Six Keys to Improving Students' Writing

                “Writing is a core skill for living, not just for school,” says New Hampshire teacher/author Penny Kittle in this exceptionally helpful Educational Leadership article. “Writing sharpens our vision, tunes us in to what matters, and helps us think through what we must live through. We write to express what we know and see and believe, and we have the power to determine exactly how readers will hear our work: where sentences will glide and where they’ll stop… We want students to know this and to write with clarity, voice, and authority.”

But too many teachers “act like scolds,” says Kittle, “red pens in hand, stamping out sin and punishing errors.” Too many students come to regard writing like a trip to the dentist, rush through their writing, and ignore the corrections and comments their teachers spend so much time making. “It’s time to stop scolding and start teaching,” she says. “At the center of teaching writing craft is what is at the center of all good instruction: the student. We don’t teach semi-colons; we teach students how to use them well. This is a subtle, but essential difference.” Here are her suggestions:

    • Independent reading – “Students become better writers when they read voraciously, deeply, and often,” says Kittle. “It is Leo Tolstoy and Sherman Alexie and Billy Collins and shelves of young adult literature consumed like the last deep breath you take before a dive. When books reach students, students reach for books.” She pushes her high-school students to read at least 25 books a year, constantly conferring, matching them with the right book, and asking them to find especially well-written passages to add to the “book graffiti board” on one wall of the classroom. She believes wide reading should be a whole-school effort.

• Providing topic choice – “Students who choose what they write about bring passion and focus to the task of writing,” says Kittle. “Ask them to argue for changes they believe in. Give them audiences throughout the school and the world.”

• Daily revision – Kittle has her students reread and listen to their writing each day, “sharpening ideas and images while shaping our sentences to be clear and smooth… All writers need a gathering place for thinking that allows for the mess of the first draft… Mistakes have to be OK as we struggle to get ideas on the page.” This takes place in a low-stakes environment and helps students pay attention to details as well as style and content. “Yet the mastery of mechanics is an illusion,” she says; “errors increase when we are unsure of what we are trying to say.”

• Sentence study – Kittle has her students imitate interesting sentences, “noticing how punctuation works in a sentence and then practice using it as they craft their own sentences.” One student called her over and asked, “Mrs. Kittle, I need punctuation that is bigger than a comma. What are my options?” Doing this kind of problem-solving in class helps students “see punctuation as a tool they can use, not just something they can name,” she says. “They become the independent writers we desire.”

• Combining sentences – Having students take three or four simple sentences and create a single complex sentence is excellent practice, says Kittle.

• Modeling the writer’s craft – “I write in front of my students, demonstrating the decisions I make to clarify and tune sentences,” she says. “I model the composition of essays, letters, and stories that matter to me, that I am deeply invested in crafting… I allow my students to watch me struggle. Passion is contagious.”

Kittle shares this YouTube video of one of her students discussing how he developed as a writer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shODcaAI5aU

For more information refer to the article, “Teaching the Writer’s Craft” by Penny Kittle in Educational Leadership, April 2014 (Vol. 71, #7, p. 34-39).

What Works to Improve Vocabulary & Comprehension ?

In a recent article in Reading Research Quarterly, Rebecca Silverman, Jeffrey Harring, Brie Doyle, Marisa Mitchell, and Anna Meyer (University of Maryland/College Park) and Patrick Proctor (Boston College) report on their study of vocabulary and comprehension instruction in 33 third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade classrooms (the schools were in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, were racially diverse, and 74 percent of students were eligible for free and reduced-price meals). By observing teachers during the school year and looking at students’ before-and-after assessment results, the researchers were able to see which teaching practices seemed to have the biggest impact on students’ literacy gains:

Vocabulary

-    Explicitly teaching definitions of words was associated with gains in vocabulary achievement.

-    Instruction that helped students see relations among words was also associated with vocabulary improvement, probably because it gives students leverage when they encounter new words.

