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February 21, 2012

Response: More Ways to Help Our Students Become Better Readers - Choice & Access

(You can see Part One of this series here and Part Two here)


Even though I'm receiving plenty of questions from readers (but could always use more!), I periodically take on a "Question That's Been On My Mind." This post is a the third in a multi-part series responding to one of them:

"What is the best advice you would give to teachers trying to help their students become better readers?"

Professors Stephen Krashen and Richard Allington contributed their responses two weeks ago. Nancie Atwell and Cris Tovani shared their thoughts in last week's post.

This week, Regie Routman, Laura Robb, and Kylene Beers -- all authors and teachers who have influenced my teaching -- are sharing contributions.

More guests will be sharing their ideas in this series' future posts, I'll be having a special one including many insightful comments being left by readers, and I'll share a few of my own suggestions.

Response From Regie Routman

Regie Routman's current work involves weeklong demonstration teaching and coaching in diverse schools around the U.S. and Canada. Her most recent book, Teaching Essentials, follows Reading Essentials and Writing Essentials and provides the ideas and principles behind all effective teaching and learning. Her DVD-based, job-embedded professional development program, Regie Routman in Residence: Transforming Our Teaching series, shows what those ideas look like and sound like in teaching reading and writing in diverse classrooms. You can visit her website:

As a reading teacher for over forty years, getting the "right" book into a student's hands is the most crucial factor. Student interest, engagement and need to know trump finding the exact, "right" level, although matching books to readers is very important, of course. For finding appropriate books, a comprehensive and relevant classroom library, organized with students, is essential.

Teaching students how to choose books they can actually read and understand is not as easy as it sometimes appears. Teachers can be lulled into a false sense of security when students can orally say how they choose books, but can't actually do so on their own. Explicitly showing students how to choose a book--with all students watching--and, then, following up with lots of shared and guided practice is a necessity for helping students understand they must be able to:

• Choose a text that interests them
• Read the title
• Have enough background and experience to comprehend the particular text
• Be able to decode almost all the words
• Look through the text and read a few pages to "test" for "just rightness"
• Figure out most unknown vocabulary
• Be comfortable with the amount and size of text on each page
• Utilize the book's contents, layout, and organization to enhance meaning
• Understand the big and small ideas in the text
• Self-monitor and self-correct while reading
• Tell someone who has not read the text what it is about

Once students have the "right" book, they must have uninterrupted time to read it. Sustained time to read continuous, meaningful texts, most of which are self-selected, must be the mainstay of any reading program. While shared reading and guided reading are important teaching scaffolds to support students' move to independence, without daily, independent practice time, carefully monitored--mostly through one-on-one conferences--students are not likely to become fluent, comprehending readers.

Response From Laura Robb

Laura Robb has completed 43 years of teaching in grades 4-8. She has written more than 18 books for teachers -- her most recent Scholastic titles are a second edition of her best selling book, Teaching Reading in Middle School and a short, focused book for content teachers, Reading Strategy Lessons for Science & Social Studies:

To develop students' reading proficiency and motivation to read, you need to balance instructional and independent reading. Both kinds of reading are the foundation of these ten suggestions.

1. Instructional Reading: Teach students to comprehend and think deeply about instructional materials to enlarge their vocabulary, enlarge their prior knowledge, and develop understandings of complex concepts such as human rights.

2. Independent Reading: In addition to instructional reading, students read thirty to fifty books a year --books they can read with 99% to 100% accuracy. Like sports, to improve their reading students practice skills and build automaticity in applying specific strategies.

3. Choice: Give students choice in independent reading materials and as much as possible with instructional texts. Choice results in motivation and engagement because students explore their passions and interests.

4. Easy Access to Reading Materials: One of my eighth graders pointed out, "We need all kinds of reading [materials] at our fingertips." My hope is that teachers will build class libraries with 700 to 1000 books and magazines on a wide range of topics and reading levels.

5. Teacher Reads Aloud: Read aloud to introduce students to different authors and genres and model how you think about texts. Choose materials students will enjoy!

6. Discussions: These make learning interactive, help students clarify their hunches, and provide accessible peer models for thinking about texts.

7. Book Talks: Invite students to present a book talk a month to advertise favorites. Over ten months, students will be introduced to 250 to 300 plus books recommended by peers.

8. Silent Reading: Set aside twenty to twenty-five minutes of silent reading at school. This can be instructional and independent reading. Have students read at home for thirty minutes each night.

9. Readers Notebooks: Invite students to complete informal written responses in their notebooks. Students can draw, draw and write, or write their reactions to read alouds and instructional and independent reading.

10. Conferences: Hold three to five minute conferences to discover students' reading strengths, build self-confidence, and determine whether scaffolds are needed. Show students how to confer with one another and document their paired discussions.

These ten ways to improve reading provide research-based practices that can help students develop positive attitudes toward reading and read, read, read to build stamina and proficiency.

Response From Kylene Beers

Kylene Beers, the 2008-2009 President of the National Council of Teachers of English, is the author of When Kids Can't Read/What Teachers Can Do. She consults with districts across the country and serves as Senior Reading Advisor for Secondary Schools for the Reading and Writing Project at Teachers College:

The conversation with the high school principal went something like this:

Principal: Thanks for visiting our school today. I hope you'll enjoy seeing our reading intervention classes. Some of our students are in those classes 3 periods a day.

Me: And what's happening in those classes?

Principal: We are using a great program we bought last year. It moves students through a prescribed set of skills and tests them over every skill. They can't move on until they show mastery on that skill. Like sequencing. Or cause and effect.

Me: So, before you put students into that program you know they have problems with sequencing or cause and effect?

Principal: They have problems with reading. This program fixes that. Let's go look and you'll see.

This school had adopted a one-size-fits-all mindset when it came to working with struggling readers. Whether students needed help in understanding a sequence of events or seeing causal relations didn't matter; the school had bought a program that advertised helping struggling readers and that was that. The problem, though, is that there is no single template for a struggling reader. Some kids struggle because they don't envision what they are reading; some struggle because of a limited vocabulary. Others struggle because they are literal readers and fail to make needed inferences. Some never make personal connections and a few struggle with decoding. And there are those who do indeed struggle with sequencing and recognizing cause and effect connections.

That means that advice for teachers who want to help their students become better readers is predicated on the teacher knowing why the students are struggling. The suggestions offered here, therefore, aren't a checklist or a recipe. Read through them, think about your individual students, and then choose what you think is most important for particular readers.

1. Read aloud to your students. When you move to a new genre, a new author, or a new topic, read aloud. When you begin a new novel with students, read aloud the first few pages. Skilled readers not only "see" the text, but they hear it. The most disfluent readers I've worked with tell me that they not only don't see the text, but they can't hear it. If you want to help disfluent readers develop prosody--that ability to read with the expression needed for a text to make sense--then they must hear fluent reading.

