Highlights from VSRA 2020

I was so looking forward to meeting these people in person this year, but I am beyond grateful that they were willing to share virtual sessions. As always, I took a ton of notes, and have taken time to reflect on my learning. Thank you SO much to the VSRA for making this happen, and to all of the presenters who shared their time and expertise with us from home! You are all very much appreciated!

When Books Become Best Friends

Lester Laminack

Mr. Laminack believes in the importance of a small collection of mentor texts (5 fiction, 5 nonfiction) that you refer back to throughout the year. He asked us to consider, “What if our students knew a small collection of books as well you know your best friends?”

I really loved his description of the “Movie Read”! Sometimes we need to read aloud a book in its entirety without interruptions for the sheer enjoyment that the book offers. (Imagine being in a movie theater and having them stop every 15 minutes so you can turn and talk. 😱)

Students NEED time to think about and reflect on the book before jumping into “activities”.  A lot of our students think once the book has been read and we’ve talked about it or drawn a picture, we’re DONE. This does not allow for rich, thoughtful discussion.

In this session, Mr. Laminack used the book Peter’s Chair by Ezra Jack Keats to do a character study using the phrases, “Peter is the kind of boy who…” and “I know this because….” This allows students to consider HOW an author presents information about a character. Student responses can be written on a T-chart and they can use these ideas in their own writing. So instead of  “The boy was tired”, a student might write, “The boy fell face-first onto his bed and fell fast asleep.”

Keep in mind when I say this that I’ve been teaching middle school for 20 years, but I was so impressed that Mr. Laminack was using this lesson with 5-year-olds. I thought, “Wow! If we already have them looking for and thinking about character development in kindergarten, imagine how deep their thinking would be by high school! We can’t achieve all of this goodness when our main concern is prepping students for standardized tests. 

Making a Case for Reading Joy

Donalyn Miller

Toward the beginning of her talk, Ms. Miller reminded us that “Independent reading does NOT mean reading the whole-class novel independently.” THANK YOU!

Our time together was mainly focused on the importance of book access, which is a HUGE equity issue. Ms. Miller recommends that students have access to books in the classroom, books in the school library, books at home, and meaningful access to books at the public library. These books need to be "as current, diverse, and nourishing as possible". To me, this was certainly already an issue, but with the closure of our schools, it became even more apparent. I am proud of my classroom library, and we are blessed with a beautiful school library. But when we got the announcement that we would be closed, there was no time to make sure that all of our students went home with books.

Ms. Miller talked about a child in one of her classes who wouldn’t go into the library on a class visit. When she asked him about it, he said he had lost a book in elementary school and was no longer allowed to check out books. “We have to stop being caretakers of the books at the expense of being caretakers of the children.” BOOM! 🎆

She recommended the book No More Summer Reading Loss (from the Not This, But That series). Third through twelfth graders should be reading 4-5 books over the summer. And she said this, “If students are receiving services for reading intervention, and we’re not probing at-home book access, we’re missing the mark!”

She also recommended Grace Lin’s TED Talk, The Windows and Mirrors of Your Child's Bookshelf.

The Power of Poetry

Nikki Grimes

What a blessing it is to hear Ms. Grimes read her poetry aloud! Her session made me miss all of my beautiful titles that are just sitting trapped in our classroom library while we’re closed.

These were some of her books that I noted during this session:

Ordinary Hazards (I was REALLY looking forward to getting an autographed copy at the conference!)

Garvey’s Choice (one of my absolute favorites!)

Chasing Freedom

Words With Wings

The Watcher

Poems in the Attic

Danitra Brown books

Poetry is powerful because “it can whet a child’s appetite for literature”! Ms. Grimes recommends pairing textbook readings with poems on the same subject. 

Ms. Grimes discussed book access as well. All children should be able to read all books. “Would we tell children that only white people living on farms should read Charlotte’s Web?” She reminded us that children are often much more complex than we give them credit for, and that we need to encourage them to share their memories and experiences through writing.

Social Justice Does Not Just Live in Our Content; It Lives in Our Methods

Cornelius Minor

It has been enormously difficult to try to fit this session into a blog post. I hope that one day I can learn from Mr. Minor in a full-day or multi-day workshop. If I could summarize my learning in one quote it would be this:

“Covid-19 has just brought out in the open the inequities already present in our system.”

He explained that we need to spend some time looking at our school-based outcomes, as well as to be attentive to the systems we have in place...systems that create inequitable outcomes for a specific group of people. 

A perfect example is what is currently happening with distance learning. Our school norms actively include kids with internet access, but disengage students without it. For me personally, I thought about the 15 minutes of daily independent reading that my students had in our classroom. How do I keep that going, especially for our students that don’t have access to digital materials, or books in their homes?

But even when we are physically in the classroom, think about what is going on with the students we teach. Mr. Minor reminded us that “The ‘normal’ that we had 2 weeks ago was already broken." He went on to explain that “We privilege the kids who show up and get it on the first try” (which means that they didn’t learn it from us anyway...they already knew it). Learning is iterative; what leads to mastery is repeated practice. There is no such thing as “I taught it and the kids mastered it.” Now imagine you’re the kid that didn’t master it on the first try. Are you afraid this is going to affect your social status? Wouldn’t you opt out of an activity if you felt it would damage your status in the eyes of your peers? Our students are no different. They just might “opt out” by throwing paper across the room and getting thrown out of class.

Right now we have a perfect opportunity to look at what is not working and change our pedagogy. One example that he gave was a principal who had recently suspended 12 students for fighting. It seemed to be happening in one particular class, which was basically set up as a 50-minute lecture. So they decided to change from a predominantly lecture format to include more engaging activities, which ended up cutting down the number of suspensions.

The final thought that I want to share is, “Doing things as they’ve always been done has left out far too many kids.”