-    Instruction devoted to syntax and morphology was also associated with vocabulary gains. “These findings suggest that if students are taught to break down words into meaningful word parts and to analyze how words are used in various syntactic contexts, they may be able to learn new words, improve language proficiency, and perhaps ultimately, use those skills to comprehend text,” say Silverman, Harring, Doyle, Mitchell, and Meyer.

-    The authors were surprised that getting students to think about words in different contexts was associated with negative effects on vocabulary achievement. They theorized this may have been because teachers weren’t handling these teaching moments well – for example, one teacher defined the word delivery and then talked about how she had ordered pizza the night before. The discussion veered into students’ favorite foods and the teacher never brought it back to the application of the word delivery in that context.

-    Instruction devoted to literal comprehension was associated with negative results in students’ vocabulary acquisition. Again, the authors believe this was because teachers were using low-level techniques with literal comprehension, mostly the Initiate/ Respond/Evaluate model in which the teacher asks a question, a student responds, and the teacher says whether it’s right or wrong and moves on – not more-effective techniques such as the who/what/when/where approach, guiding students to find answers to literary questions in texts.

Comprehension

-    Teachers’ attention to inferential comprehension – getting students thinking about what is implied in a passage – was associated with positive gains in student comprehension.

-    Instruction in comprehension strategies was associated with positive gains for bilingual students but not for monolinguals.

-    In general, however, bilingual students performed less well in vocabulary and comprehension than monolingual students, and the authors note that the teachers they observed did not do enough differentiating to help bilingual students – for example, using cognates, translation, gestures, pictures, and videos.

-    Instruction that targeted context clues, text elements, decoding, and fluency were not associated with gains or losses in comprehension or vocabulary achievement – probably because the researchers didn’t observe much instruction in these areas. It may also have been because teachers told students to “sound it out” or “read it with fluency” without giving detailed and explicit instruction on how to do each, and also because they weren’t giving differentiated instruction to students who needed help in these areas.

The study did not draw any clear conclusions on the relationship between students’ vocabulary and comprehension achievement, and the authors call for further research in that area. Attention to these instructional practices can easily be implemented in any K-12 classroom to assist with students acquisition of vocabulary and comprehension skills. 

“Teachers’ Instruction and Students’ Vocabulary and Comprehension: An Exploratory Study with English Monolingual and Spanish-English Bilingual Students in Grades 3-5” by Rebecca Silverman, Patrick Proctor, Jeffrey Harring, Brie Doyle, Marisa Mitchell, and Anna Meyer in Reading Research Quarterly, January/February/March 2014 (Vol. 49, #1, p. 31-55).

Adjusting Math Language to the Common Core State Standards

In an October (2013) Kappan article, Valerie Faulkner (North Carolina State University) presents a number of changes in the way elementary mathematics is conceived in the Common Core. Implementing the new standards means letting go of a lot of old habits. Hopefully, this information will be helpful to you as you continue to implement the instructional shifts in your practice as we fully implement the Common Core State Standards.

• Old habit to eliminate: Defining equality as “same as.”

The problem: This is mathematically incorrect and leads to misconceptions.

New habit to adopt: Defining equality as “same value as.”

For example, 3 + 4 tells a different math story than 4 + 3, but they yield the same value of 7.

• Old habit to eliminate: Calling digits “numbers.”

The problem: Failing to distinguish between digits, numbers, and numerals

New habit to adopt: Clearly distinguishing between numerals and numbers (which are essentially the same) and digits.

For example, 73 is a numeral that represents the number value 73 and has two digits – 7 and 3.

• Old habit to eliminate: “Addition makes things get bigger.”

The problem: When negative numbers are introduced, the old habit has to be debugged.

New habit to adopt: Addition is about combining.

• Old habit to eliminate: “Subtraction makes things get smaller.”

The problem: As with addition, negative numbers make this wrong.

New habit to adopt: Subtraction is about difference.

• Old habit to eliminate: When borrowing, saying, “We don’t have enough ones so we need to go to the next place.”

The problem: Students don’t understand that in the number 10, there are ten ones, but in the decimal system, we don’t “see” them.

New habit to adopt: “We can’t see the ones we need, and we need to find those ones.”

• Old habit to eliminate: “You can’t take a big number from a little number.”

The problem: The statement is intended to help elementary students deal with borrowing, but it’s mathematically inaccurate and leads to problems later on.

New habit to adopt: “We could take a larger number from a smaller number, but we would get a negative number. You will learn about these later, but right now we will learn to solve this problem using all positive numbers.”

• Old habit to eliminate: “Let’s ‘borrow’ from the tens place.”

The problem: This doesn’t prepare students for more-difficult borrowing and fractions.

New habit to adopt: Use “regrouping,” “trading,” or “decomposing” instead.

• Old habit to eliminate: Multiplication “makes things bigger.”

The problem: This is true only when using positive whole numbers and will confuse students later on.

New habit to adopt: Teach the three structures of multiplication: repeated addition; finding how many unique possibilities there are when matching one set with another; and finding a total amount or area when two sides are known.

• Old habit to eliminate: Division “makes things smaller.”

The problem: As with multiplication, this is not true a lot of the time.

New habit to adopt: Teach the different structures of division: repeated subtraction of groups; answering the question “how many for each one?”; and finding a side when an area and another side are known.

• Old habit to eliminate: “Doesn’t go into” (for example, 7 doesn’t go into 3).

The problem: Even elementary school children understand intuitively that sometimes cookies need to be split up when they don’t divide up exactly.

New habit to adopt: Prepare students for later learning by using accurate mathematical language. A teacher might say, “We could divide 3 by 7, but the result won’t be a whole number. When you begin working with fractions, you will solve problems like this regularly. Here we want to consider numbers that divide into other numbers without creating fractional parts or leftover pieces.”

• Old habit to eliminate: Saying “and” means decimal point.

The problem: In common parlance and math parlance, “and” generally means to combine, add to, or augment. Insisting on using “and” only when there’s a decimal buries the opportunity to have a discussion that focuses on considering unit sizes and different ways to form a number.

New habit to adopt: Don’t create false rules for language. In other words, it’s not a big deal to call 145 “one hundred and forty-five.”

• Old habit to eliminate: Canceling out – for example, “These eights cancel out.”

The problem: Students don’t notice how often properties are used and how important they are.

New habit to adopt: Explicitly use and discuss the idea behind simplifying. A teacher might say, “Here I have an 8 divided by an 8, and we know that anything divided by itself equals 1. So you can see here that we have simplified this expression without changing its value.”

• Old habit to eliminate: Referring to “the answer.”

The problem: If the goal is to find answers, there’s a tendency to forget the most important part: How did we do that? Why did we do that? How did you know that?

New habit to adopt: Use “the model” or “the relationships” or “the structure” or “justify your answer.”

• Old habit to eliminate: Guess-and-check as a strategy.

The problem: While this sometimes involves using number sense, it’s not logical or mathematical and doesn’t prepare students for more difficult challenges.

New habit to adopt: Teach systematic math representations – bar models, for example – to teach students to think like mathematicians.

“Why the Common Core Changes Math Instruction” by Valerie Faulkner in Phi Delta Kappan, October 2013 (Vol. 95. #2, p. 59-63).

Massillon City Schools Has Plan in Place to Address Third-Grade Reading Scores

School districts across the state of Ohio recently received their students' scores from the state's October OAA reading assessment. With nearly half of its third-grade students scoring below the 400 proficiency level, the Massillon City School District already has a plan in place for helping these students succeed.

"The Ohio Achievement Assessment our students took on Oct. 8 was significantly different than previous OAA exams," said Dr. Angela Chapman, Massillon's curriculum director. "The content has changed as well as the benchmark. Last year the Third Grade Reading Guarantee benchmark was 390. This year the benchmark is 392. The assessment was also dually aligned to the Ohio Academic Content Standards as well as the Common Core State Standards. Throughout the course of the school year we will work with students, teachers and parents to increase student reading levels as we align to these new standards."

