Jill E. Thomas has been teaching since 2002. She has spent the last 10 years in Oakland Unified School District at Life Academy where she taught everything from 9th grade English to PE to 12th grade English to 6th grade reading intervention. She has also blogged for Teaching Tolerance and Edutopia. Currently, Jill works as a Teaching Effectiveness Specialist supporting a teacher growth and development pilot in OUSD. In this piece she reflects on how learning partnerships with students, strengthened through her Mills Teacher Scholars inquiry, helped her better understand the limitations of how she been teaching visualization strategies to support students' reading comprehension. In my ninth year of teaching, I threw myself a curve ball and offered to teach a sixth grade reading support class. I’d taught reading for a number of years, but never in middle school. I thought I would mostly get schooled on preteens, and I certainly did, but I learned quite a bit about teaching reading too. As an English teacher in an urban school, the majority of my students have always been reluctant, if not struggling, readers. I’ve acquired a repertoire of reading strategies that I teach them to help address their needs. One of the classics is visualization. On the surface, it seems simple: create pictures in your head of what you read on the page in order to stay engaged and “see” what the text is about. But it turns out to be more complicated than that.

Julie Humphrey has a background in electrical and bio-engineering. She worked at General Motors, the University of Michigan, and Nicolet Biomedical, before she turned her efforts towards STEM education in 1999. Currently a middle school science teacher at Oakland School for the Arts in Oakland, California, she has seen a drop in enthusiasm as her female students enter middle school and is concerned that this is where we lose a large number of future scientists. Through her Mills Teacher Scholar’s inquiry, she sought to learn methods for increasing student engagement while deepening student content knowledge, supporting all students to remain excited and curious about science. “I was embarrassed, just like Darwin many times….” my 7th grade focal student wrote during our Theory of Evolution unit. This student, who previously reported not really “getting science,” clearly connected with Darwin’s life and times. But was there science in her response? I believe that engagement can be measured when students have learned curriculum deeply enough to be able to apply it. So at the beginning of the last school year, I covered traditional introductory life science topics and then assigned journal-based writing that would not only require students to display their new knowledge, but also give them the opportunity to apply it. When studying nutrition, students read articles on eating styles: omnivore, vegetarian and vegan. I asked them to choose one of the options - and defend that choice. Many students used direct quotes from the articles as the only evidence for their choice. I had hoped to see “comparing and contrasting” about the benefits and drawbacks of their choices but, in most cases, the writing did not exhibit an understanding of all the options and the impact that each choice might have on their life and health. After reflecting with my Mills Teacher Scholars colleagues on the poor responses, I realized that the problem was not that the students couldn’t think deeply, but that they needed more guidance in getting there.

Laura Alvarez is an 8th grade English teacher at Melrose Leadership Academy in Oakland Unified School District.  A long time Mills Teacher Scholar and part of the Mills Teacher Scholar team, she has focused her recent Mills Teacher Scholars inquiry work on supporting students' thinking and discussions around complex text. In this series of three connected blog posts, she discusses how looking at video data of student book groups broadened her understanding of student learning in this area and helped her respond in ways that moved her students forward.  As teachers, we’re often told to put students into groups. Group work has some kind of magical power in the world of education. Through group work, stronger students support their peers, students interact and construct learning together, the teacher isn’t the only authority or source of knowledge and expertise in the classroom, etc. But what actually happens when you put kids together has always been somewhat of a black hole for me as a teacher. In the midst of a busy class of 30+ students, it’s hard for me to listen in a focused way to one group of students. This year I decided my 8th graders were ready for me to let go and have them meet independently in small reading groups. With the Common Core’s focus on academic discussion and students grappling with complex text, I hoped that by letting go students would be pushed to take more ownership for their reading and discussions and be more self-directed in their meaning making. In setting up their reading groups, I tried to be as explicit as possible about the purpose--supporting each other’s reading development. The learning target was: “I can prepare for and participate in discussions about text so that everyone reaches a stronger understanding of the text,” and students regularly reflected and gathered evidence about whether they were meeting this target.  To prepare for their groups, students read the assigned chapter or chapters and wrote factual and/or interpretive questions to discuss with their group, along with the relevant page numbers. To help me grapple with the black hole of group work, I regularly audio recorded four focal students in their groups as part of my Mills Teacher Scholars inquiry work.

Laura Alvarez is an 8th grade English teacher at Melrose Leadership Academy in Oakland Unified School District. In the third of her series of three connected blog posts, Laura discusses how looking at video data of student book groups prompted her to think in a more nuanced way about what makes a "strong" reader. Listening to students’ conversations all year confirmed that the SRI was just one window into their reading abilities and that for some, like Elisa and Alejandro (described in my previous post), it was very incomplete. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas has a Lexile score of 1080, far above Elisa and Alejandro’s May SRI scores of 751 and 687, respectively, but they were able to successfully engage with the text collaboratively. During this time, many of my stronger readers with lexile scores above 1000 were struggling with The Book Thief, which has a lexile score of only 730. This led me to wonder what a Lexile score actually is and how a 30-minute computerized SRI test assigned them to my students. According to its creators, “A Lexile text measure is based on the semantic and syntactic elements of a text.” They caution that other factors affect how readers relate to books, including the book’s content and format and the reader’s interest, and that a lexile measure is only a starting point for selecting books. This caution is essential. As teachers, we’re often given assessment results as if they are some holy grail, some magical window into our students’ true capabilities. An easily administered computer test, like the SRI, which prints out neat reports with the click of mouse and efficiently allows us to group students, is very alluring. But reading is complex, and we really can’t open up kids’ brains to see what’s going on when they interact with text. The best we can do is open up little windows to peak through.