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Heinemann: Video with Vicki Vinton

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In Dynamic Teaching for Deeper Reading: Shifting to a Problem-Based Approach, the new book by Vicki Vinton, She writes:

"Feedback has long been seen as a powerful form of teaching, though increasingly researchers are recognizing that certain types of feedback are more effective than others. It turns out, for instance, that grades and written comments on student assignments, which are the most common type of feedback, are the least effective. That's because, as Dylan Wiliam writes in Embedded Formative Assessment, " in such situations, feedback is rather like the scene in the rearview mirror rather than through the windshield. Or as Douglad Reeves once memorably observed, it's like the difference between having a medical [checkup] and a postmortem.""

In the following video, Vicki Vinton goes into further detail about the nature of feedback, and what and when it is most effective.

Vicki Vinton is a literacy consultant and writer who has worked in schools and districts across the country and around the world. She is the author of Dynamic Teaching for Deeper Reading: Shifting to a Problem-Based Approach (2017), and coauthor of What Readers Really Do: Teaching the Process of Meaning Making and The Power of Grammar: Unconventional Approaches to the Conventions of Language. Vicki is also author of the novel The Jungle Law. Additionally, you can find Vicki online, at the popular literacy blog To Make a Prairie ( www.tomakeaprairie.com).

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In Dynamic Teaching for Deeper Reading: Shifting to a Problem-Based Approach , the new book by Vicki Vinton, She writes: "Feedback has long been seen as a powerful form of teaching, though increasingly researchers are recognizing that certain types of feedback are more effective than others.

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How to Begin the Shift to a Problem-Based Approach 

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How to Begin the Shift to a Problem-Based Approach 

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Heinemann: Video with Vicki Vinton

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In her new book, Dynamic Teaching for Deeper Reading Vicki Vinton calls for a shift of focus from complexity of text to the complexity of thinking a reader must engage in in order to understand the text.

I propose that rather than using problematic Lexiles and vague rubrics that contain circular reasoning, we assess a text's complexity by how much a reader has to figure out that the writer has conveyed indirectly... If our ultimate goal is truly independence, we need students to do much more thinking that highly scaffolded approaches ask of them- and students simply can't take on more complex thinking if the text is too difficult at the work and knowledge levels. Also, students build their identity and sense of agency as readers when they're the ones doing the work, and as students have more positive and agentive reading experiences, they become more competent and confident.

In the following video, Vicki talks about one way to start a move toward a problem-based approach in the classroom:

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Vicki Vinton is a literacy consultant and writer who has worked in schools and districts across the country and around the world. She is the author of Dynamic Teaching for Deeper Reading: Shifting to a Problem-Based Approach (2017), and coauthor of What Readers Really Do: Teaching the Process of Meaning Making and The Power of Grammar: Unconventional Approaches to the Conventions of Language. Vicki is also author of the novel The Jungle Law. Additionally, you can find Vicki online, at the popular literacy blog To Make a Prairie ( www.tomakeaprairie.com).

This entry was posted in Comprehension, Conferring, Education, Elementary, Heinemann, Language Arts, Literacy, Literature, Middle School, Reading and tagged Dynamic Teaching for Deeper Reading, Vicki Vinton on by .

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How to Begin the Shift to a Problem-Based Approach

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In her new book, Dynamic Teaching for Deeper Reading Vicki Vinton calls for a shift of focus from complexity of text to the complexity of thinking a reader must engage in in order to understand the text.

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from Vicki's blog: To Make a Prairie

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One of the most common text features found in professional books are subtitles, and having taken a look the last two weeks at dynamic teaching and deeper reading, I want here to explore and explain what's behind this book's subtitle: Shifting to a Problem-Based Approach.

Many of you already know something about problem-based teaching and learning (a.k.a. PBL). In fact, PBL may already be in your teaching repertoire. But here's a little background: Problem-based teaching and learning became established as a specific teaching practice when medical school professors in the 1960's shifted from teaching their students through lectures and textbooks to setting them up to solve the kind of complex diagnostic problems they'd experience in the field. And in today's world, PBL is joined by a plethora of what the Buck Institute for Education dubs "X-based learning" practices, such as project-based learning, game-based learning, design-based learning, brain-based learning-and even zombie-based learning!