Students who are at risk for not reading at grade level by the end of third grade have been placed on a Reading Improvement and Monitoring Plan (RIMP). This is an individualized plan for each student. Additional academic support will include small group instruction time with teachers and tutors, after school tutoring and a summer intervention program. The district will also provide additional professional development for teachers.

In addition, all K-3 parents are invited to attend an Elementary Parent Night on Tuesday, Jan. 21 from 6-7 p.m. in the district administrative office. The meeting will provide parents with strategies to help their children prepare for the OAA.

The assessment given in October was designed to provide districts with baseline data of how students are performing in Reading. When the test was given, students only had 32 days of instruction. The assessment will be given again in April when students have had 150 days of instruction to see how they have improved. The assessment can also be taken again in the summer and OAA alternative assessments are will also be available as well.

Under Ohio's new Third Grade Reading Guarantee, students who do not score a 392 or higher on the OAA by the end of third grade can be held back. For more information on the Third Grade Reading Guarantee please feel free visit the Ohio Department of Education’s website at  http://education.ohio.gov/Topics/Early-Learning/Third-Grade-Reading-Guarantee.

"The Massillon City School District staff has been preparing for the new third-grade reading standards," said Superintendent Richard Goodright. "The level of rigor on the new assessment is significantly higher so we are not seeing the levels of proficiency we have in the past. With the first assessment complete, we have a clearer understanding of what is being tested and can help our students achieve higher reading levels.

Understanding Informational Text

Ohio’s New Learning Standards for ELA/Literacy drawing from the Common Core State Standards for ELA/Literacy stress the importance of all K-12 students having increased access to informational texts and writing in response to reading informational texts. In last month’s issue of Educational Leadership, Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher (San Diego State University) wrote an article which suggested a number of strategies to help students master informational texts – that is, materials that teach about the physical, biological, or social world. Frey and Fisher don’t include literary nonfiction (biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs) and hybrid texts (for example, The Magic School Bus series) because these have narrative structures that make them more like fiction.

What makes informational texts difficult for so many students? Unfamiliar vocabulary, different grammatical structure, and densely packed content. “Teachers need to help students find access points that enable them to gain entry to complex informational text and then trek their way through to a successful conclusion,” say Frey and Fisher. Their suggestions:

            • Establishing purpose – Teachers must provide some kind of “hook” that increases motivation so students begin reading with a clear idea of what to expect. Teachers should also alert students to tricky parts and encourage them to use illustrations and graphics to understand the content.

            • Close reading – “Close reading requires a skilled teacher who can resist the urge to tell students the correct answer at the first sign of confusion,” say Frey and Fisher. “In fact, struggle is an essential part of the learning process; it provides an authentic reason for rereading and discussing the text.” This means scrutinizing a text, identifying central ideas and key details, investigating vocabulary and structure, and putting it all together to get the meaning. Students should annotate, answer text-dependent questions, and develop the habit of rereading.

            • Collaborative conversations – Students need to interact with each other using concepts and academic language. Book clubs, reciprocal teaching, and Socratic seminars are good formats for placing the text at the center of rigorous discussions.

            • Wide reading – “In the push to increase the complexity of the informational texts that students read, there is a risk that students will actually read less,” say Frey and Fisher. “Complex texts take time to understand, and close reading slows students down as they reread and annotate.” Teachers need to give students time every day to read high-quality, appealing texts in class, as well as encouraging them to read outside of school. Frey and Fisher believe students shouldn’t be required to write logs and reports on this kind of reading, but instead engage in ungraded follow-up activities to share their ideas.

To better assist with the implementation and understanding of Informational Texts I have compiled some instructional resources for you. 

Guiding Questions for Using Informational Text (based on the ELA/Literacy Instructional Practice Guides from Achievethecore):

• How does the unit allow students to persist in efforts to seek evidence for their responses by returning to the info text when discussing or collaborating?
• What opportunities are provided for students to build on each other's observations or insights around a piece of informational text - including charts, maps, primary docs etc.?
• What tools/strategies will students be able to use to help them gain content knowledge from informational text?
• How are questions and tasks designed to help students build academic vocabulary (content or domain specific vocabulary and syntax)?
• How are questions and tasks designed to require students to use details from the text to demonstrate understanding and support their ideas about the text?
• What factors have been considered to make sure the text used is at or above the complexity expected for the grade level?

