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This resource offers ways you can scaffold support for grade-level text before, during, and after reading.

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Implementing Seidlitz' 7 Steps using ELPS and Language Objectives 

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Implementing Seidlitz' 7 Steps using ELPS and Language Objectives 

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Boyd's Sheltered Instruction Reference Sheet

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Boyd's Sheltered Instruction Reference Sheet

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Boyd's Sheltered Instruction Reference Sheet

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Chunk and Chew Activity overview and examples

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Total Response Signals & QSSSA - Based on 7 Steps to Building a Language Rich Classroom by Anita de la Isla | This newsletter was created with Smore, an online tool for creating beautiful newsletters for educators, nonprofits, businesses and more

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Texas Foreign Language Association - TFLA

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Texas Foreign Language Association - TFLA

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TFLA advances the study of LOTE in Texas

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TFLA one day at Region 20 4-6-19 - Google Drive

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Rebecca Skloot needs little introduction to most readers of The Open Notebook: Her book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks has been a bestseller since its publication in February 2010, and she has toured the U.S. and Europe almost constantly since then talking about the book and the many issues of race, science, and privacy it raises. She's also been interviewed many times as well. Here she talks with David Dobbs about two particularly writerly issues the book raises: structure, and the use of the writer as character.
You've been interviewed to death about this book, so I'll limit this to two areas readers of The Open Notebook might be interested in: one is structure and the other is your decision to put yourself in the book and how you handled that.
That's good. I honestly think that structure is one of the most important tools in writing, yet it's not something that people often pick apart and really get obsessed with.

Did you carry your concern about structure into this project, or was it something you developed as you wrestled with it?

No, I came to the book already fixated on structure. I did my MFA in nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh, and Lee Gutkind, who was one of my professors there, taught a readings class where he constantly harped on structure. Every class, the first exercise we had to do with every piece we read was map out the structure. The first day of class we read an essay in class and his first question when we were done was, "What's the structure of this piece?" We had no idea what he meant. And he wouldn't tell us. He would just push us and push us, and people would randomly guess things ... They'd say, "It's a profile." He'd say, "No, that's not a structure."

Eventually it clicked for me when he walked me line-by-line through a piece he'd written and said, See how the piece starts here, then goes back in time here, then forward in time here, but always comes back to that same story I started with, which is actually in chronological order? The story was about a veterinarian facing tough decisions about whether to euthanize various animals; it did jump around in time a lot, and included sections of exposition, or facts-like the history of the field, or whatever-that weren't part of the narrative, but when you pulled the essay apart it became clear that the structure was just a day in the life of this vet going from one patient to the next. From that point on, I started obsessively mapping out the structures of everything I read. When I started teaching I made my students do the same thing.

Any student who has ever studied with me would think, "Ugh. Structure, structure, structure; that's all she talked about." My philosophy is, once you understand what structure is, then you can talk about characters and narrative arcs and how to fill in the story. But for me, structure can just completely make or break something.
What are some key teaching pieces you used?
I always use John McPhee's " Travels in Georgia" because it's such a brilliant structure. Once you figure it out, it's so basic. But it's really hard to see it at first. When you say to people, "Read this thing and tell me how it's structured," they just can't. But once you really pick it apart you see he starts in the middle of the story, then he goes forward for a while, then loops back around so by the middle of the piece you're back at the point where you started, then you continue forward. He's so subtle and graceful with the structure that few readers even realize they've looped back around to the point where the story started because he doesn't hit you over the head with it. He calls it the lowercase e structure, and once you learn to recognize it you see it everywhere-in so many great stories, books, movies.
Are there other writers or books who have been particular models for you, structure-wise?
When I was working on my book, I knew very early on that I wanted it to be a disjointed structure that told multiple stories at once and jumped around in time between different characters. If you learn the story of the HeLa cells by itself, it's a very different story than if you learn it alongside the story of what happened to Henrietta and her family as a result of those cells. Each story takes on a different weight when you learn them at the same time.

Plus, if I had just told the story from the beginning-"Henrietta Lacks was born ... blah, blah, blah"-nobody would have known why they should care who Henrietta was. Then Deborah, Henrietta's daughter, would have appeared about halfway through the book and the focus of the story would have suddenly shifted completely to her, since she's really the main character of the book in many ways. Then a few hundred pages later I would have appeared as a character out of nowhere. It would have all been very disjointed and disorienting and wouldn't have worked.