Most of these are variations of basic constructivist and inquiry practices that again go back to Dewey and to other great thinkers like Piaget and Einstein, who claimed, "I never teach my pupils. I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn." And while there are some differences between X-based practices, they all share at least some of the features that Dr. Howard Barrows, who adapted these ideas to the teaching of physicians, describes here:

If Google and educational websites are any indication, it seems as if PBL has taken hold in many math, science and STEM classrooms, but it hasn't gotten much traction in reading, where we tend to think that problem solving is only needed at the word level. But think back to (or catch up on) the students I wrote about last week, who worked their way through "Louisa's Liberation." They did, indeed, have to figure out what a word meant, but to do that they had to first figure out what point was being made about the fact that Louisa was playing doctor, not house or even nurse, as Katie and Emily thought. And figuring that out then allowed them to figure out what the author, Jean Little, might be trying to show them about people and life through the story.

All this figuring out was needed because the writer conveyed this information indirectly. And in Dynamic Teaching for Deeper Reading, I propose that we see every instance in which a writer conveys something implicitly, versus explicitly, as a problem that text poses for readers. This can be something as deep and meaningful as what a writer wants us to consider about the human condition to something as seemingly simple as what or who a pronoun refers to. And part of the trick of a problem-based approach is becoming more aware of where, precisely, those problems are in a text.

To build that awareness in the book, I regularly invite readers to look at a short text or excerpt to consider what the writer hasn't said directly that a reader would have to figure out. And to give you a taste of that, take a look at the text below. It's the opening of a folktale that a group of 5th grade teachers brought to my attention after it appeared on a state benchmark assessment. How much do you have to figure out just to get the basic who, what, where and when? (And if you'd like a strategy for that, pay attention to when you're confused.)

If you're like the teachers who shared this text with me, your jaw might have dropped at what seems like the unnecessary confusion of this passage. Mostly it's because the characters are referred to in different ways, which the writer doesn't explicitly clarify. And just imagine how much your confusion would be compounded if you were a fifth grader who also didn't know what the words dispute, Zen, monastery and monk meant.

If we see these, though, as problems to solve and give students a chance to collaboratively wrestle with them, many are able to do what a small group of sixth grade students did. They had no idea what a Zen master was, or a monastery, but they reasoned that the Zen master must be some sort of teacher because he had a student, and that, whatever a monastery was, it was where the Zen master lived. They also recognized that a conversation was going on, and using what they knew about dialogue, they were able to figure out that the Zen master and the old monk were one and the same, as was the wandering and the visiting monk. And while there were questions about whether there was one or two one-eyed characters (one a student and the other a monk), one of the group made a case for them being one and the same, too, because he thought that if the one-eyed monk was a new character, he'd have been introduced with an a not the.

Each chapter in the book's Section Two is grounded in a classroom room example that shows kids grappling with specific kinds of problems texts pose, like figuring out the basics in fiction or understanding the implications of facts in nonfiction. And each comes with a chart that shares some of what readers have to do to solve those problems, like this one on figuring out the basics in fiction and narrative nonfiction:

Additionally, between the chapters in Section Two, you'll find a Considering Complexity feature that notes other texts that poses similar problems at different reading levels, so, regardless of what grade you teach or where your students are, you have some place to start:

My hope is that these features will encourage and inspire you to try out this teaching approach (if you haven't already). And finally, I think it's important to remember the benefits of making this shift. Not only will students retain more of what they've learned because they've figured things out for themselves, but they'll reap the additional benefit that the ancient Roman philosopher Seneca described:

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Counting Down to Dynamic Teaching for Deeper Reading: Solving Problems as Readers

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One of the most common text features found in professional books are subtitles, and having taken a look the last two weeks at dynamic teaching and deeper reading, I want here to explore and explain what's behind this book's subtitle: Shifting to a Problem-Based Approach. Many of you already know something about problem-based teaching and...

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from Vicki's blog: To Make a Prairie

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The title of this week's post was inspired by Bertrand Russell, who wrote,

When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, . . . and making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. That's if you want to teach them to think.

I love Russell's words for all sorts of reasons, not least of which is the question he seems to raise at the end: Do we really want to teach kids to think-or not?

My hunch is that most of us would say we're committed to teaching children to think. But I sometimes wonder if this is one of those values that isn't always aligned to our actions-like saying we value growth mindsets, which honor approximations and mistakes, while evaluating students through rubrics that score not how close a student came but whether he 'got' something or not.