Instructional Resources:

• Guide for Writing Text Based Questions
• InfoOhio-Informational Text Resource Kit
• Readworks.org- This website provides K-9 lexiled reading passages and supporting text dependent questions aligned to the ELA Common Core State Standards 
• Close Reading Strategies with Informational Text-Classroom Video 
• Increasing ELL Student Reading Comprehension with Non-Fiction Text-Article
• Closing in on Close Reading- ASCD Article
• Exemplars of Close Reading Lessons

PARCC Assessments

The PARCC Assessments are coming soon! This week we received notification that four of our buildings in the Massillon City School District were selected to participate in the Spring administration of the PARCC field test assessments.

PARCC Background Information

As you know, Ohio is leading the way in assessment innovation by developing new next generation assessments with other states and the District of Columbia as part of the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) consortium. PARCC is developing a set of assessments in English Language Arts/Literacy and Mathematics based on the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) that will be used by all states in the consortium. 

In preparation for the first operational administration of PARCC assessments in the 2014–2015 school year, a PARCC Field Test will be administered in the spring of 2014 to more than one million students across all PARCC states. Participating students in grades 3-11 will be assessed in English Language Arts/Literacy or Mathematics. We are very excited that Massillon Students will have the opportunity to participate in these field tests in the Spring.

The primary purposes of the PARCC Field Test are to:

• Examine the quality of items so that PARCC can build assessment forms for the 2014-15 school year;
• Test out assessment administration procedures; and
• Give schools and districts the opportunity to experience the administration of PARCC assessments.

In preparation for the PARCC field tests and the PARCC assessments teachers should familiarize themselves with the sample items. Today, PARCC released new sample test items, PARCC has now made public exemplar test items across the grades in both mathematics and English language arts/literacy. 

These sample items are designed to help teachers, students and parents get a better sense of how PARCC will measure student learning in mathematics and ELA/literacy. The new assessments are aligned to the Common Core State Standards. 

PARCC will make all of its sample items available later this year on the PARCC technology platform, providing an opportunity for students and teachers to try out the assessment system in the manner in which it will be administered. 

For more information about PARCC, please visit www.parcconline.org.

Weekly Communication

Dear Colleagues,

This weekend I received the latest issue of the International Reading Association’s Reading Today magazine.  I was hoping to find an article that would inspire my weekly communication with you.  I was reading an article by a professor at the University of Albany, State University of New York, when I became inspired.  Our curriculum team is in the process of evaluating all of the district’s textbooks and resources in order to determine those content areas that are in the greatest need for updated materials.  We are cognizant of the fact that your materials must be aligned to Ohio’s New Learning Standards.  Granted, it is challenging to teach these new standards with outdated resources.  Donna Scanlon (2013) brings up an interesting point in her article that I read.  In 2008, she and her colleagues conducted a study in which they provided professional development that emphasized comprehensive and responsive literacy instruction to kindergarten and first grade teachers.  These teachers were not from the same school district, but rather from multiple districts in which a variety of literacy programs and practices were in place.  Scanlon and her colleagues noted that these teachers, after having received focused professional development, were able to reduce the number of children in their districts who demonstrated literacy learning difficulties by approximately 50%.  This study suggests that teaching has a greater impact on student success than programs do.  What you do in your classrooms makes all the difference!  In an effort to continue to provide you with professional development that is aligned to Ohio’s New Learning Standards, we will soon launch our district professional development program that will provide you the opportunity to showcase your expertise, grow as leaders and collaborators and enable our students to compete in a global society.  So, please stay tuned!  Enjoy your week and continue to offer up your very best instruction.

Thank you,

Dr. Lynne S. Kulich
Coordinator of Instruction