Speakers:
- Danny Torres
- Heather Howlett
- Linda Friedrich
Danny Torres:
Hello everyone, and welcome to the second session of our Leading Together Series. In these thirty-minute virtual learning webinars, WestEd experts are sharing research and evidence-based practices that help bridge opportunity gaps, support positive outcomes for children and adults, and help build thriving communities. Today’s topic: Cultivating Classroom Community Through Literacy. Our featured speakers today are Heather Howlett, director of professional learning for WestEd’s literacy team, and Linda Friedrich, director of literacy at WestEd. Thank you all very much for joining us. My name is Danny Torres. I’m associate director of events and digital media for WestEd. I’ll be your host. Now, before we move into the contents of today’s webinar, I’d like to take a brief moment to introduce WestEd. WestEd is a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that aims to improve the lives of children and adults at all ages of learning and development. We do this by addressing challenges in education and human development, reducing opportunity gaps, and helping build communities where all can thrive. Now, I’d like to pass the mic over to Heather Howlett. She’ll be leading the session today. Heather, take it away.
Heather Howlett:
All right. Welcome everyone. I’m so glad you could join us today. Lots of states and places represented. I’m Heather Howlett. I’m in Michigan, and beautiful fall day here. Hoping you’re enjoying some great weather as well. With me today is Linda Friedrich. Our session today is designed to share ideas for cultivating a sense of community within classrooms and authentically engaging students in literacy activities. We’ll discuss practical ways to create an inclusive learning environment where every student feels valued, heard, and motivated to read and learn. We’ll offer you some ideas and techniques that could be implemented immediately, and the strategies discussed will be applicable across various educational settings. So, here we go. I’m going to turn the mic over briefly to Linda, but Linda has a little bit of a voice issue today, so I’m just going to say that in case. (laughs) Go ahead, Linda.
Linda Friedrich:
Thank you, Heather. Well, Heather and I work with reading apprenticeship at WestEd, and one of the things that we always do is to invite everybody’s voices into the conversation. And we know, just looking at this list of folks, that you all already have some great practices for establishing welcoming communities. So, we would like you to take a minute to briefly jot in the chat, what are some ways you establish a welcoming classroom, school, and district culture and build relationships with students. We’ll give you about one minute to jot some ideas in the chat. I’m seeing a lot of things about just greeting everybody, saying hello. Such an important part of a welcoming culture—creating classroom agreements, check-ins, brain breaks, calling students by name. I’m not getting everything, but I encourage people to really pay attention to all of the fantastic ideas in the chat. And I think that some of what we’ll be sharing will really build on those things. So Heather, turning it back over to you.
Heather Howlett:
Thank you. Yeah, great ideas everyone. Thank you. Welcome knowledge, always. So one of the first things we want to talk about is establishing that welcoming classroom culture. And having students share information from an interest in reading survey is one effective way to begin building classroom relationships. Asking students to share information about themselves sets the tone that in this class we will get to know each other and work together, thereby establishing a welcoming classroom culture. After students complete the survey, partners can choose a few questions or topics to ask each other more about, and then use what they learn about each other to introduce their partner to the rest of the class. And in this way, students can learn many things about at least one other person and something about everyone in the class.
But is sharing this kind of personal information worth the time it takes? Well, we think that because students will be working together throughout a semester or a school year, spending relatively few minutes on preliminary activities like this can add great value. It can accelerate students’ responsiveness to each other, develop their willingness to view each other empathetically, see themselves as other humans, right, and cultivate their ability to collaborate as they work to understand challenging texts, hopefully. And for teachers, knowing students’ interests and goals helps in several ways. As I’m sure you’re aware. It can help us make connections to the curriculum and to the reading, help us draw student interests and experiences into classroom conversation, and it can help us be more informed mentors of our students.
We’re going to put a link in the chat to this resource. So we have an Interests and Reading Survey we’d like to offer you. Feel free to modify as you see fit, but something that can get you started. As students begin to collaborate, a set of student-developed community agreements can be a valuable touchstone to encourage open communication and active participation. And I appreciate that folks already shared that idea in the chat. For students whose past experiences have made them skeptical that their ideas matter, it can be especially important to see that the agreements are student-driven. That’s key—the authentic result of their ideas about what they need in order to engage in challenging learning. When it’s posted and frequently revisited, these agreements help students share the responsibility of creating a productive learning environment. They’re part of that. And they serve as a set of agreements for which students can hold themselves accountable as well.
An important part is to have students add to the agreements over time. So it’s not just the beginning of the year thing, it’s something we revisit over time to normalize the practice of being responsive to the community. The needs are going to change, especially after a break or a holiday or something like that, coming back and revisiting those agreements and adjusting to what’s needed in that space. Another piece to think a little bit more about the personal dimension, transforming one’s identity and seeing oneself in a new light is often initiated by reflecting on experiences that have shaped identity. 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.
Next, students are paired up to share those experiences, and in doing so, they begin building those connections that will support collaborative work that’s down the road. And finally, by sharing whole group—just some selected, supportive, and discouraging experiences in their growth—students start to see how everyone has an evolving reader identity. And this includes the teacher, too, because the teacher also is going to share their personal reading history. So it really helps kind of expand students’ ideas around, “What makes a reader? How are we shaped over time?” Teachers have used variations of the 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 in science, for example, could include texts like, well, of course, articles and websites. But what about mechanics manuals and virtual simulations, science fiction, topographical maps, and so forth? So students who may have proclaimed that they don’t like to read in science or aren’t a math person, and that they never understand what they’re reading or can’t make sense of it, start to realize that there actually are science texts that they read, maybe even enjoy and learn from, and that the reader identity is more nuanced than they had been allowing themselves to believe. And their identity likely has room for further growth and elaboration.
Linda Friedrich:
Thank you, Heather, for sharing all of those ideas about building a welcoming classroom culture and making those personal connections. We’ve already seen that this group has amazing input. So we’d love to hear in the chat, what connections are you making to what Heather shared? What is a new idea that might extend all of the great things that you are already doing to help students feel connected both to their peers and, importantly, to literacy in all of their classes? And please feel free to use the chat to share. And again, we’ll give you about a minute.
We’re already seeing a couple of things. So group work, classroom discussions, making sure that students have access to books that represent their culture. Reminds me of modeling emotional awareness around reading. Absolutely. World cafe after people reads, and it affirms what we’ve been doing for a number of years. Absolutely. Absolutely. Great. Sharing my own reading history as well. Terrific. Love the idea of revisiting norms throughout the year. Yeah, and some great things. We have a former science teacher here who talks about the importance of discussion and reading and science as well. Terrific. Heather, I think I will turn it back over to you. Feel free to keep adding to the chat. Again, this is a really rich set of discussions.
Heather Howlett:
So lots of ideas around student collaboration and in collaborative classrooms, teachers frequently ask students to work with a partner. And partnerships give every student in the class a collaborator, right? They have a thought partner now. And the partnership structure creates an accountable opportunity for every student to learn and contribute. No one can hide when they’re only in pairs, and that’s a good thing. However, many students benefit from explicit instruction and support in learning how to carry out academic conversations. We can’t just assume they know how to talk to each other in this way. And brain research has established that talking is critical to learning. That verbal processing is such an important piece. So through modeling and reinforcing student behavior during class discussions, you teach students how to participate. You also actively demonstrate that each student’s ideas and experiences and thinking processes are valued and contribute to the learning of the whole group.
Teachers have the really important job of turning around the intellectually crippling misconception that already knowing something, rather than being confused or wondering, is the only thing that’s valued. Students really need to understand confusion is actually the perfect and natural starting place for learning. So one way to create an opportunity for this is to begin a class discussion about a text, not by asking, “What did you get from it?” and “What is this about?” but asking them, “What are some confusions you might have had? What are questions that came up for you?” And asking them to be explicit about where in the text that they got lost or why they thought something was difficult to understand. Inviting students to share their questions has the added benefit of giving students an authentic purpose to continue their reading. They need to find the answers to those questions they’ve asked, right? Now, they’ve got this kind of thing to look for.
Creating opportunities for students to notice and share their thinking in authentic ways means that their unique insights and knowledge and perspectives can become resources for everyone’s learning. And explicitly highlighting the wealth of knowledge that students bring to academic work is an important part of creating a classroom where students work together to read and understand a variety of challenging texts. So when students learn to be metacognitive about the mental and affective processes they go through when they read, and as they hear how their peers and teacher work through those challenging texts, they can begin to notice when and where their concentration might lapse, or 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. Through such talk, members of a classroom community naturally make the thinking visible to each other. And so we’re going to take a look at two specific routines that support a metacognitive approach to reading: the Think Aloud and Reading Strategies lists.
Metacognitive routines such as Think Aloud gives students structures to monitor their comprehension and consciously interact with text. They come to realize that academic reading is active problem-solving, and that they can be successful at solving those problems. And when we approach texts as objects for inquiry, when we look at them as puzzles to be solved and try to explain, we need to provide tools and scaffolds for supporting the reading and sense-making. It’s critical. We can’t expect our students to just know what to do when we put a text in front of them. We have to give them a tool to help with that. And think alouds are an important early routine that teachers use to model the ways that reading requires thinking and what it looks like to be mentally active while reading. Specific ways of thinking that are needed to make sense of varied texts in a course. As a teacher in your discipline, you know how to make sense of text in that discipline. So we’re going to make our invisible visible and let kids in on the ways that our minds work when we’re trying to make sense of text. And on the slide you’ll see an example of a tool.
This is a metacognitive bookmark, and it can scaffold the work we ask students to do with a text. We’re going to ask them to explain their thinking. Sometimes they’re like, “I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how to say it.” So these are some sentence starters that can help with that. It can support the learning task, but it isn’t the task itself. The task itself is to make their thinking visible, and sometimes they just need help with how to start that. And think aloud can help students learn how to focus their thinking process when they read and how to name what they’re doing. So it’s not only what am I doing, but yeah, how do I name that? What are the mental moves that they’re making while they’re reading?
It ensures student engagement. The reader or thinker has a job. They’re going to read aloud and think aloud trying to name some of the things that they’re doing. And their partner, who is the listener, has a job. And that could be to copy on the text, things that they’re hearing their partner say, make notes of that. We’re putting a link to this resource in the chat as well, and encourage you to give it a try. And feel free to modify, to fit your context, fit your kiddos. And when introducing think aloud, the teacher’s role is to model a brief segment of text, get your thinking out there, and invite students to comment on that. And what did you hear me doing? What types of thinking was I doing? Let’s look at our bookmark. What are some things? Name some of the things you heard me saying and doing while I was making sense of this sentence, for example.
So there’s this back and forth of reciprocal modeling between the teacher and the students. Then, the teacher has to turn it over to kids in pairs to practice together. And floating around, listening in, paying attention to what are you hearing, then you can bring the class back together to discuss, “What are we discovering?” Let’s capture some of those strategies that we’re using to make sense of this on a reading strategies list. What’s working for us here? So, 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 inquiry conversation that’s metacognitive and that students can apply to any text. So this embeds the literacy work into your content teaching. It becomes how students learn as well as what they learn.
And the cool thing is, the reading strategies list—that you start with one particular text—will continue to grow as students encounter new texts and new genres. So the list should be seen as a living document, one that remains posted and available for adding to and revising. And it’s likely that the list will not just grow longer, but will become more elaborated. For example, if students in a history class have nominated the strategy “asking questions” to their list, that’s something they do a lot of, which is great, at some point, they might want to elaborate with a discipline-specific strategy, such as asking questions about the author’s point of view, or asking questions about whose point of view is not represented.
So when students have opportunities to contrast the reading processes they use across different types of texts and for different reading purposes, they start to gain control over when, why, and how they read. The true power of the reading strategies list is that it showcases strategies that students are finding helpful. So it’s not a predetermined list just put up on the wall by the teacher, the kids own it. These are things that they’re saying, “This is what works for us with these types of texts.” And that’s how that starts to shift their reader identity in your discipline.
All of these ideas shared today are from Reading Apprenticeship, a research-based approach to classroom instruction that’s been proven to develop student academic identity, engagement, subject area knowledge, and disciplinary literacy. So we encourage you to learn more. Visit our website at readingapprenticeship.org.