The other thing I knew was that I wanted my book to read like a novel but be entirely true. That to me is the definition of Creative Nonfiction. So instead of reading nonfiction books as models, I turned to fiction. As soon as I realized I had to structure the book in a disjointed way, I went to a local bookseller, explained the story to her and said, Find me any novel you can find that takes place in multiple time periods, with multiple characters and voices, and jumps around a lot. So she did. Some of the most helpful books early on for me were Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café, by Fannie Flagg; Love Medicine, by Louise Erdrich; As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner; Home at the End of the World and The Hours, by Michael Cunningham. I read a long list of similarly structured novels that all proved helpful in some way or another: The Grass Dancer, by Susan Power; How to Make an American Quilt, by Whitney Otto; Oral History, by Lee Smith. I also read a lot of important African American authors to immerse myself in their voices, cultures, history: Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Alex Haley, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, Toni Morrison, Edward P. Jones, Albert French ... it's a long list.
In a way you have to claim the right to do certain things fairly early in a book, or you can't do it. In this case you had to claim the right to go backward and forward in time. You wait a while to get you in there-you don't appear until page 67. But that's early enough.
Right. This relates to the famous line from Checkov: "If in Act I you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act." You need to set the reader up early for the story that follows while not introducing extraneous stuff that isn't related to the plot.

In this case, since I knew the book was going to be a braid of three narratives (the story of me and Deborah; the story of Henrietta and the cells; and the story of Henrietta's family), I needed to introduce all three strands of the braid up front, so I wouldn't lose readers later. Doing that lets readers know what to expect and gives you license to play with the structure and timeline because you've prepared them for it. I spent a lot of time working and re-working how I'd handle introducing all three stories up front since there were so many things to squeeze in.
How do you get all those into the beginning of the book?
In a way there are three beginnings to this book because there are three different narratives. The prologue introduces the "me" side of the narrative where I write in first person. Then right after that I have that one little page in Deborah's voice, to get her firmly in there. I struggled with that. I knew she had to be in the beginning of the book so you'd know she was going to be a main, strong character. I made countless attempts at that using different scenes from late in the story (for a while the book started with the scene of her seeing her mother's cells for the first time, which is now part of the climax of the book in the third section). But none of that worked because it detracted too much from the real beginning: the moment Henrietta walks into the hospital for the first time in 1951. Eventually I realized readers just need to hear Deborah's voice enough at the start to know there's something big coming from this person later on that we'll come back to.
Back to the larger structure. You start at 1950, and you pop back to 1920, and then essentially you come back to mid-century, end of century, mid-century, end of century, mid-century, end of century. And you progressively spend more time around 2000, and at a certain point it becomes more the story of you and Deborah, once you have the backstory established. How did you plot these time shifts?
I actually mapped it all out with index cards. The one chronological story that goes throughout the book is the story of me and Deborah. That's totally chronological, never jumps around in time. Having one chronological story helped anchor the structure so I could jump around with the other stories more, because you always came back to that one straightforward narrative.

As I said earlier, I saw the structure of the book as a braid, with three stories that wove and wove and wove. But at a certain point the three strands of the braid became one and the narrative was just a straightforward chronological story from that point. That happens on page 231 with the sentence, "That reporter was me." That's the moment that all three of the narratives come together, and then it becomes just one. There's no jumping back in time after that.
The story of you and Deborah is the one with the most classic narrative tension-there's a suspense about what will happen.
It's a road-trip-a journey where everybody gets transformed. I thought a lot about that element of narrative tension and how structure can help build the suspense. I learned quite a bit about that from novels, but even more so from movies. My boyfriend is an actor, writer, and director, and he started saying, "You should be watching movies because this jumping-around structure is one of the most standard movie structures."

So I started watching a lot of movies structured like that and eventually found my way to "Hurricane," about Hurricane Carter, the boxer. As I was watching it, I just freaked out because after the first few scenes I realized, Oh my God, this is the structure of my book. Three narratives braided together, a journey, etc. So I storyboarded that whole movie frame-by-frame on color-coded index cards (one color per narrative thread). I'd already mapped my own book out using the same three-colored index card scheme, and I'd mapped out a structure, but it wasn't working. After I mapped out "Hurricane" I spread the cards out on a bed and put my book's index cards on top of them, lining up the colors, to see how the film was braiding differently than I was. I immediately realized the problem with my structure was that it didn't move around in time fast enough. That was the big lesson I learned from movies: that to make this kind of structure work, it has to move quickly. You can't linger too long in any one time period or you lose the momentum of the other two.
How many designs did you try but throw out?
Oh man ... From the very first version I wrote to the first version I considered a first draft, I probably went through easily 15 different structures. And that doesn't count the many times I revised it after that: I'm a heavy re-writer. Once I had a first draft done, I rewrote it completely at least six times before my editor had to pry it out of my hands. I could have kept rewriting it forever. There isn't a single paragraph from the first draft that made it into the final book without being rewritten. I'd bet money that there isn't a single sentence from the first draft in the finished book.
This will give comfort to others who are struggling. Now I want to move to the second topic. You've talked before about your decision to put yourself in the book as a presence, a character. What were the arguments in your own head, either as you saw them then or as you see them now, against and for putting yourself in?
Well, for me the argument for years was all against. I refused to be in this book. I think a lot of potentially great stories out there have been damaged and in some cases ruined by a writer not being able to step out of the story and let the story happen. When I teach, I always harp on my students, "Stop inserting yourself in other people's stories."

There are times when I think writers should be in stories. You may be an actual character in the story, or you might be essential as a bridge between the reader and the story-there are some cases where stories are so foreign to readers that having a first person writer in the middle that fully understands the story can help readers relate to it. I wrote a story for The New York Times Magazine about people who spent tons of money on veterinary care for their goldfish; I put myself in there as a sort of sympathetic bridge toward understanding the people I was writing about. Most readers could relate more to me in that story (someone trying to understand why anyone would do MRIs and CT scans and surgery on a goldfish), than they could to the people I was writing about. In the end, I did understand their motives and saw the ways they were similar to motives we all share when it comes to love and difference-because of that, my presence seemed more likely to help readers connect to those characters than if I'd just told their story without my experience alongside it.

But other than those two situations-the writer as essential character or writer as bridge-I think there is no reason to be in a story.
In this case it offers a substantial gain: By seeing the Lacks family try to deal with you, we're seeing them try to deal simultaneously with an intrusive world but also with a part of the world that wants to be more sympathetic to them-and a changing view of how human subjects should be used.
Exactly. Pretty early on, when I was struggling with this, I knew this wonderful fiction writer named Albert French who lived right around the corner from me in Pittsburgh. I would talk to him about the story as I was figuring it out. And he kept saying to me over and over again, about the Lacks family, pounding it into my head: "Their resistance to you is part of the story."

At that point I didn't know why they were resistant to me. He just kept repeating that. I realized I had to figure out why they were so resistant to me and that doing so would lead me to the real story. Which it did.

Plus things started happening between me and Deborah that were not your usual writer-subject things, like her slamming me against a wall ... like faith healings and something that resembled an exorcism. I would come home and tell my family and my agent and my friends about what was going on and they just kept saying, "This has to be in the book! This is part of the story."

Even Deborah started harping on me. She would say, "Don't you make me be in that book by myself. You're just as much a part of this story as anybody else now." That's when I realized I had to be in the book because I was part of the story. It wasn't that I was inserting myself. Without realizing it, I had actually become a character in their story.
Like it or not.
Yeah. Like it or not. I was one in a long line of people who'd come to them wanting something having to do with those cells, and in some ways, my presence in their lives was one of the most complicated yet: I was there for more than a decade, exposing Deborah to situations and information she never would have been exposed to. She wanted that, and I couldn't have stopped her once we started, but some of those situations turned out to be dangerous for her. She came very near a stroke at one point because of information we found together about her sister.

The story of the HeLa cells is about many things-it's about science and ethics, race, class, medicine, education. But overall, it's also about unintended consequences: of doctors, of well-intended science, of journalism. I tell the story of all the other journalists who came along before me and the impact they had on the family. Eventually I realized it would be dishonest to not include the story of my own character, the journalist who came and didn't leave for ten years. I also felt like I needed to include that story as a form of disclosure, so people could understand the relationship I developed with Deborah.
You've set up nicely my next question. This is something I've been dying to ask you since I read the book. First of all, you break a million rules of journalism-you're incredibly embedded in this family, completely enmeshed. The story is sort of out of control. Deborah even tells you on page 233, "You have got no idea what you're getting yourself into," and you did not.
Clearly.
So reading it I had a strong, growing sense that we had a Rebecca Skloot, a mature writer, who's writing a book about a young writer named Rebecca Skloot who was smart and fearless but nevertheless inexperienced and on the brink of major trouble all the time.
Clearly. Yes. Right! (laughter)
Really. You end up in dangerous places; you're dropped in homes of people who have reason to be hostile to you; at one point you seem in direct and immediate danger of assault when Henrietta's son Zakariyya is standing over you, yelling at you in rage, and you're saved-this is my favorite line in the whole book-when Deborah, whom you've been taking on reporting trips, for God's sake, saves your ass by popping up out of nowhere at your shoulder and asking, "Y'all still reportin'?"
Yeah, I know (laughter). I loved that-definitely one of my favorite lines too.
I think that was the moment that this image crystallized for me: of this young writer, not the one writing the book but the younger writer researching the book in the book, skating ever further out over ever deeper water covered by increasingly thin ice-and miraculously never falling through. Sometimes you could hear the ice crack. To me this created an added layer of tension, and I suspect that for readers who aren't thinking of Skloot the character versus Skloot the author, it created a tension, too. Did you mean to be one Rebecca writing about another Rebecca? Or did that sort of happen?
I was conscious of it only in that I was constantly arguing with my younger self.
How do you mean?
Throughout the book I was learning how to be a reporter and how to write. I started fresh from an undergraduate biology degree with no real training in journalism and no clue about how to do any of this. My notes from my first trip to Turner Station were horrible. I sat down ten years later to write that scene (a scene I hadn't planned to write because I wasn't planning to be in the book), and I opened the notebook and thought, "That's all you wrote down? You moron! What were you doing?" My version of notes of the street where I was driving would be: "Dog. Trees. Brick." It was useless information.

The thing that saved me was that I took compulsive amounts of photographs. I photographed everything-every room that I was in, every person I talked to, every street that I was on, the sky to capture the weather, you name it.
So you were over-reporting visually.
Yes. Also I tape-recorded everything, including just driving around in the car yelling at myself-the 20-something me is in a car trying to convince myself to get out in the most dangerous part of East Baltimore and start knocking on the doors of strangers who I know aren't going to be happy to see me ... I'm driving around yelling into my tape recorder because I'm afraid. "Just get out of the car!"

But I would also hold up my tape recorder and drive and just babble into it: I'm driving down the street, and there are all these kids running around in the street and they're wearing these clothes and they look like this and they're waving at me and their moms are hanging laundry in front of houses that look like this ... So when I went back and transcribed all my tapes, everything was there, including my internal issues, and that, combined with the photographs, let me go back and rewrite those scenes. But I also re-reported many of them. I would go back to the people who were there at the time and interview them about scenes that I had actually witnessed myself, to make sure I hadn't missed anything. Many times they'd be like, "Weren't you there? Why are you asking me these questions?" And I'd think, "No, that wasn't me; that was ten-years-ago me; that's actually a totally different me."

Writing the first-person stuff was hard, partly because I was resistant but also because it involved this weird battle with my younger, inexperienced self. Listening to these tapes later, it really registered, "Wow, you were doing something sort of crazy right there."
Right. That's the feeling I got repeatedly: "Oh my God, she just invited Deborah to do the reporting with her!" I was thinking as I read, "This cannot end well."
But it did.

People often ask if I wish that this book had taken less time. I wouldn't trade those ten years. If I had written this book faster, it just wouldn't have worked. I needed all that time to really understand the story and how it all fit together.
Your enmeshment within the family kind of goes against a journalistic idea about involvement and distance from subjects and so on. Do you think it's important to keep a certain distance, and if so, how do you reconcile that with how close you came to be with the Lacks family?
I think that it's important to maintain distance in terms of autonomy of the story. So no matter how close and enmeshed I got with the Lacks family, there was never any question that I was a reporter. Deborah would call me "her reporter," and I think that in part was because I was constantly reminding her that's what I was. A reporter. I always had my notepad out and my tape recorder on because I felt like it was essential to have that constant reminder there: everything we talked about was going on the record. Deborah had no problem with that. When she had a point to make that she felt strongly about, she'd grab my tape recorder out of my hand and yell into the microphone, then she'd have me play it back for her so she could make sure it got recorded. There was never any question about our relationship being reporter and subject, and that I wasn't just there to do an as-told-to story of the Lacks family's life. We talked a lot about the other people I interviewed and research I did because I felt it was important to always be clear that I was telling all sides of this story, not just theirs. Which is what Deborah wanted anyway, so that was never an issue.

That said, I do feel like you have to open yourself up to the emotions of the story and be vulnerable as well. In that way, I'm not a fan of distance. With the Lacks family and everybody else, I have always been a very open writer. I feel like, I'm asking you endless questions and expecting you to answer them no matter how personal; it's only fair that you be able to do the same to me. I think it helps build trust.
You go in guarded against Deborah and she's gonna throw you out.
Oh yeah, to win Deborah's trust, you'd have been that open, and then some. She spent so much of her life being deceived, having information withheld from her, she couldn't trust someone if she didn't feel like she knew them.
A glimpse behind the scenes:

A sampling of Skloot's handwritten notes from her early reporting

David Dobbs is an author and journalist who writes about science and culture for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Wired, National Geographic, and other magazines. His e-book My Mother's Lover, published by The Atavist, was a #1 Kindle-Single bestseller. He is the author of three other books and writes the Wired blog Neuron Culture. Several of his magazine stories have been included in leading anthologies, including Best American Science Writing 2010 and Best American Sports Writing 2011. Follow David on Twitter @David_Dobbs.

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How Rebecca Skloot Built The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

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Rebecca Skloot needs little introduction to most readers of The Open Notebook: Her book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks has been a bestseller since its publication in February 2010, and she has toured the U.S. and Europe almost constantly since then talking about the book and the many issues of race, science, and privacy it raises.

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Word Document for Planning

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Scroll down to the last 3 pages for a summary of scaffolds

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Copy of ELAI_II_Meaningful Classroom Talk.Walqui

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Training and Materials (read only)

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The steps are simple...

1. Pick the TEKS
2. Create a question that meets the cognitive expectations of the TEKS (not just the content/topic)
3. Create an exemplar answer
4. Erase the parts students should provide This is their stem/frame
5. Plan for how you will measure mastery
6. Plan lessons and activities that give students "at-bats" with the thinking required of the TEKS

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A Focus on Content Language and Language Structures

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Common Core Companion 6-8 Standards Decoded

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Common Core Companion 6-8 Standards Decoded

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Thank you Kelly!

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Common Core Companion 6-8 Standards Decoded

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What Students Can Show Us About How School Is Letting Them Down-and How to Fix It

We've been telling students that doing well in school creates opportunities-that showing up, doing the work, and meeting teachers' expectations will prepare them for their futures. Unfortunately, that's a myth.

Far too many students graduate from high school still unprepared for the lives they want to lead. They enroll in college and land in remedial courses, or start jobs and discover they're missing skills they need. We wanted to understand why.

To do this, we followed nearly 4,000 students in five diverse school systems to learn more about their experiences. What we found was unnerving: classroom after classroom filled with A and B students whose big goals for their lives are slipping further away each day, unbeknownst to them and their families-not because they can't master challenging material, but because they're rarely given a real chance to try.

In fact, most students-and especially students of color, those from low-income families, those with mild to moderate disabilities, and English language learners-spent the vast majority of their school days missing out on four crucial resources: grade-appropriate assignments, strong instruction, deep engagement, and teachers with high expectations. Students spent more than 500 hours per school year on assignments that weren't appropriate for their grade and with instruction that didn't ask enough of them-the equivalent of six months of wasted class time in each core subject. And middle and high school students reported that their school experiences were engaging less than half the time. In classrooms with more access to these resources, students did better-particularly if they started the school year behind their peers.

This lack of access isn't random. It's the result of choices adults make at every level of our educational system. We're asking all adults whose choices affect students' experiences to commit to unraveling the opportunity myth.

Citation: TNTP. (2018). The Opportunity Myth: What Students Can Show Us About How School Is Letting Them Down-and How to Fix It. https://tntp.org/assets/documents/TNTP_The-Opportunity-Myth_Web.pdf

Bring TNTP to your school system

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What Students Can Show Us About How School Is Letting Them Down-and How to Fix It We've been telling students that doing well in school creates opportunities-that showing up, doing the work, and meeting teachers' expectations will prepare them for their futures. Unfortunately, that's a myth.

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by Robin DiAngelo

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A graphic organizer for building student vocabulary.

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Marzano's 6 Steps to Building Vocabulary

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Marzano's 6 Steps to Building Vocabulary

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Building Background Activity. Post an image or picture prior to learning about content to begin generating ideas and questions around it.

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Use this graphic organizer when viewing short clips.

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Seidlitz's Seven Steps and which Language Objectives would work for these strategies.

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Support for writing quality language objectives

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Support for writing quality language objectives

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A simple template to use when reflecting on student data.

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In an ELAR classroom

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Summary of John Seidlitz' 7 Steps to a Language Rich Classroom

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Summary of John Seidlitz' 7 Steps to a Language Rich Classroom

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Marzano's Six Step Process

In "Building Academic Vocabulary" (Marzano, 2004), Marzano outlines a comprehensive approach to learing the context specific academic vocabulary, or the brick words that students encounter in their reading. The first three steps help us introduce new terms during the frist lesson; the last three steps help students practice & reinforce those terms over time.

Remember: Describe, Describe, Draw, Do, Discuss, Play

Step 1: Describe - Instead of a standard definition, teachers give students a description or explanation of the word or term using examples and visuals. The goal is to appeal to learners of ALL types in order to help them understand new vocabulary.

Step 2: Describe - Students are asked to give their own description or explanation using their own words. By listening/reading student descriptions/explanations, we can assess mastery or provide help. Students record descriptions in their personal notebooks to reference later.

Step 3: Draw - Students draw representations of the new vocabulary word/term. Acceptable ways to complete this task include: drawing pictures, designing symbols, making graphics, creating cartoons, finding a visual on Internet or magazine. This can be done individually or in groups.

Step 4: Do - Give students more practice using new vocabulary words/terms. Have them participate in activities such as: identifying prefixes, suffixes, synonyms, antonyms, related words and additional visuals.

Step 5: Discuss - Students discuss words/terms as they work with/in partners, triads or groups. This conversation is more effective when structured. Monitoring discussions clears up any confusion students may have.

Step 6: Play - Students participate in games that reinforce deep understanding or new vocabulary words/terms. Examples of games include: Jeopardy, Wordo (like Bingo), Charades, Pictionary, Scrabble, etc...

If you like what you see be sure to follow along with #SiglerNation on Twitter. You can follow Matt Arend on Facebook and Twitter.

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7 Steps...Language Rich Classrooms - By, John Seidlitz by McClure Marshals | This newsletter was created with Smore, an online tool for creating beautiful newsletters for educators, nonprofits, businesses and more

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Use these processing ideas with students after every 10 minutes of direct instruction.

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High School co-teachers use a "Sentence Stem of the Day" to support structured conversations!

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This is the Powerpoint used during the Come and Coach It! Conference.

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Come and Coach It Conference - EL Coaching

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Kagan structures to support Active Engagement in Structured Conversations

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Kagan structures to support Active Engagement in Structured Conversations

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This is a free article that offers some ideas on how to support accountability in structured conversations.

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kagan publishing teaching catalog teacher resources school supplies music games cooperative learning differentiated instruction educational products esl ell foreign language posters multiple intelligences textbooks math books science literature social studies

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Kagan's FREE Articles - Kagan Structures for English Language Learners

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Read Dr. Spencer Kagans provocative and insightful articles on Kagan Structures and how they have the power to transform education. Cooperative learning, multiple intelligences, the brain, character development, Win-Win Discipline.

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Modify these frames for specific lessons, post them, and use them to provide support during structured conversations.

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developed by John Seidlitz

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Social Studies Questioning Stem Guide.pdf

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Made with Seesaw - Student Driven Digital Portfolios. Free for teachers!

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Adapted from the more comprehensive checklist developed by Region 13

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ELL OBSERVATION CHECKLIST for Instructional Leaders - Justin's update.docx

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Increase turns-and-talks and reduce ping-pong style whole class questioning.

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from The SIOP MODEL for Teaching History-Social Studies to English Learners

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After a coaching session, a Kindergarten teacher created a pictorial criteria for success for one of her stations. She did a great job!

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Review

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Sample Teach

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Made with Seesaw - Student Driven Digital Portfolios. Free for teachers!

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Made with Seesaw - Student Driven Digital Portfolios. Free for teachers!

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Made with Seesaw - Student Driven Digital Portfolios. Free for teachers!

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Made with Seesaw - Student Driven Digital Portfolios. Free for teachers!

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Made with Seesaw - Student Driven Digital Portfolios. Free for teachers!

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Made with Seesaw - Student Driven Digital Portfolios. Free for teachers!

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Made with Seesaw - Student Driven Digital Portfolios. Free for teachers!

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Yes, we need to prepare our students for standardized tests, but "practicing for a standardized test is like “practicing” for your annual physical exam; it mistakes measures for goals."

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In this era of accountability, educators throughout the nation are under pressure. Administrators are held accountable for student achievement in their schools as gauged by standardized tests. Increasingly, teachers' evaluations include a percentage based on the results of test scores (at least in the tested grades and subjects). In some states, a school can be "reconstituted" if standardized assessment results do not improve over time. And in many communities, the test scores for a district or a school affect real estate values within their boundaries. Not surprisingly, these factors lead teachers and administrators to pay close attention to the results of external tests and strive to improve them. One consequence of this high-stakes accountability system is the increased use of "test prep" in the classroom; i.e., where teachers spend time focusing primarily on the tested content while giving students lots of practice with the test format (primarily multiple choice).

While mindful of the pressures associated with the high-stakes of accountability testing that lead to test preparation actions, excessive test prep can narrow the curriculum, undermine meaningful learning, and negatively affect student interest and motivation. At best, test prep can yield modest, short-term gains in test scores, especially if students are unfamiliar with standardized test formats and protocols. However, I contend that the practice itself, while well intentioned, is grounded in misconceptions that may, ultimately, undermine the learning that students need to perform well on standardized tests. Let's explore these points further.
What is Test Prep?
The practice of test prep in the U.S. has several distinguishing characteristics. Students typically engage in exercises and worksheets that mimic the format of standardized tests. Since accountability tests are generally constructed around sets of selected-response items, test prep involves lots of practice on decontextualized, multiple-choice questions. Sometimes, test prep includes timed, on-demand, assessments to simulate test-day conditions. In states that employ computer-based testing, students are often given opportunities to practice using a laptop or tablet device. Many schools and districts have institutionalized test prep by mandating the use of interim or benchmark assessments modeled after their state tests. Not surprisingly, we have witnessed the growth of an entire cottage industry of commercial "test prep" materials to address this perceived need.

A second characteristic of test prep relates to the content that is practiced. Typically, teachers are exhorted to focus only on tested knowledge and skills. The logic is understandable; i.e., since we are being held accountable for student achievement on standards A, B, and C, then we don't have to worry about standards X, Y, and Z since they are not tested. Yet this logic has problematic consequences for learning. For example, in English/Language Arts, most standardized tests do not assess Listening, Speaking, or extended writing even though they are listed in all E/LA standards. Accordingly, teachers rarely spend any "test prep" time on listening and speaking skills or essay writing, even though these skills are fundamental to literacy development.

A third aspect of test prep involves the explicit teaching of test taking strategies and common "trigger" words used in test prompts. Examples of trigger words include compare, critical, distinguish, differentiate, key, major, significant, solve. Here are common test-taking strategies that are taught:

Read the question completely before you look at the answer options.

Read all the choices before choosing your answer.

Cross out any choices that you know are wrong.

Answer the questions that you know first; then tackle the remaining questions.

Usually the correct answer is the choice with the most information.

Always take an educated guess if you do not know the answer.

In a question with an "All of the above" choice, if you see that at least two correct statements, then "All of the above" is probably the answer.

Be aware of the time and pace yourself. Don't spend too much time on any one item.

If time is about to expire, just select an answer for as many of the items as possible, even if you haven't had time to read the questions.

It is not uncommon to see such trigger words and test-taking tips posted on classroom walls prior to test days as reminders to students.

Of course, it makes sense to familiarize students with standardized test formats since it is a genre that they will see throughout their school lives. Similarly, there is nothing wrong with imparting test taking strategies in advance of a high stakes assessment. However, such actions can be accomplished quickly and should not divert valuable instructional time from more substantive learning.
Test Prep Practice is Rooted in Misconceptions
The logic of test prep is plausible and rooted in experience from other domains. For example, if you want to improve your performance in dribbling a basketball or piano playing, then you must practice those activities. Shouldn't the same apply to test taking? Perhaps, but I contend that excessive test prep practices reflect two fundamental misconceptions that deserve to be critically examined:

Misconception #1 - The best (and only) way to improve test scores is to practice the test.

While this statement seems to makes sense on the surface, Wiggins and McTighe (2001) offer the following analogy to expose this misconception:

"To begin to uncover the flaw in this reasoning, consider an analogy. Once per year, we go to the doctor for a physical exam. No one particularly relishes the thought of such an exam, but we go with the understanding that it is in our long-term interest to get an objective (yet superficial) measure of our health. The doctor performs a few tests in a short span of time (e.g. blood pressure, pulse, temperature, blood work for cholesterol, etc.). The 'physical' is a small sample of tests, yielding a few useful indicators of one's health status. Its validity and value stem from the fact that the results suggest our state of health, not because the physical defines healthfulness.

Now suppose we are terribly concerned about the final numbers (weight, blood pressure, cholesterol, etc.) and that these 'scores' ultimately link to our personal health insurance costs. What we might do, in our panicky state prior to each annual physical, would be to 'practice' for the test - focus all our energy on doing well on the physical exam (as opposed to what its indicators suggest). If our doctor knew of our actions, her response would surely be: 'Whoa! You're confused: you have mixed up causality and correlation here. The best way to prepare for your physical exam is to live a healthful life on a regular basis -exercising, watching weight, lowering intake of fats, eating more fiber, getting sufficient sleep, avoiding tobacco, etc.'

It would be thought silly to practice the physical exam as a way to improve one's health. But this confusion is precisely what we see in schools all over North America. Local educators, fearful of results, focus on the indicators, not their causes. The format of the test misleads us, in other words."

Misconception #2 - Standardized test items involve primarily recall and recognition, and thus drill and practice will be the most effective method to prepare students for them.

Given the predominant use of the multiple-choice format, there may be the assumption that these items primarily test factual knowledge, basic skills and "low-level" thinking. After all, there is a "right" answer, and all a student has to do is select that answer from a set of given alternatives. What follows from this assumption is the belief that covering lots of factual information and drilling and practicing multiple-choice items will provide adequate preparation for the accountability tests. Moreover, one might conclude that there is no need for, nor benefit from, in-depth learning involving extended thinking or the use of more authentic assessments.

Grant Wiggins (2013) points out the flaw in this reasoning: "Even though the test format requires a selected response, it does not mean that the tested knowledge is necessarily simple. The [format] deceives you into thinking that since you are mimicking the format of the test, you are therefore mimicking the rigor of the test. But data show the opposite conclusively: local tests are often less rigorous than state and national tests even when they mimic the format."

Item analyses of consortium and state test results validate Grant's point. Indeed, the pattern is remarkably consistent - the most widely missed items on standardized tests are not those assessing simple recall of factual knowledge or basic skills as referenced at Level 1 on the Depth of Knowledge scale (Webb, 2006). Instead, they require inference and interpretation in reading, analysis and reasoning in mathematics and science. While knowledge and skills are needed, the more difficult items demand "higher-order" thinking and involve transfer at Depth of Knowledge (DOK) Levels 2 and 3. Such items often include distractors that present typical misconceptions, common errors, and flawed reasoning that will trip up test takers who only have learned by rote. Accordingly, low-level, drill and practice is not the optimal instructional method for improving test scores.

Too often, the information revealed by test prep exercises identifies whether students have chosen the "correct" answer rather than helping teachers determine if they have a conceptual understanding of the underlying concepts and skills and can apply (transfer) those.
Casualties of Test Prep
There are opportunity costs to consider when precious classroom time and energy are devoted to test prep, and excessive test prep can have significant negative consequences. When classroom instruction and assessment fixates excessively on the multiple-choice format, meaningful learning is sacrificed and students are likely to become bored and disengaged by repeated drills on decontextualized items that lack relevance. Judy Willis, MD, a board-certified neurologist who left her medical practice to become a teacher, has written extensively on the brain and learning. She addresses the negative consequences of test prep in a recent article (Willis, 2012):

Boredom, frustration, negativity, apathy, self-doubt, and the behavioral manifestations of these brain stressors have increased in the past decade. As facts increase, as over-packed curriculum expands, and as demands for rote memorization for high-stakes testing intensify, the brains of our students have reacted to the increased stress. Stress, including that provoked by sustained or frequent boredom or frustration, detours brain processing away from the higher, rational, prefrontal cortex. In the stress state, the lower, reactive brain is in control. Retrievable memory is not formed, and behavioral responses are limited to involuntary fight/flight/freeze-seen in the classroom as acting out, zoning out, or dropping out.

In short, it doesn't matter how many practice tests we give; if the learners are not engaged or fail to see the purpose, their learning will not be optimized and performance on high-stakes tests will not be bolstered.

Don't take my word; ask yourself: Teachers - To what extent are your students motivated and genuinely engaged by test prep? Administrators - Do your best teachers claim that test prep is their favorite or most effective teaching practice? Parents - Do your children rave about the joys of test prep at the dinner table?

The pressures to improve accountability test scores can result in a narrowing of the curriculum. It is often the case that the tested subjects receive greater attention compared to those not tested. Indeed, we have witnessed schools and districts that have doubled up on reading and mathematics instructional time while reducing or eliminating the arts and/or health and physical education. Sadly, for many students, these are the most engaging subjects in their school day.

The use of precious classroom time for test prep can distort students' perception of the nature of schooling. They could easily conclude that a primary mission of schools is to improve test taking savvy and raise test scores rather than to strive for meaningful learning. Moreover, a focus on multiple-choice teaching and testing can convey the fallacious idea that navigating school and life is simply a matter of choosing the "correct" answer from 4 or 5 alternatives!

Ironically, the widespread use of test preparation practices based on narrow, inauthentic assessments can unwittingly undermine the very "college and career" readiness competencies identified in national and state standards and for the development of 21st century skills. Many educators and policy makers worry that important educational goals (e.g., discussion and debate, extended writing for real audiences, research, teamwork, creative problem solving, expression in the arts, or substantive research and experimental inquiry) that are not easily and cheaply tested are likely to "fall through the cracks." To be blunt, students will not be equipped to handle the sophisticated work expected in colleges and much of the workforce if teachers simply march through a superficial "coverage" of discrete knowledge and skills in grade-level standards and assess learning primarily through multiple-choice tests of de-contextualized items.
So, What Should be Done?
It would be naïve, indeed irresponsible, to dismiss the reality of high-stakes accountability tests by imploring educators to ignore them or suggesting that if teachers simply "teach well and love the children" the test scores will take care of themselves. As noted, it is prudent to introduce students to the test format. However, beware of mistaking the measures for the goals. Excessive "multiple-choice" teaching and practice testing are not the best long-term strategies for developing a well-rounded, educated person or realizing significant improvements in scores on annual accountability tests.

I contend that the best way to raise test scores over the long haul is to: 1) teach the key concepts and processes contained in standards (the content that is purportedly tested) in rich and engaging ways for deep learning; 2) collect evidence of student understanding of that content via more authentic local assessments; and 3) regularly review student work on authentic tasks in Professional Learning Communities (McTighe, 2008).

To summarize, I offer the following set of Do's and Don'ts as more effective alternatives to test prep.

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In this era of accountability, educators throughout the nation are under pressure. Administrators are held accountable for student achievement in their schools as gauged by standardized tests. Increasingly, teachers' evaluations include a percentage based on the results of test scores (at least in the tested grades and subjects).

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Make any video your lesson. Pick a video, add your magical touch and track your students' understanding.

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Inside Standards Institute: Analyzing Juicy Sentences at the Secondary Level  - Shakiela Richardson

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Understanding Language/Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity published a paper titled Principles for the Design of Mathematics Curricula: Promoting Language and Content Development. It discusses the fundamental importance and interdependence of mathematics content development and mathematical language development. The authors aim to "provide guidance to mathematics teachers for recognizing and supporting students' language development processes in the context of mathematical sense making. We provide a framework for organizing strategies and special considerations to support students in learning mathematics practices, content, and language. The framework is intended to help teachers address the specialized academic language demands in math when planning and delivering lessons, including the demands of reading, writing, speaking, listening, conversing, and representing in math (Aguirre & Bunch, 2012). Therefore, while the framework can and should be used to support all students learning mathematics, it is particularly well-suited to meet the needs of linguistically and culturally diverse students who are simultaneously learning mathematics while acquiring English."

The following language routines support this effort. Like other instructional routines, when implemented regularly, allow students to access academic vocabulary and content. The framework build on four design principles:

Support Sense-making

Optimize Output

Cultivate Conversation

Maximize Linguistic and Cognitive Meta-awareness

Examples of each can be found in the paper by clicking here, or their website by clicking here.

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Understanding Language/Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity published a paper titled Principles for the Design of Mathematics Curricula: Promoting Language and Content Development. It discusses the fundamental importance and interdependence of mathematics content development and mathematical language development.