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Here is another padlet resource!  (watch before using!)

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Here is another padlet resource!  (watch before using!)

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Text complexity cards - use these for progressions, making rubrics and assessing!

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Text complexity cards - use these for progressions, making rubrics and assessing!

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Choice board great for notebook pages, too!!!

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Choice board great for notebook pages, too!!!

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elizabethbkhoury@gmail.com

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Teach kids to discuss productively- Kate Roberts

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Teach kids to discuss productively- Kate Roberts

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Powering up talk in book clubs through written response

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Powering up talk in book clubs through written response

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Login - Heinemann | Publisher of professional resources and a provider of educational services for teachers, kindergarten through college

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Heinemann is a publisher of professional resources and a provider of educational services for teachers, kindergarten through college.

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Middle & High School: Workshop Instruction and Units of Study with TCRWP | Facebook

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This group is for Middle School & High School teachers who are implementing writing and/or reading workshop as well as thinking about how to use Units of Study in their classrooms. Here, we are…

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Log into Facebook to start sharing and connecting with your friends, family, and people you know.

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Sample Progression

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Amalia and McKenna - Graphic Novel Book Club Discussion.mov

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Log into Facebook to start sharing and connecting with your friends, family, and people you know.

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Your Research-based Guide to Developing Skilled Readers. 300+ strategies with learning progressions support 13 reading goals, with each strategy cross-linked to skills, teacher tips, prompts, research, and reading levels-everything from fluency to literary analysis.

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1. You Can Have It Both Ways: Reading Literature Deeply and Fostering Joyful, Independent Reading

2. Start with the Students: Identify the Skills Your Students Need

3. Look Beyond the Usual Suspects: Choose the Book Your Students Need

4. Map Out the Unit: Plan the Timing and the Strategies You'll Teach

5. Delight in the Details: Play Your Daily Instruction: Read-Alouds and Minilessons

6. Reach Everyone: Differentiate with Small Groups and Conferences

7. Keep Students Engaged: Address the Challenges of Teaching a Whole-Class Text

8. Track Growth: Assess Along the Way Through Writing About Reading

9. Launch Readers: Honor Choice to Develop Stronger, Independent Students

10. Celebrate Achievements: Assessing, Writing, and Making as an End to the Unit

Can't we provide both individualized instruction and challenging reading for our students? This book shows how we can do just that. In a nutshell:

1. We plan a unit in our classroom, naming the skill or skills that will be our primary focus.

2. We choose a whole-class novel that will both interest the kids and do the heavy lifting for the skills we plan to teach.

3. We plan our lessons accordingly.

That's it. Pretty simple. Of course, like many simple ideas in and out of education, the execution takes some doing. That's what the rest of the book is for. We'll begin with a deep dive into the troubles and triumphs of both whole-class novels and readers workshop and think about what we can aim for in our teaching (Chapter 1). Then, we'll follow the trajectory of a unit: choosing the skills and book you'll be using (Chapters 2 and 3), teaching with the whole-class novel (Chapters 4 and 5) and meeting individual needs while doing so (Chapters 6 and 7), assessing formatively (Chapter 8), helping students transfer the skills they've learned to book-club books (Chapter 9), and assessing summatively (Chapter 10).

- Introduction

"A Novel Approach dismantles timeworn methods for teaching whole class novels that consume class time, provide little relevance or rigor, and disengage students from reading. Kate Roberts offers an empowering road map for navigating whole class novels with your students while supporting their independent reading lives. A forward-thinking model for progressive literacy education."-Donalyn Miller, author of The Book Whisperer and Reading in the Wild

"I wish this book was around back when I completely stopped reading in High School. I lost years of my reading life, just as so many students turn away from reading in secondary grades because the assigned books are uninteresting, too confusing, or seem to drag on. Kate's approach shows us that when novel teaching is skills driven, brief, and complimented with book clubs, it can be more engaging to students and more rewarding for teachers."-Christopher Lehman, coauthor of Falling in Love with Close Reading and author of Energize Research Writing

"Increasing the volume of student reading starts with finding the right balance between independent reading, book club reading, and core work reading. And this is where A Novel Approach proves invaluable. Kate Roberts not only shows secondary teachers why achieving this balance is important, she demonstrates how to do it."-Kelly Gallagher, coauthor of 180 Days and author of Readicide

"There isn't a teacher among us who hasn't wondered, "How do I do all of this?" Reading this book is like having the world's best instructional coach by your side to help you craft a clear, manageable, and responsive approach to helping your students become better readers, thinkers, and people. Kate reminds us of the tremendous power of our instructional decisions on our students' reading lives, all the while, handing us resources, instilling in us a necessary confidence, and high-fiving us through pages of this book." -Allison Marchetti and Rebekah O'Dell, coauthors of Beyond Literary Analysis and Writing With Mentors

