curriculum, but it’s an approach to teaching, and it works and is applicable in any content area in lots of different levels.
As we’ve been putting in the chat, we have a lot of different options for professional learning. We meet with district leaders to determine what they need and how best to support and sustain the work. We can kind of start small and grow over time, but we have lots of offerings. And so the QR code here on your screen takes you to our webpage to see all of the upcoming opportunities. If you go there and you scroll down, you’ll see the dates and locations of our open enrollment courses that we’re offering this summer, and those are more suitable for individuals or small teams. If you have, say, 20 or more people at your site, please reach out to us for further conversation. We can come to you in the link there, will take you to that website, too, that Ray just put in. Thank you so much, everyone, for coming today. I hope you have a great rest of your day. We appreciate all of your work with students, and teachers, and in education. So, have a good day. Thank you.