In January, I attended a professional development session through Edmonton Regional Learning Consortium called "When Kids Can't Read: Strategies to Improve Adolescent Literacy". Upon registration, I did not realized that I had chosen a professional development opportunity that would change and inspire my teaching methodology.
I have reflected, learned, and sought out different and engaging methods of presenting curriculum to ELA students where they are engaged and the learning is meaningful. In my classes, I shy away from the rote method of completing a reading, having a guided discussion, and then providing students with reading comprehension questions. It is my belief that method is not engaging or meaningful to the students or the teacher. I have researched and experimented with close reading strategies. I originally began with Cris Tovani's I Read It, But I Don't Get It. I love her use of "sticky notes" and her ideas as they made sense to me. Students will be engaged in what they read if they find purpose, connections, and meaning. As an active reader myself, I love this strategy and use it in my own personal reading or within my book club. In the classroom, however, I found sticky notes to be a bit more challenging. The following difficulties I found with sticky notes:
- students were unclear as to what they needed to find for the sticky note - even if I had modelled it for them
- students were unaccustomed to using sticky notes and would lose them
- students wanted "questions" and did not want to re-read text
- students just did not want to annotate
In this school year, I have taught English Language Arts 10-1 and 10-2. In both streams, I have noticed that a large majority of students are unaccustomed to close reading strategies, such as the use of sticky notes, and have more classroom experience with rote reading comprehension questions. In my practice, I had to come up with a way to combine the two where it was less threatening way to have them close read with out making them feel like they were "doing something different".
In January I found the close reading practice that I had been searching for and that would be practical for my classes. The professional development session I attended through Edmonton Regional Learning Consortium called "When Kids Can't Read: Strategies to Improve Adolescent Literacy." The presenters, Kylene Beers and Robert Probst, provided discussion, professional learning, methodology, strategies, and philosophies based on their book Notice and Note: Strategies for Close Reading. Through the session Beers and Probst had facilitated both whole and small group discussion on rigor, curricular outcomes/ common core competencies, and how to engage reluctant readers to re-read text for understanding. Beers and Probst unveiled the six signposts of literature in their session. They modelled "Contrasts and Contradictions" with us again in both whole and small group activity. I cam away from the session with various ideas and strategies that I could bring back into the ELA classroom.
I made the choice to use Notice and Note close reading strategies with my ELA 10-2 class starting in the second semester. I thought that experimenting with it would be the only true test for me if it would work in my classroom. At the beginning of the semester, I used the same mentor text used in the PD session and carefully taught and modelled "Contrast and Contradictions". At first, the students did not buy into the activity. I persevered and re-introduced it with the novel study Hunter in the Dark. Previously, when I taught this novel study, I would have my students complete four sticky notes per chapter: figurative language, character development, 'This reminded me of,' and one last sticky note dependant upon the chapter. This time, rather than giving students four sticky notes per chapter, as a group we would look for any of the signposts that we could find. I began by completing a 'mind map' with all the signposts. It took sometime, and still I was met with some reluctance, but by the time we were at the mid-point of the novel, students ideas and ease with the signposts had come along and were beginning to initiate discussions, questions, and analysis within small group and whole class discussion.
Of course, I would have to model and re-explain the signposts. As much as this could seem to be reteaching, it affirmed the students knowledge and personal capabilities to trust their judgement in their reading comprehension. Once we reached Chapter Six, students were able to complete in small groups their own mind map containing all six signposts.
After completing the novel study, I asked my class their preference. Many students had began to really like uncovering signposts of literature. One student even made an electronic word document and shared it with me. This experiment has taken me down a path of teaching reading and I look forward as to how noticed and note will look in my next units and classroom assignments.