2. Let students talk a lot about what they are reading. The research connecting classroom discourse to reading comprehension is impressive. This means we need to spend time doing what my colleague Bob Probst suggests: asking questions that are about exploring rather than answering. We need to give students time to talk in small groups, think through issues, wrestle with words and ideas.

3. Require that students actually read. In too many schools I visit, too many times the teacher explains that the textbook is too hard and so the teacher simply lectures and students copy notes from the PowerPoint presentation the teacher has created. Students will never get better at reading history texts or science texts or literary texts if they never, well, read them. Of course, that means that we have to have texts in our classrooms that students can read. And that leads to the final point.

4. Stand in your principal's office every day asking that he figure out how to get more books of varying difficulty into your classroom. Tell him that you want your students reading but that means you need the right materials. Some of your students can probably handle the textbook you have; others can read books even more challenging; and some need a book that's easier. We must find the resources to make all our classrooms, not just the language arts classroom, print rich environments that are filled with books that our least skilled readers can read and others that our most skilled can read. We then must become adept at matching kids to books and knowing how to move them throughout the year into increasingly more difficult books.

Please feel free to leave a comment sharing your reactions to this question and the ideas shared here. I'll be compiling reader suggestions in a future post in this series.

Thanks to Regie, Laura and Kylene for sharing their responses!

Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at lferlazzo@epe.org.When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it's selected or if you'd prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

Anyone whose question is selected for this weekly column can choose one free book from a selection of twelve published by Eye On Education.

I won't be posting a new "Question Of The Week" until this series is completed in two weeks, but feel free to send a question in if you have one in mind! And don't forget to contribute your own advice on teaching reading...

Posted by Larry Ferlazzo at 5:50 PM | | Leave a comment | Recommend

February 14, 2012

Response: Ways to Help Our Students Become Better Readers - Part Two

(You can see Part One of this series here)


Even though I'm receiving plenty of questions from readers (but could always use more!), I periodically take on a "Question That's Been On My Mind." This post is a the second in a four-part series responding to one of them:

"What is the best advice you would give to teachers trying to help their students become better readers?"

Professors Stephen Krashen and Richard Allington contributed their responses in last week's post. Today, I'm lucky to have contributions from two other educators, thinkers, and writers who have also had a major impact on my teaching (and, I'm sure, on the work of many other teachers), Nancie Atwell and Cris Tovani.

More guests will be sharing their ideas in this series' future posts, I'll be having a special one including many insightful comments being left by readers, and I'll share a few of my own suggestions.

Response From Nancie Atwell

Nancie Atwell teaches seventh and eighth grade writing, reading, and history at the Center for Teaching and Learning in Edgecomb, Maine. She is the author of The Reading Zone: How to Help Kids Become Skilled, Passionate, Habitual, Critical Readers (Scholastic) and In the Middle (Heinemann):

My advice is to do what it takes to make reading easy, inviting, enjoyable, and meaningful. This means access to books that tell great stories, freedom of choice, time to read, and encouragement and information along the way. We need to dismantle the institutional hurdles--to shelve class sets of novels, sticky notes, and core reading programs--and acknowledge that it's engaged practice that makes readers. No child who didn't read a lot ever became a strong reader.

Building a classroom library of compelling, young-adult titles is a place to begin. I started out borrowing collections from my school library, then signing out titles to individuals. Today my students browse in a classroom library that offers a minimum of twenty titles per reader. The books they nominate as sure-fire invitations to non-readers appear on our website, c-t-l.org, on the Kids Recommend page. Of course, teachers need to get--and keep--our own feet wet as readers of young adult literature, by no means a burden, given the intriguing, richly-themed titles available these days for adolescent readers.

Kids need time to read the books they choose, in school and at home. Malcolm Gladwell theorizes in Outliers (2008) that it takes ten thousand hours of practice for an expert to acquire his or her expertise. When we dedicate regular class time to students living vicariously in stories, and when we assign pleasure reading as baseline, priority, nightly homework, students begin to acquire the kind of experience that leads to increased fluency, understanding, vocabulary, and stamina. My students read an average of fifty-three books representing a dozen genres last year, and they are wizard readers--and critics.

An effective program of independent reading isn't a study hall where we all Drop Everything And Read. The teacher's main roles are to talk with individual kids--quiet conversations about what they're reading, how they're reading it, what they're understanding and noticing, whether they're happy, and what they might read next--and with the whole class about books, authors, genres, and literary elements. In minilessons, my students discuss character development, theme, setting, plot structure, description, reflection, dialogue, form, voice, diction, tone, style, leads, and conclusions. We also conduct booktalks: hundreds of sales pitches about titles we loved and think others will love, too. The classroom is alive with the language of literary criticism, spoken by students who see themselves as insiders, as members of what Frank Smith calls the literacy club (1988), because they read good writing and have learned to identify what makes it work.

A few years back, I taught an eighth grader, new to our school, who told me he had never read a book. I was incredulous--how could this be? He'd listened to class discussions, skimmed SparksNotes, cheated off friends when it came time for tests, and maintained the average he needed to play sports. When I booktalked titles with him in mind the first week of school, written by such gifts to boy readers as Carl Deuker, Todd Strasser, and Sherman Alexie, he practically ripped them out of my hands, he was so eager to find out what happens next. This is what great stories do for kids--for all of us. They tap humans' built-in interest in the human condition, in all its varieties.

This boy read thirty-six books by June. He developed and identified favorites--titles, authors, genres--and easily named his criteria for choosing and judging books. His reading level soared. Most importantly, he discovered why anyone would want to read in the first place: for the pleasure to be found in getting lost in a story.

Citations

Gladwell, M. (2008). Outliers: The Story of Success. New York: Little, Brown.

Smith, F. (1988). Joining the Literacy Club: Further Essays into Education. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Response From Cris Tovani

Cris Tovani is an English/Reading teacher and the author of So...What do They Really Know? and several other books.

All Readers Deserve to Get Better.

People who read well, read often. Sometimes I get so focused on struggling readers that I forget about the kids who can read well, but choose not to. Students who don't show growth over time aren't always the strugglers. Even good readers improve when they are exposed to the following teaching behaviors.

Carve out reading time during class in all content areas.

Good readers make time to read every day. People who don't read well often wait for others to tell them what the reading is about. If we have kids who won't read on their own, we have to make time in class for them to practice. As students read, the teacher is then freed up to confer with individuals or work with small groups. In essence, make differentiation manageable.

There are no short cuts here. No one gets better at something by watching someone else do it. Ironically, the kids who need to read the most get the fewest school opportunities to do it. In the haste to cover content, kids are robbed of reading chances. Simply reading the required text aloud or telling students what the content is about won't grow readers.

Model how to construct meaning.

All readers need mentors to learn from, and to some degree, every teacher can be a mentor when it comes to comprehension instruction. Take a minute to consider what you do to comprehend. Do you reread the entire text or only selected parts based on a specific purpose? Do you hold your thinking by filling out worksheets or by annotating text? Do you demonstrate your comprehension by turning in a graphic organizer or do you actually use it to complete a task? Do your questions drive what you read or do you read to answer someone else's questions?

Showing kids the authentic ways you interact with text will not only encourage them to read more, it will also give them power and independence to think in your class.

Provide some choice.

Choice drives engagement. People who like to read have some choice in the matter. Struggling readers are often told what and how to read. Providing choice in the classroom doesn't mean that everyone has to be in a different book all the time. Sometimes choice comes in the form of letting kids pick from two different articles. Maybe students get to choose how they group themselves when it's time to share. Perhaps choice comes in the way students show their understanding.

All students deserve to grow as readers. Creating conditions where kids have time to read and opportunities to learn how experts construct meaning is a good start. In addition, we honor the learner's individuality by providing some options for choice. Who knows? These three suggestions might be the spark that reignites students' desire to read that will ultimately lead to better comprehension.

Please feel free to leave a comment sharing your reactions to this question and the ideas shared here. I'll be compiling reader suggestions in a future post in this series.

Thanks to Nancie and Cris for sharing their responses!

Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at lferlazzo@epe.org.When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it's selected or if you'd prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

Anyone whose question is selected for this weekly column can choose one free book from a selection of twelve published by Eye On Education.

I won't be posting a new "Question Of The Week" until this series is completed in four weeks, but feel free to send a question in if you have one in mind! And don't forget to contribute your own advice on teaching reading...

Posted by Larry Ferlazzo at 10:03 AM | | Leave a comment | Recommend

February 07, 2012

Response: Ways To Help Our Students Become Better Readers

Even though I'm receiving plenty of questions from readers (but could always use more!), I periodically take on a "Question That's Been On My Mind." This post is a the first in a four-part series responding to one of them:

"What is the best advice you would give to teachers trying to help their students become better readers?"

I'll be sharing my own advice in a future post in this series, as well ideas from other guests and readers.

I'd like to start off the series with guest responses from two educators who have had a major influence on how I -- and many others -- help students become better readers. I don't think it's hyperbole to describe Stephen Krashen and Richard Allington as giants in the field.

Response From Stephen Krashen

Stephen Krashen is Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Southern California. He is best known for developing the first comprehensive theory of second language acquisition, introducing the concept of sheltered subject matter teaching, and as the co-inventor of the Natural Approach to foreign language teaching. His recent papers can be found at his website:

My advice is guided by one central hypothesis: We learn to read, improve in reading, and develop most aspects of literacy (phonemic awareness, most of phonics, vocabulary, spelling, knowledge of text structure) in just one way: When we understand texts, when we understand what is on the page, and especially when we find the messages we are reading to be very interesting (or compelling). This "reading hypothesis" originated with Frank Smith and Kenneth Goodman, and has enormous empirical support. It is consistent with the more general Comprehension Hypothesis, which claims that we acquire language and develop literacy when we understand messages.

If the Reading Hypothesis is correct, the way to become a better reader is to be engaged in texts that are comprehensible and that are extremely interesting, This is true for all levels of reading ability, but details differ at each level.

A typical path for those who eventually develop "academic language" (the ability to read specialized texts and to write in an educated style) is as follows:

1. At the beginning level, read-alouds give children input in the form of stories, helping them acquire the language of books, and they also stimulate interest in reading.

2. The next part of the path is self-selected reading, often fiction, and often "narrow," focusing on certain authors and genres, gradually widening or changing as interests change and reading competence grows. This kind of reading provides the language competence and background knowledge to make at least some professional or "academic" reading comprehensible, and serves as a bridge to academic language.

8. Academic language is also acquired through self-selected reading of academic texts
that are of great personal interest. Reading that helps us develop academic language competence is not done for in order to acquire academic language, but is done because the reader is very interested in the message.

Assuming this view is correct, what can we do?

- Provide access to reading material, through classroom and school libraries. This is of crucial importance for those with little access to books at home and in their communities.

- Stimulate interest in reading and help make reading more interesting and comprehensible: Compelling read-alouds at all ages do this, as does discussion of stories. For those who have begun to read independently, providing time to read (eg SSR), discussion of some (not all) of what is read (among students as well as conferencing), and occasionally students writing reflections relating what they have read to their interests, will help students find more to read of interest to them and make texts more interesting and comprehensible. All of this is what is known as "language arts" or "literature."

What about skills?

What I have described above is the core of language arts. On the periphery, there is some room for "skills," but the ones that should be taught are those that make reading more comprehensible. Some basic rules of phonics do this, as do a few reading strategies. Strategy teaching, I suspect, is "deprogramming," helping readers move away from inefficient and unnatural practices they have learned in school.

Krashen, S. (2004). The power of reading. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Publishing Company, and Westview, CONN: Libraries Unlimited. Second Edition.

Response From Richard Allington

Richard Allington is a professor of literacy studies at the University of Tennessee and past president of the International Reading Association. You can find his books and papers at his website:

All students need to engage in lots of reading every school day. Most of this reading should be self-selected reading. Skip the worksheets, skip the low level interrogations, and provide the time to read and the books that kids want to read and can read. While the kids are reading, move about the room and engage readers in literate conversations about what they are reading. Literate conversation focus on thoughtful dialogue about the characters, the plot, and the responses the reader is having as he/she reads.

If your students are not very adept at selecting books they can read and want to read it may simply indicate that they are relatively unpracticed at this activity. So help them by blessing 3 or 4 books every day. Blessing books is easy. Just hold up the book and tell the readers something about the book. Perhaps read a page or two aloud to allow them to hear what the book sounds like.

If you don't have many books available in your classroom, begin an effort to change that. You can ask kids to bring in books they have already read and donate them to the classroom. You can even create stickers that say, "This book was donated by XXXX." Ask your principal for funds to expand the collection you have. Explore the sources for free books. They exist. My experience suggests that every classroom should have a collection of roughly 1000 titles. Work toward that goal - 1,000 titles that will interest your students and represent the range of text complexity that will be needed to provide multiple titles for every reader in your room.

Please feel free to leave a comment sharing your reactions to this question and the ideas shared here. I'll be compiling reader suggestions in a future post in this series.

Thanks to Professors Krashen and Allington for sharing their responses!

Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at lferlazzo@epe.org.When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it's selected or if you'd prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

Anyone whose question is selected for this weekly column can choose one free book from a selection of twelve published by Eye On Education.

I won't be posting a new "Question Of The Week" until this series is completed in four weeks, but feel free to send a question in if you have one in mind! And don't forget to contribute your own advice on teaching reading...