"Like any author worth her salt, Kate trusts her readers to bring their own expertise to the text. If you are expecting the definitive answer to the age-old question, "What's better: giving students opportunities for independent choice, or teaching with a whole class novel?" you won't get the answer. What you will get is Kate's straightforward, common sense approach on how to use both. Kate helps teachers weigh their options and make choices about what's best for their students. She shares her systems and structures and reassures readers that students of all levels can make growth."-Cris Tovani, coauthor of No More Telling as Teaching and I Read It, But I Don't Get It

"In A Novel Approach, Kate Roberts offers those of us in the classroom a witty, engaging, and thoughtful examination of a problem we are all grappling with one way or another: How to teach whole-classs novels in ways that challenge and engage not only our students but us! This thoughtful book provides a range of approaches that would work in different classes with different kids. Just as important, though, it shows us that it is still possible to be the sort of English teacher we wanted to be when we entered the profession."-Jim Burke, author of The English Teacher's Companion

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A practical framework for creating units that combine whole-class novels and independent reading to truly help students grow as readers. Take a deep dive into the troubles and triumphs of both to find a student-centered, balanced approach to teaching reading.

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example from Outsiders - developing ideas about characters across a whole class novel 

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example from Outsiders - developing ideas about characters across a whole class novel 

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Listen to my interview with Marisa Thompson (transcript):
Sponsored by Peergrade and 3Doodler

Check out information about Marisa Thompson's Ultimate TQE Course at the bottom of this page!

So much of the learning we do comes from texts: articles, textbooks, novels, and all kinds of online publications. Sometimes, those texts come in less traditional forms; in fact, our use of the word "text" has broadened over time to include things like films, images, and even diagrams. Regardless of what form they come in, texts make up the bulk of how our students experience learning.

But too often, when we assign texts to students, we find that they don't experience them with much depth. One reason for that may be that we don't set them up to do that. In many text-based classes (English, history, science), the learning cycle often consists of (1) consuming a section of the text, (2) answering teacher-created questions about the text, (3) taking a test after several sections have been completed.

For years, high school English teacher Marisa Thompson followed this same programming, and got typical results: Some students did the required work, but never seemed particularly invested in the books themselves. Others completed the questions unevenly, sometimes not answering them all, other times copying work from their peers. And when students didn't do the work, they got calls home and office referrals.

As this pattern repeated itself year after year, Thompson became more frustrated: The texts themselves were wonderful, but students weren't experiencing them the way they were meant to be experienced. Instead, they had shallow interactions with them, doing whatever surface work had to be done to get a grade.

Finally, she started experimenting with a different approach, and the way she teaches texts now is completely different from the way she used to. Her current approach, which she calls TQE, is similar to Socratic Seminar, where students lead a discussion on a given text, but with a few twists. Since implementing this new approach, Thompson has seen her students reading much more than they used to, and with much more depth than ever before. They are having college-level conversations about books in class, and for the first time, they seem excited about the books they're reading.

On top of that, Thompson's prepping and grading work for these class sessions is down to almost nothing.

What I love about this method, and why I'm sharing it here, is that I think it could be applied in a lot of different areas, not just with the study of novels. In any class where students need to read a text in order to learn, something along these lines could be implemented, and I think you'll find that the learning in your classroom gets much richer as a result. So as you read about TQE, think about how you might be able to apply it in your content area.

The Problem

As an English teacher, Thompson found that her students were experiencing books in a very shallow, grade-focused way.

"(I would) send students home, maybe get them started on Chapter 1, and then, Hey guys, go home and read Chapter 2. Come on back and we'll talk about it, and here's your list of questions; you're going to have a reading quiz. I realized I wasn't really assessing their reading with homework and quizzes. I was assessing whether or not they did their homework questions."

This method not only diminished the value of the books students were reading, it also led to other problems. "It made reading seem like a hassle," Thomspon says. "I started getting a bunch of cheating. One year I had 10 kids copy off each other. It turned this amazing story-this beautiful novel that everybody should read and enjoy and love-into a discipline problem."

Early Changes

Knowing something had to change, Thompson decided to try grading students only on whether their participation in class indicated that they had read the book.

"I said, 'Look. We're going to read this book, and we're just going to read it and talk about it. You're not going to have study questions. You're not going to have any reading quizzes. But I'm going to know if you read or not. I'm going to know.'"

These early discussions were similar to Socratic Seminar, where students came with questions and Thompson mostly observed. When a student participated in a way that demonstrated that he or she had read the book, their names would be crossed off of a chart. "And that was it," Thompson says. "The standard says, Be able to read and analyze at grade level. And if they're doing that, I mean, yeah, cross their name off. Move on."

For students who scored low on the discussion or who weren't initially comfortable with active participation, Thompson offered alternative means of assessment. "I said, hey, if I'm wrong with your score, then we need to come up with some sort of alternative: They were used to taking annotations, taking notes on their thoughts while they read-you can show me those. You can sit down and have a conversation just one-on-one, or you can take a test. So if you got an eight out of 10, and you're like, 'No, I want the 10 out of 10,' I have a multiple-choice test on the book."

