Podcast Roundup: On Reading Levels and Illustrative Mathematics

 

Back to school is a great time to kick off new routines or to explore new resources. Two podcasts that are of interest to us as we move Griswold Forward are "Literacy Talks" and "Making Math Moments that Matter." 

In the episodes below, researchers and experts weigh in on the instructional practices and curriculum that Griswold is moving forward with. These are worth the listen!

Literacy Talks Podcast, Episode “On Levels: A Candid Conversation with Guest Dr. Matt Burns”

The gist: A famous reading researcher shares the research on what works when working with developing and struggling readers.

Takeaways:

• Leveled readers don’t align with research; decodables do.
• Effective assessments for reading skills help drive intervention.
• Partnered reading is an effective way to build fluency.

Making Math Moments that Matter, Episode “Engaging Students, Empowering Minds: A Conversation with Bill McCallum”

The gist: Illustrative Mathematics co-founder and distinguished math education professor shares the power of connecting mathematics to stories in problem-based learning. He connects to program practices and discusses the potential impact of AI and digital tools.

Takeaways:

• To learn math, students need to do math
• The instructional routines are key to the success of the curriculum.

Have you visited the TLI Website lately?

NWEA MAP season is almost upon the teachers and students of Griswold, and that means it's time to dust off that handout reminding you about how to administer testing. 

But if you lost your handout, remember that there is another way to access not only those directions, but tutorial videos and other resources of value: the TLI website!

GPS staff can access a wealth of resources that are specifically targeted to our teachers and support staff (often with student support materials too!). And while the homepage might largely look the same, updates are made regularly to each page, with new resources to support curriculum, instruction, templates for blended learning, and support for SBAC IABs and NGSS Interim tests as well. In fact, coming next week are some tutorials for downloading your data and using Excel or Sheets to quickly analyze it. Templates will be shared too!

It's worth setting a reminder to check the TLI website for news and updates every month or so. To find out what's new, in addition to looking at the instructional spotlight, you can click on the "News & Updates" tab to see what's been updated (and to see the archives of the Spotlight, so you can clean out your email). 

What kinds of resources are you looking for? Add a comment below, and the TLI team will respond!

PBJ is PBL?

My daughter is obsessive and picky about her peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. As I was putting just the right amount of peanut butter on her lunch, listening to a podcast, and thinking about project-based learning (PBL), it occurred to me that with this sandwich, I might just have a project on my hands.

You see, many teachers of writing have done some version of the peanut butter & jelly sandwich writing activity. (I used to do a version called "How to Eat an Oreo.") The gist is to model how "bad instructions" can lead to confusion (i.e. smearing jelly on a nose, instead of on bread), while clear and specific instructions lead to perfection.

While this is certainly a fun activity, most educators would say it doesn't rise to the level of project-based learning (PBL). We often hear that PBL has to have certain steps or rules, like an authentic audience and outside experts, and making a PBJ just doesn't cut it.

But who gets to say that isn't PBL?

PBL Works shares that:

Project Based Learning (PBL) is a teaching method in which students learn by actively engaging in real-world and personally meaningful projects.

About 15 minutes into a recent podcast, PBL expert Trevor Muir shares that his own first grade son's experience crafting his dream house as part of class showed him that PBL is flexible, as "real-world authenticity" can vary a lot based on the students in the classroom. 

For example, if your child is very, very picky about how her PBJ is made--lots of jelly, cut into squares, arranged in a circle on the plate, etc.--then that child will have a greater sense of ownership than a student who is allergic to peanut butter or who doesn't eat bread. Likewise, students interested in food science might want to investigate what it is about the PBJ that makes it such a popular combination of flavors, or experiment to see if other PBJ applications are as popular.

The key is helping to make the learning address or solve a problem or questions that is meaningful and relevant to YOUR students. Often times we have elements of this in our classrooms already, and framing our planned activities with a question or giving students opportunities to own a topic can make the difference. The GHS Biology team made a similar shift two years ago, taking a project they would normally do at the end of the unit and making it the driving purpose of a unit: as students explored their species, the lessons the teachers taught about evolution were made all the more relevant.

There is so much research behind the power of PBL that it is worth the try. Feeling like you have to be "perfect" before trying it or that students can't handle it ought not to stand in the way. Students can learn just as much, if not more, from a failed experiment as an epic project, and as a teacher, you get to model the same humility and growth mindset that you want to foster.

Think that your unit would be more interesting if centered around addressing a  real-world problem or question? Check out these resources for more ideas on how to start using PBL to make your classroom more responsive to student voice and choice.

(Ctrl) F that!

 

Quick Tip:

Ctrl+F is also known as the "Find" shortcut, and it allows you to open a search window in the page you have open on your browser--or in your Google document, PDF, etc. Type in the word (or part of the word) you want to find, and it will highlight the instances of that word on your page. 

There are many everyday uses for Ctrl+F that may make this a daily trick to use. If you are best described as an "okay" speller, using Ctrl+F to find and then REPLACE that word or name you repeatedly butchered can be a huge time saver. Or, if you tend to use the same word/phrase over and over again, you can find each instance and revise with a more colorful and accurate sentence!

Additional Uses: 

Ctrl + F is also valuable for those teaching reading or media literacy skills. The uses for this in the classroom are multiple, including the following:

Quickly evaluate a source for usefulness.
When researching, whether on a webpage or PDF, you can quickly see if the key word or phrase you are looking for is present--or how many times it appears. If it only shows up once, that might be an indication to move on...

Support students in identifying key words.
Sometimes students don't know whether to look up a word they don't know. A quick search for the word in the text will show the number of times it appears, and thus give them an indication of how important it is to define and understand.

Quickly find citations, etc.
Ctrl+F also works in Google documents! This time-saver is great for checking instances of a specific source cited or finding instances of the parenthesis ( on a page to count the number of parenthetical citations.

Check for plagiarism.
Quickly find key words or phrases that you suspect are copied. This is also a helpful tool for students to check that they have paraphrased appropriately!

Support students in evaluating sources for credibility.
Ctrl+F is great for finding key pieces of information fast, especially if you are practicing lateral reading and trying to confirm information found from another source.

Lateral reading helps you determine an author’s credibility, intent and biases by searching for articles on the same topic by other writers (to see how they are covering it) and for other articles by the author you’re checking on. That’s what professional fact-checkers do.

In fact, there is a Canadian program called CTRL+F that has a free program for media literacy, including lessons, videos, examples, and assessments (pre/post) for students in Grades 7-12. For those familiar with the News Literacy Project and its Checkology curriculum for Grades 6-12, this is similar but more easily used in pieces--Google slides, paper handouts, and with no student data sharing--to suit your learners. If this is something you have been thinking about, check out the introductory video below:

How else have you used Ctrl+F in the classroom or in your teacher life to increase productivity? Let us know in the comments below!

Can Students Have a Say in Curriculum?

In a recent post "Student Pathways into a Curriculum: Chaotic or Empowering," Benjamin Freud raises many questions we've heard from teachers about how we build student-centered curricula.

He introduces the challenge, which is that standards (and some other outside forces) dictate what we MUST teach students, but these skills and concepts themselves may not be innately interesting to our students. But, if we give students license to learn what they want to learn, then how will we know if they've learned what they need to learn? Some would argue that the more structure we put into curriculum, the better. The more common our activities and assessments, the more equitable the education. Correct?

Freud says, 

"Careful! There is a bait and switch at play: in order not to see ourselves as one of those people who force curriculum down students’ throats, we defend our ways by saying we’re helping students, guiding them. “You’ll see,” we declare, “they’ll thank us for it one day when they realize that we were that inspiring figure who opened them up to the unknown world of calculating the angle of the refraction of light!” It’s all nicely brought together in a conscience-appeasing dictum. Our job is to introduce students to subjects they don’t know they love yet.

The problem is that all these good intentions can quickly lead us to teaching what the teacher is in love with, or worse, what the teacher somehow feels the students should love because that is what the teacher was told she should love back when she was at school. Good intentions gone astray. "

While the post raises more questions than it provides in answer, the post is timely as many teachers are thinking about revising and implementing curricula and performance tasks while working toward our Griswold Forward goals. Consider: 

• Are all of the tasks or topics that we think we "have to do" really mandatory? Or are they simply customary, a reflection of what past teachers said was important or what the individual teacher likes? 
• Can we provide flexibility in the content, process, or product for the unit while still meeting the spirit and rigor of the standards for our grade level and content? 
• Can we build our units around meaningful topics or questions that can be customized for student interest, but which are still manageable for a single teacher or team to monitor and implement?

Placing students at the center may mean leaving behind traditions and opening our minds to new texts, new activities, and new ways of structuring class time. If you are interested in looking for places in your curriculum to incorporate student-centered learning, check out this resource from Cult of Pedagogy that breaks down the steps for planning a unit around an authentic "task."

What questions or concerns do you have about project-based learning (or similarly, problem-based learning or inquiry-based learning)?

Textbooks Can't Do It

On the Leading Equity podcast "Cultural Relevance in Science with Chanel Johnson, STEMinist (love this!) Johnson was talking about highlighting famous scientists of color in the classrooms and making science and math relevant to our students. One statement that really stuck out was: "Textbooks aren't doing it."

And while her point about teachers needing to include a variety of voices was important on its own--and the discussion about respectfully incorporating culture in the classroom so that students "see themselves" in their learning is worth a listen--this also made me think about other conversations I've had with teachers about blended learning. 

Recently a teacher made a joke that  along the lines of, "If I keep making videos, I won't even have to come to school anymore." And while we all laughed, the serious side of me has been thinking that this idea needs to be addressed, in part because of the misconception that textbooks, technology, and/or blended learning minimizes the roles of teachers:  NOTHING can replace a good teacher in a classroom. 

A great video can't do it. 

A great online program can't do it. 

A great textbook can't do it.

Teachers are the people who get to know their students: what is important to them in school, at home, in society, and in their futures. It is by creating and drawing on these relationships that teachers can make education meaningful, respectful, and relevant to their learners. It is through these relationships that teachers can broach difficult topics and broaden student horizons.

Along those lines, one other useful idea from the podcast was about inviting students to share phenomena in science, via TicTok or Youtube videos that come their way, or via television and movies. One example given was from Black Panther, and Ms. Johnson talked about using a scene to discuss energy transfer! Not only does inviting students to contribute make the content relevant, but it opens the door to interdisciplinary practices such as evaluating the credibility of sources (i.e. media literacy) or making connections to current events or trends. A textbook just can't keep up with all that.

-Jessica Gillespie

The Science of Reading

This week, we met with several grade level teams to discuss our Language Arts Curriculum.  Throughout these conversations, the topic Science of Reading continued to come up.  This reminded us of an excellent article that explains, not only the research regarding how children learn to read, but also what skills need to be taught and when.  

Research emphasizes an approach that is explicit, systematic, engaging and intensive and one that addresses phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension, aka the five key components of reading.  

Here's the link to The Science of Reading: Evidence for a New Era in Reading Instruction.