Posted by Larry Ferlazzo at 9:46 AM | | Leave a comment | Recommend

February 01, 2012

How Can We Help Our Students Become Better Readers?

Though I'm receiving plenty of reader questions (but could always use more!), I periodically instead decide to respond to a "Question That's Been On My Mind."

This is another one of those times (I'll soon be returning to reader questions)....

My question is:

"What would be the best advice you would give to teachers trying to help their students become better readers?"

Please share your responses in the comments, or, if you prefer, feel free to email them to me.

Anyone whose question is selected for this weekly column can choose one free book from a selection of twelve -- including my own -- published by Eye On Education.

You can send questions to me at lferlazzo@epe.org.When you send in your question, let me know if I can use your real name if it's selected or if you'd prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

And just a reminder -- you can subscribe to this blog for free via RSS Reader or email....

Posted by Larry Ferlazzo at 12:14 PM | | Leave a comment | Recommend

January 31, 2012

Response: Several Ways To Apply Social-Emotional Learning Strategies In The Classroom

Glenda Robertson asked:

"What are some highly-effective must-do social-emotional learning strategies that we can immediately incorporate into our classroom culture?"

Social Emotional Learning (SEL) is sometimes also referred to as "character education." It's been receiving more and more attention recently, both from researchers and practitioners.

I'm a big believer in helping students develop strategies to strengthen their perseverance, self-control, intrinsic motivation, and healthy ways to deal with stress and conflict -- among many other qualities -- and think it's fairly easy to integrate lessons with literacy development. I've gathered related resources and lesson plans at The Best Resources On Social Emotional Learning.

These ideas have also been covered in previous posts here, including in Several Ways To Respond To "Unpredictable" Student Behavior and in Several Ways To 'Motivate' the Unmotivated To Learn.

I do have some questions about the push to develop official standards for them, though I suppose you could make a case that those are useful for pushing administrators to provide classroom time for SEL lessons.

I also think it's an awful idea to actually grade students on these character traits, a practice that some charter schools have begun recently. It seems to me that we tend to "beat" enough intrinsic motivation out of our students with testing and grading now, and that carrots and sticks might not work very effectively if we're trying to help transform character...Instead, it seems to me that we should focus on encouragement and self-reflection, and help students see how developing these qualities are in their short and long-term self interest.

Two guests with a great deal of experience with Social Emotional Learning have agreed to write responses to Glenda's question today -- Maurice J. Elias, director of the Rutgers Social-Emotional Learning Lab and Tom Roderick, the executive director of Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility. I also include suggestions from readers.

Response From Maurice J. Elias

Maurice J. Elias is a psychology professor at Rutgers University and director of the Rutgers Social-Emotional Learning Lab. He is the author of numerous studies on SEL and a regular blogger on the topic for Edutopia. He is the co-author of Social Decision Making/Social Problem Solving:

The point of using lessons from a social-emotional learning/social-emotional and character development (SEL/SECD) is to build a set of skills in children that will generalize without adult reminders. Formal lessons only serve to introduce the skills. Carrying out SEL/SECD lessons is not hard. But whether or not the skills are learned and generalized depends on the pedagogical procedure used and the reinforcement of skill use subsequently. Here are some tips for building any SEL/SECD competency effectively:

• Introduce the skill and/or concept and provide motivation for learning; discuss when the skill will and will not be useful.

• Break down the skill into its behavioral components, model them, and clarify with descriptions and behavioral examples of using and not using the skill.

• Provide opportunities for practice of the skill in "kid-tested", enjoyable activities, to allow for corrective feedback and reinforcement until skill mastery is approached.

• Label the skill with a "prompt or cue" to establish a shared language that can be used to call for the use of the skill in future situations to promote transfer and generalization. For example, in the Social Decision Making/Social Problem Solving Curriculum, the skill of self-calming is taught in a teacher-based lesson and labeled with the prompt, "Keep Calm." When students hear that prompt, they are reminded to use a breathing and self-talk procedure they were taught in the curriculum. Anyone in a school building should know this prompt and use it in a situation to help students calm themselves down, such as before a test, a class presentation, or difficult social task. "Use Keep Calm" invokes the learned skill.

• Assignments for skill practice outside the structured lessons. (E.g., be sure to use Keep Calm before your standardized tests next week)

• Follow-through activities and planned opportunities for using skill prompts in academic content areas, classroom management and everyday interpersonal situations at school and in the home and community.

• Occasional take-home activities or information sheets for parents so they can also recognize when skills are being used and/or prompt their use.

The Reflective Summary

We have found great benefit in concluding each SEL/SECD topic or set of related lessons with a Reflective Summary. The purpose of this is to allow students a chance to think about what they have learned from the topic, as well as to allow teachers/group leaders to see what students are taking away with them. Sometimes, the Reflective Summary can show when students have misunderstandings or uncertainty about what they have learned, suggesting the need for additional instructional activities before moving on in the lesson sequence. Here is the procedure, which we use in Grades 2-12:

"Ask students to reflect on the question, 'What did you learn from today's lesson/activity?' You can do this with the whole group, in a Sharing Circle or related class meeting format, by having students fill out index cards, keep a reflection journal, or other formats as you choose. We recommend that you have some variety in formats. After getting a sense of what the students learned, reinforce key themes that they mentioned and add perhaps one or two that you would like them to keep in mind. Also discuss any follow up assignments or take home materials."

These instructional suggestions, as well as other related SEL/SECD strategies, can be found in the Social Decision Making/Social Problem Solving curricula.

Response From Tom Roderick

Tom Roderick is executive director of Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility, which has been helping New York City public schools foster students' social and emotional learning since 1983. Tom was a teacher in the NYC public schools and director of the East Harlem Day School, and is author of A School of Our Own: Parents, Power, and Community at the East Harlem Block Schools:

We help teachers foster SEL in two ways: through building a classroom community based on respect, every day of the week; and through weekly lessons aimed specifically at developing students' social and emotional skills. Here are community building activities we like and are easy to do.

Name games are a good way to start off the year. Kids stand in a circle and toss a soft ball to each other. When a child catches the ball, the class shouts out the child's name. The game continues till everyone gets a shout-out.

Have a Heart dramatizes the importance of making the classroom a "put-down-free zone." With a construction paper heart taped to her chest, the teacher tells the story of a child who experiences put-downs throughout her day. At each put-down, the teacher tears a piece from the heart. After a brief discussion (Have you ever had a day like this? How do put-downs make us feel?), she retells the story. But this time the class substitutes put-ups for the put-downs.