Most of the time, Thompson's initial score on the discussion turned out to be accurate. "I did have a lot of students who had a B for their assessment, and they're like, No, I want the A. Great. And they took the test and then it was cute, because they were like Yeah, I didn't really read all of it. So my assessment was, on average, about 3 or 4 percent higher than what they were normally getting on their tests."

Right away, Thompson started to see changes in how her students were reading. "I had students who started reading more than they were assigned, and they were finishing the book early," she says. Some were even reading ahead.

Over time, Thompson refined her approach, adding small-group time before the large-group discussions, offering scaffolding to help students develop better questions, and structuring student contributions so that the richest questions got the most discussion time.

These changes have so elevated the level of discourse that Thompson sometimes feels like she's teaching college class. "And that's exactly what I tell them: 'What we just did, that was a collegiate literature course. That was amazing. You could walk into a college course and have this discussion.' And you can see that they're enjoying it."

The TQE Method

Here is the approach Thompson uses now, step by step:

1. Students Complete Assigned Reading at Home

Usually, this will be a segment of a longer text, like a few chapters in a novel. Students who show up having not completed the reading are invited to finish up in the hall during small group discussion (step 2) to catch up. They are welcome to return to class for the discussion when they finish.

2. Small Group Discussions (15 minutes)

When they arrive in class, students get into small groups, where they have 15 minutes to share thoughts, lingering questions, and epiphanies (TQEs) they have about the reading. Early in the year, Thompson provides stems to help students generate these (see below), encouraging them to move from the more simplistic ideas on the left to the more complex ones on the right.

3. TQEs on the Board

By the time the 15 minutes is up, each group needs to choose their top 2 TQEs from the group and write them on the board. Although these are meant to serve as the basis for the group discussion, they are not necessarily used as is.

"If they put something on there that is not at the quality or as thought-provoking as we need it to be for the class to discuss, we'll edit it together, the 40 of us," Thompson explains. "So it becomes a writing lesson."

Thompson also insists that when discussing a text, students use the author's name. When discussing Of Mice and Men, for example, she started by having students repeat the name "Steinbeck" five times. "I love Lenny and George. I love Lenny," she told them. "but he's totally fictional. So when you start asking questions like, 'Why did George do that?' George doesn't exist."

Instead, she has students practice asking questions like, "Why did hat theme is Steinbeck have George do that?" "W Steinbeck trying to convey to the rest of us by having his character do that?"

"It's not about the character," she explains. "It's not about the character's motivation, it's the author's purpose in providing that motivation for the character."

4. Class Discussion of TQEs

Thompson then moderates a whole-class discussion of the reading, using the TQEs that have been written on the board. This takes about 40 minutes of class time-she teaches on a block schedule, so there's plenty of time to dig in. When the class is actively studying a novel, they will have these conversations in every class meeting.

As for grading, Thompson simply records when students participate, and that's it. "I have a chart with their little pictures," she explains, "and I cross them off as I go. So I'm not necessarily grading them every single day. My student Sally might have participated a ton one day, and skipped the next day. But my standard-based grading says she is reading and analyzing at at least grade level. I don't need to score each of my 40 kids every single day."

"And the amount of planning is nil," Thompson adds. " I'm not creating, I'm not copying, I'm not collecting, I don't need to waste my time. My prep is reading before bed every night."

What Student-Centered Learning Looks Like

"We have all these really great aphorisms, these quotes about, 'Students should own their learning,' and 'Empower students,'" Thompson observes. "And it's like, well that's great, but how in the heck do we do that?"

Since starting the TQE process, Thompson has seen true student-centered learning in action: Students are in charge of the content of the discussions, and the ability to participate fully has become its own motivator for completing the homework.

"The peer pressure of Everyone's discussing this book- that becomes cool. To have an idea, to have an opinion. So the student comes in, and all of a sudden it's, "Wait, I read that part, and I think this," you know? And you want to talk about empowering a student? You just turned that student into a part of the classroom community." ♦

If you are a fan of the TQE method and you want to take it further, check out Marisa's Ultimate TQE Course. This course will revolutionize your reading and writing instruction and assessment through student-led inquiry, intentional teacher guidance, feedback that is immediately useful to students while eliminating the need for at-home grading, even for essays, and a personable approach to teaching and learning that leaves everyone in the room energized and engaged.

Cult of Pedagogy receives a portion of the Ultimate TQE Course sales that come through the link on this page.

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Deeper Class Discussions with the TQE Method

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Want your students to have rich, complex conversations about the texts they read? This method leads to the kinds of classroom discussions you thought only happened in college.

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Novel Study Mini Lesson planning protocol (Kate Roberts)

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Novel Study Mini Lesson planning protocol (Kate Roberts)

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RW Gr 8 Critital Lit - readers notebook checklist

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Book lists "teen course of study" to coach students up in text complexity in genres and series

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Book lists "teen course of study" to coach students up in text complexity in genres and series

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Key slides - unpacking units, planning for small groups, writing about reading

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Key slides - unpacking units, planning for small groups, writing about reading