As for thinking, I worry that to make sure students 'get' whatever we teach them, we often provide too much scaffolding, breaking down complex skills or tasks into bite size pieces or steps that minimize the need for thinking. Or as fourth grade teacher Jeremy Greensmith pithily put it in his interview with Zoe Ryder White for The Teacher You Want to Be,

The danger with a lot of what gets done at the moment is that there's so much scaffolding that you end up just teaching the scaffold, and you really don't teach the way of thinking and the way of reading and writing-you just teach [students] to deliver the tool you taught them."

Of course, Jeremy also raises questions, such as, What do we really mean by thinking? What are the ways of reading and writing? And how do we effectively teach those? And to consider those questions, let's take a look at a common unit taught in third grade, reading and writing biographies.

When it comes to reading biographies, many units focus on teaching students things like:

The difference between expository and narrative nonfiction

The difference between biographies and other kinds of narrative nonfiction

The structure of biographies (chronological)

How to identify the traits of a biography's subject (like you would a character in fiction)

How to identify the theme, big idea or life lessons of a biography

How to learn about a historical period through biographies

While some of these objectives require inferring, many involve the kind of thinking found at the first level of Webb's Depth of Knowledge: identify, recall, recognize, and match. And thinking is even more limited if we offer additional scaffolds, like providing lists of character traits,

thought prompts,

or common biography theme statements.

As for writing biographies, students are usually taught how to take notes, paraphrase, use transitional sequence words, and craft hooks, topic sentences and conclusions, none of which necessarily involves higher order thinking. But what was the deeper thinking work of biographies for readers and writers?

As an occasional biography reader myself (and author of a historical fiction novel), I recognized that a biography is the biographer's interpretation of the significance of someone's accomplishments and life, not just an objective recounting. So the thinking work of reading a biography was to try to figure out what the biographer wanted her readers to understand about the subject's life, while the writing work was figuring out what story do you, as a biographer, want to tell about your subject.

This is exactly the kind of deeper vision of genre I explored earlier, and I kept it in mind as I planned for a day with third grader teachers working on biographies. For the demo lesson I looked for biographies that conveyed slightly different stories about the same subject through the author's choice of what events to share (and leave out), what words to use to describe those events, and what message she seemed to want readers to take away. And I hit the jackpot with two biographies of George Washington Carver, one from the "Who Was" series of biographies and the other A Weed is a Flower, by the award-winning writer and illustrator Aliki.

In the classroom, I began by asking the kids what they had already learned about biographies, and it turns out they'd met many of the unit's objectives already through their whole class study of Jane Goodall and their biography book club books. They also said they'd noticed that biographies of the same subject didn't always contain the same events-which made them think they had to read multiple biographies of the subject they'd be writing about to be sure they knew everything about him or her. And with that I segued to my lesson.

It was possible, I said, that some biographers didn't have the same events as others because they hadn't researched enough, but more likely, it was because biographers choose which events and details to include based on what they want us to understand about their subject. And to help us understand that, we'd look at the opening of two different biographies of George Washington Carver and about what each writer might want us to understand about Carver.

I began with the "Who Was" book, which opens with an anecdote about a woman who "lived in the biggest house in Diamond Grove, Missouri" and was frustrated that her roses weren't as nice as her friend Susan Carver's were. So she asked Susan what her secret was and we learn the following:

When the class shared out what they thought the writer wanted them to understand about Carver, they said thinks like, "He was really helpful and hard-working," "He loved plants," and "He loved his foster mother." And with that in mind, we moved on to the opening of A Weed Is a Flower, where the students literally gasped when I read the word slaves.

Immediately they realized that Aliki was telling quite a different story about George Washington Carver. Here he was helpful, not simply because he was thoughtful and nice, but because he was committed to helping his people-and his life had been nowhere as pleasant or easy as it seemed in the "Who Was" book. Also they were bursting with questions: Was he still a slave? Did Mrs. Carver own him? What happened to his real mother? and Why did the other author not say he was a slave?

Over the next week they would explore the different choices these authors had made and why, but at that point, I invited them to go back to their tables and think about what story they wanted to tell about their subject by first looking at the books they had read to see what each biographer had emphasized and then to consider what they, as biographers, thought was important. And that required far more thinking than filling in the blanks of a thought prompt or matching a book to a theme statement.

So if we really want to teach children to think, we have to create and give them opportunities to do so-and I'll share more about that in another post.

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If We Want to Teach Children to Think . . .

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The title of this week's post was inspired by Bertrand Russell, who wrote, When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, . . . and making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning.