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I have written several posts about the different types of rubrics-especially my favorite, the single-point rubric-and over time, many teachers have asked me about the most effective way to convert the information on these rubrics into points. Even if you are moving toward a no grades classroom, as a growing number of educators are, you may still be required to supply points or letter grades for student assignments.

Despite the title of this post, all I can really offer here is a description of my own process. It has been refined over years of trial and error, and the only evidence I have to back up its effectiveness is that in over 10 years of teaching middle school and college, I can only recall one or two times when a student or parent challenged a grade I gave based on a rubric. This is by no means the only way to do it-I'm sure plenty of other processes exist-but this is what has worked for me.

Before I get into the specifics of the scores themselves, I'm going to describe all the things that happen before those points go into the grade book. I'll do this with an example scenario: Suppose I want my eighth-grade students to write a narrative account of a true story. This will not be a personal narrative, but rather a journalistic piece that illustrates some larger concept, such as the story of one student's chaotic after-school routine to illustrate the problem of some kids having too many activities and homework after school.

Step 1: Define the Criteria

To start with, I have to get clear on what the final product should look like. Although I have my own opinions of what makes a well-written story, I need to put that into words so my students know what I'm looking for. Ideally, this criteria should be developed with my students. Any project will be more effective if students are part of the conversation from the beginning; I would ask them what makes for a good story, what kind of criteria should be used to judge its quality, and so on. To generate ideas for this discussion, we would first read a few examples from magazines and websites of the type of writing I want them to produce, and we'd figure out what qualities make these stories work. Eventually we'd shape these ideas into a list of attributes for the rubric. (Full disclosure: This is an ideal scenario. I often skipped the step of involving students to save time, but that was ultimately not the best decision.)

I would also consult with my standards and curriculum materials, to make sure I wasn't missing something relevant and to make sure the language in my rubric is aligned with those standards.

Using the single-point format, my rubric would look something like this:

If you have been working with single-point rubrics, you know that the left-hand column is reserved for indicating how students need to improve. The right-hand column has a different title than what I have used in the past. In earlier versions I titled this column"Exceeds Expectations," providing space to tell students how they exceeded the standards. I have adapted it here to "Above and Beyond" to make it more open-ended. It can be a place to describe where students have gone beyond the expectations, or it could be a place where the teacher or the student could suggest ways the work could reach even further, a place to set "stretch goals" appropriate to that student's readiness and the task at hand.

Step 2: Distribute the Points

Once my criteria have been defined, and if I will ultimately be giving points for this assignment, I need to decide how to divide those points across each category. Assuming a total of 100 points for this assignment, I would weigh certain components more heavily than others. Because my main goal is for students to write a robust, well-developed story, I would place more value on the top two categories-structure and idea development. This is an area where subjectivity can take over, and where rubrics can really vary from one teacher to another. So again, keep in mind that this is what it looks like for me.

For a 100-point assignment, I might distribute points as follows, adding them right into the rubric with a space for inserting the student's score when the task has been graded:

Step 3: Share the Rubric with Students Ahead of Time

This part is crucial. Even if students are not included in the development of the rubric itself, it's absolutely vital to let them study that rubric before they ever complete the assignment. The rubric loses most of its value if students aren't aware of it until the work is already done, so let them see it ahead of time. I typically provide students with a printed copy of the rubric when we are in the beginning stages of working on a big assignment like this, along with a prompt that describes the task itself.

Step 4: Score Samples

Another powerful step that makes the rubric even more effective is to score sample products as a class, using the rubric as a guide. I often created these samples myself, building in the kinds of problems I often saw in that type of writing. Occasionally I would use a piece of writing from a previous student with their name removed. Ideally, we would score one or two of these as a whole-class activity, and then I would have students do a few more in pairs. This process really gets students paying attention to the rubric, asking questions about the criteria, and getting a much clearer picture of what quality work looks like. When it comes time to craft their own pieces, they are better at using this tool for peer review and self-assessment.

Step 5: Assess Student Work (Round 1)

After students have been given time to plan, draft, and revise their writing-a time when I am watching their work in progress, advising them, and regularly referring to the rubric as a guide-students submit their "finished" pieces for a grade. My feedback for a student who hit many of the marks, but needed work in some areas, might look like this:

I put a check beside the criteria that has been satisfied in that draft, and add comments to the left of those that need work. In the right-hand column, I add a few suggestions for ways this student might push herself a bit more to make the piece even better.

You'll notice that the space for scores has been left blank. There's a reason for that: When students are given both feedback and number or letter grades, their motivation often drops and they tend to ignore the written feedback (Butler & Nisan, 1986). My own experience has proved this to be true; I have often spent hours giving written feedback on student writing, but found they often ignored that. Now I know this was because the feedback also included a grade. No-grades advocate Alfie Kohn, in his piece From Degrading to De-Grading, recommends that teachers who want to avoid this effect "make grades as invisible as possible for as long as possible." With that in mind, in this round, students only get feedback, not scores.

Keep in mind that much of this feedback could be generated with the student, in a conference. If time permits, you could sit with the student and go through the rubric together, noting places that still need work and considering ways to take what's already working and improve it further.

Unless the student has satisfied all the criteria on this first try, she will have an opportunity to revise her work and resubmit it, along with the original rubric. Those who did meet all the standards have the option to revise; not for a higher score (since scores haven't been given), but to simply push the piece to an even higher level of quality.

Step 6: Assess Student Work (Round 2)

When students have improved their work and re-submitted it, if they have gotten much closer to achieving the criteria, this would be an appropriate time to assign points to go into the grade book. If the issues raised in the first round have now been addressed, they are given a check to indicate that they are no longer a problem. In cases where all criteria in a category has been satisfied, the full number of points will be given. If a problem persists, new feedback may be added, and a portion of the points will be deducted. Again, this is the subjective part: I try to consider the work as a whole and deduct only a small percentage of the total points for a small problem. Really, if a problem is significant, the assignment should be reworked until that problem has been resolved. Once each section of the rubric has been scored, the points are totaled and that total is the score that's entered into the grade book.

Q&A About this Process

Will there be a Round 3?
That depends on you and your student. If you feel the student is growing and will put the work in to improve the piece further, and you are willing to assess it again, you should offer another round, and another, if progress is still being made.

Doesn't this process result in most students getting an A on the assignment?
It definitely could. If a student is willing to put the time in to satisfy all the criteria, then she will get the A. Those who are used to getting A's will have the option to push their skills to a higher level in Round 2 or will have the luxury of moving on to something else. It may bother some people that two students who may have different skill levels could end up with the same grade, but behind the scenes, the effort to reach that grade could be very different from student to student.

Isn't this time-consuming?
Heck yeah it is. Well, sort of. For me, this type of assignment would be given over the course of several weeks. By the time I have to actually give points, I have seen that student's piece many times. I have given her informal feedback while she writes and more formal feedback in Round 1, so the time I put into all the stages ultimately results in a final product that's much stronger than it would have been as a quick, one-time thing. And that makes the final assessment process much faster.

Doesn't this result in students being at different stages at different times?
Yes. In many cases, you will find yourself with some students being "done" with an assignment, while others are re-doing it. Most teachers want their students to be learning the same skills at roughly the same time, and unless you are running a very personalized, Montessori-style classroom, you'll want some kind of consistency from student to student. Consider whether you might be willing to spend only part of your class doing the more lock-step, everyone-on-the-same-page kind of work, but set aside other times for students to work on improving past assignments or doing independent work like genius hour projects.

Need Ready-Made Rubrics?

My Rubric Pack gives you four different designs in Microsoft Word and Google Docs formats. It also comes with video tutorials to show you how to customize them for any need, plus a Teacher's Manual to help you understand the pros and cons of each style. Check it out here:
References:
Butler, R. & Nisan, M. (1986). Effects of no feedback, task-related comments, and grades on intrinsic motivation and performance. Journal of Educational Psychology, 78(3), 210-216.

Kohn, Alfie. "From Degrading to De-grading." High School Magazine (1999). Retrieved 19 Aug. 2015 from www.alfiekohn.org/article/degrading-de-grading/.

Like what you've seen so far?
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Many teachers are confused about how to convert rubric feedback into grades or points. Even if you are moving away from traditional grades, you still may be required to supply them. Here's my process.

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This article originally appeared on the Mr. G Mpls Blog. It has been reproduced here with permission from the author.
The " knowledge-gap" is pinpointed most recently by Natalie Wexler as a culprit for continued stagnant reading proficiency levels and growing disparities in student outcomes in the U.S. Thankfully, more and more are realizing that students' ability to think critically and creatively is severely hampered without a solid foundation of background knowledge.

Yet beyond adopting a "knowledge-rich" curricula and understanding the importance of building a deep structure of knowledge, I've recently caught myself struggling to think of how, specifically, knowledge-building happens within lessons. As in, I was unsure exactly how a knowledge-rich curriculum was brought to life and best imparted to students on a day-to-day basis.

While I prioritize class time around a cohesive curricula with reading, writing, and discussion and have found tremendous benefits from using knowledge organizers, I was still left feeling my approach to "knowledge-building" was missing...something. That something, I learned recently, was robust vocabulary instruction.

Why Is Vocabulary Important?

As a profession, we've come to associate a variety of stale and ineffective practices with vocabulary instruction. I used to practice the following "vocabulary activities," deliriously hoping I was building students' vocabulary.

Repetitively teaching vocabulary with the same definition (this is actually rote learning)

Using matching exercises and one-dimensional puzzles

Having students copy opaque, poorly-written definitions from dictionaries or glossaries

Challenging students to vaguely "write a new sentence using this word."

What I and many others have passed off as vocabulary instruction is completely inadequate and fails to allow students the opportunity to take advantage of the power of a deep and interconnected vocabulary. Shanahan (2005) writes in The National Reading Panel Report: Practical Advice for Teachers.

"The importance of vocabulary is beyond doubt...such knowledge is integral to any activities that involve language, and psychologists have shown how vocabulary is more than a list of 'word meanings in the mind,' but actually functions as an index of a much richer and harder to measure constellation of understandings and experiences."

This interconnected web of vocabulary we each carry around has been found to be a vital foundation for reading comprehension. In Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction, Beck, McKeown, and Kucan (2013) highlight the close relationship between vocabulary and reading comprehension.

"There is much evidence - strong correlations, several causal studies, as well as rich theoretical orientations - that shows that vocabulary is tightly related to reading comprehension across the age span."

And so, while the empirical support for vocabulary instruction is present, what are teachers to do with more than a quarter million words in most dictionaries? How can teachers best approach the daunting, yet crucial challenge of vocabulary instruction? To start, the answer is certainly not to rely on independent reading to do the job.

Beck, McKeown, and Kucan (2013) point out that while "wide reading" is indeed an important source of vocabulary development for students, it should not be seen as a replacement for robust instruction.

"Written context is clearly an important source of new vocabulary for any reader. But relying on learning word meanings from independent reading is not an adequate way to deal with students' vocabulary development."

Furthermore, the Matthew Effect must be considered. Shanahan (2005) points out "studies suggest lower achieving readers acquire less incidental vocabulary than good readers acquire." In other words, it is teachers' great responsibility to provide all students with access to the vocabulary required to experience success in school. First though, we have to figure out what vocabulary to teach.

Three Tier Framework

The Three Tier framework, articulated by Beck, McKeown, and Kucan (2013), is a powerful tool to help teachers categorize and identify high-value vocabulary that can improve students' verbal functioning and reading comprehension. Essentially, words are categorized into three buckets:

Tier One: "Words typically found in oral language." These words are typically found in high frequency word lists, and do not require much focus as students hear these on a regular basis in conversation.

Tier Three: "Words that tend to be limited to specific domains." These are the words textbooks typically put in bold. While important, these words have limited use outside the specific content area, and are not very helpful for enriching descriptions or explanations.

Tier Two: "Words that are more characteristic of written language, and not so common in conversation." These are words that students will not hear, but will encounter across various domains as they read and write in school. These words are to be prioritized for instruction.

It's estimated that to read with minimal disturbance in comprehension, readers need a vocabulary of around 15,000 words. Of those 15,000 words, Beck, McKeown, and Kucan (2013) conclude that 8,000 are Tier One which require minimal focus, and 7,000 are Tier Two and should be the focus of robust vocabulary instruction. That breaks down to between 300-400 Tier Two words per year to be deliberately taught alongside the context/content they authentically arise.

Tier Two words are so important because they fundamentally expand students' verbal functioning by building rich representations of words that can be used in a variety of contexts. These Tier Two words empower students to provide more specific, mature ways of describing and explaining the world. While an exact science does not exist to pinpoint Tier Two vocabulary, Beck, McKeown, and Kucan (2013) do provide some helpful questions to ponder when identifying Tier 2 words.

1. Generally, how useful is the word; will students see it in multiple contexts; will it help students better describe their experiences?

2. How does the word contribute to the overall text being read; does it communicate vital meaning or tone?

3. How does the word relate to other words and previously-learned content?

Having identified a rough process identifying Tier Two vocabulary, what are best practices for introducing, teaching, and assessing this vocabulary?

Best Practices for Teaching Vocabulary

When designing vocabulary instruction, it is important to keep in mind two words: frequency and robustness. Beck, McKeown, and Kucan (2013) write about the importance of providing "frequent and varied encounters with target words and robust instructional activities that engage students in deep processing."

To accomplish frequent and robust encounters with vocabulary, the instructional sequence for words is spread across at least three days, but ideally five or more days. In this sequence, a variety of deliberately-designed exercises are done with students to use the words to describe new contexts, explore the multidimensional nature of words, and consider relationships among words (seriously, buy the book, it is loaded with exercises to use!). Here is an outline of the instructional sequence recommended in Bringing Words to Life:

Day 1: Introduce words to students with student-friendly explanations and context

Days 2-4: Follow-up activities
Identify examples/non-examples; form word associations with new contexts, additional writing exercises (The Writing Revolution makes for a great supplement here).

Day 5: Assessment

When introducing new vocabulary, Beck, McKeown, and Kucan (2013) highlight the importance of providing student-friendly explanations, the original context the word came from, and opportunities for students to interact with word meanings. "A robust approach to vocabulary involves directly explaining the meanings of words along with thought-provoking, playful, and interactive follow-up."

Therefore, to get started, I first scanned each lesson's text for Tier Two vocabulary, and then created a table with the target word, instructional context, and a student-friendly definition modified from learner's dictionaries. (Optional: I also created a "student dictionary" with the explanation cells left blank for students to fill in as a lesson starter).

Then, I created a variety of exercises (example/non-example and writing sentence stems) to be completed with students to start lessons after the new words have been introduced.

Ideally students are working with each word 3-4 days in a row, and further challenge should be gradually added by having students generate new situations to match target words (e.g. How would a critical person write about a music show?). Here's an example of encouraging students to interact with vocabulary meaning in new contexts.

The key is to make sure students are having plenty of opportunities to explain why they made the yes/no choice they did, and then to discuss it whole-class. While students complete this table, they have their "student dictionary" available to refer to.

Finally, at the end of units, I created true/false assessments with explanations to measure more surface level knowledge (e.g. does a critical person think carefully before making decisions?) and deeper knowledge (e.g. how can the history of Columbus be analyzed critically?). In this way, the full instructional sequence of Tier Two word instruction is designed to simultaneously improve students' verbal functioning and activate background knowledge.

Summary

Robust vocabulary instruction is a crucial driver of knowledge-building. While many knowledge-rich curricula might emphasize the importance of vocabulary and identify key vocabulary words in each lesson (typically Tier Three), ultimately the quality and robustness of vocabulary instruction comes down to teacher expertise and judgement.

Shanahan (2005) summarizes it best: "the most effective direct instruction in vocabulary helps children gain deep understanding of word meanings (much more than simple dictionary definitions); requires plenty of reading, writing, talking, and listening; emphasizes the interconnections among words and word meanings and the connections of words to children's own experiences; and provides abundant ongoing review and repetition."

We do a disservice to students when we devalue vocabulary instruction to a level of copying definitions and matching exercises. Knowledge-building is made more robust with vocabulary instruction.

I'm on Twitter.

References

Beck, I. L., McKeown, M. G., & Kucan, L. (2013). Bringing words to life: Robust vocabulary instruction. Guilford Press.

Shanahan, T. (2005). The National Reading Panel Report. Practical Advice for Teachers. Learning Point Associates/North Central Regional Educational Laboratory (NCREL).

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Robust Vocabulary Instruction - Achieve the Core Aligned Materials

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This article originally appeared on the Mr. G Mpls Blog. It has been reproduced here with permission from the author. The "knowledge-gap" is pinpointed most recently by Natalie Wexler as a culprit for continued stagnant reading proficiency levels and growing disparities in student outcomes in the U.S.

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How Important Is Teaching Literacy in All Content Areas?

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Students do plenty of listening in our classes, but what about reading, writing, and speaking?

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Allen, K. (2005). Alphabet knowledge: Letter recognition, naming, and sequencing. In J. Birsh (Ed.), Multisensory teaching of basic language skills, 2nd Edition, pp. 113-150. Baltimore, Md.: Paul Brookes.

Apel, K., Masterson, J.J., and Niessen, N.L. (2004). Spelling assessment frameworks. In Stone, C.A., Silliman, E.R., Ehren, B.J., and Apel, K. (Eds.), Handbook of language and literacy: Development and disorders, pp. 644-660. New York: Guilford.

Bailet, L. (2004). Spelling instructional and intervention frameworks. In Stone, C.A., Silliman, E.R., Ehren, B.J., and Apel, K. (Eds), Handbook of language and literacy: Development and disorders, pp. 661-678. New York: Guilford.

Balmuth, M. (1992). The roots of phonics: A historical introduction. Baltimore, Md.: York Press.

Bear, D., Invernizzi, M., Templeton, S., and Johnston, F. (2000). Words their way (2nd Edition). Columbus, Ohio: Merrill.

Bryson, B. (1990). The mother tongue: English and how it got that way. New York: Avon Books.

Berninger, V. Vaughan, K., Abbott, R., Brooks, A., Abbott, S., Reed, E., Rogan, L. and Graham, S. (1998). Early intervention for spelling problems: Teaching spelling units of varying size within a multiple connections framework. Journal of Educational Psychology, 90, 587- 605.

Bryant, P., Nunes, T. and Bindman, M. (1997). Children's understanding of the connection between grammar and spelling. In B. Blachman (Ed.), Foundations of reading acquisition and dyslexia, pp. 219-240. Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum.

Carlisle, J.F. and Stone, C.A. (2005). Exploring the role of morphemes in word reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 40(4), 428-449.

Carreker, S. (2005). Teaching spelling. In J. Birsh (Ed.), Multisensory teaching of basic language skills (2nd Edition), pp. 257-295. Baltimore, Md.: Paul Brookes.

Ehri, L.C. (1998). Grapheme-phoneme knowledge is essential for learning to read words in English. In J.L. Metsala & L.C. Ehri (Eds.), Word recognition in beginning literacy, pp. 3-40. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Ehri, L. (2000). Learning to read and learning to spell: Two sides of a coin. Topics in Language Disorders, 20(3), 19-49.

Ehri, L. (2004). Teaching phonemic awareness and phonics. In P. Mc- Cardle and V. Chhabra (Eds.), The voice of evidence in reading research, pp. 153-186. Baltimore, Md.: Brookes Publishing.

Ehri, L. and Snowling, M.J. (2004). Developmental variation in word recognition. In Stone, C.A., Silliman, E.R., Ehren, B.J., and Apel, K. (Eds.), Handbook of language and literacy: Development and disorders, pp. 433-460. New York: Guilford.

Grace, K. (in press). Phonics and spelling through phoneme-grapheme mapping. Longmont, Colo.: Sopris West.

Graham, S., Harris, K.R., and Loynachan, C. (1994). The spelling for writing list. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 27 (4), 210-214.

Hanna, P.R., Hanna, J.S., Hodges, R.E., and Rudorf, E.H., Jr. (1966). Phoneme-grapheme correspondences as cues to spelling improvement (USDOE Publication No. 32008). Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Henry, M. (2003). Unlocking literacy. Baltimore, Md.: Brookes Publishing.

Henry, M. (1997). The decoding/spelling curriculum: Integrated decoding and spelling instruction from pre-school to early secondary school. Dyslexia, 38, 178-198.

Kessler, B. and Treiman, R. (2001). Relationships between sounds and letters in English monosyllables. Journal of Memory and Language, 44, 592-617.

King, D. (2000). English isn't crazy. Baltimore, Md.: York Press.

Lindamood, C.H. and Lindamood, P. (1998). The Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing Program for reading, spelling, and speech. Austin, Texas: Pro-Ed.

Mehta, P., Foorman, B.R., Branum-Martin, L., and Taylor, P.W. (2005). Literacy as a unidimensional construct: Validation, sources of influence, and implications in a longitudinal study in grades 1 to 4. Scientific Studies of Reading, 9(2), 85-116.

Moats, L.C. (1995). Spelling: Development, disability, and instruction. Baltimore, Md.: York Press.

Moats, L.C. (1996). Phonological spelling errors in the writing of dyslexic adolescents. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 8, 105-119.

Moats, L.C. (2000). Speech to print: Language essentials for teachers. Baltimore, Md.: Brookes Publishing.

Moats, L.C. (2003). The speech to print workbook. Baltimore, Md.: Paul Brookes.

Moats, L.C. (2004). Language essentials for teachers of reading and spelling (LETRS), Module 2, The Speech Sounds of English, and Module 3, Spellography for Teachers. Longmont, Colo.: Sopris West Educational Services.

Moats, L.C. and Rosow, B. (2002). Spellography. Longmont, Colo.: Sopris West.

Montgomery, D.J., Karlan, G.R., and Coutinho, M. (2001). The effectiveness of word processor spell checker programs to produce target words for misspellings generated by students with learning disabilities, Journal of Special Education Technology, 16 (2).

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Snow, C. E., Griffin, P., and Burns, M. S. (Eds.) (2005). Knowledge to Support the Teaching of Reading: Preparing Teachers for a Changing World. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Tangel, D. and Blachman, B. (1995). Effect of phoneme awareness instruction on the invented spelling of first-grade children: A one-year follow-up. Journal of Reading Behavior, 27, 153-185.

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Many young readers are puzzled by the rules and exceptions of spelling. Research shows that learning to spell and learning to read rely on much of the same underlying knowledge. Learn more about the relationships between letters and sounds and how a proper understanding of spelling mechanics can lead to improved reading.

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Search our free collection of high-quality PreK - 12 ELA and Math materials. Filter by subject or grade. Download, adapt, share.

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Station Rotation Model: Grouping Strategies - Dr. Catlin Tucker

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The Station Rotation Model is a blended learning model where students rotate through a series of online and offline stations. This model is an easier shift for elementary teachers who are already use learning stations with students. Unfortunately, most secondary teachers do not learn how to design lessons using stations in credential school.

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Posted:

Science is a subject dependent upon reading and writing. So even if I do not explicitly teach literacy, it is present in my daily instruction. Grappling with this, I sought the experts-my ELA colleagues. I watched, questioned, and probed their techniques to create my own unique teaching style, and continue to do this today. One of my biggest takeaways was how to identify and use essential literacy elements that promote scientific communication.

The Need for an Anchor Text

My first hurdle to implementation was finding suitable anchor texts. It was so frustrating that many rigorous and relevant texts were above grade level. Specialized vocabulary, scientific background knowledge, and concept load make these above-level texts difficult for student comprehension ¹.

How can students ask questions and make inferences if there is no common reference point for analysis? Using an anchor text brings authenticity to scientific content; it provides a point of analysis. When a text is combined with hands-on experiences, it creates a foothold for thinking and problem solving. This foothold generates creativity in which the teacher can stimulate further discourse combining both textual and data evidence. A deeper conceptual understanding is gained through reflection.

Yet, most of my students struggled when reading informational texts. So, I found myself with the following question: "How do I develop an effective scaffolding protocol that will engage my students in interpreting scientific complex texts?"

Use a Foundational Instructional Activity as a Base

A viable foundational reading activity is one that incorporates the thinking skills for comprehension, allows for dialogue, and is reflective in nature. After much research, I decided that Reciprocal Teaching fit the bill perfectly. Reciprocal Teaching utilizes four strategies: clarifying, questioning, predicting, and summarizing.

Students clarify previously unknown vocabulary terms, ask questions about the text's content, predict what the text will explain, and summarize the text concisely. All of these tasks are completed through careful reading of the text and use of its features, such as bolded words, context clues, etc. I modeled these strategies over a period of four weeks devoting 15 minutes each day using the same text. Chunking the activity into small pieces allowed students to digest the nuances of a given strategy. Though this model of instruction is usually completed by one reader, I created a rotation in which students take turns reading, and the group annotates the text together.

I would add that a foundational instructional activity also lends itself easily to embedding related techniques. Using Reciprocal Teaching, I incorporated other known reading strategies/techniques such as annotation notes, question stems, and close reading/views. For a good example of Reciprocal Teaching in science, watch this video: NYC DOE Presents: MSQI Stories-Reciprocal Teaching: Science.

Create or Choose a Common Graphic Organizer to Monitor Thinking Within Activity

Gauging literacy skills within a discussion is essential to determine progress. When I first looked at my students' annotation notes, there were no predictions or questions from the given text. I realized that my students required a structural framework to complete the four actions called for by Reciprocal Teaching. Hence, a graphic organizer was created. (A sample graphic organizer can be downloaded at the top of this post.)

Using a sentence stem, students make a prediction about what the text will be about based on keywords within the title. As students read, they summarize the paragraphs and write any unknown words on the class poster. This simple poster addresses specialized vocabulary by allowing real-time examples.

During and after reading, students create questions using Webb's Depth of Knowledge (DOK) Stems (attached to this blog post). Within the graphic organizer, they reflect whether their posed question is answerable. From these questions we, as a class, determine if they are literal (directly stated), inferential (indirectly stated), or thematic (beyond what is stated).

Frontload Background Information Using Video or Demonstration

Before students read the anchor text, I always introduce a short video or demonstration to build background knowledge. However, the implementation lacked focus at first. When I showed a video, students failed to understand the purpose was to gather information- not just watch.

Working with my ELA colleagues, we discovered that informational text and video utilized the same text connections: text to text, text to self, and text to world. So, we brainstormed about audiovisual cues to simulate connections creating the close view. The technique is modified from the close reading routine in which a text is read multiple times with a different task ².

In the first view, students concentrate on the visuals using their eyes. As a class, we make connections by brainstorming a list. Students then watch for a second time to write at least three points from the video. In a group discussion, they write down another key point and connect the points to the created list. This strategy allows my students to reflect by concentrating on only one video aspect at a time. The brain is able to incorporate more information which helps my lower-level students to retain key ideas.

Emphasize the Purpose of Features in Informational Texts

Informational texts depend heavily on concept load: the number of ideas within a passage ¹. Understanding the features helps my classes find relevant information. Thus, students were taught the differences between text and visual features using a think-aloud and were able to reflect on these differences by asking each other reflective questions during the active reading. When students are aware of features to look for, they are better equipped to analyze the author's purpose.

Welding Scientific Instruction to Literacy

As we look at connections between CCSS literacy and NGSS standards, the focus for 3-dimensional learning will be science and engineering practices. There are several areas in which the presented protocol overlaps with literacy.

A Final Note

As scientific instruction is evolving based on new standards, it is an exciting yet perplexing time for us educators. The paradigm shift requires learning opportunities that entwine scientific and/or engineering practices, cross-cutting concepts, and disciplinary core ideas. We are clamoring to fill an instructional void because it is uncharted territory. One thing is consistent: obtaining scientific knowledge is dependent upon literacy.

References

1. Fisher, D., Frey, N., & Lapp, D. (2012). Teaching students to read like detectives: comprehending, analyzing, and discussing text. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree

2. Frey, N., Fisher, D., & Pearson, P. D. (2013). Rigorous reading: 5 access points for comprehending complex texts. Thousand Oaks: Corwin

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Welding Literacy into Scientific Instruction - Achieve the Core Aligned Materials

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Science is a subject dependent upon reading and writing. So even if I do not explicitly teach literacy, it is present in my daily instruction. Grappling with this, I sought the experts-my ELA colleagues. I watched, questioned, and probed their techniques to create my own unique teaching style, and continue to do this today.

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The New York State Education Department is no longer supporting the EngageNY.org website and it will no longer be available for use after April 15, 2022. NYSED encourages educators to download any EngageNY content they wish to use in the future.

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Laura  Randazzo – Solutions for the Secondary Classroom

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I hate name games. Painfully awkward, these games have never magically connected me to people just because they've repeated, "Her name's Laura and she likes llamas."

Nope. Not happening around here, people.

For the first day of school, I usually start with a one-minute welcome and intro. of my background, have students make name cards they post on their desks (a half-sheet of colored paper folded hot dog-style), give a meme-based lecture covering my classroom expectations with a bit of humor, and model our first MUG Shot (mechanics, usage, and grammar) whiteboard activity to throw a little something academic at them before our first class wraps.

This year, though, the meme lecture's starting to feel stale and I'm always open to fresh ideas. In a Facebook group for ELA folks that I follow, first-day stations were kicked around and I thought, Oh yeah, that'll work.

Here's my new first-day plan:
1. One-minute welcome/intro.
2. Make name cards
3. Stations activity
4. You are Here worksheet
(The MUG Shot and meme lecture have been slid to Day 2 on my calendar.)

Here's how Stations & You are Here will roll: I'm on a block, so I might even be able to squeeze in that first MUG Shot. We'll see how it goes.

And here's all the same info in a video:

If you'd like a free set of the 38-page Stations/You are Here materials, just go here to grab a copy. There's also a second version in the download with generic, non-ELA wording, meaning our friends in all subject areas can enjoy some cheese-free fun on the first day of school. Hope this helps start the year strong!
Special thanks to my talented teacher friend Madeline Alyce for the inspiration! Click here to check out her free annotation tools.
Teach on, everyone.

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Non-Cheesy Icebreaker for First Day of School

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I hate name games. Painfully awkward, these games have never magically connected me to people just because they've repeated, "Her name's Laura and she likes llamas." Nope. Not happening around here, people. For the first day of school, I usually start with a one-minute welcome and intro.

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Icebreakers that Rock | Cult of Pedagogy

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Too many classroom icebreakers require students to take big social risks with people they barely know. Or they don’t really help students get to know each other. Or they are just plain cheesy.

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Mention group work and you're confronted with pointed questions and criticisms. The big problems, according to our audience: One or two students do all the work; it can be hard on introverts; and grading the group isn't fair to the individuals.

But the research suggests that a certain amount of group work is beneficial.

"The most effective creative process alternates between time in groups, collaboration, interaction, and conversation... [and] times of solitude, where something different happens cognitively in your brain," says Dr. Keith Sawyer, a researcher on creativity and collaboration, and author of Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration.

So we looked through our archives and reached out to educators on Facebook to find out what solutions they've come up with for these common problems.

Making Sure Everyone Participates

"How many times have we put students in groups only to watch them interact with their laptops instead of each other? Or complain about a lazy teammate?" asks Mary Burns, a former French, Latin, and English middle and high school teacher who now offers professional development in technology integration.

Unequal participation is perhaps the most common complaint about group work. Still, a review of Edutopia's archives-and the tens of thousands of insights we receive in comments and reactions to our articles-revealed a handful of practices that educators use to promote equal participation. These involve setting out clear expectations for group work, increasing accountability among participants, and nurturing a productive group work dynamic.

Norms: At Aptos Middle School in San Francisco, the first step for group work is establishing group norms. Taji Allen-Sanchez, a sixth- and seventh-grade science teacher, lists expectations on the whiteboard, such as "everyone contributes" and "help others do things for themselves."

For ambitious projects, Mikel Grady Jones, a high school math teacher in Houston, takes it a step further, asking her students to sign a group contract in which they agree on how they'll divide the tasks and on expectations like "we all promise to do our work on time." Heather Wolpert-Gawron, an English middle school teacher in Los Angeles, suggests creating a classroom contract with your students at the start of the year, so that agreed-upon norms can be referenced each time a new group activity begins.

Group size: It's a simple fix, but the size of the groups can help establish the right dynamics. Generally, smaller groups are better because students can't get away with hiding while the work is completed by others.

"When there is less room to hide, nonparticipation is more difficult," says Burns. She recommends groups of four to five students, while Brande Tucker Arthur, a 10th-grade biology teacher in Lynchburg, Virginia, recommends even smaller groups of two or three students.

Meaningful roles: Roles can play an important part in keeping students accountable, but not all roles are helpful. A role like materials manager, for example, won't actively engage a student in contributing to a group problem; the roles must be both meaningful and interdependent.

At University Park Campus School, a grade 7-12 school in Worcester, Massachusetts, students take on highly interdependent roles like summarizer, questioner, and clarifier. In an ongoing project, the questioner asks probing questions about the problem and suggests a few ideas on how to solve it, while the clarifier attempts to clear up any confusion, restates the problem, and selects a possible strategy the group will use as they move forward.
Courtesy of University Park Campus School
At Design 39, a K-8 school in San Diego, groups and roles are assigned randomly using Random Team Generator, but ClassDojo, Team Shake, and drawing students' names from a container can also do the trick. In a practice called vertical learning, Design 39 students conduct group work publicly, writing out their thought processes on whiteboards to facilitate group feedback. The combination of randomizing teams and public sharing exposes students to a range of problem-solving approaches, gets them more comfortable with making mistakes, promotes teamwork, and allows kids to utilize different skill sets during each project.

Rich tasks: Making sure that a project is challenging and compelling is critical. A rich task is a problem that has multiple pathways to the solution and that one person would have difficulty solving on their own.

In an eighth-grade math class at Design 39, one recent rich task explored the concept of how monetary investments grow: Groups were tasked with solving exponential growth problems using simple and compound interest rates.

Rich tasks are not just for math class. When Dan St. Louis, the principal of University Park, was a teacher, he asked his English students to come up with a group definition of the word Orwellian. They did this through the jigsaw method, a type of grouping strategy that John Hattie's study Visible Learning ranked as highly effective.

"Five groups of five students might each read a different news article about the modern world," says St. Louis. "Then each student would join a new group of five where they need to explain their previous group's article to each other and make connections to each. Using these connections, the group must then construct a definition of the word Orwellian." For another example of the jigsaw approach, see this video from Cult of Pedagogy.

Supporting Introverts

Teachers worry about the impact of group work on introverts. Some of our educators suggest that giving introverts choice in who they're grouped with can help them feel more comfortable.

"Even the quietest students are usually comfortable and confident when they are with peers with whom they connect," says Shelly Kunkle, a veteran teacher at Wasawee Middle School in North Webster, Indiana. Wolpert-Gawron asks her students to list four peers they want to work with and then makes sure to pair them with one from their list.

Having defined roles within groups-like clarifier or questioner-also provides structure for students who may be less comfortable within complex social dynamics, and ensures that introverts don't get overshadowed by their more extroverted peers.

Finally, be mindful that introverted students often simply need time to recharge. "Many introverts do not mind and even enjoy interacting in groups as long as they get some quiet time and solitude to recharge. It's not about being shy or feeling unsafe in a large group," says Barb Larochelle, a recently retired high school English teacher in Edmonton, Alberta, who taught for 29 years.

"I planned classes with some time to work quietly alone, some time to interact in smaller groups or as a whole class, and some time to get up and move around a little. A whole class of any one of those is going to be hard on one group, but a balance works well."

Assessing Group Work

Grading group work is problematic. Often, you don't have a clear understanding of what each student knows, and a single student's lack of effort can torpedo the group grade. To some degree, strategies that assign meaningful roles or that require public presentations from groups provide a window in to each student's knowledge and contributions.

But not all classwork needs to be graded. Suzanna Kruger, a high school science teacher in Seaside, Oregon, doesn't grade group work-there are plenty of individual assignments that receive grades, and plenty of other opportunities for formative assessment.

John McCarthy, a former high school English and social studies teacher and current education consultant and adjunct professor at Madonna University for the graduate department for education, suggests using group presentations or group products as a non-graded review for a test. But if you want to grade group work, he recommends making all academic assessments within group work individual assessments. For example, instead of grading a group presentation, McCarthy grades each student on an essay, which the students then use to create their group presentation.

Laura Moffit, a fifth-grade teacher in Wilmington, North Carolina, uses self and peer evaluations to shed light on how each student is contributing to group work-starting with a lesson on how to do an objective evaluation. "Just have students circle :), :|, or :( on three to five statements about each partner, anonymously," Moffit commented on Facebook. "Then give the evaluations back to each group member. Finding out what people really think of your performance is a wake-up call."

And Ted Malefyt, a middle school science teacher in Hamilton, Michigan, carries a clipboard with the class list formatted in a spreadsheet and walks around checking in on students while they do group work.

"Using this spreadsheet, you have your own record of which student is meeting your expectations and who needs extra help," explains Malefyt. "As formative assessment takes place, quickly document with simple checkmarks."

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Educators weigh in on solutions to the common pitfalls of group work.

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Last week, we kicked off our second and final round of book clubs for the year. As I shared the titles for this round of book clubs, I was asked a lot of implementation questions. What do they look like? What do kids do? How do you make them successful? And while I have been referring people back to this post that discusses the changes that we have implemented through the years, I thought it might be nice for a comprehensive post that shares the how and why of what we do.

Timeline and Time Spent

Where do book clubs fit in for us? This graph may help with our layoot for the year. While I love doing book clubs, I will not do more than two of them in a year, our students ask us for moderation in everything we do and so two is enough in order for them to have other experiences with books as well. Of course, students may choose to run their own book clubs at any point, but they are not required to discuss their books like this except for these two times.

Having a gap in the book clubs allows us to continue our all-year focus on joyful independent reading, as well as see their growth. Since we start out the year by focusing on their independent reading and then slip into a read aloud for the Global Read Aloud we have done a lot of work with establishing our overall reading community. This helps a lot when I need students to work independently either reading or discussion while I am coaching other students in our team area.

In our 90 minutes our breakdown looks something like this (note this is the only time during the year that we do not start our class with independent reading:

Five minute word study (a root word exploration required by our district).

10-20 minute mini-lesson, it becomes about 10 minutes once we have read aloud our anchor mentor text - a short story that I found in the brilliant book Unbroken - 13 Stories Starring Disabled Teens edited by Marieke Nijkamp.

Then 20 to 30 minutes is reading time for the groups. They can also choose to discuss in their group, I require they discuss in front of a teacher once a week.

After our bell break, we usually finish with book clubs and switch to our writing work for 45 minutes. We will be kicking off our This I Believe writing unit next week that fits in nicely with our book club theme.

Overall Purpose

The number one purpose of book clubs for us is for students to engage in meaningful discussions, that are rooted in their chosen books but not confined by them. We really want students to feel like they are honing their voices, continuing to carve out their ideas and thoughts on the world, and also find others to share their thoughts with. This community piece is huge for us, which is why there is very limited written work associated with their time in book clubs.

We have a few guidelines in room 235D:

The book club experience needs to protect their reading identity.

The book club experience needs to be worth their time.

The book club experience needs to give them opportunities for authentic, non-teacher directed conversations.

The book club experience needs to help them grow as readers, thinkers, and human beings.

The book club experience needs to be accessible to all types of readers. It is not just meant for the chosen few.

We want to make sure at all times that these guidelines are honored in order to protect the reading community we have painstakingly built together. This means that we check in with these guidelines before we implement anything.

This also means that the skills they are assessed on are directly tied into their discussions and not to any written work, unless they choose this. The rubric for their discussions can be viewed here. If a student does not do well in discussion or would rather be assessed through writing, we give them the option to do this one-pager created by my fantastic colleague Liz. We also have a few kids where they are doing the one-pager and discussing with an adult instead of with a group because of extenuating circumstances. However, we try our very best to give ALL kids the same experience, even if we provide more support for some of them in order to be successful. Often, kids who are labeled as below grade level readers will not be exposed to the same reading experiences and opportunities as their peers, because we worry that they will not be able to do it, however, when we remove even the opportunity for them to try then we may end up limiting their future growth. How can you ever be successful in discussions if you have never been expected to do one?

Book Choices

Central to the experience is, of course, the choice of books. While our first book club of the year is centered around Dystopian Science Fiction (which the students loved), this second round is centered on the theme overcoming obstacles. Because this is a broad theme it has allowed us to bring in all types of formats of books, as well as honor many different reading accessibility points. We, therefore, have more than 40 books to choose from. These include many genres such as realistic fiction, fantasy, science fiction, historical fiction. It also includes different formats beyond the regular chapter books such as free verse novels, graphic novels, and audio books.

While all students are expected to read at least one book in the three or so week span that clubs last, we also have groups who choose to read an entire series. They then engage in across series comparison work. One trick then is to make sure that they slow down enough to think deeply across the books and not just skim through the pages.

To see our book club choices, please view the slide show. Note: this is updated and I keep updating it so if you want to remember these choices, I would encourage you to make a copy for yourself.

One thing, we are asked a lot is how do you have so many books? There are a few factors at play here. One, my district, Oregon School District, believes in the power of funding books. This is why we have a beautiful school library and classroom libraries. We have a well-curated book room that continues to grow and expand as we add more titles, we tend to add groups of 5 to 10 titles in order to have a lot of different books to offer rather than just a few. I also buy a lot of books, I wish it wasn't that way, but I do. While I certainly buy many via traditional means, I also use Books4School and Scholastic to help supplement our collection.

Because our book clubs are central components every year, we have been adding to our collection year after year and I don't think that will stop any time soon. We have a lot of different readers and need a lot of different books.

Making Groups and Choosing Books

Because choice and honoring who our students are as human beings is a central component, we knew we needed to offer students ways to be invested in who they are spending all of this time with, as well as the book(s) that they end up reading. This is why they have a central voice in who they are with.

This starts with the partner interviews. This is a way for all students to reflect on who they are as a reader and what they need others to be in their groups. While many students naturally gravitate toward interviewing their friends, they often find that their friends' reading habits do not match their own. They use this sheet to interview each other and then hand it in. For this later round of book clubs, students were given the opportunity to totally group themselves. We did discuss that they needed to be welcoming to all students and to base this off their reading habits, not just who they were friends with. All classes did a really nice job setting up their groups. All groups are kept to 3 or 4 students, with a rare exception for a partnership or a group of 5. We like the 3 to 4 people groups because it means everyone has an active role.

We do not assign roles to members of the group because we see this as an artificial component of groups, that while it may be helpful when students first start out in book clubs in younger grades, really can end up changing the experience and not allowing them to fully express themselves they way we would like them to.

Once they have created a group, they then go through the slideshow to select their top 5 of the books. There are two rules, they have to follow:

1. No one in the group can have read the book or watched the movie.

2. Everyone has to agree to rank it.

For some of my voracious readers, there were not enough choices. We then enlist the help of our classroom library, school library, and our librarian in order to help them find something they want. This is also where I typically end up buying one or two other sets of books that then get added into our rotation.

Once their books have been selected, they turn their sheets into me and then wait a day while we puzzle out what they get. The very next day, they are then introduced to their book club choice. Students then create their own reading plan breakdown. This is once again to honor their busy lives and reading habits. They then sign up for one day a week to discuss in front of a teacher, who assesses their discussion skills. There are still a few choices here:

1. The group can choose to change their book before they even begin - we then show them what is left for them to choose from.

2. The group can choose to abandon the book together within the first 3 days of reading. This is in case they don't love it as much as they should. We want this experience to be awesome, not awful so book choice is vital.

3. A student can choose to abandon their group within the first 3 days as well, if they really dislike the book or the dynamics are not working out for some reason. They then need to approach another group to ask if they can join them (with adult support) and then catch up to that group.

If a group needs access to the audio version of the book in order for all kids to be successful, we then add the book to our Audible account. We don't ever want the decoding of the words to stand in the way for a child to truly participate since the decoding is not what is being assessed. This also allows our kiddos who need extra support to be a part of these clubs without barriers that may harm their reading identity. Many groups also end up using Audible as a way to read together, thus enhancing the reading experience.

And now they read and we start our mini-lessons. We always give them a few days to get into their book, during this time we do reminders of what we are looking for in powerful discussions, as well as have them do a main character baseline.

Other "tools" we introduce to help our students find success are...

Creating an anchor chart following our mini-lessons of what they can pay attention to when they are reading.

Handing them a bookmark that also gives them things to discuss. They tape their reading plan to the back of it. I also pull small groups that need extra support with their discussions in order to help them find success.

I stop discussions if they are not going well. If it is clear that a group is not prepared to discuss, I would rather pause them than keep them going. This means they get a chance to come back the following day once they have prepared. If it happens again, then they do their discussion ad we discuss what needs to happen the following week.

Lots of post-its or note cards. This is the only time during the year where we require students take notes as they read. I do mini-lessons on what you can annotate for so that there is a deeper meaning to their notes and not just "...the teacher said I had to do it..." some students need more help than others. They cannot discuss if they do not have evidence pulled to support their thoughts.

Discussion prep sheets. We have found that if we have students pick things they want to pay attention to and discuss the following week, their discussions are so much better. This graphic organizer changes as we see fit. Before they then discuss in front of us, we ask them what they are focused on this week and then hold them accountable for that.

Partner feedback groups. I have written more about these in this blog post.

After the first week, I pull them to discuss in front of me and then continue to do so every week. The first discussion is a formative discussion and then the following two are summative. I will write another post about what I am listening for if there is any interest in that.

PS: In case, you missed the announcement, I am running a book study of my first book Passionate Learners this summer in the Passionate Readers Facebook group. You should join us!
If you like what you read here, consider reading my newest book, Passionate Readers - The Art of Reaching and Engaging Every Child. This book focuses on the five keys we can implement into any reading community to strengthen student reading experiences, even within the 45 minute English block. If you are looking for solutions and ideas for how to re-engage all of your students consider reading my very first book Passionate Learners - How to Engage and Empower Your Students. Also, if you are wondering where I will be in the coming year or would like to have me speak, please see this page.

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How We Set Up Book Clubs in Middle School

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Last week, we kicked off our second and final round of book clubs for the year. As I shared the titles for this round of book clubs, I was asked a lot of implementation questions. What do they look like? What do kids do? How do you make them successful?

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This year I have posted several blogs about grading and assessment. I encouraged teachers to stop taking grading home for two simple reasons:

1. Grading in isolation robs us of the opportunity to have conversations with students as we assess their work and, ultimately, makes feedback one-sided and less effective.

2. Grading at home robs us of precious time with our families, time to relax, and time to create dynamic learning experiences for students.

When I tell teachers I have not taken grading home since January of last year, they are immediately interested. They want to know exactly how I have managed that as a high school English teacher.

I explain that I use blended learning models, like Station Rotation and Whole Class Rotation, to create the time and space needed to move assessment into the classroom. If students are working 0n an essay, I dedicate one station each day to providing real-time feedback as they write.

Teachers want to know what the other students are doing while I am engaged in my real-time editing station. Below is an example of a station rotation lesson for my 9th and 10th English class. I work in a 90-minute block schedule so I can move my students through four 20 minute stations. I also coach teachers who teach traditional 50-minute classes and they have a four station two-day rotation. In that model, students hit four stations over the course of two days.

When a formal assignment is due, I use my teacher-led station to have individual grade conversations with my students. Instead of leading a station, I design a self-paced hyperdoc lesson or a station rotation that does not require that I lead a station. Then I meet with individual students to grade their work while they sit next to me. I explain what I am seeing in terms of their skills and talk them through the rubric and their scores. Before we end our conversation, I turn to them and ask, "Do you have any questions?"

These grading conversations take about 3 minutes because I do not try to grade every single aspect of their paper or assignment. Instead, I select 2 or 3 specific skills to assess for a score. In the rubric below, you'll see I've select claims and analysis. There are other aspects of writing covered in the rubric, but I don't try to assess them all for every single assignment.

Most teachers I work with struggle to limit the scope of their assessments. They use complex 5 or 10 point rubrics and assess every aspect of an assignment. This is overwhelming for students who are attempting to master specific skills.

Assessments are most effective when the scope is limited to two or three skills that students can focus on improving. Click To Tweet

When I assess their first piece of argumentative writing, I may only provide assessment scores for 1) the quality of their claims and 2) their analysis of their evidence. Then on the second argumentative essay, I may focus on 1) quality of their evidence and 2) analysis. As they write, they receive real-time feedback on all of their writing, but when it comes time to give them an assessment score, I keep my focus narrow.

When I lead workshops on assessment and grading strategies, there are always a few teachers who protest, "I don't have time to provide feedback in the classroom or have grade conversations. I'm barely getting through all of the curriculum." When I hear this, I wonder how much students learn when we race through content but do not dedicate time to supporting the development of specific skills. Students need feedback to improve their skills. This should happen in the classroom where the teacher can act as a coach.

Teachers who are tired of taking stacks of grading (real or virtual) home and want their feedback to be more meaningful should use the new year as an opportunity to explore different approaches to teaching. Using video content, multimedia lessons, and technology tools combined with blended learning models can create more time and space for teachers to work directly with students.

If you are interested in learning more about blended learning models, check out my book Blended Learning in Action.

This entry was posted in Learning. Bookmark the permalink.

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This year I have posted several blogs about grading and assessment. I encouraged teachers to stop taking grading home for two simple reasons: Grading in isolation robs us of the opportunity to have conversations with students as we assess their work

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The practice of using single point rubrics is slowly but surely catching on. The simplicity of these rubrics - with just a single column of criteria, rather than a full menu of performance levels - offers a whole host of benefits:

Teachers find them easier and faster to create, because they no longer have to spend precious time thinking up all the different ways students could fail to meet expectations.

Students find them easier to read when preparing an assignment. With only the target expectations to focus on, they are more likely to read those expectations.

They allow for higher-quality feedback, because teachers must specify key problem areas and notable areas of excellence for that particular student, rather than choosing from a list of generic descriptions.

Want to Learn More?

I first talked about this type of rubric in an earlier post ( Know Your Terms: Holistic, Analytic, and Single-Point Rubrics). If this is the first time you've encountered this type of rubric, reading this will give you some background knowledge on all the different types of rubrics and why the single-point deserves world domination.

To give credit where it's due, I did not come up with the name single point rubric. Although the idea for a simplified rubric with a single set of criteria came to me independently, when I went looking for academic support for its use, I found that the type of rubric I had in mind was given the name "Single Point Rubric" in 2000 during a conference presentation by someone named Mary Dietz. Attending that conference was a researcher named Jarene Fluckiger, who published a study on its effectiveness in 2010. (The reference to Dietz is in Fluckiger's paper, but no one named Dietz has published anything on the topic.)

Show Us Your Rubrics!

I urge you to take one of your most convoluted rubrics and make a single-point version of it. Then show it to the world, so other teachers can learn: Take a screenshot of it and post the picture on Twitter with the hashtag #singlepointrubric. If you aren't on Twitter or don't feel like doing this, just put a link to your rubric in the comments below. Help us start a movement to rid the world of ineffective rubrics!

Another Variation (Added in 2017)

After considering some of the limitations of this format, I played around with the rubric a bit more and came up with this variation:

The original version of the single point rubric allowed no space for actually pointing out when the student hit the standard, apart from maybe circling or highlighting the middle column. With this format, teachers can pinpoint where the student is on each descriptor, then offer feedback, either constructive, positive, or both.

To grab a copy of this for your own modification, click here.

Need Ready-Made Rubrics?

My Rubric Pack gives you four different designs in Microsoft Word and Google Docs formats. It also comes with video tutorials to show you how to customize them for any need, plus a Teacher's Manual to help you understand the pros and cons of each style. Check it out here:

Stick around.
Join my mailing list and never miss another post. You'll get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration - in quick, bite-sized packages - all geared toward making your teaching more effective and joyful. To thank you, I'll send you a free copy of my new e-booklet, 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half. I look forward to getting to know you better!

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The practice of using single point rubrics is slowly but surely catching on. Try one for yourself and let us see it!

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Listen to my interview with Mark Wise (transcript):
Sponsored by Pear Deck and Microsoft Teams for Education

In my 20-year career as an administrator, I've had the opportunity to be a fly on the wall in hundreds of classrooms across grade levels and content areas. While much has changed in education over those years, one element has remained constant: the well-intentioned use of rubrics with varying levels of success.

Starting with their use as early as kindergarten and continuing through high school, rubrics are meant to clarify expectations, but poor design can make the experience anything but clear. Rows of criteria describe, often in 10-point font, how students will be graded for an upcoming project. Students attempt to decipher the details, review the exemplars provided, and note the corresponding due dates, but the information doesn't always translate into action.

This is unfortunate because a well-designed rubric can be more than just an evaluation tool. For the teacher, it can clarify expectations, which increases the likelihood that these traits will be attended to during instruction and as a result, can provide more targeted feedback. For the learner, knowing what is expected from the start along with clear indicators of progress provides an effective means to self-assess, make adjustments, and improve the quality of performance.

So how do we get there? How do we take our current rubrics and fine-tune them so they deliver on those promises? These five guidelines will help.

1. Measure What Really Matters

Teachers often include multiple criteria in their rubrics without adding the primary learning outcome they are most interested in: Did it persuade? Did it create an emotional connection? Did you win your argument? We tend to construct our rubrics with important but sometimes peripheral components of performance because they are easy to see, count, or score ( Wiggins and McTighe, p. 34). For example, if your students are writing an editorial, it could be stylistically sophisticated, well-organized, and meet the length requirement. However, an editorial, regardless of how well written, is wholly ineffective if it fails to persuade the reader.

Moreover, since students can become overwhelmed by the sheer number of criteria they are required to meet, less can be more. One way to accomplish this is to utilize a single-point rubric, which allows the student to focus on the stated expectations while receiving feedback on the degree to which they are meeting them. If you are using a more traditional 4-6 point rubric that details the continuum of performance, it is even more incumbent upon you to identify the main reason students are engaged in the task in the first place and edit down the criteria so it incentivizes students to focus on the most important aspects of the performance.

The "before" example below shows a rubric that measures a lot of things that don't have anything to do with whether a student understands the lunar phases: things like creativity, attractiveness, and whether the task is completed on time. If the purpose of the assignment is to assess whether students have really learned the lunar phases, the rubric should focus primarily on whether the content in the model is accurate and effective.

In the revised version below, all of the criteria is focused on the quality and accuracy of the information in the model and measures the desired scientific thinking from building the model in the first place.

2. Weigh the Criteria Appropriately

As designers of rubrics, we can signal to students that certain criteria matter more than others. Just because a rubric has four criteria, doesn't mean that each needs to be worth 25 percent of the score. With the weight of each criterion adjusted, the rubric itself guides students to focus on what is most important.

In the example below-which is the same revised rubric from above, but where the teacher wanted to include some accountability for mechanics-all four criteria are weighted exactly the same. This means a student who demonstrates a perfect understanding of the science behind lunar phases, but who struggles with spelling and punctuation, could end up with a C on the project. That would not be a true reflection of mastery.

By contrast, in the revised rubric below, "Mechanics" is only assigned 10 percent of the overall grade, while the other three criteria make up 90 percent combined. This way, the final grade will be a much more reliable measure of student understanding of lunar phases.

Another thing to keep in mind is that each criterion doesn't have to be graded every time or the same way. Within the structure of the rubric, teachers have a great deal of flexibility. Although all of the criteria are important, we can use our discretion by grading only certain items, then attending to the others when those skills or concepts are formally taught and practiced. Likewise, since our expectations of what students can accomplish at the beginning of the year are quite different from what we expect at the end of the year, we can continue to adjust the grade or point values we assign to each column.

3. Check Your Math

Your point values for each column need to yield an accurate reflection of the student's performance. For example, if on a 4-point rubric the "3" is "meets expectations" most teachers believe the point value should reflect a range from A- to B+. This stands in contrast to a C (3 out of 4 points) which is what would be earned if a student met expectations for the criteria within that column. This can result in either the teacher giving an unfair grade or altering the feedback in order to generate the desired grade.Either result isn't helpful for the student.

A design tip is to look at each column vertically and choose a number or range that would be appropriate for a student scoring exclusively within that column. The corresponding grades don't have to reflect a neat 4, 3, 2 progression. Often using decimals or a range of numbers is necessary to align each column vertically to a grade that matches the column's descriptors.

4. Can Do Rubrics, Not Can't Do Rubrics

We need to consider the language we choose so that our rubrics encourage students to improve. Without realizing it, when teachers detail the levels of performance, we tend to use degrees of deficiency (e.g. mostly, somewhat, lacking) rather than affirmative non-judgmental statements as to what the students are capable of at each point along the continuum. If we are going to truly use the rubric as a tool to enhance students' ability to self-assess and thus enhance their performance, we must provide clear markers along the way for how students can improve and not unintentionally send the message that their ongoing work is insufficient rather than on a path of progress.

The examples below show two rows in a rubric for a research project. The first uses deficit language to describe the lower levels of performance, while the second describes each level in terms of what the student CAN do.

A real-world model that clearly illustrates a learner's progression toward achieving proficiency is the traditional swim chart which indicates where the swimmer is in on the path toward achieving independence in the deep end of the pool. The language of the swim chart describes traits-from treading water to extended front crawl-that are required for the learner to move from Tadpole (beginner) to Seal (advanced). The expectations are clear, measurable, and non-judgemental; it describes what swimmers can do rather than what they can't. We can view the transparency and progression of the swim chart as an aspirational goal for our rubric design, being mindful to choose language that states the desired outcome, rather than anticipated problems.

Educators are already working toward this in the area of world languages. The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) has performance descriptors that describe the learner's degree of communication fluency. ACTFL has also developed "Can Do" statements that describe what language learners can do consistently and independently. Like the swim chart, these indicators allow learners to use the statements for self-evaluation so they are more aware of what they know and can do in the target language. In turn, world language educators have developed rubrics that match those desired outcomes.

5. Models, Models, Models!

When we design rubrics, we tend to pore over their construction. We perseverate over the language we use ("should I say 'clearly.'.. or 'distinctly'?"), repeatedly delete rows or columns, and painstakingly choose fonts.

From the student perspective, they experience the rubric differently. After being introduced to the rubric at the start of the project, the next time students typically see it is when it is returned, replete with circled boxes, teacher comments, and a final grade attached. Understandably, many students suffer from "rubric fatigue," a condition caused by encountering a series of disconnected rubrics across subject areas on any given day.

What students really benefit from are actual models (both exemplars and non-exemplars) that link to descriptors on the rubric that illustrate the quality of work expected. For example, in the real world we typically have many models of the performance or product we are trying to create or implement-whether it is for how a game should be played, a song should be sung, or an editorial should be written. Similarly, when launching a project, showing students multiple examples of prior student work or appropriate real-world examples makes the rubric meaningful and brings these descriptors to life.

Another strategy is to have students sort the various models in order to determine the specific qualities that make some examples stronger than others. The teacher can then incorporate the students' language in their draft version of the rubric or highlight aspects the teacher may have initially overlooked before distributing the final rubric. This process allows the students themselves to generate the criteria and descriptive language of the desired performance which deepens their understanding and creates shared ownership of the expectations for quality work.

Similarly, the rubric can become more user-friendly if we make the criteria more visible to students. This can be done by adding hyperlinks of models tied to the descriptors so students can access a range of examples to inform where they are along the continuum and show them exactly how they can improve.

Better Rubrics Support Student-Centered Learning

As educators, we are rightfully drawn to the goal of establishing a classroom where students have opportunities to engage in complex problem solving, participate more actively in dialogue and debate, design their own experiments, or research topics that interest them. These types of experiences-ones that do not result in a single "correct" answer or follow a formulaic procedure-require more of an open-ended assessment tool with clear guidelines for success that students can use to guide, self-assess, and ultimately improve their learning. Hopefully by following these five suggestions, your rubrics will help clarify what you really want students to take away from the experience, provide your learners with the means to get there, and allow you to fairly and honestly assess their performance. ♦

Reference

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2012). The understanding by design guide to advanced concepts in creating and reviewing units. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

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Rubric Repair: 5 Changes that Get Results

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Rubrics are meant to clarify expectations, but poor design can make the experience anything but clear. These five guidelines will help.

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Listen to my interview with Jeff Frieden (transcript):
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In our dreamiest of teacher dreams, some of us might imagine days when our students spontaneously erupt into complex, nuanced conversations about the things they're learning in our classes. If we borrow the language of the Common Core, they would "engage effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one-on-one, in groups, and teacher-led) with diverse partners on grade-level topics, texts, and issues, building on others' ideas and expressing their own clearly."

Sounds wonderful, doesn't it? And maybe the "teacher-led" kind is possible, because we could structure and guide it, but that doesn't give students much ownership of their learning. In groups? That might be a bit harder to accomplish. And one-on-one? Well, how do you even manage that?

Jeff Frieden, a high school English teacher in southern California, wondered the same thing. Wanting a less teacher-centered class, he was looking for ways to get students talking to each other about the content. He'd tried all kinds of techniques- think-pair-share, appointment clocks, groups of four-but none of them gave him the results he was looking for.

When he tried to get the whole class talking in mixer-style activities, they would "poke holes in those systems," he said. "They just kind of work their way around it to end up talking to their friends, and it becomes more social than content-centered interaction." Meanwhile, he also discovered that many of his students, who had gone to school together for years, didn't know each other's names.

Then one morning, just a few minutes before class started, he came up with something new on the fly: A simple system for getting every student in the room to talk with every other student, a way of tracking conversations over time so that students had a reason to reach out to people they never interacted with, and have more meaningful, content-based discussions with each other. Since he started using this method, Jeff says his classroom just feels different. Students are taking more academic risks, diving deeper into the content, and actually getting to know each other.

The Strategy

Here is the Ongoing Conversations system Frieden uses to get his students talking:

Each student is given a conversation tracker, a chart where they keep track of the conversations they've had with other students in the class.

Students are to have conversations with a minimum number of other students (set by the teacher-about 75 percent of the class) over a predetermined period of time (say, 2 to 3 weeks). These conversations can be structured, based on topic prompts supplied by the teacher.

On their tracker, students record the name of the person they talked to, the date of their conversation, and a one-line summary of what they talked about.

Once a pair of students has had a conversation, they may not return to each other until after they have reached the minimum number of unique conversations set by the teacher.

The image below shows one version of a conversation tracker, where Frieden's students were discussing a novel they'd read.

Currently, Frieden scaffolds the conversations by supplying topics for each round of conversation; students are not left to come up with ideas on their own. He projects these topics one at a time on Google Slides: "It might be something as simple as, Explain one thing that really confused you from the chapter to your partner. " Sometimes he'll recycle a topic by having students switch partners, then summarize the conversation they just had with their last partner.

The Benefits

On the first day Frieden tried Ongoing Conversations, "It went surprisingly well," he says. "I was actually shocked by how well it was going. And it was more content-centered talking, too; it wasn't just about their social lives. They were really responding to the prompts that I was giving them and talking about the book."

Now that he's using the strategy on a regular basis, he's found that it delivers several benefits:

More Students Engaged

Before switching to this method, Frieden believes far fewer students were actually participating in his class.

"For years, I was seeing what I wanted to see with student interactions," he says. Although his class discussions felt lively, "I might have like a third of my class really interacting." Moving to Ongoing Conversations gave more students an opportunity to really participate in discussions.

Simple, Actionable Formative Assessment

When he uses Ongoing Conversations, Frieden says, "My check for understanding is by walking around. The other day my sophomores were talking about Animal Farm, and I had asked a question about Clover, and there were way too many of them saying, 'Clover? Who's Clover? I don't know who Clover is.' And so I just went, 'Okay. Time out.' And then we talked about that character and her relevance in the story."

As a formative assessment method, Ongoing Conversations offers two advantages: It lets teachers take immediate action-like in the scenario above-and it gives them less work to take home. "I don't need to do exit tickets, I don't need to do quizzes," Frieden says, "I collect less work, but students do more."

Works with Other Strategies

This method can be blended with other discussion and instructional strategies. For example, if Frieden is having students do a philosophical chairs discussion, he might have them turn and talk with someone on their side of the room, then record that interaction on their conversation tracker.

Not Just for English Class

Ongoing Conversations is a strategy that can be used in any content area. Although Frieden initially structured these conversations around literature, he quickly realized they could be expanded beyond that. When he moved students into an inquiry-based research project, he continued using the conversation tracker, swapping out literature-based questions with prompts that centered on the research students were doing.

Grading and Assessment

Do these conversations get a grade? When Frieden first started using this system, he gave students a small amount of points for these conversations, and that would work in a points-based classroom. This year, however, he's been working toward a modified version of a gradeless classroom, where a student's course grade is determined by a conference in which the student must justify how well they've met the standards.

Frieden has found that knowing these conferences are coming is what generally keeps students motivated to give the Ongoing Conversations a good effort; they know Frieden is paying attention. "I'm watching," he says. "I'm going to hold you accountable to this, and eventually we're going to have a conversation. You're going to have to look me in the eye and say, 'This is what grade I deserve,' or 'Here, I can justify this grade.'"

Tips for Success

Don't "Free-Range" It

Frieden did not just hand students the charts and tell them to start talking: Even though they are in 12th grade, they needed a bit of structure for the strategy to be successful; younger students would need even more scaffolding. In addition to providing questions for discussion, talk with students ahead of time about behavior expectations, how to initiate conversations, how to ask follow-up questions, and even how to record the content on the tracker. You might even want to model a conversation fishbowl-style, with you as one of the participants, so students can see what a good quality conversation looks like ahead of time.

Frame the Discussion Through a Helping Lens

To relieve the anxiety students might feel about these conversations, Frieden launches the conversations by framing them through a lens of mutual support.

"I'm going to come clean that I'm a confused reader," he tells them. "Join the club. When I read something for the first time, it's always confusing, and I need help to understand it. So let's basically form this class-wide support group here for struggling readers, and as we go through this, let's talk about the things that are perplexing to us that we don't get, words we don't understand. Maybe we miss a detail that our partners or our friends figure out, so they can help us."

Setting this tone has helped student relax. "They kind of know, 'Oh, okay. We're just in here to kind of feel our way through this novel,'" Frieden says. "That's what I'm hoping."

The Value of Conversation

Giving students regular opportunities to engage in rich conversations is good for them in so many ways. "There's tremendous benefit in getting past some of the socially awkward stuff," Frieden points out. "And really just learning how to interact with another human being will actually enrich your academic life too."

Students are recognizing the benefits, too. "Even though they're struggling through the discomfort, they say that it's exposing them to ideas they wouldn't have considered had they just been asked to do it alone or respond on a worksheet," Frieden says. "I had one student who actually wrote a lengthy response saying, You know what? I don't know if I've changed my mind, but I just told myself, 'For the sake of this, I'm going to be open,' and it's actually changed the way I think about this issue. "

It was one of those rare moments when you know you're doing something right.

"My teacher nerd heart was singing that day." ♥

You can learn more from Jeff Frieden by following him on Twitter or visiting his website, Make them Master It, where he shares tons of great ideas and insights about teaching. You can read his original post about Ongoing Conversations here.

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Join my mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration that will make your teaching more effective and fun. You'll get access to our members-only library of free downloads, including 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, the e-booklet that has helped thousands of teachers save time on grading. Over 50,000 teachers have already joined-come on in.

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Get Students Talking with Ongoing Conversations

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It's not just a fantasy: This simple system gets every student in your room to have rich conversations with every other student. About content. Really.

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Need to analyze The Scarlet Letter or To Kill a Mockingbird for English class, but fumbling for the right vocabulary and concepts for literary devices? You've come to the right place. To successfully interpret and analyze literary texts, you'll first need to have a solid foundation in literary terms and their definitions.

In this article, we'll help you get familiar with most commonly used literary devices in prose and poetry. We'll give you a clear definition of each of the terms we discuss along with examples of literary elements and the context in which they most often appear (comedic writing, drama, or other).

Before we get to the list of literary devices, however, we have a quick refresher on what literary devices are and how understanding them will help you analyze works of literature.

What Are Literary Devices and Why Should You Know Them?

Literary devices are techniques that writers use to create a special and pointed effect in their writing, to convey information, or to help readers understand their writing on a deeper level.

Often, literary devices are used in writing for emphasis or clarity. Authors will also use literary devices to get readers to connect more strongly with either a story as a whole or specific characters or themes.

So why is it important to know different literary devices and terms? Aside from helping you get good grades on your literary analysis homework, there are several benefits to knowing the techniques authors commonly use.

Being able to identify when different literary techniques are being used helps you understand the motivation behind the author's choices. For example, being able to identify symbols in a story can help you figure out why the author might have chosen to insert these focal points and what these might suggest in regard to her attitude toward certain characters, plot points, and events.

In addition, being able to identify literary devices can make a written work's overall meaning or purpose clearer to you. For instance, let's say you're planning to read (or re-read) The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis. By knowing that this particular book is a religious allegory with references to Christ (represented by the character Aslan) and Judas (represented by Edmund), it will be clearer to you why Lewis uses certain language to describe certain characters and why certain events happen the way they do.

Finally, literary techniques are important to know because they make texts more interesting and more fun to read. If you were to read a novel without knowing any literary devices, chances are you wouldn't be able to detect many of the layers of meaning interwoven into the story via different techniques.

Now that we've gone over why you should spend some time learning literary devices, let's take a look at some of the most important literary elements to know.

List of Literary Devices: 31 Literary Terms You Should Know

Below is a list of literary devices, most of which you'll often come across in both prose and poetry. We explain what each literary term is and give you an example of how it's used. This literary elements list is arranged in alphabetical order.

Allegory

An allegory is a story that is used to represent a more general message about real-life (historical) issues and/or events. It is typically an entire book, novel, play, etc.

Example: George Orwell's dystopian book Animal Farm is an allegory for the events preceding the Russian Revolution and the Stalinist era in early 20th century Russia. In the story, animals on a farm practice animalism, which is essentially communism. Many characters correspond to actual historical figures: Old Major represents both the founder of communism Karl Marx and the Russian communist leader Vladimir Lenin; the farmer, Mr. Jones, is the Russian Czar; the boar Napoleon stands for Joseph Stalin; and the pig Snowball represents Leon Trotsky.

Alliteration

Alliteration is a series of words or phrases that all (or almost all) start with the same sound. These sounds are typically consonants to give more stress to that syllable. You'll often come across alliteration in poetry, titles of books and poems ( Jane Austen is a fan of this device, for example-just look at Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility), and tongue twisters.

Example: "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers." In this tongue twister, the "p" sound is repeated at the beginning of all major words.

Allusion

Allusion is when an author makes an indirect reference to a figure, place, event, or idea originating from outside the text. Many allusions make reference to previous works of literature or art.

Example: "Stop acting so smart-it's not like you're Einstein or something." This is an allusion to the famous real-life theoretical physicist Albert Einstein.

Anachronism

An anachronism occurs when there is an (intentional) error in the chronology or timeline of a text. This could be a character who appears in a different time period than when he actually lived, or a technology that appears before it was invented. Anachronisms are often used for comedic effect.

Example: A Renaissance king who says, "That's dope, dude!" would be an anachronism, since this type of language is very modern and not actually from the Renaissance period.

Anaphora

Anaphora is when a word or phrase is repeated at the beginning of multiple sentences throughout a piece of writing. It's used to emphasize the repeated phrase and evoke strong feelings in the audience.

Example: A famous example of anaphora is Winston Churchill's "We Shall Fight on the Beaches" speech. Throughout this speech, he repeats the phrase "we shall fight" while listing numerous places where the British army will continue battling during WWII. He did this to rally both troops and the British people and to give them confidence that they would still win the war.

Anthropomorphism

An anthropomorphism occurs when something nonhuman, such as an animal, place, or inanimate object, behaves in a human-like way.

Example: Children's cartoons have many examples of anthropomorphism. For example, Mickey and Minnie Mouse can speak, wear clothes, sing, dance, drive cars, etc. Real mice can't do any of these things, but the two mouse characters behave much more like humans than mice.

Asyndeton

Asyndeton is when the writer leaves out conjunctions (such as "and," "or," "but," and "for") in a group of words or phrases so that the meaning of the phrase or sentence is emphasized. It is often used for speeches since sentences containing asyndeton can have a powerful, memorable rhythm.

Example: Abraham Lincoln ends the Gettysburg Address with the phrase "...and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the Earth." By leaving out certain conjunctions, he ends the speech on a more powerful, melodic note.

Colloquialism

Colloquialism is the use of informal language and slang. It's often used by authors to lend a sense of realism to their characters and dialogue. Forms of colloquialism include words, phrases, and contractions that aren't real words (such as "gonna" and "ain't").

Example: "Hey, what's up, man?" This piece of dialogue is an example of a colloquialism, since it uses common everyday words and phrases, namely "what's up" and "man."

Epigraph

An epigraph is when an author inserts a famous quotation, poem, song, or other short passage or text at the beginning of a larger text (e.g., a book, chapter, etc.). An epigraph is typically written by a different writer (with credit given) and used as a way to introduce overarching themes or messages in the work. Some pieces of literature, such as Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby-Dick, incorporate multiple epigraphs throughout.

Example: At the beginning of Ernest Hemingway's book The Sun Also Rises is an epigraph that consists of a quotation from poet Gertrude Stein, which reads, "You are all a lost generation," and a passage from the Bible.

Epistrophe

Epistrophe is similar to anaphora, but in this case, the repeated word or phrase appears at the end of successive statements. Like anaphora, it is used to evoke an emotional response from the audience.

Example: In Lyndon B. Johnson's speech, "The American Promise," he repeats the word "problem" in a use of epistrophe: "There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem."
Hemingway, deep in thought about what quotation to choose for his epigraph.
Euphemism

A euphemism is when a more mild or indirect word or expression is used in place of another word or phrase that is considered harsh, blunt, vulgar, or unpleasant.

Example: "I'm so sorry, but he didn't make it." The phrase "didn't make it" is a more polite and less blunt way of saying that someone has died.

Flashback

A flashback is an interruption in a narrative that depicts events that have already occurred, either before the present time or before the time at which the narration takes place. This device is often used to give the reader more background information and details about specific characters, events, plot points, and so on.

Example: Most of the novel Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë is a flashback from the point of view of the housekeeper, Nelly Dean, as she engages in a conversation with a visitor named Lockwood. In this story, Nelly narrates Catherine Earnshaw's and Heathcliff's childhoods, the pair's budding romance, and their tragic demise.

Foreshadowing

Foreshadowing is when an author indirectly hints at-through things such as dialogue, description, or characters' actions-what's to come later on in the story. This device is often used to introduce tension to a narrative.

Example: Say you're reading a fictionalized account of Amelia Earhart. Before she embarks on her (what we know to be unfortunate) plane ride, a friend says to her, "Be safe. Wouldn't want you getting lost-or worse." This line would be an example of foreshadowing because it implies that something bad ("or worse") will happen to Earhart.

Hyperbole

Hyperbole is an exaggerated statement that's not meant to be taken literally by the reader. It is often used for comedic effect and/or emphasis.

Example: "I'm so hungry I could eat a horse." The speaker will not literally eat an entire horse (and most likely couldn't), but this hyperbole emphasizes how starved the speaker feels.

Imagery

Imagery is when an author describes a scene, thing, or idea so that it appeals to our senses (taste, smell, sight, touch, or hearing). This device is often used to help the reader clearly visualize parts of the story by creating a strong mental picture.

Example: Here's an example of imagery taken from William Wordsworth's famous poem "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud":
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden Daffodils;
Beside the Lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Irony

Irony is when a statement is used to express an opposite meaning than the one literally expressed by it. There are three types of irony in literature:

Verbal irony: When someone says something but means the opposite (similar to sarcasm).

Situational irony: When something happens that's the opposite of what was expected or intended to happen.

Dramatic irony: When the audience is aware of the true intentions or outcomes, while the characters are not. As a result, certain actions and/or events take on different meanings for the audience than they do for the characters involved.
Poe was a fan of irony-and ravens.
Examples:

Verbal irony: One example of this type of irony can be found in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado." In this short story, a man named Montresor plans to get revenge on another man named Fortunato. As they toast, Montresor says, "And I, Fortunato-I drink to your long life." This statement is ironic because we the readers already know by this point that Montresor plans to kill Fortunato.

Situational irony: A girl wakes up late for school and quickly rushes to get there. As soon as she arrives, though, she realizes that it's Saturday and there is no school.

Dramatic irony: In William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Romeo commits suicide in order to be with Juliet; however, the audience (unlike poor Romeo) knows that Juliet is not actually dead-just asleep.

Juxtaposition

Juxtaposition is the comparing and contrasting of two or more different (usually opposite) ideas, characters, objects, etc. This literary device is often used to help create a clearer picture of the characteristics of one object or idea by comparing it with those of another.

Example: One of the most famous literary examples of juxtaposition is the opening passage from Charles Dickens' novel A Tale of Two Cities:

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair ..."

Malapropism

Malapropism happens when an incorrect word is used in place of a word that has a similar sound. This misuse of the word typically results in a statement that is both nonsensical and humorous; as a result, this device is commonly used in comedic writing.

Example: "I just can't wait to dance the flamingo!" Here, a character has accidentally called the flamenco (a type of dance) the flamingo (an animal).

Metaphor/Simile

Metaphors are when ideas, actions, or objects are described in non-literal terms. In short, it's when an author compares one thing to another. The two things being described usually share something in common but are unalike in all other respects.

A simile is a type of metaphor in which an object, idea, character, action, etc., is compared to another thing using the words "as" or "like."

Both metaphors and similes are often used in writing for clarity or emphasis.

Examples:
"What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun." In this line from Romeo and Juliet, Romeo compares Juliet to the sun. However, because Romeo doesn't use the words "as" or "like," it is not a simile-just a metaphor.

"She is as vicious as a lion." Since this statement uses the word "as" to make a comparison between "she" and "a lion," it is a simile.

Metonym

A metonym is when a related word or phrase is substituted for the actual thing to which it's referring. This device is usually used for poetic or rhetorical effect.

Example: "The pen is mightier than the sword." This statement, which was coined by Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1839, contains two examples of metonymy: "the pen" refers to "the written word," and "the sword" refers to "military force/violence."

Mood

Mood is the general feeling the writer wants the audience to have. The writer can achieve this through description, setting, dialogue, and word choice.

Example: Here's a passage from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit: "It had a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle. The door opened on to a tube-shaped hall like a tunnel: a very comfortable tunnel without smoke, with panelled walls, and floors tiled and carpeted, provided with polished chairs, and lots and lots of pegs for hats and coats -- the hobbit was fond of visitors." In this passage, Tolkien uses detailed description to set create a cozy, comforting mood. From the writing, you can see that the hobbit's home is well-cared for and designed to provide comfort.

Onomatopoeia

Onomatopoeia is a word (or group of words) that represents a sound and actually resembles or imitates the sound it stands for. It is often used for dramatic, realistic, or poetic effect.

Examples: Buzz, boom, chirp, creak, sizzle, zoom, etc.

Oxymoron
The Penrose stairs = a classic example of a paradox. Are they going up or down?!
An oxymoron is a combination of two words that, together, express a contradictory meaning. This device is often used for emphasis, for humor, to create tension, or to illustrate a paradox (see next entry for more information on paradoxes).

Examples: Deafening silence, organized chaos, cruelly kind, insanely logical, etc.

Paradox

A paradox is a statement that appears illogical or self-contradictory but, upon investigation, might actually be true or plausible.

Note that a paradox is different from an oxymoron: a paradox is an entire phrase or sentence, whereas an oxymoron is a combination of just two words.

Example: Here's a famous paradoxical sentence: "This statement is false." If the statement is true, then it isn't actually false (as it suggests). But if it's false, then the statement is true! Thus, this statement is a paradox because it is both true and false at the same time.

Personification

Personification is when a nonhuman figure or other abstract concept or element is described as having human-like qualities or characteristics. (Unlike anthropomorphism where non-human figures become human-like characters, with personification, the object/figure is simply described as being human-like.) Personification is used to help the reader create a clearer mental picture of the scene or object being described.

Example: "The wind moaned, beckoning me to come outside." In this example, the wind-a nonhuman element-is being described as if it is human (it "moans" and "beckons").

Repetition

Repetition is when a word or phrase is written multiple times, usually for the purpose of emphasis. It is often used in poetry (for purposes of rhythm as well).

Example: When Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote the score for the hit musical Hamilton, gave his speech at the 2016 Tony's, he recited a poem he'd written that included the following line:
And love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love cannot be killed or swept aside.

Satire

Satire is genre of writing that criticizes something, such as a person, behavior, belief, government, or society. Satire often employs irony, humor, and hyperbole to make its point.

Example: The Onion is a satirical newspaper and digital media company. It uses satire to parody common news features such as opinion columns, editorial cartoons, and click bait headlines.

Soliloquy

A type of monologue that's often used in dramas, a soliloquy is when a character speaks aloud to himself (and to the audience), thereby revealing his inner thoughts and feelings.

Example: In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet's speech on the balcony that begins with, "O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?" is a soliloquy, as she is speaking aloud to herself (remember that she doesn't realize Romeo's there listening!).

Symbolism

Symbolism refers to the use of an object, figure, event, situation, or other idea in a written work to represent something else- typically a broader message or deeper meaning that differs from its literal meaning.

The things used for symbolism are called "symbols," and they'll often appear multiple times throughout a text, sometimes changing in meaning as the plot progresses.

Example: In F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, the green light that sits across from Gatsby's mansion symbolizes Gatsby's hopes and dreams.

Synecdoche

A synecdoche is a literary device in which part of something is used to represent the whole, or vice versa. It's similar to a metonym (see above); however, a metonym doesn't have to represent the whole-just something associated with the word used.

Example: "Help me out, I need some hands!" In this case, "hands" is being used to refer to people (the whole human, essentially).
Time to become your own Sherlock Holmes!
Tone

While mood is what the audience is supposed to feel, tone is the writer or narrator's attitude towards a subject. A good writer will always want the audience to feel the mood they're trying to evoke, but the audience may not always agree with the narrator's tone, especially if the narrator is an unsympathetic character or has viewpoints that differ from those of the reader.

Example: In an essay disdaining Americans and some of the sites they visit as tourists, Rudyard Kipling begins with the line, "Today I am in the Yellowstone Park, and I wish I were dead." If you enjoy Yellowstone and/or national parks, you may not agree with the author's tone in this piece.

How to Identify and Analyze Literary Devices: 4 Tips

In order to fully interpret pieces of literature, you have to understand a lot about literary devices in the texts you read. Here are our top tips for identifying and analyzing different literary techniques:

Tip 1: Read Closely and Carefully

First off, you'll need to make sure that you're reading very carefully. Resist the temptation to skim or skip any sections of the text. If you do this, you might miss some literary devices being used and, as a result, will be unable to accurately interpret the text.

If there are any passages in the work that make you feel especially emotional, curious, intrigued, or just plain interested, check that area again for any literary devices at play.

It's also a good idea to reread any parts you thought were confusing or that you didn't totally understand on a first read-through. Doing this ensures that you have a solid grasp of the passage (and text as a whole) and will be able to analyze it appropriately.

Tip 2: Memorize Common Literary Terms

You won't be able to identify literary elements in texts if you don't know what they are or how they're used, so spend some time memorizing the literary elements list above. Knowing these (and how they look in writing) will allow you to more easily pinpoint these techniques in various types of written works.

Tip 3: Know the Author's Intended Audience

Knowing what kind of audience an author intended her work to have can help you figure out what types of literary devices might be at play.

For example, if you were trying to analyze a children's book, you'd want to be on the lookout for child-appropriate devices, such as repetition and alliteration.

Tip 4: Take Notes and Bookmark Key Passages and Pages

This is one of the most important tips to know, especially if you're reading and analyzing works for English class. As you read, take notes on the work in a notebook or on a computer. Write down any passages, paragraphs, conversations, descriptions, etc., that jump out at you or that contain a literary device you were able to identify.

You can also take notes directly in the book, if possible (but don't do this if you're borrowing a book from the library!). I recommend circling keywords and important phrases, as well as starring interesting or particularly effective passages and paragraphs.

Lastly, use sticky notes or post-its to bookmark pages that are interesting to you or that have some kind of notable literary device. This will help you go back to them later should you need to revisit some of what you've found for a paper you plan to write.

What's Next?

Looking for more in-depth explorations and examples of literary devices? Join us as we delve into imagery, personification, rhetorical devices, tone words and mood, and different points of view in literature, as well as some more poetry-specific terms like assonance and iambic pentameter.
These recommendations are based solely on our knowledge and experience. If you purchase an item through one of our links, PrepScholar may receive a commission.
Reading The Great Gatsby for class or even just for fun? Then you'll definitely want to check out our expert guides on the biggest themes in this classic book, from love and relationships to money and materialism.

Got questions about Arthur Miller's The Crucible? Read our in-depth articles to learn about the most important themes in this play and get a complete rundown of all the characters.

For more information on your favorite works of literature, take a look at our collection of high-quality book guides and our guide to the 9 literary elements that appear in every story!

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Trying to identify literary techniques? Check out our complete list of literary devices and get tips on how to spot and analyze them.

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Please view my blog post titled #BookSnaps - Snapping for Learning for more information.

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Created by the Digital Media Team and Steve Bradford for general distribution purposes. Please contact Steve for any questions/issues.

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Let's talk about note-taking. Every day, in classrooms all over the world, students are taking notes. I have my own half-baked ideas about what makes one approach better than another, and I'm sure you do too. But if we're going to call ourselves professionals, we need to know what the research says, yes?

So I've combed through about three decades' worth of research, and I'm going to tell you what it says about best practices in note-taking. Although this is not an exhaustive summary, it hits on some of the most frequently debated questions on the subject.

This information is going to be useful for any subject area-I found some really good stuff that would be especially useful for STEM teachers or anyone who does heavy work with calculations, diagrams, and other technical illustrations. Of course, there's plenty here for teachers of social studies, English, and the humanities as well, so everyone sit tight because you'll probably come away with something you can apply to your classroom.

First, Let's Talk About Lectures

When we think about note-taking, it's natural to assume a context of lecture-based lessons. And yes, that is one common scenario when a student is likely to take notes. But other learning experiences also lend themselves to note-taking: Watching videos in a flipped or blended environment, reading assigned textbook chapters or handouts, doing research for a project, and going on field trips can all be opportunities for taking notes.

So instead of referring to lectures in this overview, I'll just talk about learning experiences or intake sessions-times when students are absorbing content or skills through some sort of medium, as opposed to purely applying that content or synthesizing it into some kind of product. Even in student-centered, project-driven classrooms where students pursue their own authentic tasks like the Apollo School, or in more traditional classrooms that set aside time for Genius Hour projects, students need to gather, encode, and store information, so note-taking would still be a fit.

What the Research Says About Note-Taking

1. Note-taking matters.

Whether it's taking notes from lectures (Kiewra, 2002) or from reading (Rahmani & Sadeghi, 2011; Chang & Ku, 2014), note-taking has been shown to improve student learning. In other words, if we want our students to remember more of what they learn in our classes, it's better to have them take notes than it is to not have them take notes.

The thinking behind this is that note-taking requires effort. Rather than passively taking information in, the act of encoding the information into words or pictures forms new pathways in the brain, which stores it more firmly in long-term memory. On top of that, having the information stored in a new place gives students the opportunity to revisit it later and reinforce the learning that happened the first time around.

So if you're not currently having students take notes in your class, consider adding note-taking to your regular classroom routine. With that said, a number of other factors can influence the potency of a student's note-taking, and that is what these other points will address.

2. More is better.

Although students are often encouraged to keep notes brief, it turns out that in general, the more notes students take, the more information they tend to remember later. The quantity of notes is directly related to how much information students retain (Nye, Crooks, Powley, & Tripp, 1984).

This would be useful to share with students. If they know that more complete notes will result in better learning, they may be more likely to record additional information in their notes, rather than striving for brevity.

Obviously, some students are going to be faster note-takers than others, and this will allow them to take more complete notes. But you can do quite a bit to help all students get more information into their notes, regardless of their natural speed, and that's what we'll talk about next.

3. Explicitly teaching note-taking strategies can make a difference.

Although some students seem to have an intuitive sense for what notes to record, for everyone else, getting trained in specific note-taking strategies can significantly improve the quality of notes and the amount of material they remember later. (Boyle, 2013; Rahmani & Sadeghi, 2011; Robin, Foxx, Martello, & Archable, 1977). This is especially true for students with learning disabilities.

One frequently used note-taking system is Cornell Notes. This approach has been around for decades, and the format provides a simple way to take "live" notes in class and condense and review them later.

4. Adding visuals boosts the power of notes.

Compared with writing alone, adding drawings to notes to represent concepts, terms, and relationships has a significant effect on memory and learning (Wammes, Meade, & Fernandes, 2016).

The growing popularity of sketchnoting in recent years suggests that teachers are well on their way to taking advantage of this research.

This video combines sketchnoting with Cornell Notes, and it's an approach I think is definitely worth considering.

To explore sketchnoting more deeply, check out this list of sketchnoting resources compiled by celebrated education sketchnote artist Sylvia Duckworth.

5. Revision, collaboration, and pausing boosts the power of notes.

When students are given the opportunity to revise, add to, or rewrite their notes, they tend to retain more information. And when that revision happens during deliberate pauses in a lecture or other learning experience, students remember the information better and take better notes than if the revision happens after the learning experience is over. Finally, if students collaborate on this revision with partners, they record even more complete notes and score higher on post-tests (Luo, Kiewra, & Samuelson, 2016).

With this in mind, it would be a good idea to plan breaks in lectures, videos, or independent reading periods to allow students to look over, add to, and revise their notes, ideally with a partner or small group. This partner work could happen after students have had time to revise their notes alone, or students might be given access to classmates for the duration of the pause.

6. Scaffolding increases retention.

Teachers can build scaffolds into their instruction to ensure that students take better notes. One very effective type of scaffold is guided notes (also called skeleton or skeletal notes). With guided notes, the instructor provides some type of outline of the material to be covered, but with space left for students to complete key information. This strategy has been shown to substantially increase student achievement across all grade levels (elementary through college) and with students who present with various disabilities (Haydon, Mancil, Kroeger, McLeskey, & Lin, 2011).

As instructors experiment with guided notes, certain features show a lot of promise. One that I found incredibly interesting was a style developed by engineering professor Susan Reynolds to accompany her lectures: The notes combine typed information, handwritten content, and graphics, but still leave room for student notes and working out example problems.

Diagrams are pre-drawn, but some key numbers are left out for students to fill in during the lecture. These notes consolidate all the technical material for a lecture into a single document, and the information is organized to align with the lecture. The more I study these notes, the more I see how useful they are, and how well they balance the efficiency offered by guided notes with the need for students to actively participate in the encoding process.

Guided notes created by engineering professor Susan Reynolds. These have not been completed yet.

The same pages of guided notes completed by the instructor during the lecture.

Reynolds' students have had strong positive reactions to this style of notes and consistently attribute the notes as a key factor in their engagement and learning in the course (Reynolds & Tackie, 2016).

While teachers should experiment with different styles, the take-away here is that if you want students to get the most out of a learning experience, provide them with some form of partially completed notes.

In the meantime, you can add another layer of scaffolding by simply adding more verbal cues to your learning experiences (Kiewra, 2002). Research shows that simply saying things like, "This is an important point," or "Be sure to add this to your notes," instructors can ensure that students include key ideas in their notes. Providing written cues on the board or a slideshow can also help students structure their notes and decide what information to include.

7. Providing instructor notes improves learning.

In an article I wrote a few years ago, I denounced instructor-prepared notes as an ineffective method for teaching, primarily because encoding this information required no effort from students and therefore made the learning too passive.

Although I stand by the assertion that we should avoid simply supplying students with notes, I need to refine the message: Research has shown that when we give students complete, well-written, instructor-prepared notes to review after they take their own notes, they learn significantly more than with their own notes alone (Kiewra, 1985).

If we combine this strategy with student revision, collaboration, and pausing to improve note-taking and learning-in other words, having students pause during an intake session to collaboratively revise their notes, then let them review instructor notes at the end-we can give our students an incredibly powerful learning experience.

One concern is that providing notes might make students more passive about taking their own notes during the learning experience. Here are some suggestions for addressing that:

Assigning a small grade for student notes would likely compel most students to do them, but this could distort the validity of a grade, as we discussed in another post.

It would probably be more effective to simply build note-taking into the class activities. For example, if students are encouraged to take notes, and then they are given a pause every few minutes to compare and revise notes, it would be pretty awkward for them to turn to a partner and have nothing to contribute.

Sharing the research with students that those taking notes then revising them with instructor notes has greater impact than instructor notes alone might push students to take more notes.

Allowing students to choose a note-taking format that works best for them would also boost student motivation for taking the notes.

8. Handwritten notes may be more powerful than digital notes, but digital note-taking can be fine-tuned.

Studies have shown that students who take notes by hand learn more than those who take notes on a laptop (Mueller & Oppenheimer, 2014; Carter, Greenberg, & Walker, 2017).

This research confirms what a number of educators suspect about the negative effects of digital devices in the classroom, and some have taken it to mean they should definitely ban laptops from their lectures (Dynarski, 2017). Others argue that prohibiting laptop use robs students of the opportunity to develop metacognitive awareness of their own levels of distraction and make the appropriate adjustments (Holland, 2017).

Because technology is always changing, and because as a species, we are still adjusting to these new formats, I would hesitate to ban laptops from the classroom. Here's why:

Research on this topic is still pretty young: Some researchers have found no significant difference in performance between paper-based and digital note-takers (Artz, Johnson, Robson, & Taengnoi, 2017). My guess is that more research will pile up and get more refined, so we should take a measured approach for the time being.

Other researchers are looking at ways to reduce some of the problems associated with digital note-taking, like distraction: One study found that while doing online research, students who used matrix-style notes and were given time limits were much less likely to become distracted by other online material than students without those conditions (Wu, & Xie, 2018).

I believe we serve our students better by helping them find a note-taking system that works best for them. With that in mind, I would be more likely to have students experiment with hand-written and digital notes, share the research with them, and give them opportunities to reflect on and measure their results.

See What Other Teachers are Doing

To learn more about what other teachers have found to be most effective note-taking methods, I put the call out on Twitter, asking teachers to share what works for them. You can browse that conversation here.

References

Artz, B., Johnson, M., Robson, D., & Taengnoi, S. (2017). Note-taking in the digital age: Evidence from classroom random control trials. http://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3036455

Boyle, J. R. (2013). Strategic note-taking for inclusive middle school science classrooms. Remedial and Special Education, 34(2), 78-90. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0741932511410862

Carter, S. P., Greenberg, K., & Walker, M. S. (2017). The impact of computer usage on academic performance: Evidence from a randomized trial at the United States Military Academy. Economics of Education Review, 56, 118-132. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econedurev.2016.12.005

Chang, W., & Ku, Y. (2014). The effects of note-taking skills instruction on elementary students' reading. The Journal of Educational Research, 108(4), 278-291. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.2014.886175

Dynarski, S. (2017). For Note Taking, Low-Tech is Often Best. Retrieved from https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/uk/17/08/note-taking-low-tech-often-best

Haydon, T., Mancil, G.R., Kroeger, S.D., McLeskey, J., & Lin, W.J. (2011). A review of the effectiveness of guided notes for students who struggle learning academic content. Preventing School Failure: Alternative Education for Children and Youth, 55(4), 226-231. http://doi.org/10.1080/1045988X.2010.548415

Holland, B. (2017). Note taking editorials - groundhog day all over again. Retrieved from http://brholland.com/note-taking-editorials-groundhog-day-all-over-again/

Kiewra, K.A. (1985). Providing the instructor's notes: an effective addition to student notetaking. Educational Psychologist, 20(1), 33-39. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15326985ep2001_5

Kiewra, K.A. (2002). How classroom teachers can help students learn and teach them how to learn. Theory into Practice, 41(2), 71-80. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4102_3

Luo, L., Kiewra, K.A. & Samuelson, L. (2016). Revising lecture notes: how revision, pauses, and partners affect note taking and achievement. Instructional Science, 44(1). 45-67. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-016-9370-4

Mueller, P.A., & Oppenheimer, D.M. (2014). The pen is mightier than the keyboard: Advantages of longhand over laptop note taking. Psychological Science, 25(6), 1159-1168. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614524581

Nye, P.A., Crooks, T.J., Powley, M., & Tripp, G. (1984). Student note-taking related to university examination performance. Higher Education, 13(1), 85-97. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00136532

Rahmani, M., & Sadeghi, K. (2011). Effects of note-taking training on reading comprehension and recall. The Reading Matrix, 11(2). Retrieved from https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/85a8/f016516e61de663ac9413d9bec58fa07bccd.pdf

Reynolds, S.M., & Tackie, R.N. (2016). A novel approach to skeleton-note instruction in large engineering courses: Unified and concise handouts that are fun and colorful. American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition, New Orleans, LA, June 26-29, 2016. Retrieved from https://www.asee.org/public/conferences/64/papers/15115/view

Robin, A., Foxx, R. M., Martello, J., & Archable, C. (1977). Teaching note-taking skills to underachieving college students. The Journal of Educational Research, 71(2), 81-85. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.1977.10885042

Wammes, J.D., Meade, M.E., & Fernandes, M.A. (2016). The drawing effect: Evidence for reliable and robust memory benefits in free recall. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 69(9). http://doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2015.1094494

Wu, J. Y., & Xie, C. (2018). Using time pressure and note-taking to prevent digital distraction behavior and enhance online search performance: Perspectives from the load theory of attention and cognitive control. Computers in Human Behavior, 88, 244-254. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2018.07.008

Come back for more.
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A summary of 8 best practices in note-taking, straight from the research.

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One-pagers and Sketchnotes have become incredibly popular in recent years, and it's easy to see why. Rather than just jotting down words on a page, students use one-pagers to visually represent key points and takeaways. They're fun to create and have a real impact on memory and comprehension. Here's how to use them, plus lots of terrific one-pager examples to inspire you and your students.

What Are One-Pagers?

Source: Chomping at the Lit

One-pagers invite students to think deeply about a text and produce a single page to represent its most important aspects. They usually include some images, doodles, or other graphic elements, giving them the alternate name Sketchnotes. One-pagers are often full of color and may include more images than words, depending on the student. They're most commonly used in ELA classrooms but can be helpful in other subjects too.

This note-taking concept was pioneered by AVID, a group that seeks to prepare all students for college. As one-pagers caught on, teachers found that students who used one-pagers made a deeper connection to the text and had better retention of key concepts. AVID's guidelines encourage students to share their one-pagers with one another, helping to inspire learning in a variety of visual ways.

How To Get Started With One-Pagers

Source: Spark Creativity

One problem teachers face when encouraging kids to use one-pagers is that some students don't feel "artistic" enough. They may also not know where to start. When teaching kids to use Sketchnote one-pagers, provide more direction at first. Start by showing kids one-pager examples (see below). Ask what they notice about these Sketchnotes. Some characteristics they might note:

The information and images fill the whole page.

They're colorful and full of illustrations.

The illustrations don't need to be expert, they just help emphasize a connection.

Words are carefully chosen to highlight key concepts.

Some kids will take the idea and run with it right off the bat. Others will need a little more help. In this case, offering one-pager templates like these from Spark Creativity can really help.

You can also share these specific directions from AVID, which provide guidance on what to include on each page. Giving students a clear list of what to cover will increase confidence and free them up to be creative. For example, in English Language Arts, you might ask students to:

Sketch one visual symbol that represents the text's main theme.

Write out two quotations that show the author's style.

Include a sketch and a sentence representing the setting.

Make connections between the text and current events using sketches and text.

Examine one or two main characters and their development.

Identify three symbols through sketches or text.

Include a statement about one thing they connected with in the reading.

One-Pager Examples and Ideas

Here are some outstanding one-pager examples on a variety of texts and topics. Note the incredible array of styles, which you can use to remind kids that there's no one right way to use Sketchnotes. Encourage them to be creative!

Simple DNA One-Pager

Source: @sciencelessonsthatrock

We like this one-pager example because it shows students that you don't need to be an expert artist to create something meaningful.

Poetry One-Pager

Source: @prestoplans

Here's an example of how a template can provide students with strong guidance to get them started. This one-pager has more words than illustrations, but it's still colorful and engaging.

Digital One-Pager

Source: @readitwriteitlearnit

One-pagers can go digital too! Try a whiteboard tool like Jamboard to make the process easy.

The Outsiders One-Pagers

Source: @wonderingwithmrswatto, The Outsiders

Source: @wonderingwithmrswatto, Digital The Outsiders

Take a look at these two different one-pager examples, one handwritten and one digital-and both effective!

Symbols One-Pager

Source: @studyallknight

Here's another terrific way to use a template. Students can sketch the symbol, then add in handwritten notes for more info.

Beowulf One-Pager

Source: @gretazefo

This note-taking option really gives artistic students a chance to shine! Just make sure they add enough information (graphic or text) to help them make connections with what they've read.

The Great Gatsby One-Pager

Source: @mrsreganreads

Sketching characters from books can bring them to life for readers. Highlight a few quotes that truly express their personalities.

Power Profiles One-Pager

Source: @laumom

Students can use one-pagers to demonstrate what they know. They make interesting alternatives to essays or book reports.

Because of Winn-Dixie One-Pagers

Source: @enrichingelementary

Note that although each student used the same basic template (hand-drawn too, so don't worry about making copies!), they each created something different and meaningful to themselves.

Fahrenheit 451 One-Pager

Source: @mudandinkteaching

Encourage students to add at least some images to their Sketchnotes, even if they're as simple as stick figures or outlines. This engages different parts of the brain than just writing words does, and it deepens recall.

Letter From Birmingham Jail One-Pager

Source: @thehodgenator

Even when writing text, try to use a variety of colors and styles for emphasis. Just shading a background can draw the eye to something important.

Geography One-Pager

Source: @wmscl4

One-pagers are terrific for comparing and contrasting information, like this one comparing how geography affects the lives of people in China and India.

The Running Dream One-Pager

Source: @mayor_james

We love the idea of adding a word cloud to a one-pager! If you're making a digital version, try these word cloud generators.

Intro One-Pager

Source: @nowsparkcreativity

One-pagers are such a fun way to do a getting-to-know-you activity on the first day of class.

Frayer Model Vocab One-Pager

Source: @missjackiesroom

The Frayer model graphic organizer is a terrific lead-in to more creative one-pagers, and a nice way to get students more comfortable with the format.

Inaugural Address One-Pager

Source: @mrsprzbooks

The main image choice can set the tone for an entire one-pager analysis.

USA One-Pager

Source: Teach With Tina

Don't be afraid to try one-pagers in any class, for any topic!

Want to share more one-pager examples or ask for advice? Join the conversation in the WeAreTeachers HELPLINE group on Facebook.

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20 One-Pager Examples + Advice for Using Them in Class

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One-pagers let students note all the important info on one quick reference sheet. Learn how to use them and get one-pager examples here.

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1. Record: During the lecture, use the note-taking column to record the
lecture using telegraphic sentences.
2. Questions: As soon after class as possible, formulate questions based on
the notes in the right-hand column. Writing questions helps to clarify
meanings, reveal relationships, establish continuity, and strengthen
memory. Also, the writing of questions sets up a perfect stage for exam-studying
later.
3. Recite: Cover the note-taking column with a sheet of paper. Then, looking
at the questions or cue-words in the question and cue column only, say
aloud, in your own words, the answers to the questions, facts, or ideas
indicated by the cue-words.
4. Reflect: Reflect on the material by asking yourself questions, for example:
"What's the significance of these facts? What principle are they based on?
How can I apply them? How do they fit in with what I already know?
What's beyond them?
5. Review: Spend at least ten minutes every week reviewing all your previous
notes. If you do, you'll retain a great deal for current use, as well as, for the
exam.

Adapted from How to Study in College 7/e by Walter Pauk, 2001 Houghton Mifflin Company
pdf of the Cornell Note-taking System

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1. Record: During the lecture, use the note-taking column to record the lecture using telegraphic sentences. 2. Questions: As soon after class as possible, formulate questions based on the notes in the right-hand column. Writing questions helps to clarify meanings, reveal relationships, establish continuity, and strengthen memory.

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Let's talk about note-taking. Every day, in classrooms all over the world, students are taking notes. I have my own half-baked ideas about what makes one approach better than another, and I'm sure you do too. But if we're going to call ourselves professionals, we need to know what the research says, yes?

So I've combed through about three decades' worth of research, and I'm going to tell you what it says about best practices in note-taking. Although this is not an exhaustive summary, it hits on some of the most frequently debated questions on the subject.

This information is going to be useful for any subject area-I found some really good stuff that would be especially useful for STEM teachers or anyone who does heavy work with calculations, diagrams, and other technical illustrations. Of course, there's plenty here for teachers of social studies, English, and the humanities as well, so everyone sit tight because you'll probably come away with something you can apply to your classroom.

First, Let's Talk About Lectures

When we think about note-taking, it's natural to assume a context of lecture-based lessons. And yes, that is one common scenario when a student is likely to take notes. But other learning experiences also lend themselves to note-taking: Watching videos in a flipped or blended environment, reading assigned textbook chapters or handouts, doing research for a project, and going on field trips can all be opportunities for taking notes.

So instead of referring to lectures in this overview, I'll just talk about learning experiences or intake sessions-times when students are absorbing content or skills through some sort of medium, as opposed to purely applying that content or synthesizing it into some kind of product. Even in student-centered, project-driven classrooms where students pursue their own authentic tasks like the Apollo School, or in more traditional classrooms that set aside time for Genius Hour projects, students need to gather, encode, and store information, so note-taking would still be a fit.

What the Research Says About Note-Taking

1. Note-taking matters.

Whether it's taking notes from lectures (Kiewra, 2002) or from reading (Rahmani & Sadeghi, 2011; Chang & Ku, 2014), note-taking has been shown to improve student learning. In other words, if we want our students to remember more of what they learn in our classes, it's better to have them take notes than it is to not have them take notes.

The thinking behind this is that note-taking requires effort. Rather than passively taking information in, the act of encoding the information into words or pictures forms new pathways in the brain, which stores it more firmly in long-term memory. On top of that, having the information stored in a new place gives students the opportunity to revisit it later and reinforce the learning that happened the first time around.

So if you're not currently having students take notes in your class, consider adding note-taking to your regular classroom routine. With that said, a number of other factors can influence the potency of a student's note-taking, and that is what these other points will address.

2. More is better.

Although students are often encouraged to keep notes brief, it turns out that in general, the more notes students take, the more information they tend to remember later. The quantity of notes is directly related to how much information students retain (Nye, Crooks, Powley, & Tripp, 1984).

This would be useful to share with students. If they know that more complete notes will result in better learning, they may be more likely to record additional information in their notes, rather than striving for brevity.

Obviously, some students are going to be faster note-takers than others, and this will allow them to take more complete notes. But you can do quite a bit to help all students get more information into their notes, regardless of their natural speed, and that's what we'll talk about next.

3. Explicitly teaching note-taking strategies can make a difference.

Although some students seem to have an intuitive sense for what notes to record, for everyone else, getting trained in specific note-taking strategies can significantly improve the quality of notes and the amount of material they remember later. (Boyle, 2013; Rahmani & Sadeghi, 2011; Robin, Foxx, Martello, & Archable, 1977). This is especially true for students with learning disabilities.

One frequently used note-taking system is Cornell Notes. This approach has been around for decades, and the format provides a simple way to take "live" notes in class and condense and review them later.

4. Adding visuals boosts the power of notes.

Compared with writing alone, adding drawings to notes to represent concepts, terms, and relationships has a significant effect on memory and learning (Wammes, Meade, & Fernandes, 2016).

The growing popularity of sketchnoting in recent years suggests that teachers are well on their way to taking advantage of this research.

This video combines sketchnoting with Cornell Notes, and it's an approach I think is definitely worth considering.

To explore sketchnoting more deeply, check out this list of sketchnoting resources compiled by celebrated education sketchnote artist Sylvia Duckworth.

5. Revision, collaboration, and pausing boosts the power of notes.

When students are given the opportunity to revise, add to, or rewrite their notes, they tend to retain more information. And when that revision happens during deliberate pauses in a lecture or other learning experience, students remember the information better and take better notes than if the revision happens after the learning experience is over. Finally, if students collaborate on this revision with partners, they record even more complete notes and score higher on post-tests (Luo, Kiewra, & Samuelson, 2016).

With this in mind, it would be a good idea to plan breaks in lectures, videos, or independent reading periods to allow students to look over, add to, and revise their notes, ideally with a partner or small group. This partner work could happen after students have had time to revise their notes alone, or students might be given access to classmates for the duration of the pause.

6. Scaffolding increases retention.

Teachers can build scaffolds into their instruction to ensure that students take better notes. One very effective type of scaffold is guided notes (also called skeleton or skeletal notes). With guided notes, the instructor provides some type of outline of the material to be covered, but with space left for students to complete key information. This strategy has been shown to substantially increase student achievement across all grade levels (elementary through college) and with students who present with various disabilities (Haydon, Mancil, Kroeger, McLeskey, & Lin, 2011).

As instructors experiment with guided notes, certain features show a lot of promise. One that I found incredibly interesting was a style developed by engineering professor Susan Reynolds to accompany her lectures: The notes combine typed information, handwritten content, and graphics, but still leave room for student notes and working out example problems.

Diagrams are pre-drawn, but some key numbers are left out for students to fill in during the lecture. These notes consolidate all the technical material for a lecture into a single document, and the information is organized to align with the lecture. The more I study these notes, the more I see how useful they are, and how well they balance the efficiency offered by guided notes with the need for students to actively participate in the encoding process.

Guided notes created by engineering professor Susan Reynolds. These have not been completed yet.

The same pages of guided notes completed by the instructor during the lecture.

Reynolds' students have had strong positive reactions to this style of notes and consistently attribute the notes as a key factor in their engagement and learning in the course (Reynolds & Tackie, 2016).

While teachers should experiment with different styles, the take-away here is that if you want students to get the most out of a learning experience, provide them with some form of partially completed notes.

In the meantime, you can add another layer of scaffolding by simply adding more verbal cues to your learning experiences (Kiewra, 2002). Research shows that simply saying things like, "This is an important point," or "Be sure to add this to your notes," instructors can ensure that students include key ideas in their notes. Providing written cues on the board or a slideshow can also help students structure their notes and decide what information to include.

7. Providing instructor notes improves learning.

In an article I wrote a few years ago, I denounced instructor-prepared notes as an ineffective method for teaching, primarily because encoding this information required no effort from students and therefore made the learning too passive.

Although I stand by the assertion that we should avoid simply supplying students with notes, I need to refine the message: Research has shown that when we give students complete, well-written, instructor-prepared notes to review after they take their own notes, they learn significantly more than with their own notes alone (Kiewra, 1985).

If we combine this strategy with student revision, collaboration, and pausing to improve note-taking and learning-in other words, having students pause during an intake session to collaboratively revise their notes, then let them review instructor notes at the end-we can give our students an incredibly powerful learning experience.

One concern is that providing notes might make students more passive about taking their own notes during the learning experience. Here are some suggestions for addressing that:

Assigning a small grade for student notes would likely compel most students to do them, but this could distort the validity of a grade, as we discussed in another post.

It would probably be more effective to simply build note-taking into the class activities. For example, if students are encouraged to take notes, and then they are given a pause every few minutes to compare and revise notes, it would be pretty awkward for them to turn to a partner and have nothing to contribute.

Sharing the research with students that those taking notes then revising them with instructor notes has greater impact than instructor notes alone might push students to take more notes.

Allowing students to choose a note-taking format that works best for them would also boost student motivation for taking the notes.

8. Handwritten notes may be more powerful than digital notes, but digital note-taking can be fine-tuned.

Studies have shown that students who take notes by hand learn more than those who take notes on a laptop (Mueller & Oppenheimer, 2014; Carter, Greenberg, & Walker, 2017).

This research confirms what a number of educators suspect about the negative effects of digital devices in the classroom, and some have taken it to mean they should definitely ban laptops from their lectures (Dynarski, 2017). Others argue that prohibiting laptop use robs students of the opportunity to develop metacognitive awareness of their own levels of distraction and make the appropriate adjustments (Holland, 2017).

Because technology is always changing, and because as a species, we are still adjusting to these new formats, I would hesitate to ban laptops from the classroom. Here's why:

Research on this topic is still pretty young: Some researchers have found no significant difference in performance between paper-based and digital note-takers (Artz, Johnson, Robson, & Taengnoi, 2017). My guess is that more research will pile up and get more refined, so we should take a measured approach for the time being.

Other researchers are looking at ways to reduce some of the problems associated with digital note-taking, like distraction: One study found that while doing online research, students who used matrix-style notes and were given time limits were much less likely to become distracted by other online material than students without those conditions (Wu, & Xie, 2018).

I believe we serve our students better by helping them find a note-taking system that works best for them. With that in mind, I would be more likely to have students experiment with hand-written and digital notes, share the research with them, and give them opportunities to reflect on and measure their results.

See What Other Teachers are Doing

To learn more about what other teachers have found to be most effective note-taking methods, I put the call out on Twitter, asking teachers to share what works for them. You can browse that conversation here.

References

Artz, B., Johnson, M., Robson, D., & Taengnoi, S. (2017). Note-taking in the digital age: Evidence from classroom random control trials. http://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3036455

Boyle, J. R. (2013). Strategic note-taking for inclusive middle school science classrooms. Remedial and Special Education, 34(2), 78-90. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0741932511410862

Carter, S. P., Greenberg, K., & Walker, M. S. (2017). The impact of computer usage on academic performance: Evidence from a randomized trial at the United States Military Academy. Economics of Education Review, 56, 118-132. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econedurev.2016.12.005

Chang, W., & Ku, Y. (2014). The effects of note-taking skills instruction on elementary students' reading. The Journal of Educational Research, 108(4), 278-291. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.2014.886175

Dynarski, S. (2017). For Note Taking, Low-Tech is Often Best. Retrieved from https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/uk/17/08/note-taking-low-tech-often-best

Haydon, T., Mancil, G.R., Kroeger, S.D., McLeskey, J., & Lin, W.J. (2011). A review of the effectiveness of guided notes for students who struggle learning academic content. Preventing School Failure: Alternative Education for Children and Youth, 55(4), 226-231. http://doi.org/10.1080/1045988X.2010.548415

Holland, B. (2017). Note taking editorials - groundhog day all over again. Retrieved from http://brholland.com/note-taking-editorials-groundhog-day-all-over-again/

Kiewra, K.A. (1985). Providing the instructor's notes: an effective addition to student notetaking. Educational Psychologist, 20(1), 33-39. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15326985ep2001_5

Kiewra, K.A. (2002). How classroom teachers can help students learn and teach them how to learn. Theory into Practice, 41(2), 71-80. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4102_3

Luo, L., Kiewra, K.A. & Samuelson, L. (2016). Revising lecture notes: how revision, pauses, and partners affect note taking and achievement. Instructional Science, 44(1). 45-67. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-016-9370-4

Mueller, P.A., & Oppenheimer, D.M. (2014). The pen is mightier than the keyboard: Advantages of longhand over laptop note taking. Psychological Science, 25(6), 1159-1168. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614524581

Nye, P.A., Crooks, T.J., Powley, M., & Tripp, G. (1984). Student note-taking related to university examination performance. Higher Education, 13(1), 85-97. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00136532

Rahmani, M., & Sadeghi, K. (2011). Effects of note-taking training on reading comprehension and recall. The Reading Matrix, 11(2). Retrieved from https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/85a8/f016516e61de663ac9413d9bec58fa07bccd.pdf

Reynolds, S.M., & Tackie, R.N. (2016). A novel approach to skeleton-note instruction in large engineering courses: Unified and concise handouts that are fun and colorful. American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition, New Orleans, LA, June 26-29, 2016. Retrieved from https://www.asee.org/public/conferences/64/papers/15115/view

Robin, A., Foxx, R. M., Martello, J., & Archable, C. (1977). Teaching note-taking skills to underachieving college students. The Journal of Educational Research, 71(2), 81-85. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.1977.10885042

Wammes, J.D., Meade, M.E., & Fernandes, M.A. (2016). The drawing effect: Evidence for reliable and robust memory benefits in free recall. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 69(9). http://doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2015.1094494

Wu, J. Y., & Xie, C. (2018). Using time pressure and note-taking to prevent digital distraction behavior and enhance online search performance: Perspectives from the load theory of attention and cognitive control. Computers in Human Behavior, 88, 244-254. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2018.07.008

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A summary of 8 best practices in note-taking, straight from the research.

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This year, I revised the materials in my reader's notebooks. I'm using a combo of a binder and a notebook for reading workshop this year, and I'm not 100% happy with it. I thought I would share some of what I've been doing. Maybe you can help me tweak.

Let me first tell you how I've been working it. In their binder, they have a section for anchor charts and handouts. There's an index where they write the title of the paper so they can see at a glance what they have. It' sort of like a mini version of my anchor chart binder, but they have only the few charts I give the entire class and the ones I give specifically to them as needed during conferencing. There's also a section in their binder to keep track of books they have read, books they want to read, and a genre tracker.

Now, the notebook is more of our workhorse. The notebook is where they take notes during mini-lessons, jot their thinking about their independent reading, and write their weekly letter to me for assessment.

These are the notebooks I use. I got them at Staples during the ten cent sale. My friends turn their notebooks in one day a week. This way I only have to read 4 or 5 a day rather than all 24 at once. As you can see, orange notebooks are due on Tuesdays.

When you open the notebook, you will first find this page:

I think the note is pretty clear. Our focus this year is all about thinking deeper about our reading. The next couple of pages give an example of friendly letter format and how to edit/proofread their letter.

Next, there are facing pages that have the "thinking stems" we use. A reader had asked me to post a link to these, but I just can't find it. I pulled these pages from a file I've had for a few years. I know I originally found them on the web, but when I tried to find them again this year I couldn't. If you have ever run across these, please let me know where so I can credit the author.

(7/22/12) Special thanks to Marilyn who emailed me the link she found for these Thinking Stems. This link should take you to a Word document you can print out. I believe they are from the Calhoun School District, but again not sure. CLICK HERE TO GO TO DOCUMENT.

These thinking stems are good for helping my friends who have difficulty coming up with something to write. I used them as a springboard when I modeled writing a reading response letter not just once, but twice for my friends. I will do more modeling of this as time goes on and I expect more from their letters.

After these pages, I still have two blank pages. One is for a rubric that I have yet to put in their notebook. That's one of the things I've not yet figured out to my satisfaction. While the kids know what I'm looking for, I want a rubric in their notebook. The problem is I can't find one that fits exactly what I want and I've been too lazy busy to just sit down and make my own. I guess I'm going to have to just do it this weekend.﻿

The rest of their notebook is filled with notes from our mini-lessons, their independent writing about their reading, and their weekly reading response letter to me. It's actually all working pretty well so far, but I just have this gnawing feeling that I'm missing something. So, I'm throwing it out there to you!

What are you doing with your reading notebooks?

What do your friends do with their notebooks?

What and how are you assessing them?

What's worked for you?

By the way, don't forget to ENTER MY THANK YOU GIVE AWAY! There are only about 22 or so entries thus far, so the odds are pretty good! You have also been leaving some great ideas for picture books to use in mini-lessons. Click over and check out the comments. Even if you don't enter, you will get some great picture book suggestions.﻿

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This year, I revised the materials in my reader's notebooks. I'm using a combo of a binder and a notebook for reading workshop this year, and I'm not 100% happy with it. I thought I would share some of what I've been doing. Maybe you can help me tweak.

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A high school English teacher has a single accountability measure for her students' choice reading: talking to them about it.

Teachers face many challenges when it comes to helping students develop a love of reading, some of which I wrote about in " Putting an End to Fake Reading," but one of the most daunting is the accountability piece. How do we know if students are actually reading? How do we assess the learning students are gaining from choice reading? How do we include this in our grade books?

I've tried many accountability measures over the years, including reading logs of various formats, book reports, assorted handouts, and reading quizzes on Accelerated Reader, but Donalyn Miller's The Book Whisperer and Penny Kittle's Book Love helped me realize why those assessments were so unsatisfying. If I wanted my students to become authentic readers, why was I assigning them activities that real readers-including me-would never voluntarily engage in?

I had to ask myself: What do real readers do? And one important part of my own reading life is talking about what I read with others. So I decided to try an experiment and do away with all accountability measures for choice reading except for one-on-one conferences with me.

The results were profoundly positive.

The Logistics of Conferencing

Although the idea of talking about books with students is appealing-honestly, it's one of the main reasons I became an English teacher-the first thing I had to tackle were the logistics of the conferences.

In my on-level 10th grade English classes, I allot 10 to 15 minutes of our 55-minute periods for choice reading, and my students range widely in reading ability and motivation. I was worried that juggling everything going on in my classroom would be overwhelming, but with some structure and fine-tuning, I was able to have great discussions with two to three students each day, and to talk with each of my students at least once a month.

At the beginning of the period each day, I greet students and quickly take down the page number they're on in their books. This serves several purposes. First, it's a reminder for students to have their books out and open for reading right at the beginning of the period. Also, it gives me a quick way of assessing their progress through their book. If a student has read only a few pages over the course of the week, I know they're probably in need of some help in either getting into their books or choosing a new one, and a conference is a perfect way to work out which it is and find a solution.

I then grab my reading conference binder and sit down in one of two chairs I've arranged in a comfy corner of my room, calling over a student to begin our chat. I've established norms for independent work in my classroom, so with occasional reminders, students know that this is a time to work quietly on their own.

Keeping Track of Conversations

To keep track of conferences, I keep a binder with dividers for each class and a note sheet for each student where I record the details of our conversations for future reference.

I always start out by asking each student to remind me what they're currently reading and what page they're on, and I ask what rating they would give their book and why. This gives us a jumping-off point for what to talk about next. I also have some reading conference questions to refer to if I'm stuck for something to ask, but the more I conference with students, the easier it is to know what to talk about. I only need to remember my purpose for reading conferences: supporting students in thinking about their books and helping them find books they enjoy.

Assessing Choice Reading

Real-life readers don't get scored for reading for pleasure, but I do want to encourage students to find books they enjoy and to give them a way to keep track of their own reading progress, so I created a simple sheet for them to record the books they finish, along with their thoughts about what they read. When students finish a book, they complete this sheet and bring it to our conference, and we use it to talk about the book and what they might like to read next.

I don't have a requirement for how many books students must finish, and these sheets are not scored in any way. I simply save them in the student's class file for reflection at the end of the grading period. The only score my students receive for choice reading is this reading reflection each six weeks, in which they write their thoughts and feelings about the books they've read and what they'd like to read next. I give them completion points, not a grade, for doing the reflection.

The Results of My Choice Reading Experiment

When I began this experiment, I was concerned that, without the accountability of points entered in the grade book, my students would not be motivated to read. My fear, however, was proven beautifully unfounded.

More of my students read far more books than ever before, and with our regular conversations, it's far easier to notice and support students who are struggling with finding a book they enjoy. I'm able to tap into some student interests-sports fiction and poetry collections among them-and, most importantly, I've noticed my connections with students strengthening. And that's probably the most important thing a teacher can do to improve learning in the classroom.

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The Unexpected Power of Reading Conferences

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A high school English teacher has a single accountability measure for her students' choice reading: talking to them about it.

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ASCD Express 13.21 - Yes, You Can Find Time for Independent Reading

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This is the year I'm going to keep better records.

I craved chocolate chip cookies, eight summers ago, when I was pregnant with my daughter. Despite needing compression stockings to quell the swelling in my legs, I had no qualms about standing in the kitchen to bake chocolate chip cookies from scratch. I was very pregnant and willing to try many recipes in the search of the perfect cookie. After tasting what I thought would be the best cookie yet, I was happy for a while, but after eating several cookies, I typically had a complaint. Some recipes were too crunchy while others were too greasy. Therefore, I'd try to figure out what to change (e.g., a different ratio of brown sugar to white sugar, softened butter instead of melted butter) and bake another batch.

Besides finding the perfect chocolate chip cookie recipe, there are a handful of things I've become obsessively passionate about getting right. One of the other things I've tried to perfect are my conferring records. In fact, I've obsessed over record-keeping forms even more than chocolate chip cookie recipes. When it came to record-keeping forms, everything I tried worked for a while for the purpose of organization and documentation, but the information wasn't truly driving my instruction.
Why does record-keeping matter?
Record-keeping can seem challenging. But, like anything else, it's important to think about why we keep records. Record-keeping helps you distribute your time equitably amongst your students. It allows you to see the tracks of your teaching. Record-keeping helps you monitor student growth. It also helps with goal-setting. Finally, keeping records of conferences and strategy lessons allows you to determine the next steps with each student, small groups, or the whole class.

Regardless of what kind of record-keeping form you use, it's helpful to jot down notes in the moment, rather than waiting until the end of the school day. I suggest teachers take notes when their students are actively involved in trying out the strategy you taught them or in-between writing conferences. Writing notes when you're in the moment allows your record-keeping to be accurate and detailed.

Now that we've established that record keeping matters, I want to share my record-keeping journey with you (complete with a variety of forms you can download at the end of this post).
Class-at-a-Glance Grids
I started obsessing over my conferring record keeping sheets when I was a fifth-grade teacher in Manhattan. I tried using a class conferring manifest , which is a single sheet of paper that has all of the students' names, dates you conferred with them, and the teaching point you delivered on one sheet of paper. Thing is, I taught 26 - 32 fifth graders so I couldn't fit all of my students on one sheet of 8.5" x 11" paper! Therefore, I had to keep two sheets of paper on my clipboard, which meant I couldn't glance at the manifest quickly. In addition, the manifest didn't feel detailed enough for me since I couldn't keep track of the compliments I gave to my students when I met with them.
Three-Column Notes
Next, I created sections for each student in a spiral notebook that allowed me to or the track my observations and teaching points compliments and teaching points I delivered every time I met with a student. I used stick-on tabs to separate each child's section, which was four back-and-front pages, from the next. I used a sheets like these on and off for a few years. What I didn't know then, that I understand now, is that these pages were too sparse for me.
Carbonless Notebooks
I went through a period where I used this same three-column system, but housed it in a carbonless notebook so my students could have a "carbon copy" of my conferring notes. (They housed their carbonless copy in their writing folder.) Eventually, this system became cumbersome since there were always a handful of students who misplaced their carbonless copy. Once I learned about the idea of leaving behind a tangible artifact for students at the end of a writing conference, my carbonless notebook became obsolete. Another idea, which I learned about recently from Melanie Meehan, are conference cards , which can be a useful tool for a teacher as s/he has a conference and for the student to recall what s/he discussed in the writing conference after the teacher has departed.
Forms for Three-Ring Binders
After studying with Lucy Calkins and Carl Anderson in the summer of 2008, I realized my conference record keeping forms needed a massive reboot. I bounced around a lot that year, going back and forth between my old three-column chart and using a three-ring binder to house a variety of record-keeping sheets in every student's section that captured more information (e.g., , next steps mentor texts) .

I took a week-long course in at the 2011 TCRWP Summer Writing Institute. After studying with Carl, I realized conferring record-keeping sheets should have a space for students' writing goals so they can be kept top-of-mind. Therefore, I updated one of my three-ring binder forms so it had space for each student's name, his/her writing goals, and then ample space to record a compliment, teaching point, and future teaching plans. Finally, after seven years of tinkering with record-keeping forms, I Assessment-Based Writing Instruction with Carl Anderson finally felt like I got a record-keeping sheet right .
Digital Records
In early 2013, my PLN was a buzz about Evernote. (I purchased a premium subscription that same summer and have allowed Evernote to transform my life by digitizing all of the paper that used to surround me.) Cathy Mere shared her expertise for using Evernote to keep digital conferring records in a December 2013 guest blog post here on TWT . Once I read her post, I decided digital conferring notes would be a smarter way to go for me since I see kids in different schools due to the nature of my life as a literacy consultant. Having paper records just doesn't make sense for me at this point in my career.

Initially, I created templates for 1:1 conferences and strategy lessons on . However, when Kustomnote was bought out by , I started keeping more simplified notes in Evernote. This was ineffective since I often forgot to write down key information. Eventually, I came across an Evernote . Therefore, once I created Kustomnote Transpose how-to about creating templates conferring and strategy lesson templates, all I have to do when I want to use a template from my template library notebook, is to right-click and choose "copy to notebook" from the pop-up menu. Then, I select the notebook I want to copy a template into and I'm ready to keep my records.

What's great about Evernote (BTW: I don't work for Evernote. Simply put, I love their product!) is that you can take photos of student work to embed in each student's note file. Also, you can record audio clips of your conferences or strategy lessons and place them in your notes. Not only will this help you hold onto what students are working on, but your digital conferring notes can make parent-teacher conferences come alive since parents will get to see and hear their students in action.

Why did I take you on this journey? I could've written this post and included links to a variety of record-keeping forms (You'll find links to all of the above-mentioned forms below!) with the hope one of them would transform your record-keeping this year. However, I wanted you to realize that even if this is the year you're going to keep better conference records, then you must understand that you, too, will go on a journey to find a record-keeping system that works for you. Don't let anyone tell you what form to use! You must find a system that works for you even when it feels messy and giving up (and not keeping records) seems like the better option. Therefore, pick something and try it out for a week. Reflect. Refine your record-keeping tool or start anew. You'll know you have a record-keeping system that's working when you regularly examine your notes in order to plan for future conferences, strategy lessons, and mini-lessons. Don't be afraid to tweak your record-keeping system until you find one that feels as right as the perfect chocolate chip cookie tastes.
Let this be the year you're going to keep better conferring records!
Ready to get started? Here are some action steps to take depending on how much (or how little) you've kept records in the past.

Links to Record Keeping Forms:

Bonus Links to My Favorite Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipes:

This giveaway is for a copy of . Thanks to Kids 1st from Day 1: A Teacher's Guide to Today's Classroom Heinemann for donating a copy for one reader. (You must have a U.S. mailing address to win a copy of this book.)

For a chance to win this copy of Kids 1st from Day 1: A Teacher's Guide to Today's Classroom, please leave a comment about this or any blog post in this blog series by Sunday, August 12th at 6:00 p.m. EDT. Melanie Meehan will use a random number generator to pick the winner's commenter number. His/her name will be announced in the ICYMI blog post for this series on Monday, August 13th.

Please leave a valid e-mail address when you post your comment so Melanie can contact you to obtain your mailing address if you win. From there, our contact at Heinemann will ship the book to you. (NOTE: Your e-mail address will not be published online if you leave it in the e-mail field only.)

If you are the winner of the book, Melanie will email you with the subject line of TWO WRITING TEACHERS - KIDS 1ST. Please respond to her e-mail with your mailing address within five days of receipt. A new winner will be chosen if a response isn't received within five days of the giveaway announcement.

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This is the year I'm going to keep better records.

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Want to keep (better) conferring records, but don't know where to begin? This post will help you discover analog and digital record-keeping systems. Read all the way through since there will are lots of downloadable templates to help you get started.

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This post is going to be a big one, but definitely worth your time if you are interested in Mentor Sentences!

Do I have your attention now? 😛 After hearing Jeff Anderson speak about them and reading his books, I was hooked on the idea and knew I wanted to make a routine that would work in my elementary classroom! I have adapted his ideas, and explain how I did so in this post.

If you aren't sold enough to read the whole post yet, let me tell you why I use Mentor Sentences in my classroom.
#1: I already use children's literature to teach my mini-lessons in reading and writing. Why not use those books for grammar, too? #2: Kids need to learn from amazing, Giving them a sentence filled with mistakes and telling them to "fix it" doesn't work if they don't even know what it's supposed to look like to begin with! #3: My kids don't know they are learning grammar during our daily Mentor Sentence time. They think it's a scavenger hunt, or a game, or a challenge. #4: My students' grammar knowledge I found my students actually trying to imitate the mentor sentences in their own writing. #5: It only takes 10-15 minutes per day!
Are you still with me? (How could you not be?) I realized after blogging about Mentor Sentences last year that although reading about them is helpful, seeing it in action is really what teachers needed. (Raise your hand if you are a visual learner just like over half of the students in your classroom!) So, I made a video. That's right, Y'ALL go ahead and get ready to make fun of my accent if you aren't from Georgia. ;o)

Did you hear how excited the kids were? They can't WAIT to find out what the Mentor Sentence will be each week, and they are dying to be the one who figures out the skill I want them to see in the sentence, or for their sentence to be chosen to get displayed.

Still need more...? Want to read about it, too? Here you go, friends. Below you will find information about grades 3-5 mentor sentences. If you are a primary grades teacher, there are mentor sentences for you, too! Read about how you can implement them in the lower grades here!

**These are two posts written in April 2013 combined!**

On Monday, I give the students their sentence for the week to glue down into their journals. (Mine use the back of their Writer's Notebook.) This sentence comes from a book we read the week before, or we are going to read that week. Usually, I have not read the book when I give them the sentence, so when I do read the book, they are hanging on every word, waiting to hear the sentence. I have trained mine to snap when they hear me read the sentence (instead of shouting out). Last week, we used a sentence from one of my favorite books, Step-Stomp Stride by Andrea Davis Pinkney which I had already read to them the week before as part of our biographies unit.
Sojourner put one big-black-beautiful foot in front of the other and she STOMPED on the floorboards of ignorance that were underneath.
Once they have their sentence glued down, we practice reading the sentence together fluently. I'll call on some volunteer students to read it by themselves to show off, but we read it a few times chorally as well. Then, they "notice" what is so awesome about this sentence. Some things I ask to prompt them and get them going are:
How is this sentence different from others you've seen? How is it the same? What makes it so awesome? Why do you think I chose THIS sentence out of ALL the sentences in the book? What about the way this sentence is written stands out to you?
I expect them to write at least three things down on their own, but usually they write more. I give them just a few minutes, and then we come to the floor and they share what they saw. I add their "noticings" to the chart. I always have something in mind that made the sentence stand out to me, and the students know they are trying to "guess" what it was that made me pick it. This helps with their list of "noticings" too because they know it's usually not something small and simple (although, sometimes it is!). Here is our list from last week's sentence:

I have my students tell me why for everything. They can't just say the sentence is descriptive. They had to tell me they could imagine the scene in their head like a movie. They couldn't just tell me STOMPED was in all capitals- they had to tell me why they thought the author put that word in all capital letters. You'll notice the star next to "big-black-beautiful"- there were two things about that, and they got them both!! Alliteration, and the hyphens! We also talked about this being a compound sentence, but I just realized it didn't make it on the list. I don't know how that happened! Whoops! I am usually really good about making sure everything that they say is there! My apologies!

On Tuesday, the students re-write the sentence in their notebook, skipping lines in between, and label all the parts of speech that they know (first, independently). Then we come to the floor again, and they tell me what parts of speech they know, but again, they have to talk about WHY. Here is the completed sentence, but check below it for examples of the dialogue we had as we labeled:

Student 1: Sojourner is a proper noun.

Ms. Ivey: How do you know that?

Student 1: Because it's her name, and she is a person.

Student 2: Underneath is an adverb.

Ms. Ivey: Really? But it tells position. Why isn't it a preposition? (yup, I'm mean. Trying to trick them!!)

Student 2: (thinks for a minute) Because it tells where they were, but it doesn't connect it to a noun...? (She was not totally sure, but she was right! I was so proud!)

Ms. Ivey: Very good!!! No fooling you!! What else do you notice?

Student 3: Oh! "On the floorboards" is a prepositional phrase, because like <student 2> just said, it DOES connect to a noun. On connects to the floorboards, and it tells where!

Ms. Ivey: Very good!! You are right, and actually, our whole prepositional phrase is "on the floorboards of ignorance"- of is ANOTHER preposition! (It's okay to tell them some things, like this, because you don't want them to be confused...)

Student 3: So "in front of the other" is a prepositional phrase too, right?

You can see that, by this point, I am not having to really lead them too much. They do most of it on their own. This is a different story at the beginning of the year. Please do not believe that the conversation you just read above happens right away. They begin to understand the "language" and know how to tell me the answer as we get more comfortable with the process. Of course, I would not give them a sentence like this in the beginning of the year either- I want them to feel successful, which they can do on simpler sentences at first. Something you might hear from them early on is, "big is an adjective." Instead of just labeling it, make sure to ask, "how do you know?" If they give you a blank stare, or just tell you it's a describing word, make them tell you what word it's describing! Same with nouns. Yes, at this point they had BETTER know what a noun is, but make them tell you what MAKES it a noun! (For example, it's a person.) This is what leads to them being able to tell you why something is a preposition, for example. It also is great when you get into those adjectives that are also nouns, like "kitchen table." They want to tell you kitchen is a noun. Well it is, by itself. But it's describing what kind of table!
Mentor sentences give you the chance to hit several aspects of grammar repeatedly each week. I rarely teach grammar in isolation anymore because I can do it through mentor sentences!
The focus of day 3 is to make the sentence SOUND even better than it already does. I have an exercise I do with the kids every Wednesday (and other times in writing also, but they expect it during Mentor Sentences on Wednesday). I ask them, "what happens when we edit?" I have taught them editing makes our writing LOOK better, so they all say together, "we make it look better," as they put their hands on their eyes like binoculars. I ask students to share ways we can edit- capitalization, punctuation, spelling... And then I ask, "what happens when we revise?" I have taught them revising makes our writing SOUND better, so they all say together, "we make it sound better," as they cup their hands around their ears to give themselves supersonic ears! I ask students to share ways we can revise- changing verbs to make them more vivid, adding descriptive language like adjectives or figurative language, combining sentences, etc...

So, now they are ready to revise this week's mentor sentence! We do talk about how just adding any old adjective (or adding TEN adjectives) is not revising because we want to make it sound better, not just "longer." I always give them an example of the sentence that I revised. This helps get their brain going. It also allows conversation for what kinds of things can be done during revision. Here's my sentence from last week:

(Remember, the original sentence was: Sojourner put one big-black-beautiful foot in front of the other and she STOMPED on the floorboards of ignorance that were underneath.)

We talk about the things that are different in the revised sentence:
*I changed the word put to placed, making it more vivid.
*I also replaced STOMPED with POUNDED- both are vivid, but POUNDED makes an impact in all capital letters, too.
*I used the preposition across instead of on because I thought it fit better with POUNDED.
*I changed the adverb underneath to below.

The students write their sentences and I allow the ones who volunteer to share; the rest of the class listens for the revisions and shares what they hear. It's very important that you stress to them they are keeping the meaning of the sentence, but just making it sound better. Once they learn Thursday's task, they will sometimes get confused and want to change the meaning of the sentence. Just remind them that they won't do that until the next day...

Thursday's task is to write like the author. Imitation is the greatest form of flattery, I always say! So, on this day, the students decide what they want to write their sentence about (this is the day they change the meaning!) but try to keep the structure of the sentence the same. It is important to go back and review the noticings from Monday. The author used a metaphor? Oh, I should too! The sentence is a compound sentence? Then, so should mine! The author connected three alliterative adjectives with hyphens? I will, too!

Again, I share my example with them and we compare how it is the same as the mentor sentence:

I wrote a compound sentence with three alliterative adjectives connected with hyphens followed by a prepositional phrase, and capitalized my vivid verb. Sometimes, I even go word by word or phrase by phrase, pointing at the mentor sentence and pointing at mine to talk about the similarities. Then it's their turn! They all imitate the sentence and I choose 4 students to write their sentence on sentence strips with special markers. Some weeks, it is REALLY difficult to choose only 4! The students all want to be one of the four chosen, so they really try hard to write some SUPER sentences. I also try to pick different students each week to give everyone the chance to be displayed on the bulletin board.

The four sentences I chose last week were great! You'll notice they don't have EVERY element from the mentor sentence, but that's okay! You can tell they are trying some of the elements, and hey! I would be so happy with these sentences written in their writing pieces! The first one is by far my favorite. I laughed out loud!!

My dog dropped one stinky-smelly-surprise in front of me and BARKED for me to clean it up.

I bounced the basketball with my super-sweaty-super-sized hand and threw the basketball into the white netted hoop.

My mom made the best-blasting-booming with taste pasta and my brothers and I devoured it.

Jeremy bought delicious-dreamy-delicate brownies from the Debie Snack store and he STUFFED the brownies in his mouth and ate it.

Perfect sentences? No. But better than those boring ol' sentences I'd be getting otherwise? Absolutely!! And YES! They do try to incorporate the elements and structure of mentor sentences into their own writing! I have seen improvements in my students writing over the last few years while using mentor sentences.

As I mentioned in my last post, I teach grammar through mentor sentences and through my reading and writing lessons. Very rarely do I teach it in isolation. We have been working on distinguishing between simple, compound, and complex sentences for the last several weeks. I alternated my mentor sentences between compound and complex, and we talked about how we knew it was compound vs. complex.Every Friday, I give a mentor sentence quiz. The quiz requires them to edit the sentence that they've been seeing ALL week (so they know at this point what it should look like), and it assesses whatever skill we worked on as the focus for that week. It sometimes also spirals back to include skills that were previous focuses but also showed up in this sentence. For example, in this week's sentence, I focused on the fact that it was compound (last week was complex). But we also talked about the alliteration in "big-black-beautiful" which was a previous focus in our figurative language unit and another mentor sentence... so I included it on the quiz!

You can easily pull a sentence from any book and try this in your classroom, or if you love the idea of all the work being done for you, check out my TPT Store for Mentor Sentence Units.
Remember, CONSISTENCY IS KEY! To see real improvement, you need to carve out a time in your schedule to do Mentor Sentences daily. I promise you, it's worth it! You won't have to teach grammar in isolation so much anymore (BORING!) and you'll see improvement in the students' writing!
If you want even more IN-DEPTH step-by-step help with implementing mentor sentences, check out my courses!

For more ideas with mentor sentences, follow my Pinterest board!

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Step-by-Step: The Why and How of Mentor Sentences

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This post is going to be a big one, but definitely worth your time if you are interested in Mentor Sentences! Do I have your attention now? 😛 After hearing Jeff Anderson speak about them and reading his books, I was hooked on the idea and knew I wanted to make a routine that would work in my elementary classroom!

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The Five Senses Essential Questions: How do the five senses help us understand the world around us?

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Idea Library | Reading, Writing, & Content Areas | Smekens Education

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Articles and helpful guides on topics like pre-reading, the 6 Traits of Writing, research, and more in the areas of writing, reading, and content areas.

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You want your students to read more, but the books aren't exactly flying off the classroom bookshelves. A book talk may be just the tool you need to engage your students in a new book. A book talk could sell your students on the idea of picking up a new title or author or give them the push they need to find a book they love and convince their peers to read it.

[📷: Top image by mrs._cronk on Instagram.]

What is a book talk?

A book talk is a short presentation about a book with the goal of convincing other people to read it. It's not a formal book report or review. And, it's more persuasive than expository-think sales and marketing. In a book talk, the goal is to engage the listeners and present a fun, exciting, and even suspenseful commercial for your book. A book talk could highlight the plot, like this example featuring the book Smile by Raina Telgemeir. It could focus on a character, like this talk on the book Matilda by Roald Dahl. Or, it could recreate a book's mood to ignite readers' curiosity. Teach your students how to do book talks by modeling the practice. Then hand the reins to students by assigning them book talks in partners or as presentations.

What are some good book talk examples?

Books talks can take many forms. Here are some of our favorite examples:

As you get started, use a book talk template to help students organize their talks.

Choosing a book to talk about

Probably the best way to choose a book for a book talk is to find one that you really like. If students need inspiration to find a book to talk about:

Provide a box of books that are recommended for their grade level, like this list for 4th grade.

As you get to know students, slip them a note card with a personalized book recommendation. The personal touch will give them the confidence to know that they can read the book and that it's a good choice.

Focus on a theme, like Women's History Month, by providing a shelf of books inspired by the topic.

Ensure that students will connect with a book by having them choose a book written in first person with characters that reflect their experiences (check out this list of diverse titles for ideas).

Planning the best book talk

You have a book and know you have to sell it, but students need more guidelines than that. Here are some parameters that will maximize the book talk format:

Don't give away the ending (the exception may be for a series or book of short stories where incorporating the ending to one story might excite readers about reading more from that author).

Similarly, show the book, title, and author at the end of the book talk. Don't lead with it! That'll keep the audience engaged and wondering, Have I heard of this book?

Start with a hook that will get the audience's attention. This can be verbal, like reading a portion of the story (perhaps a cliffhanger), or nonverbal, like reenacting a major fight scene.

End with a hook. Leave the audience wanting to know more by creating a cliff-hanger, like authors do at the end of a chapter, and ending with it. A book talk is successful when the audience has questions.

A book talk should be short. Aim for between one and five minutes, depending on your audience.

No two book talks should sound the same! Bring your own personality and voice to the book talk and encourage students to do the same.

Choose a book that has a strong theme that will be of interest to your class. In middle and high school, books about love, humor, magic, friendship, and problems they deal with every day (breakups, family, school, etc.) are likely to resonate.

Prepare for a book talk while you read by taking notes and placing sticky notes at cliff-hangers, quotes, scenes that surprise you, and parts that you connect with.

Think about craft: What does the author do to keep you engaged?

Like any good presentation, don't memorize it but do have your major points in mind.

Engage your audience-ask questions, take a poll, have them guess what will happen next. The author kept you on the edge of your seat, get your students on the edge of theirs.

Practice, practice, practice! (Teacher bonus: Unlike your students, who take your class only once, you can perfect a book talk and give it year after year.)

Book talks = learning and love of reading

So they're fun and spirited, but there are also real academic benefits to incorporating book talks into your classroom:

They get kids reading-really reading. When students do a book talk, they have to know the book and know it well. A book talk will fall flat if they haven't read the book and can't talk about it.

They get kids sharing reading with others. Reading can be contagious, and book talks are a great way to spread a love of reading throughout your class, one book at a time.

They teach note-taking. As students prepare for a book talk, taking notes and using those notes to summarize the story is an important skill they'll develop.

They build presentation skills. The process of reading the book, thinking through how to present it, and practicing are good rehearsal for later presentations.

They build listening skills. When students aren't presenting, they're listening. The practice of participating in book talks, listening, and asking questions refines students' listening skills.

Bringing book talks to the next level

Already do book talks? Here are some ways to kick it up a notch:

The cardinal rule of book talks is to talk about a book you like, but challenge your students to give a book talk about a book they don't like. Can they convince people that they actually liked the book?

Partner book talks: As students get comfortable with book talks, you can pair them up in class or across classes for them to have conversations with peers. As they talk about different books, encourage them to find similarities and differences between what they're reading.

Picture-book talks: Challenge older students to hone their presentation skills by having them give a book talk on a picture book.

Peer review: Create a rubric or checklist (like this one) and have students give each other feedback.

Come and share your book talk ideas in our WeAreTeachers HELPLINE group on Facebook. Plus, check out 8 ways to amp up book talks.

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What Is a Book Talk?: Your Guide to Making Them Work in the Classroom

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What is a book talk and how can you use book talks in the classroom? Our WeAreTeachers guide is chock-full of teacher and student tips.

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I have written extensively about the use of picture books within our classroom and yet there are still questions that keep coming up. No worries as I realized that I had yet to make a central blog post about picture books and how I use them with older students and so while this post may be long, I hope it is helpful. Note that really everything I write here about using picture books with older students also goes for using them with younger kids because as we all know there no is no too old for picture books.

I have written before of why I use picture books with my middle school students, the changes it has created for us as we build our community of readers. I have shared lists upon lists of our favorite books as well, hoping to help others find the very best value in the books they bring in, hoping to inspire others to make them an integral part of their classroom.

How Do I Know Which Books to Get?

I am connected. I am a proud member of the Nerdy Book Club and through Twitter I am connected to many picture book loving people; teachers, librarians, parents, and all of the other amazing people out there. I follow hashtags like #WeNeedDiverseBooks #Titletalk, #pb10for10 #classroombookaday and #nerdybookclub to stay in the know. And I tweet out asking for recommendations all of the time.

I keep a written list handy. I have a journal book with me at all times, and while I often add books to my wishlist on Amazon, I like having the list in my bag. I am always adding to it and will cross out as I either purchase or reject. This also makes it easy for me to recommend books to others that they may not know about.

I read them beforehand, most of the time. Many times we will wander to the nearest bookstore so that I can browse the books before purchasing them. How do I know that this will be a great one for our room, well there are few things I look for...

Do I react to it in any way? A picture book doesn't always have to have a deep message for me to react to it; was it funny, did it make me think, did it leave me with questions? All of these are things that I look for.

Is it easy to follow? Sometimes it takes more than one read to really get a book and while I love those books too, most of the time, I am looking for a book that my students will get rather quickly. At least most of them. However, I do purchase picture books to use with smaller groups that have layers we can peel away.

Is the language accessible? Yes, I teach 7th graders but their reading development levels range from 2nd grade to high school, so can all students access the text or will I need to "translate" it?

What purpose does it have? I often look for picture books that can be used as community builders, self-connections, or conversation starters. We also use them as mentor texts as we develop as readers and writers throughout the year. But I also look for picture books that will make my students laugh, make them reconnect with being a little kid again, or help them get out of a bad mood. I try to get a balance of all of these types of books in the hands of students.

Will we read it more than once? Because I buy most of the picture books in my classroom, I look for enduring books that we will return to again and again. Different things make books repeat reads; the illustrations, the phrasing, the story. Bottom-line: it is a gut feeling most of the time.

Do we have other works by the author? My students feel closely connected to the picture book authors and illustrators whose books we love so I try to expand our favorite collections as often as possible. Some of our favorites are Jackie Woodson, Julie Flett, Peter Brown, Mo Willems, Peter H. Reynolds, Ame Dyckman, Jon Klassen, and Amy Krouse Rosenthal.

How Do I Organize our Picture Books?

Every hardcover picture book is stamped on the inside with a custom-made stamp from Amazon, which has been easily one of the best purchases I have ever made.

They are then also labeled with the first letter of the author's last name on their spine. That way as long as I know the author's last name, I can quickly pull the book from that section.

Picture books are typically not checked out by students as they are easy to lose, however, others teachers borrow them freely.

Picture books are shelved together in our classroom but not organized by theme or author. I simply do not have room for splitting up the groups, so I try to display the picture books by theme in our classroom instead. For example, whenever it is a new month or after a break, our display is always changed out. I want students to want to read them as much as possible and a fresh new display helps entice them.

How Do I Select the Book to Use?

I first identify the purpose of the lesson of course and then go through either my lists of picture books or simply flip through our stacks. As our collection has grown, I have started keeping a better eye on picture books that can be used for more than one purpose.

Which book I choose to share depends on the lesson. I treat it much like a short story in what I want students to get out of it so it has to suit the very purpose we are trying to understand. I introduce the concept by sharing a story and then I ask my students to come as close as they can to the rocking chair in our corner. Once settled, whether on the floor, on balls or on chairs, I read it aloud. We stop and talk throughout as needed but not on every page, it should not take more than 10 minutes at most to get through an average size picture book. If it is a brand new concept I may just have students listen, while other times they might engage in a turn-and-talk. I have an easel right next to me and at times we write our thoughts on that. Sometimes we make an anchor chart, it really just depends on the purpose of the lesson. Often a picture book is used as one type of media on a topic and we can then branch into excerpts from text, video, or audio that relates to the topic.

Because I teach the same class multiple times in a row, I often switch out the picture books I use with the different classes. There are some that you can still love reading after 4 times, while others get to be a bit tedious, so I adjust as needed. This is why having a lot of great picture books to choose from is something I am committed to.

I do not have multiple copies of really any picture books, I don't see it as needed. Instead, I pick the picture book to read aloud and then find "companion books," other picture books that share the same concept, for example easily identifiable themes. These are spread out on tables, waiting for the students to select them. This way, when I ask students to work with them they are truly testing out the skill and not just whether they can spot the same things that we just practiced together. Often times, students can choose to work with a partner as they explore their self-selected books.

What Are Different Concepts You Can Use Picture Books to Teach?
Thematic statements
Using a picture book as an example, we read one aloud and work through the example together. While many of my students can easily pick up on the theme "word" (Death, love, freedom), they have a much harder stretching that into an actual thematic statement. So rather than just death, they have to write something along the lines of "In the picture book, Ida Always, the text is used to illustrate that the fear of death should not stand in the way of creating lasting bonds." While this may seem hard at first, the idea of doing this work with a picture book, rather than a longer book, alleviates some of the stress that my students have with the analytical work being done. After we write our thematic statement and turn it into a full paragraph, the students are then given a stack of picture books to choose from to practice on their own. This is, therefore, a way to assess their understanding without having to use a common text. Students can then either hand in their thoughts as a written piece of work or choose to discuss it with me or record it using their device.
Writers Craft
The writing skills used in a great picture book are worthy of our close analysis. I love finding a stack of small moment picture books and then having students really take the writing apart. How did the author move the story along with such few pages? If we were to remove the images would the story still stand on its own? Why? Other questions can be:

How does the author transition time or setting?

How does the author situate us?

How is the character described?

How are the words further explained through the illustrations?

How does the illustrator deepen the message?

How are words repeated?

How do we pick out symbolism and what does it signify?

How can we introduce all of the Notice and Note signposts through picture books?

These are just a few examples of separate lessons that can be done through a lense of writer's craft.
Plot and Small Moment Stories
While my students can write stories, they do not always write good stories. Sometimes they get bogged down in too many details, other times they have too few or their story is simply not interesting. Using picture books we can study the art of plot, as well as how to encapsulate an entire story in very little language. These are great primers for students to think of their own story craft.
Non-Fiction Focus
We have written nonfiction picture books in the past and one of my greatest joys is to get students read some of the incredible nonfiction picture books we have in our collection. I think of books like Pink is for Blobfish, Growing Up Pedro, Gorillas, Giant Squid, or How to Be an Elephant. These authors breathe life into their nonfiction texts and so I ask my students to study their craft. How did they take all of this research and create something so accessible yet information-filled? It is wondrous to see the lightbulb go off for my students when they can see what I mean right in the text.
Fluency and Expression
One of our favorite units of the year is when all of our students perform plays based on Mo Willem's Elephant & Piggie books. It is incredible to see these sometimes very cool 7th graders, truly connect with their silly side and go for it in their performance. Reading aloud picture books, performing them, and putting your heart into it helps with all public speaking skills.
Introductory texts.
In order for us to go deeper with text analysis and discussion, I need my students to sometimes gain some confidence. Picture books are not scary. They are inviting to kids. So as we begin the year with an introduction or reminder of the signposts as discussed in the book Notice and Note, I use picture books to introduce every single signpost. (To see the lists go here). It helps me break it down simply for kids, to give them confidence, and then also to be able to transfer it into their own reading.
Inferring.
One of my biggest tools for boosting inference skills is to use wordless picture books. After all, it is hard to read books like Unspoke n or The Whale and not have an opinion on what just happened. Another reason I love wordless picture books is that it levels the playing field for a lot of our kids. They don't have to decode the words to get to the story but instead have to decode the images. I have found that some of my most vulnerable readers are incredibly good at this as this is one of the reading survival strategies they use daily.
Introducing Hard Content
There are incredible picture books that discuss topics such as death, jail, suicide, war, and even drug abuse and so we use these picture books to broach harder topics with students. Seeing their stories or stories that are incredible foreign to them played out within the pages of a short book really allows for us to open up a discussion as well as connections to the pages.

As you can see, picture books are not just for show, and yet, even if they were, I would be ok with that. After all, how many times does a child just need to fall into the pages of a picture book to remember the magic that reading itself? What an incredible gift all of these authors and illustrators give us when they decide to spill their ideas into a picture book.

How Do you Assess Skills and Strategies Through a Picture Book?

Because we are a classroom driven by self-selected reading, it can be hard to figure out what students really know. Picture books are again a central tenet of this. Whether I have introduced a brand new skill or simply done a review, I can quickly assess students' knowledge and use of the skill through the pages of a picture book. All I have to do is gather up the picture books that all have the skill in them such as character development and then have students read them. After that, they can either write, discuss, or record a response to show me their understanding. That way I do not have to know the independent book they are reading but I can still see what they can do.

What Comes After the Reading?

Picture books are not just something we read, we write them ourselves in our epic nonfiction picture book project. We study them. We speak about them. We get ideas and inspiration from them. We carefully protect the time we have to read them. They are the mentor texts we shape our instruction around.

What Are Some Current Favorites?

And because I cannot write a blog post about picture books and then not share a few favorites, here are some that I love at the moment. For "live" recommendations follow my Instagram account.
Drawn Together by Minh Le and Dan Santat Heartbeat by Evan Turk I'm Sad by Michael Ian Black and Debbie Ridpath Ohi Prince & Knight by Daniel Haack and Stevie Lewis The Day You Begin by Jacqueline Woodson and Rafael Lopez
So there you have it, a little further explanation of how picture books are used in our classroom. They become part of the tapestry of our room and something the students search out for solace when they need to feel like they are readers again. As one child told me after I had shared our very first picture book, "Picture books make you remember your imagination again." And I knew that these kids got it. That they knew that this wasn't just me having some fun, but that picture books will teach us some of the largest lesson this year. That picture books are not just for little kids and laughter. They are for readers of all ages, and in particular, those who have gotten lost.
If you like what you read here, consider reading my newest book, Passionate Readers - The Art of Reaching and Engaging Every Child Also consider joining our book club study of it, kicking off June 17th. This book focuses on the five keys we can implement into any reading community to strengthen student reading experiences, even within the 45 minute English block. If you are looking for solutions and ideas for how to re-engage all of your students consider reading my very first book Passionate Learners - How to Engage and Empower Your Students. Also, if you are wondering where I will be in the coming year or would like to have me speak, please see this page.

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Using Picture Books With Older Students - A How-to Guide

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I have written extensively about the use of picture books within our classroom and yet there are still questions that keep coming up. No worries as I realized that I had yet to make a central blog post about picture books and how I use them with older students and so while this post may...

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I have been trying to share as many of our favorite books as possible in different ways. Here is an overview of all of the lists so far. Picture Book lists can be found at the bottom. Happy reading! Chapter Books: The Best Books for Middle School According to My Students: The Favorite Reads of...

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Don't let your literature anthology dictate the short stories you read with your middle school and high school students. There are so many wonderful short stories out there, many of which can be used to teach a variety of literary elements and paired with other texts. Here's 13 of my favorites.

1. The Sniper by Liam O'Flaherty

I'm always looking for texts that will draw in my reluctant male readers. Anything with war, guns, or a little violence ups the appealing factor immediately. "The Sniper" is set in the 1920s during the Irish revolution. A sniper is stationed on a rooftop contemplating how he will get down before the light of dawn exposes him. I often use this text when teaching irony because of its unexpected ending. It is also a great piece to use for reviewing plot as the climax appears at the very end of the story; students sometimes struggle to correctly identify the climax when it happens so late in a story. The story's theme emphasizes the senselessness of war, making it perfect for pairing with other short stories or novels with a similar theme such as The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, or The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien.

This short story is one that I like to read just before the holidays because of its message about giving and thinking of others. Like "The Sniper," it's a great piece for teaching irony and reviewing plot. I also like to focus on how the setting dictates many of the details in the plot. After reading, I challenge students to write a modern retelling of the story, paying careful attention to how an updated setting affects the plot. The story's connection to the holidays and it's message about what we should value most make it perfect for pairing with A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.

"The Interlopers" is a short story that is sure to hook reluctant readers. It is set at night and focuses on a long-standing turf war. The two main characters are out in the forest, the disputed territory, hunting each other, but as the two men meet, a tree falls and traps both of them beneath it. The twist at the end of the story makes it another great text to use for teaching irony and reviewing plot. The text's focus on a long lasting conflict between two families connect it with works like William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (the Grangerfords versus the Shepherdsons), and the real life conflict between the Hatfields and the McCoys.

4. The Lady, or The Tiger? by Frank Stockton

This is one of my absolute favorite short stories to dig into. "The Lady, or The Tiger?" centers around a justice system in which the accused determine their own fate by choosing between two doors in an arena, behind one is a lady (marriage is the reward for innocence) and behind the other is a tiger (death is the punishment for guilt). The plot intensifies when the king of the arena discovers that his daughter is in love with a commoner and puts that man on trial. To help my students understand the king's system of justice, I created a simulation in which each student is assigned a crime and gets to choose a door to determine their innocence or guilt. Later students reveal whether they actually committed the crime of which they were accused. This leads to discussion about the fairness of this justice system and comparison to the fairness of our own. This short story would be a great lead in to any text centered around a court case like To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee or Inherit The Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee. There is often something current in the media related to the justice system that can be connected to the story as well.

Literary criticism can be a complex idea to introduce to students. I always start with the most basic two approaches: historical and biographical, using this short story, which is focused on the day of President John F. Kennedy's assassination. The united feelings of Americans and even the global community, are contrasted by the racial and socio-economic discrimination faced by the main character. The short story could be paired with news articles and other nonfiction readings about this event. To bring things into the 21st century, you could use a novel like Love is the Higher Law by David Levithan, which centers around the events of September 11th.

This short story is full of imagery and symbolism, and also great for teaching the different types of conflict. The main character struggles against himself, his mother, other boys, and forces of nature. Like most young people, the main character wrestles with being viewed as a child when he wants to be treated like a young adult. Another short story that pits child against parent and incorporates many of the different types of conflict is "The White Umbrella" by Gish Jen.

"Geraldo No Name" is one vignette from The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. It does not include the novel's main character Esperanza, but instead focuses on Marin, an older girl Esperanza idolizes, and Geraldo, a young man Marin meets at a dance. Like "American History," the short story centers around issues of race and class. Geraldo is hit by a car and Marin believes that if he were treated differently at the hospital, his life might have been saved. This short story could be paired with the film Fruitvale Station or any current news articles about the Black/Brown Lives Matter movement.

The idea behind this short story has always fascinated me. If we could travel back in time, how would it affect the future? In Ray Bradbury's text, time travel takes the characters to the prehistoric age of dinosaurs and one misstep has innumerable effects on the future. It's a perfect illustration of the butterfly effect. You probably can't show your students the Ashton Kutcher film of the same title, A Butterfly Effect, but the movie Groundhog's Day is a much lighter treatment of the same idea as are the films Frequency and Big.

"The Scarlet Ibis is probably my all time favorite short story. I remember reading it as a ninth grade student and was delighted to find it in the literature anthology I used as a ninth grade teacher. The story is full of beautiful imagery that contrasts the heartbreaking end to the relationship between the two brothers. It's a great text for examining foreshadowing, the author's use of symbolism is clear, yet multi-layered, and the story can also be used to introduce allegory by discussing the author's attitude toward war. The power dynamics between the older and younger brother could be compared to George and Lennie's relationship in Of Mice and Men.

Edgar Allan Poe is known for his creepy tales and "The Black Cat" does not disappoint. The narrator, a crazy drunk, takes drastic measures to get back at his cat, which he believes is ignoring him. This is an excellent short story to use for analyzing first person point of view and unreliable narrator. After reading, challenge students to rewrite the story, still using first person point of view, but from another character's perspective.

"The Stolen Party" is another great short story for teaching point of view, specifically third person limited point of view. Because the character that the narrator focuses in on is a young girl, her thoughts and feelings are unreliable and may skew students' understanding of the story until the final event. Like with "The Black Cat," after reading, you can challenge students to rewrite the story still using third person limited point of view, but focusing in on another character's thoughts and feelings.

12. Thank You M'am by Langston Hughes

While reader's theater is traditionally used in primary classrooms, "Thank You M'am" is the perfect short story to act out or at least read aloud. Mrs. Jones is a tough elderly woman who is full of sass, while Roger is a shaken young man who quickly regrets his attempt to steal Mrs. Jones's purse. It is also a great text for teaching conflict and characterization.

13. The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell
"The Most Dangerous Game" is another excellent short story if your students like suspense. The tension in the story begins as the main character sails past an island with a terrible reputation and builds when he lands on the island by mistake and meets the man living there. At the start of the story, you can focus on how the details of the setting help to create mood. It's also an excellent text for introducing and having student complete a plot diagram.

You can find all of my resources for teaching short stories, including a unit of all 13 texts, here.
For more ideas for teaching short stories & literature:

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The Literary Maven: 13 Short Stories for Engaging Secondary Students & Teaching Literary Elements

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Don't let your literature anthology dictate the short stories you read with your middle school and high school students. There are so many wonderful short stories out there, many of which can be used to teach a variety of literary elements and paired with other texts.

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Writing Achieve the Core- Vermont Writing Collaborative

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Writing Achieve the Core- Vermont Writing Collaborative

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Assessing Grammar and Language Convention Skills

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Assessing Grammar and Language Convention Skills

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Posted:

Question: What is the best way to assess student grammar and convention skills? (Since we are the assessment team, we thought we would give you some multiple-choice answer options to consider.

A. reviewing actual student writing for students' use of grammar and conventions
B. using embedded-error passages and associated items to assess specific grammar and convention skills
C. requiring students to explain why they corrected an error in grammar or conventions in a specific way
D. ignoring grammar and conventions skills altogether, hoping students learn from your modeling good writing

The correct answer to this silly little multiple-choice question is option A. The most authentic way to see if a student has mastery of the rules of English usage and conventions is to review the use of those skills in a piece of writing. There is no question that a teacher gets the best understanding of how a student is using his or her language by reviewing actual student work. The SAP-developed Scoring Rubric for Text-Based Writing Prompts serves as an example of a rubric that demonstrates expectations that students attend to grammar and conventions when writing (see row 5).

However, we know that it is not always possible in education to spend the time required to analyze student work for language skills, or, in the case of summative assessment, those pieces of writing aren't available to teachers.

While we still firmly believe that it is best to assess student mastery of grammar and conventions by reviewing actual writing, we realize another option is needed: a way to assess these skills that does not require a constructed response and scoring rubric. To address this issue, we turned to the CCSSO Criteria for Procuring and Evaluating High-Quality Assessments, a document that outlines the expectations of high-quality summative assessments. There we found significant guidance on best practices for assessing grammar and convention skills in a way that mirrors the way students would use those skills in the real world-in college and their chosen careers. The CCSSO Criteria state:

"Language is assessed within writing assessments as part of the scoring rubric, or it is assessed with test items that specifically address language skills. Language assessments reflect requirements for college and career readiness by

Mirroring real-world activities (e.g., actual editing or revision, actual writing); and

Focusing on common student errors and those conventions most important for readiness."

After considering the guidance, consulting with the experts, and reviewing different assessments to see grammar and conventions assessed well, we developed Assessing Language Standards (Grammar and Conventions) for College and Career Readiness. This document provides:

An outline of the expectations of high-quality grammar and conventions items

Guidance for crafting embedded-error passages

Sample passages and items for each grade (3-11).

The intent of the document is to help teachers and assessment developers recognize the variety of ways that these skills can be assessed in both the classroom and large-scale assessments.

Teachers can use this resource in several ways. The sample embedded-error passages and items can be used as classroom assessments. Looking across the grades, teachers can see how the skills evolve as students progress through the grades. Additionally, the introductory text provides guidance for teachers and assessment developers interested in creating their own high-quality embedded error passages and items.

What's more, the entire document is an excellent tool for coaches to use to support professional development around the grammar and convention standards. It can be used as a source of conversation in PLCs, helping to guide teachers as they work their way through the grammar and conventions standards.
Although Yellowstone was the first park established, it was not the last. There are now over 400 national parks in the United States. (4) Each park features beutiful landscapes and fasinating wildlife, all protected by the National Park Service. The best way for us to appreciate the amazing national parks is visit them (5) myself. For the sentence labeled 5, which pronoun correctly completes the sentence C. yourselves D. ourselves
So, the next time you are looking for a way to assess grammar and conventions skills, knowing that grading student essays may not be an option all the time, consider the exemplar language items in the Assessing Language Standards (Grammar and Conventions) for College and Career Readiness document. Below is a 6 th grade excerpt from one of the sample passages and items included in that document.

Our hope is that passages and items like this can provide you with the guidance necessary to find alternate ways to assess your students' skills with grammar and conventions.

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Assessing Grammar and Language Convention Skills - Achieve the Core Aligned Materials

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Question: What is the best way to assess student grammar and convention skills? (Since we are the assessment team, we thought we would give you some multiple-choice answer options to consider. A. reviewing actual student writing for students' use of grammar and conventions B. using embedded-error passages and associated items to assess specific grammar and ...

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Cult of Pedagogy

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Listen to this post as a podcast:
Sponsored by Raymond Geddes and Kids Discover

This is an excerpt from a letter written to a Charlotte, North Carolina newspaper in 2002 by a first-year math teacher, a man who was vehemently opposed to block scheduling.

"I am...a first year high school math teacher. (My school) operates on a block schedule - a concept I had never even heard of until I accepted (this) teaching position. My observations of block scheduling have been a shocking education for me. Block scheduling has resulted in less emphasis on core content and more on gimmickry. Classes used to be places where serious learning took place. No more. Under block scheduling, they have become little more than glorified playtime periods. Classes used to consist of core subject material being communicated to students by individuals rich in knowledge and experience. Now teachers are no longer teachers, but merely guides - glorified baby-sitters, if you will. Under block scheduling, the students are now in groups trying to "discover" facts that used to be communicated instantly when teachers actually taught. It's obvious that this format wastes valuable class time - and that doesn't include the time students waste by talking, singing, and becoming restless all-around as a result of the lengthened class periods."

This letter articulates the concerns some teachers, parents, and even students have about block scheduling, where class periods last 80 to 100 minutes and only four classes are held each day. This type of schedule became popular in middle and high schools in the 1990s as an alternative to the traditional schedule, where students attend the same six to eight classes, 45 to 50 minutes each, every day. The idea behind the change was that with less transition time between classes, fewer instructional minutes would be wasted, and the kinds of behavior issues and bullying that can crop up during class transitions would also be cut down. On top of that, having extended blocks of time would give teachers the opportunity to dive more deeply into their content.

And in many cases, schools have been successful with block scheduling. They've even found solutions for some of the problems it presents, like offering shorter periods for classes like math and band, where consistent daily practice is more important. But one issue with block scheduling seems to persist, a problem that is highlighted in the letter above, a problem that is still voiced by teachers and students today: The ineffective use of the longer block of instructional time.

So that's what we're going to focus on here. We'll start by looking at the mindset that causes a lot of block scheduling's biggest problems. Then we'll quickly review some best practices for teaching in the block. Finally, I'll walk you through five specific structures you can choose from to plan solid, interesting instruction for an extended class period, the kind of teaching that will make those 90 minutes fly by.

The Big Problem: A Lecture-as-Teaching Mindset

Some of the challenges associated with block scheduling boil down to logistics, like needing more time for AP courses. These issues can often be solved with creative scheduling tweaks.

But the rest of it, the criticisms lobbed at block scheduling and the problems that can crop up with it, can almost all be traced back to one mindset, a single strong, pervasive belief about teaching, and that mindset is this:
teaching = lecture
This mindset, the belief that lecture is the only "real" way to teach, causes all kinds of trouble in block scheduling.

Let's go back to the math teacher who described the extended classes in block scheduling as "glorified play periods" in his letter. One likely reason he felt that way was because he saw his co-workers doing something besides straight-up lecturing. Here's a line from his letter again, where he longs for the good old days of traditional scheduling: "Classes used to consist of core subject material being communicated to students by individuals rich in knowledge and experience." What could he possibly mean besides lecture?

In this teacher's mind, anything that wasn't lecture couldn't possibly be "serious learning," and therefore all the other non-lecture-based activities he observed in his colleagues' classrooms were a waste of time.

And to an extent, he may have a point. We don't know what was going on in his colleagues' classrooms. Maybe the other teachers were using some highly effective techniques that he was just unfamiliar with. Or maybe, if his school was like some who don't invest enough in training teachers in different methodologies, they really were just screwing around. Because if teachers don't have a well-rounded repertoire of instructional strategies, methods that they know are effective, they will only use lecture to teach, and that gives them one of two choices:

1. Lecture for the full 90 minutes, which bores students to tears, can lead to behavior problems, and ultimately has a negative return, since student attention spans can't be sustained for longer than about 15 minutes. So in this case, you're "covering" a lot of material, but students aren't learning it.

2. Lecture for half the period, then give students the second half for "homework time." This is also ineffective, because that means students are actually learning only half the material over the course of a semester or year. This is typically the reason why some teachers object to block scheduling: They say they can't "get through" as much material. But if these teachers knew more strategies, that remaining time could be used for instruction that would actually hit more learning targets.

Best Practices on the Block

Do not rely solely on lecture.
This advice comes from every teacher I have talked to and every piece of research I have read about successful block teaching (for a good summary, see Queen, 2002). Although I do believe a brief, dynamic lecture every now and then is an efficient way to deliver instruction, and does not need to be abandoned entirely, teachers who lean too heavily on it are doomed to failure in a longer class period. Instead, use a variety of instructional strategies, many of which we will get to in a little while.

Switch activities every 15 to 20 minutes.
Students get restless when they are required to sit still or do the same thing for long periods of time, so unless they are working on a task that will truly engage them for a full hour (and we'll get to these later on), look at your class period as a series of 15- to 20-minute chunks of time and switch activities in each chunk.

Overplan.
If you've ever finished your planned activities in a 50-minute period and found yourself with ten awkward minutes to kill, imagine how much worse it is when you have 30. So plan for the essential activities, but also build in some extras that would be nice to get to, but aren't essential. Meagan Brockway, a high school history teacher in Greencastle, PA, says, "Block scheduling requires planning for more than you can accomplish and then continually readjusting based on student needs." This readjustment may vary from student to student and class to class. "If I have a class that is tremendously behind, then it is a matter of looking at the 'extras' and either cutting those out completely to get to the content needed OR if it is a class that is up for a challenge, then I give them extended time to complete it on their own."

Use a smart pacing guide.
One of the challenges of block scheduling is "fitting in" all of the content you might be used to teaching on a daily schedule. Pacing guides, which are used to map out when you will address each learning target or standard throughout the year or semester, are essential to make sure you use class time wisely. But these often value "coverage" over actual learning. The late educator Grant Wiggins, who always offered incredibly insightful ideas on authentic learning, wrote a great post on designing pacing guides that help teachers hit the most essential standards but also build in time for re-teaching and extension when necessary.

5 Structures for a Block Class Period

To make the most of your extended class period, consider one of these five structures, which you can mix and match over the course of a marking period, depending on your instructional needs. For the sake of convenience, I'm going to assume we're talking about a 90-minute class period, but you should obviously make slight adjustments if your block is longer or shorter than that.

The Classic

This would look the most like a typical lesson, except you would have time to do it right and include ALL the bells and whistles that we all know a good lesson should have:

(10 min) An engaging anticipatory set to pique students' interest, build relevance, bring concepts out of long-term memory or just set the stage for learning. This is a step we often skip over when we are pressed for time. (For ideas, see my post on anticipatory sets or this one on How to Approach Your Teaching Like a Master Chef.)

(15-20 min) Some kind of direct instruction, where the teacher delivers the day's lesson through a lecture (Yes! In small doses this is okay!), doing a demonstration, showing a video, having students read through some kind of text or do an interactive online lesson.

(30 min) Student application of the content. This might take the form of individual practice, reciprocal learning, or some other kind of group work.

(15-20 min) An assessment of the content or skill, followed perhaps by re-teaching to those who need it and an extension activity for students who met the standard.

(10 min) A reflection or other kind of wrap-up, where the value of the lesson is reinforced.

Whitney Schultz, who teaches 80-minute blocks of English at a high school in Baltimore, MD, uses this kind of structure on most days, mixing up the activities within each of the segments. "That 10-15 minute review and 10-15 minute introduction might instead be a 20-30 minute quiz followed by self-grading; or, in my AP class, it might be 20-30 minutes of daily AP practice followed by 40-50 minutes of text discussion/analysis. I've found it's easier to fill 80 minutes than try to trim down what I cover each day!"

The Workshop

In this structure, students would spend the majority of time working on their own projects. The class period might start with a brief (10-minute) mini-lesson, and it would ideally end with some kind of a wrap-up, sharing, or reflection time, but at least a full hour would be spent working independently or in groups on a long-term, hands-on project. Meanwhile, the teacher would circulate, conferencing individually with students as needed or using an appointment system like the one used at the Apollo School.

In an English language arts class, this could be independent writing or reading, or a mixture of both, depending on what each student happens to be working on at the time.

If you are running a self-paced math class, or are delivering instruction through hyperdocs or playlists, where students work at their own pace through a series of lessons, then during the hour, students would just get started from wherever they are in the materials.

In any class that has implemented Genius Hour, this time could be devoted to research, writing, or working on presentations.

The Lab

One big, focused activity takes up most of the class period in this structure. Class may start with some kind of an introduction and end with a reflection or wrap-up, but at least an hour is set aside for an activity where the whole class digs into a single meaty task. In this case, the task itself is designed to be active and engaging, so the rule about switching every 15 or 20 minutes is waived. The big activity could be any of the following:

Simulations or role-plays, which can be incredibly useful in helping students understand complex social studies or science concepts.

A debate, socratic seminar, or some other long-form discussion strategy

A project-based learning activity

A virtual field trip

Jigsaw or another cooperative learning activity

An actual lab (hello, science!)

Sketchnoting: This idea comes from Jana Maiuri, a middle school English teacher in Oakland, California, who will occasionally set aside a whole class period for students to create sketchnotes on a given topic. It starts with "a ten minute rapid-fire warm-up...followed by a kind of 'okay, show me everything you know about commercial fish depletion in a sketchnote in the next 90 minutes.' Then in the next class we do two concentric circles and everyone gets two minutes to present their sketch: three vital facts, the most unique or compelling thought, and one artistic accomplishment or challenge. The movement and the art are engaging and thought provoking." (To get started with sketchnoting, see Vicki Davis' comprehensive post on sketchnoting here.)

The Performance

At the end of a learning cycle, students should ideally have some kind of final product to share with peers, or even outside visitors. A 90-minute block class would be ideal for sharing and celebrating this student work. This performance could take many forms:

Student speeches

Film festival

Gallery of physical or digital products

Skits

Poetry or other readings

The Variety Pack

On some days, you might opt to just give students a fast-paced mixture of activities, some that might review previously learned content, some that introduce new stuff, others that do a bit of drill and practice, and even some that are just there for fun and enrichment. These can be handled in a station rotation model, with student-selected learning centers, or just by having the whole class do a a series of smaller activities together. Here are just a few possible activities you could include:

Any kind of skills practice, flashcard work, or retrieval practice

Watching a short video clip

Independent reading

Journal writing

Having a short philosophical chairs debate

A short read-aloud from a book you're reading together as a class

Small group work with the teacher

Games like Kahoot or Crumple & Shoot

So whether you're brand-new to block scheduling or you've already been doing it for years, I hope you've found at least one new idea to help you make the most of that extended class period and never again be accused of running a "glorified playtime period." ♦
References
Queen, J.A. (2002). Block scheduling revisited. Phi Delta Kappan, 82(3), 214-222.

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Listen to this post as a podcast: Sponsored by Raymond Geddes and Kids Discover This is an excerpt from a letter written to a Charlotte, North Carolina newspaper in 2002 by a first-year math teacher, a man who was vehemently opposed to block scheduling. "I am...a first year high school math teacher.

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Using Mentor Sentences to Improve Grammar and Mechanics

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During the last professional development session that I did with the middle school teachers language arts teachers, we dove head first in...

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English Language Arts Guidebook Units | LearnZillion

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Classroom-ready daily ELA lessons developed in partnership with the Louisiana Department of Education. Units include daily lessons, assessments, texts, blank and completed handouts, and student writing examples.

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When I worked with student teachers on developing effective lesson plans, one thing I always asked them to revise was the phrase "We will discuss."
We will discuss the video. We will discuss the story. We will discuss our results.
Every time I saw it in a lesson plan, I would add a note: "What format will you use? What questions will you ask? How will you ensure that all students participate?" I was pretty sure that We will discuss actually meant the teacher would do most of the talking; He would throw out a couple of questions like "So what did you think about the video?" or "What was the theme of the story?" and a few students would respond, resulting in something that looked like a discussion, but was ultimately just a conversation between the teacher and a handful of extroverted students; a classic case of Fisheye Teaching.

The problem wasn't them; in most of the classrooms where they'd sat as students, that's exactly what a class discussion looked like. They didn't know any other "formats." I have only ever been familiar with a few myself. But when teachers began contacting me recently asking for a more comprehensive list, I knew it was time to do some serious research.

So here they are: 15 formats for structuring a class discussion to make it more engaging, more organized, more equitable, and more academically challenging. If you've struggled to find effective ways to develop students' speaking and listening skills, this is your lucky day.

I've separated the strategies into three groups. The first batch contains the higher-prep strategies, formats that require teachers to do some planning or gathering of materials ahead of time. Next come the low-prep strategies, which can be used on the fly when you have a few extra minutes or just want your students to get more active. Note that these are not strict categories; it's certainly possible to simplify or add more meat to any of these structures and still make them work. The last group is the ongoing strategies. These are smaller techniques that can be integrated with other instructional strategies and don't really stand alone. For each strategy, you'll find a list of other names it sometimes goes by, a description of its basic structure, and an explanation of variations that exist, if any. To watch each strategy in action, click on its name and a new window will open with a video that demonstrates it.

Enjoy!
a.k.a. Chat Stations
Basic Structure: Stations or posters are set up around the classroom, on the walls or on tables. Small groups of students travel from station to station together, performing some kind of task or responding to a prompt, either of which will result in a conversation.

Variations: Some Gallery Walks stay true to the term gallery, where groups of students create informative posters, then act as tour guides or docents, giving other students a short presentation about their poster and conducting a Q&A about it. In Starr Sackstein's high school classroom, her stations consisted of video tutorials created by the students themselves. Before I knew the term Gallery Walk, I shared a strategy similar to it called Chat Stations, where the teacher prepares discussion prompts or content-related tasks and sets them up around the room for students to visit in small groups.
a.k.a. Values Continuum, Forced Debate, Physical Barometer, This or That
Basic Structure: A statement that has two possible responses-agree or disagree-is read out loud. Depending on whether they agree or disagree with this statement, students move to one side of the room or the other. From that spot, students take turns defending their positions.

Variations: Often a Philosophical Chairs debate will be based around a text or group of texts students have read ahead of time; students are required to cite textual evidence to support their claims and usually hold the texts in their hands during the discussion. Some teachers set up one hot seat to represent each side, and students must take turns in the seat. In less formal variations (which require less prep), a teacher may simply read provocative statements students are likely to disagree on, and a debate can occur spontaneously without a text to refer to (I call this variation This or That in my classroom icebreakers post). Teachers may also opt to offer a continuum of choices, ranging from "Strongly Agree" on one side of the room, all the way to "Strongly Disagree" on the other, and have students place themselves along that continuum based on the strength of their convictions.

Basic Structure: Students are divided into 4 groups. Three of these groups are assigned to represent specific points of view. Members of the fourth group are designated as "provocateurs," tasked with making sure the discussion keeps going and stays challenging. One person from each group (the "speaker") sits in a desk facing speakers from the other groups, so they form a square in the center of the room. Behind each speaker, the remaining group members are seated: two right behind the speaker, then three behind them, and so on, forming a kind of triangle. From above, this would look like a pinwheel. The four speakers introduce and discuss questions they prepared ahead of time (this preparation is done with their groups). After some time passes, new students rotate from the seats behind the speaker into the center seats and continue the conversation.

Variations: When high school English teacher Sarah Brown Wessling introduced this strategy in the featured video (click Pinwheel Discussion above), she used it as a device for talking about literature, where each group represented a different author, plus one provocateur group. But in the comments that follow the video, Wessling adds that she also uses the strategy with non-fiction, where students represent authors of different non-fiction texts or are assigned to take on different perspectives about an issue.
a.k.a. Socratic Circles
Basic Structure: Students prepare by reading a text or group of texts and writing some higher-order discussion questions about the text. On seminar day, students sit in a circle and an introductory, open-ended question is posed by the teacher or student discussion leader. From there, students continue the conversation, prompting one another to support their claims with textual evidence. There is no particular order to how students speak, but they are encouraged to respectfully share the floor with others. Discussion is meant to happen naturally and students do not need to raise their hands to speak. This overview of Socratic Seminar from the website Facing History and Ourselves provides a list of appropriate questions, plus more information about how to prepare for a seminar.

Variations: If students are beginners, the teacher may write the discussion questions, or the question creation can be a joint effort. For larger classes, teachers may need to set up seminars in more of a fishbowl-like arrangement, dividing students into one inner circle that will participate in the discussion, and one outer circle that silently observes, takes notes, and may eventually trade places with those in the inner circle, sometimes all at once, and sometimes by "tapping in" as the urge strikes them.
a.k.a. Affinity Diagramming
Basic Structure: Give students a broad question or problem that is likely to result in lots of different ideas, such as "What were the impacts of the Great Depression?" or "What literary works should every person read?" Have students generate responses by writing ideas on post-it notes (one idea per note) and placing them in no particular arrangement on a wall, whiteboard, or chart paper. Once lots of ideas have been generated, have students begin grouping them into similar categories, then label the categories and discuss why the ideas fit within them, how the categories relate to one another, and so on.

Variations: Some teachers have students do much of this exercise-recording their ideas and arranging them into categories- without talking at first. In other variations, participants are asked to re-combine the ideas into new, different categories after the first round of organization occurs. Often, this activity serves as a good pre-writing exercise, after which students will write some kind of analysis or position paper.
a.k.a. Speed Dating
Basic Structure: Students form two circles, one inside circle and one outside circle. Each student on the inside is paired with a student on the outside; they face each other. The teacher poses a question to the whole group and pairs discuss their responses with each other. Then the teacher signals students to rotate: Students on the outside circle move one space to the right so they are standing in front of a new person (or sitting, as they are in the video). Now the teacher poses a new question, and the process is repeated.

Variations: Instead of two circles, students could also form two straight lines facing one another. Instead of "rotating" to switch partners, one line just slides over one spot, and the leftover person on the end comes around to the beginning of the line. Some teachers use this strategy to have students teach one piece of content to their fellow students, making it less of a discussion strategy and more of a peer teaching format. In fact, many of these protocols could be used for peer teaching as well.

Basic Structure: Another great idea from Sarah Brown Wessling, this is a small-group discussion strategy that gives students exposure to more of their peers' ideas and prevents the stagnation that can happen when a group doesn't happen to have the right chemistry. Students are placed into a few groups of 4-6 students each and are given a discussion question to talk about. After sufficient time has passed for the discussion to develop, one or two students from each group rotate to a different group, while the other group members remain where they are. Once in their new group, they will discuss a different, but related question, and they may also share some of the key points from their last group's conversation. For the next rotation, students who have not rotated before may be chosen to move, resulting in groups that are continually evolving.

Basic Structure: Two students sit facing each other in the center of the room; the remaining students sit in a circle around them. The two central students have a conversation based on a pre-determined topic and often using specific skills the class is practicing (such as asking follow-up questions, paraphrasing, or elaborating on another person's point). Students on the outside observe, take notes, or perform some other discussion-related task assigned by the teacher.

Variations: One variation of this strategy allows students in the outer circle to trade places with those in the fishbowl, doing kind of a relay-style discussion, or they may periodically "coach" the fishbowl talkers from the sidelines. Teachers may also opt to have students in the outside circle grade the participants' conversation with a rubric, then give feedback on what they saw in a debriefing afterward, as mentioned in the featured video.

Basic Structure: One student assumes the role of a book character, significant figure in history, or concept (such as a tornado, an animal, or the Titanic). Sitting in front of the rest of the class, the student responds to classmates' questions while staying in character in that role.

Variations: Give more students the opportunity to be in the hot seat while increasing everyone's participation by having students do hot seat discussions in small groups, where one person per group acts as the "character" and three or four others ask them questions. In another variation, several students could form a panel of different characters, taking questions from the class all together and interacting with one another like guests on a TV talk show.
a.k.a. Pyramid Discussion
Basic Structure: Students begin in pairs, responding to a discussion question only with a single partner. After each person has had a chance to share their ideas, the pair joins another pair, creating a group of four. Pairs share their ideas with the pair they just joined. Next, groups of four join together to form groups of eight, and so on, until the whole class is joined up in one large discussion.

Variations: This structure could simply be used to share ideas on a topic, or students could be required to reach consensus every time they join up with a new group.

Whereas the other formats in this list have a distinct shape-specific activities you do with students-the strategies in this section are more like plug-ins, working discussion into other instructional activities and improving the quality and reach of existing conversations.

One of the limitations of discussion is that rich, face-to-face conversations can only happen when all parties are available, so we're limited to the time we have in class. With a tool like Voxer, those limitations disappear. Like a private voice mailbox that you set up with just one person or a group (but SOOOO much easier), Voxer allows users to have conversations at whatever time is most convenient for each participant. So a group of four students can "discuss" a topic from 3pm until bedtime-asynchronously-each member contributing whenever they have a moment, and if the teacher makes herself part of the group, she can listen in, offer feedback, or contribute her own discussion points. Voxer is also invaluable for collaborating on projects and for having one-on-one discussions with students, parents, and your own colleagues. Like many other educators, Peter DeWitt took a while to really understand the potential of Voxer, but in this EdWeek piece, he explains what turned him around.

A backchannel is a conversation that happens right alongside another activity. The first time I saw a backchannel in action was at my first unconference: While those of us in the audience listened to presenters and watched a few short video clips, a separate screen was up beside the main screen, projecting something called TodaysMeet (update: TodaysMeet has shut down. Use YoTeach! instead.) It looked a lot like those chat rooms from back in the day, basically a blank screen where people would contribute a few lines of text, the lines stacking up one after the other, no other bells or whistles. Anyone in the room could participate in this conversation on their phone, laptop, or tablet, asking questions, offering commentary, and sharing links to related resources without ever interrupting the flow of the presentations. This kind of tool allows for a completely silent discussion, one that doesn't have to move at a super-fast pace, and it gives students who may be reluctant to speak up or who process their thoughts more slowly a chance to fully contribute. For a deeper discussion of how this kind of tool can be used, read this thoughtful overview of using backchannel discussions in the classroom by Edutopia's Beth Holland.
a.k.a. Accountable Talk
Talk moves are sentence frames we supply to our students that help them express ideas and interact with one another in respectful, academically appropriate ways. From kindergarten all the way through college, students can benefit from explicit instruction in the skills of summarizing another person's argument before presenting an alternate view, asking clarifying questions, and expressing agreement or partial agreement with the stance of another participant. Talk moves can be incorporated into any of the other discussion formats listed here.

Whole Brain Teaching is a set of teaching and classroom management methods that has grown in popularity over the past 10 years. One of WBT's foundational techniques is Teach-OK, a peer teaching strategy that begins with the teacher spending a few minutes introducing a concept to the class. Next, the teacher says Teach!, the class responds with Okay!, and pairs of students take turns re-teaching the concept to each other. It's a bit like think-pair-share, but it's faster-paced, it focuses more on re-teaching than general sharing, and students are encouraged to use gestures to animate their discussion. Although WBT is most popular in elementary schools, this featured video shows the creator of WBT, Chris Biffle, using it quite successfully with college students. I have also used Teach-OK with college students, and most of my students said they were happy for a change from the sit-and-listen they were used to in college classrooms.

An oldie but a goodie, think-pair-share can be used any time you want to plug interactivity into a lesson: Simply have students think about their response to a question, form a pair with another person, discuss their response, then share it with the larger group. Because I feel this strategy has so many uses and can be way more powerful than we give it credit for, I devoted a whole post to think-pair-share; everything you need to know about it is right there.

TWO MORE YOU'LL LOVE

Since writing this post, I have learned about two more discussion strategies that teachers are finding to be incredibly effective and powerful for getting students to talk, especially about books and other texts:

This protocol has students come up with their own Thoughts, lingering Questions, and Epiphanies from an assigned reading. Teachers who have used this method say it has generated some of the richest conversations they have ever heard from students!

This strategy places students into one-on-one conversations, getting them to learn each others' names better and create a track record of what they talked about. Excellent for classes where you want to assess for discussion and help students get more comfortable with each other.

So what else do you have? I would like to think this is a pretty complete list, but I'm sure more strategies are out there. If you use a discussion strategy that's not mentioned here, please share it below.

Come back for more.
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The Big List of Class Discussion Strategies

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Here they are: 15 formats for structuring a class discussion to make it more engaging, more organized, more equitable, and more academically challenging.

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You've probably heard of-and maybe used-learning stations in your classroom. With stations, teachers set up activities around their rooms, then have students rotate from station to station, performing each task. They are a wonderful way to provide variety and engagement in your classroom.

There's only one real downside to stations-they take a LOT of time to set up. And because we're all short on time, we may not use stations as often as we could.

So today I'm proposing a watered-down version of stations that keeps the movement, interactivity and variety while minimizing the prep work. I'm calling these "Chat Stations," discussion prompts that students visit just like stations, but instead of performing a complex task, they just have a quick discussion. Chat Stations are incredibly flexible: They can be used for test reviews, ethical debates, exploring new material, even analyzing literature.

On top of their flexibility as a cooperative learning tool, Chat Stations can also dramatically improve whole-class discussions. Because students have fully explored each issue in the less-threatening Chat Station setting, they will be better prepared to participate in a larger class discussion next. And as we explored in a previous post, we need to do more to engage our less talkative students. Chat Stations offer another way to get them more involved.

Here's a video demonstrating how Chat Stations work:

The more traditional kinds of stations-where students perform more complex or hands-on work-are still the gold standard for student engagement, but Chat Stations can be a great strategy for those times when you haven't been able to prepare a "real" station. They still get students up and moving and breathe new life into your content. And there's really no limit to how challenging your questions can be.

I'm pretty sure I haven't invented anything new here, so if you're doing something like this and have a tip or suggestion to add, please comment below. If you try this for the first time, please share your experiences with us. ♦

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Students Sitting Around Too Much? Try Chat Stations.

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Your new favorite teaching strategy: This pared-down version of learning stations keeps the movement, interactivity and variety while minimizing the prep work.

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The state released writing task examples and graded student responses.  It gives clear examples of what they consider student work for each level.

Please see below for directions on accessing them on EdTools.  There are also examples of an alternative task online.

Go to https://tdoe.randasolutions.com

Click "Resources" at the top of the page.

Go to "Training Resources" under the resources tab.

Click "2017 Writing Resources".

Have a wonderful afternoon!

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Common Core Learning Standards for Mathematics