Think Differently encourages students of all ages to engage in lively debate while acknowledging that we can disagree--and still treat each other with respect.. The teacher tapes a "Strongly Agree" sign on one side of the classroom and a "Strongly Disagree" sign on the other. The teacher makes a statement and students move to one sign or the other depending on whether they agree or disagree. If they're undecided, they stand in the middle. Statements can range from the trivial ("Vanilla ice cream is best") to the more serious ("Kids should only be allowed to watch one hour of TV per day" or "Slavery was the cause of the civil war"). The teacher asks students in each group to explain their view, and students change position if they change their mind during the discussion. If the debate gets too heated, the teacher can ask students to paraphrase the opinion just expressed before putting out their own.

SEL activities are interactive, engaging, and fun for kids and adults--and give students skills they can use for the rest of their lives.

Reader Responses

Andrea Fanjoy wrote:

There are many things a school must do to have significant success with social-emotional learning. If I had to choose one strategy to do first, teach all children how to give 'I messages' so they learn how to resolve minor social conflicts well. From the start of grade one, our students are directly taught the names for different emotions, taught to say "I feel sad/mad/etc when you..." They are also taught to listen respectfully, apologise and shake hands. You'll be amazed how much ability they have if given a simple structure to follow.

"Perpetual Student" made this suggestion:

A block of time should be set aside at the beginning of every year, optimally two or more weeks, when conflict resolution, cooperation and collaboration behaviors, effective ways of communicating, and team-building are constructed and nurtured. After that, it is necessary to keep all of these skills visible and active throughout the school day, regardless of the task.

Lisa S. shared this comment:

I've seen very effective instruction in the social emotional realm done through the use of school-wide "class meetings." These weekly meetings are an opportunity for the teacher to model how to calmly bring up social concerns and problem solve appropriate responses. The buildings where I teach have this directed by the school counselor with her providing training to the teachers and then the teachers training students to "run" the meetings in their presence and with some direction from the teacher. I think if students know that they are going to have an outlet to bring things up to their peers and get some suggestions on how to handle problems, they are less impulsive as they encounter social situations that cause frustration.

Please feel free to leave a comment sharing your reactions to this question and the ideas shared here.

Thanks to Maurice, Tom, Andrea, "Perpetual Student" and Lisa for sharing their responses!

Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at lferlazzo@epe.org.When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it's selected or if you'd prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

Anyone whose question is selected for this weekly column can choose one free book from a selection of twelve published by Eye On Education.

I'll be posting the next "question of the week" on Friday.

Posted by Larry Ferlazzo at 4:17 PM | | Leave a comment | Recommend

January 26, 2012

How Can We Apply Social-Emotional Learning Strategies In The Classroom?

Glenda Robertson asks:

"What are some highly-effective must-do social-emotional learning strategies that we can immediately incorporate into our classroom culture?"

Social Emotional Learning is sometimes also referred to as "character education." It's been receiving more and more attention recently, both from researchers and practitioners.

Please share your responses in the comments, or, if you prefer, feel free to email them to me.

Anyone whose question is selected for this weekly column can choose one free book from a selection of twelve -- including my own -- published by Eye On Education.

You can send questions to me at lferlazzo@epe.org.When you send in your question, let me know if I can use your real name if it's selected or if you'd prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

And just a reminder -- you can subscribe to this blog for free via RSS Reader or email....

Posted by Larry Ferlazzo at 10:16 AM | | Leave a comment | Recommend

January 24, 2012

Response: More Ways To Differentiate Instruction -- Part Two

(This is the second post in a two-part series on differentiation. You can see the first post, which includes responses from Carol Tomlinson and Rick Wormeli, here)

I posed this question last week:

"What is the best advice you can give to a teacher about differentiating instruction?"

I've shared my response in an Ed Week Teacher article that I've co-authored with my colleague, Katie Hull Sypnieski. It's titled "The Five By Five Approach To Differentiation Success."

Today's column includes commentaries from Dr. Kimberly Kappler Hewitt and Daniel K. Weckstein, and from Megan Allen, as well as ones from readers

Response From Dr. Kimberly Kappler Hewitt & Daniel K. Weckstein

Dr. Kimberly Kappler Hewitt serves as Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at University of North Carolina Greensboro and Daniel K. Weckstein is the Principal of Oakwood Junior High School in Dayton, Ohio. Kim and Dan co-authored Differentiation is an Expectation: A School Leader's Guide to Building a Culture of Differentiation:

Interested in differentiating instruction in your classroom? Here's how to jump-start your process.

* Recognize that differentiation is an approach to teaching and learning, not a list of strategies. Differentiation requires commitment to the idea that one size doesn't fit all. Differentiation means that "fairness" isn't everyone getting the same thing but rather everyone getting what she or he needs to maximize potential.

* Recognize and celebrate what you already do. It's likely that you are already doing some differentiation in your classroom (e.g., flexible grouping for guided reading). Build on what you are already doing.

* Assess yourself to identify your strengths and areas for growth. Use a differentiation self-assessment rubric.

* Set reasonable goals/expectations for yourself. Once you identify ways in which you can grow in how you differentiate content, process, and product, identify one or two reachable goals for yourself.

* Learn! Model life-long learning by using books, DVDs, and websites about differentiation to grow as a teacher. We recommend The Differentiated Classroom: Responding to the Needs of All Learners (Carol Ann Tomlinson, ASCD, 1999) and Leading and Managing a Differentiated Classroom (C. A. Tomlinson, ASCD, 2010), as well as the website Differentiation Central and the DVD series Differentiated Instruction in Action (ASCD, 2008).

* Be candid with your students, administrators, and parents about what you are doing. Folks tend to be skeptical of what they don't understand. Generally, though, people respond well when they know that a teacher is differentiating instruction to help students soar. A helpful book for administrators might be our own book, Differentiation is an Expectation: A School Leader's Guide to Building a Culture of Differentiation.

* Find a collaborative group of colleagues with whom you can learn and dialogue. Are you part of a Professional Learning Community (PLC)? If so, leverage it to support your differentiation efforts. If you don't belong to a PLC, consider starting one with a couple of respected colleagues. PLCs can be an immensely powerful way to learn and grow as an educator. Learn more about PLCs here.

* Consider the implications for assessment. Differentiation has all sorts of implications for assessment (e.g., use of formative assessment, including pretesting for flexible grouping and use of performance assessment). The book Fair Isn't Always Equal by Rick Wormeli provides a good introduction to these issues.

Response From Megan Allen

Megan Allen is Florida's 2010 State Teacher of the Year, a part of The Center For Teaching Quality's Hillsborough New Millennium Initiative work in Florida, and is currently Educator In Residence at the University of Central Florida. Megan also has just published a post on Ed Week about teacher preparation:

Our search committee asked job candidates a standard question: "How do you differentiate instruction?" Unfortunately, the answers were standard, too. After one interview, my colleague erupted, volcano-style: "Why do we assume differentiated instruction can only happen in guided reading?" Good point, my fiery-tempered friend.

Differentiated instruction can apply to any subject. I contemplated this truth recently while indulging in my latest exercise addiction: yoga. Sprawled across a wood floor in an uncomfortable position, wishing I had the flexibility of an Olympic gymnast, I realized something. My yoga instructor uses the same differentiation strategies in the studio that work in our K-12 classrooms:

Identify students' starting points and interests. My yoga instructor begins every class by asking each student about any injuries and what they hope to accomplish in the session.

Offer ample opportunities for students to engage with concepts, stretch their thinking (or tendons), and reach their goals. I think of it as differentiated "construction" rather than "instruction"--I construct learning experiences using what I've discovered about students' interests, abilities, and learning styles.

Provide students with avenues for growth. For each pose, my instructor demonstrates an easy starting pose, then bumps it up notch-by-notch. That way, I can start with the beginner's pose and attempt more advanced versions the moment I'm ready.

Gauge students' progress--and know when to push them. My yoga instructor's informal observations help me to move forward and try new poses, even if they're uncomfortable at first.

My yoga instructor's teaching is student-centered--adapted for each student's needs, interests, abilities, and learning styles. Yoga has improved my flexibility, but it's also reminded me of the flexibility of differentiated instruction strategies. They're not just for guided reading. As the yogi of our classrooms, we must use these tools to reach each student.

Response From Readers

bill writes:

I think one of the best ways to differentiate content is by using student-generated questions. You can teach the skills you want, but each student's topic is by definition relevant to them. For skills, there have been two years where I worked a system wherein they all start with an identical skill list and then as they achieve proficiency in different areas, I give them a list of new skills from which to choose.

Ed Week Teacher blogger Coach G wrote:

I think we should think of it more as differentiated learning than differentiated instruction. Hand in hand with this is the recognition that real learning doesn't happen when teachers are presenting information, but rather when students are applying that information--and teachers are there to coach them as necessary. Check-out my post for more on this....

Please feel free to leave a comment sharing your reactions to this question and the ideas shared here.

Thanks to Kim, Dan, Megan, bill and Coach G for sharing their responses!

Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at lferlazzo@epe.org.When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it's selected or if you'd prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

Anyone whose question is selected for this weekly column can choose one free book from a selection of twelve published by Eye On Education.

I'll be posting the next "question of the week" on Friday.

Posted by Larry Ferlazzo at 9:37 AM | | Leave a comment | Recommend

January 17, 2012

Response: Several Ways To Differentiate Instruction

(This is the first post in a two-part series on differentiation)

I posed this question last week:

"What is the best advice you can give to a teacher about differentiating instruction?"

I've shared my response in an Ed Week Teacher article that I've co-authored with my colleague, Katie Hull Sypnieski. It's titled "The Five By Five Approach To Differentiation Success."

I'll limit my contribution here to sharing a useful link to The Best Resources On Differentiating Instruction.

Experts in the field, though, have agreed to share their responses here, so today I'm pleased to publish answers from Carol Tomlinson and Rick Wormeli. More guests will respond in Part Two of this series on Thursday, and I'll be including comments from readers then, too.

Response From Carol Tomlinson

Carol Tomlinson is an internationally-recognized leader and author in the field of differentiated instruction. She has an excellent website that's appropriately called "Differentiation Central" :

My journey with differentiation began in my middle school classroom when it was quite clear that my one-size-fits-all approach to teaching was, in fact, not fitting many of my students. While the idea of differentiation (teaching with student differences in mind) is quite an old one, there were no books on differentiation at the time, no conferences, and certainly no web sources of help.

So some colleagues and I began to ask ourselves some fairly straightforward, if daunting, questions. Could we provide more than one way to give students access to information? How could we meet with kids in small groups to attend to particular learning needs? Did it sometimes make sense for students to have different homework, and how would we handle that? What would we say to students who asked why people were doing different tasks at a particular time in class? How did we keep from seeing kids as bluebirds, buzzards, and wombats--and how did we keep them from seeing themselves that way?

There were many more questions, of course. Sometimes we landed on viable answers right away. Sometimes we muddled along for a while trying to find a solution that felt right. Here's the point. We kept going because we could see that our work was making a difference for the kids we taught, even when we were clumsy for a time with our thinking.
My view of differentiation is still much the same. It's not a mystery formula that only a few can understand. It's not a series of mandatory instructional strategies. It's not a recipe. It's problem solving on behalf of kids. One step at a time, all teachers can do that. Working with like-minded colleagues makes the journey smoother and more rewarding.

Here are a few other suggestions.

1) Start small. Begin with whatever steps feel right to you. Differentiation isn't so hard. Change is. Go in a direction that's likely to result in some success. Start with one subject or one class. Start with 10 minutes a day or 15 minutes a week. Just start.

2) Study your students. The more you see them as distinct individuals--the more you understand them as human beings--the clearer your motivation will be.

3) Use formative assessments regularly (ones you develop to be close to your teaching--not standardized ones). As you see where your students are in relation to your learning goals, you'll understand more clearly what you need to do next to help students move ahead from their starting points.

4) Invest time in thinking through classroom routines--giving directions, handling transitions, starting and stopping tasks, using materials effectively. Envision how you want things to work and help your students do the same.

5) Make the students your partners in creating a classroom that works well for everyone. Don't do differentiation to them, do it with them. Explain your thinking and ask for their input. Enlist their help in making sure the classroom runs smoothly. Get their input on which approaches work best for them.

Differentiation just asks of us what we commend for our students: flexible thinking, intellectual risk-taking, problem-solving--and a deepening sense of humanity.

Response From Rick Wormeli

Rick Wormeli is a well-known author, workshop leader and educator. He has written books on the topic of differentiation, and I'd recommend you read another essay he's written titled Differentiated Instruction: Setting the Pedagogy Straight.

There is no one book, video, presenter, or Website that will show everyone how to differentiate instruction. Let's stop looking for it. One size rarely fits all. Our classrooms are too diverse and our communities too important for such simplistic notions.

Instead, let's realize what differentiation really is: highly effective teaching, which is complex and interwoven; no one element defining it. Reading multiple books and watching many videos on accomplished teaching as well as listening to presenters speak on effective teaching and augmenting all those insights with perspectives gained from on-line communities, faculty conversation, PLC's, and dedicated Websites prepares teachers best for teaching, i.e. differentiated instruction.

Professor and differentiation expert, Diane Heacox, reminded me a few years ago that differentiation is foremost a mindset. It's only 10% craft and mechanics of pulling it off. If we're attentive to the results of formative assessments, for example, we realize that Michael needs 15 minutes with a mentor to review proper lab write-up procedures, LaShawn needs help with Punnett Squares in the Genetics unit, and Umber is ready to write something more compelling in her studies on political rhetoric. Without the focus on formative assessment and adjusting learning in response to what it reveals, however, these students drift with needs unmet, academic potential dwindling. Are our minds tuned to differentiation possibilities?

In a successful differentiated class, we stop hiding behind the factory model of teaching. We teach in whatever way students best learn, even if that's different student to student, or different from the way we best learn ourselves. Many of us are guilty of that from time to time - teaching the way we best learn, not the way our students best learn, myself included. We can do better. We can embrace the root of differentiation: responsive teaching. As students' learning story is revealed, we adjust our instruction in order to maximize their learning. If a student needs more, less, or a different challenge, we provide it as we can.

Most schools conspire against this, unfortunately. As institutions, they are designed to meet the needs of students who "get it" first or easiest. This curriculum-by-age approach protects the status quo, and it provides a false sense of orderly effectiveness. Since teaching and learning can be messy processes, we seek easy schematics; they make us feel like we know what we're doing and we are in control. As a consequence, we are our own worst enemies when we try to teach so students actually move content and skills into long-term memory. In order to live up to a school's mission, we sometimes have to part way with its protocols.

Accepting differentiation more as a collection of principles about responsive teaching than a collection of quick recipes for someone's diversity cookbook is my first piece of advice, as practical as those recipes may be. Mitigating the negative aspects of the factory model of schooling is my second. In addition to these, I suggest we:

• Build our personal capacity for creative thinking and problem-solving. Differentiation requires us to take risks, think divergently, and move out of comfort zones.

• Read and converse professionally. The best differentiation teachers I know read professional journals, books, and/or blogs regularly, and they take the time to discuss their ideas with colleagues in and out of their buildings. They share lesson plans for collegial review. Multiple perspectives help us teach smarter, not harder.

• Lower our professional standards. Yep, I said to lower them. So many of us are trying to do everything wise and wonderful every single day in the classroom while dealing with teacher-bashing media and an impoverished, ever-increasing class-size world. It's too much; we have to conserve what little energy we have left at the end of the day for ourselves and families. Since we can't do it all, we end up not doing any of it. Instead, try one differentiation idea per month for three years. Give yourself time and space to improve. This is healthy and reasonable. And every time you focus on one differentiation idea formally, it'll affect many of the other elements in your teaching. You'll actually continue your high standards and integrity, but you have license to be imperfect as you grow. This is the professional.

• Spend considerable time demonstrating to yourself and others how your assessments - pre-, formative, summative, common - inform your instructional decisions. We don't put students into small groups, for example, because that is what differentiating teachers do. We put them into those groups because of something specific we knew about those students indicated the small group experience would improve their learning over what could be achieved in a whole class experience. To this end, get analytical daily: What impact did our instruction have on students and how do we know?

• Construct a solid understanding of the unique nature of the students you serve. There are universal characteristics about how brains of all ages learn, but there are very specific characteristics of the 12 year-old's brain that we don't find in the brains of 18 year-olds or the brains of 6 year-olds. Let's articulate these differences and respond to them in our lessons.

Finally, I highly recommend teachers see teaching as something they do with students, not to students. It's a collaboration to conduct the enterprise of schooling, and every successful classroom I've ever found embraced a modified democracy and mutual ethos of respect between student and teacher. Honor the student's experience and aspirations, and the student will honor our suggestions and example. We can live with this; we can even thrive.

Please feel free to leave a comment sharing your reactions to this question and the ideas shared here.

Thanks to Carol and Rick for sharing their responses!

Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at lferlazzo@epe.org.When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it's selected or if you'd prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

Anyone whose question is selected for this weekly column can choose one free book from a selection of twelve published by Eye On Education.

I'll be posting Part Two of this differentiation series in a week and the next "question of the week" in ten days.

Posted by Larry Ferlazzo at 11:07 AM | | Leave a comment | Recommend

January 12, 2012

What Are The Best Ways To Differentiate Instruction?

Though I'm receiving plenty of reader questions (but could always use more!), now and then I, instead, decide to respond to a "Question That's Been On My Mind."

This is one of those weeks....

My question is:

"What is the best advice you can give to a teacher about differentiating instruction?"

I'll be sharing my own response in an Ed Week Teacher article that I've co-authored with my colleague, Katie Hull Sypnieski. That article will be published next week at the same time a post here will come online and share responses from special invited guests and readers.

In addition, Katie will be co-leading a February 1st Ed Week Teacher Webinar on this same topic. You can sign-up for it here. As I've said before, Katie's the best teacher I've ever seen.

Please share your responses in the comments, or, if you prefer, feel free to email them to me.

Anyone whose question is selected for this weekly column can choose one free book from a selection of twelve -- including my own -- published by Eye On Education.

You can send questions to me at lferlazzo@epe.org.When you send in your question, let me know if I can use your real name if it's selected or if you'd prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

And just a reminder -- you can subscribe to this blog for free via RSS Reader or email....

Posted by Larry Ferlazzo at 2:13 PM | | Leave a comment | Recommend

January 10, 2012

Response: Ways to Include Students in the Formative Assessment Process

Matt Townsley asked:

Carol Boston says "Black and Wiliam (1998b) define assessment broadly to include all activities that teachers and students undertake to get information that can be used diagnostically to alter teaching and learning. Under this definition, assessment encompasses teacher observation, classroom discussion, and analysis of student work, including homework and tests. Assessments become formative when the information is used to adapt teaching and learning to meet student need." Where and how do we include students in the formative assessment process? What is the role of technology in this feedback cycle?

Formative assessment is a critical element in an effective classroom, and is also a buzzword that is often misused. Thanks, Matt, for raising this important question.

I'll first try to answer your question, and then have articulate guests and readers respond, as well. My response is partially taken from an upcoming book that my colleague, Katie Hull-Sypnieski, and I are co-authoring.

Formative assessment, as I understand it, is an on-going process where both teachers and students evaluate assessment evidence in order to make adjustments to their teaching and learning. Robert Marzano has called it "one of the more powerful weapons in a teacher's arsenal."

The formative assessment process can strengthen students' abilities to assess their own progress, to set and evaluate their own learning goals, and to make adjustments accordingly. Formative assessment can also elicit valuable feedback from students about what teachers are doing effectively and what they could do better.

Here are a few activities some of my colleagues and I use to integrate students into the formative assessment process:

Student Self-Assessment and Reflection

Activities which promote metacognitive thinking and ask students to reflect on their learning processes are key to the formative assessment process. When students are asked to think about what they have learned and how they have learned it (the learning strategies they've used), they are better able to understand their own learning processes and can set new goals for themselves. Students can reflect on their learning in many ways: answering a set of questions, drawing a picture or set of pictures to represent their learning process, talking with a partner, keeping a learning log or journal, etc.

For example, in my class last month, we did a unit on "celebrating mistakes" where students reviewed important things they had learned through mistakes they had made, and discovered how much we all wouldn't know if we hadn't been willing to risk making them. The teacher can use these kinds of responses to check for student understanding, but also to check the "pulse" of the class in terms of student motivation, confidence levels, and levels of metacognition.

Goal Sheets

Having students set their own goals and evaluate their progress toward achieving them is an effective part of the formative assessment process. Goal setting has a positive effect on student motivation and learning when the goals are specific and performance based, relatively short-term, and moderately difficult.

Goal sheets are an effective way to help students set goals and track their progress. It is best to identify specific goals. For example, "I will read in English for 20 minutes each night" is more specific than "I will read more." Also, goals need to be achievable in a short period of time and not impossibly difficult. The teacher can model how to set effective goals and also how to evaluate one's progress toward achieving them by asking students to periodically write or talk about what they have achieved, what they still would like to achieve, and how they will do it.

Online Audio Recording

Using an online audio recording site like Fotobabble or other similar sites is a way for students and the teacher to assess student progress in speaking and reading fluency. Students can periodically record themselves (speaking or reading a text) and then can reflect on their improvement over time.

Improvement Rubrics

Studies by Professor Carol Dweck and others have identified the importance for students to clearly see for themselves the growth in their own knowledge. One way my colleagues and I do this is by having students compare essays they write -- separated by several months -- and have students compare the two using an improvement rubric.

For more information on the topic of formative assessment, you might want to explore "The Best Resources For Learning About Formative Assessment."

Response From Amy Benjamin

Amy Benjamin, a veteran English teacher, trains educators throughout the country in writing across the curriculum, strategic literacy, and differentiated instruction. She is the author of Formative Assessment For English Language Arts: A Guide For Middle And High School Teachers:

Formative assessment, broadly defined, is up-to-the-minute feedback from students that teachers can use diagnostically to guide instructional decisions. Formative assessment is done intuitively by almost all teachers, whether that entails an anonymous survey to see who knows what or a simple thumbs-up/thumbs-down directive to the class to see who feels ready to move ahead and who needs more work. But as we group such practices under the name "formative assessment," we can refine them as such.

Summative assessments are those "big tests" that are recorded in the teacher's gradebook. Summative assessments "count," meaning that their results are used to sort students into groups: Who passes and who gets passed over? After summative assessments, either the student moves on to the next level, or the teacher moves on to the next topic, usually without regard to those students who are not ready to do so. "Oh well," the thinking goes, "Pick up the pieces, learn what caused you to fail that last unit test, and swim in more shark-infested waters as we march through the mandated curriculum."

Formative assessments lead to differentiation. If differentiation is not on the menu--if the teacher is going to proceed as scheduled without regard to who knows what--then what would be the point of formative assessment? That may explain why so many teachers don't do it! We're either teaching students or we're teaching the curriculum, regardless of the students.

Where do quizzes fit in? Ideally, they fit somewhere in the middle. Quizzes "count" in the teacher's gradebook, but they should also inform the teacher of students' needs as units of study progress. Let's say students are reading Great Expectations. Student A fails the quiz on Chapters 1-5 because she didn't read them; Student B gets the same grade because he didn't remember the particular details that the teacher included on the quiz. Hmm... This is why quizzes should test for important concepts, not minutiae. This is why our quizzes, when viewed as formative assessment, should provide guiding information for the teacher and at the same time hold students accountable for their assignments and attentiveness in class.

Response From Cheryl Suliteanu

Cheryl Suliteanu is a National Board Certified Teacher in Oceanside, CA. She is also a Candidate Support Provider for teachers working on National Board certification through the California Teacher's Association Instruction and Professional Development department. She is a member of The Teacher Leaders Network:

It's important to teach children about goals and objectives as early as kindergarten. In my kindergarten classroom, I post daily objectives prominently on the board. I explain the objective for the day in language arts and mathematics--not just what it is, but why we need to learn it. For example, I'll say, "We will play 'Top It' today so we can practice recognizing numbers." I then ask students to come up with examples of where they see numbers outside our classroom. One responds, "I see numbers in the grocery store." We then talk about knowing numbers so we can use money. Another student says, "I see numbers on the TV." Our conversation moves to how to find the channels we want to watch, and so on. These conversations motivate students, helping them understand how they can apply their learning in the real world.

Enjoying a learning experience deepens students' connection to new concepts and skills. When highly engaged, students can function independently, freeing me to walk around and observe their application of number concepts. For example, one day I noticed that a student drew an incorrect number of circles for the number 8. I gave him a different color crayon and asked him to draw 8 circles again. After giving him two more opportunities to match the number 8 to an amount, I saw that he had the concept but lost concentration, forgetting to stop at 8. By observing him and asking guiding questions, I could discern that his problem wasn't the math, but a potential issue with attention. Creating a stress-free environment for my students to explore mathematical concepts is a win-win for all of us: they have fun, while I collect data.

Reader Responses

Here's a portion of Benjamin Stewart's response (you can read more at his blog):

We include students in the formative assessment process by listening to them. We listen by taking part in informal discussions, instructional conversations, Socratic Method, academic prompts, performance tasks, quizzes and exams, eportfolios, etc. We listen to them not relying only on a limited number of forms of assessment, but rather through the collection of many different types of evidence that allow us to make better inferences on student achievement.

Peter Jory wrote:

We have been working on assessment for learning strategies during monthly PLC time for a few years now, and informing parents and students what those strategies are and how we are trying to use them classes in our monthly newsletters helps brings attention to our work. This week we toured classes and actually explained to classes directly what descriptive feedback is and why it is so important, as a lead off for "Feedback Month". A grade 7 student asked, "If feedback is so important, shouldn't every month be Feedback Month?"

Australian educator dpack left a great comment that's too long to include here in its entirety but is worth reading in full. Here's his last paragraph:

It amazes me that formative assessment is such a mystery in American education. It's very simple ... once you get out of the standardized, computer marked, multiple choice question frame of mind ... and the way of thinking that says everything must be marked for a grade. It does require time ... and teachers talking to kids ... which is really the best part of teaching, anyway!

Dave Orphal writes:

I've started letting my student co-write the grading rubrics in my classroom. I've been very impressed with how serious they take the job of determining what criteria they should be graded on and what elements make an excellent example of the project that they will create. I'm writing a three-part piece about this on my blog at TransformED. (Editor's Note: TransformED is one of my favorite blogs)

Extra Credit? also left a comment describing an excellent question-asking activity. I've run-out of room here to repeat it, but I'd strongly encourage you to check-out her/his description.

Please feel free to leave a comment sharing your reactions to this question and the ideas shared here.

Thanks to Amy, Cheryl, Benjamin, Peter, dpack, