What happens when you let students take the lead in suggesting and selecting books for literature circles based on individual interest? Dina Moskowitz, a middle school teacher at Creative Arts Charter School in San Francisco, CA,  set out to investigate this in her fourth year as a Mills Teacher Scholar.    When I began teaching middle school humanities, I read Nancy Allison’s book, Middle School Readers (Heinemann, 2009). Her model of an independent reading program to engage students in enjoyable books sounded amazing, so I spent a year creating a culture of reading (see my previous blog here).  I did everything from doing a graphic novel unit, to pumping up book talks, to conversing with kids more about their books.  I built up trust with my more resistant kids. Great, right? Well, no, not exactly.  Even though it was better than what I had traditionally done with reading instruction, I found that as a teacher I couldn’t adequately give personal support to each of the variety of learners in my class.  Many kids didn’t complete their books.  They didn’t have sufficient ways of getting support when they were confused and they might not even know what they didn’t know, because they rarely had conversations with others reading the same book. I was able to conference with a few students each day, and then I had to trust that the rest of them we’re on-task and developing as readers. In early spring 2013, I introduced the idea of Book Clubs with student choice in an attempt to address some of these issues.  I decided to combine the model of students selecting their own books with group book clubs, hoping that through this, students would be more engaged with their books, complete their books, and develop stronger reading comprehension.

What happens when a teacher takes the time to focus explicitly on supporting positive partnerships between students? Joanna Davis, a second grade teacher at New Highland Academy Elementary School and one of the Mills Teacher Scholars teacher leaders at her site, began her inquiry looking at partner reading but soon realized that students needed to learn to work together before she could expect this structure to support their reading development.  When I began teaching in 2005, I remember saying to another new teacher: “I didn’t train to be a therapist, I trained to be a teacher.”  With experience, my attitude around this role began to change and this last school year completed my “180." I really am not a therapist, but many of the actions I take with my students feel like therapy moves. My students are mostly English Learners and New Highland Academy is in one of the most violent neighborhoods in Oakland. Many students in our school experience trauma, but they are also remarkable: they generally remain a positive, resilient bunch. And like everywhere, some mixture of individual temperament and environment makes some kids better than others at talking and working together. During partner activities in the past I had often ended up frustrated over arguments that would erupt with certain students.Over the course of the school year, partnerships would slowly peter out in the classroom. With all the academic demands it felt like too much time to spend teaching and re-teaching how to get along. My work with Mills Teacher Scholars has transformed my commitment to supporting students’ social-emotional development.  Partnerships are now at the center of our classroom culture and I am like a coach on the sidelines of these partnerships, listening, recording, and giving suggestions. Teacher Learning=Changed Practice I began my inquiry project focusing specifically on partner reading. Then, in October I read a blog post by Larry Ferlazzo from 2009 about the importance of explicitly teaching “non-cognitive skills”.  That’s when I decided I wanted to go deeper into the partner process. My goals shifted to more generally 1) completing work with a partner, 2) cooperating respectfully, and 3) remembering and articulating the specifics of the interaction. I began to consciously modify my own practice to support students in meeting these goals.

Marguerite Sheffer, a high school English teacher in Oakland Unified, knew she wanted her students to read "closely," but she wasn't sure exactly what that entailed. Frustrated with the mixed messages she was receiving from professional development resources about how to support students with close reading, she turned her uncertainty into a rigorous teacher inquiry project that helped clarify her ideas around this skill. In a series of three blog posts, she shares her insights from her year long inquiry with Mills Teacher Scholars.  The new Common Core standards explicitly call out the skill of “close reading of a rigorous text.” Depending on who you ask, though, “close reading” means reading multiple times, reading through multiple critical lenses, or reading for “layers” of meaning.  All agree that close reading is deep reading, but there is not one sure path to get students there.  It becomes even murkier when we turn to removing the scaffolds and empowering students to closely read on their own. As a teacher, I had become frustrated because I was receiving different “close reading resources” that were so varied that they amounted to different cognitive demands on students--some were more teacher-directed, whereas others were open-ended and student-focused. Through my inquiry work at Mills, I was able to turn my frustration into advocacy, and enter the debate on what close reading means and how best to teach it.

In Part 3 of her three part series on close reading, Marguerite Sheffer describes how she arrived at  a personal definition of close reading and ultimately synthesized the varied messages she was receiving around best practices in teaching close reading of complex text. After concluding my inquiry on close reading, I became a believer in having students ask the questions about complex text.  In retrospect, it seemed obvious.  If I wanted students to make an original, bold claim about the text, I had to empower them to find their own meaning.  If I wanted to help them find meaning, I had to start by encouraging them to ask their own questions.  Most crucially, questioning seemed to encourage the elusive skill of grappling with a text.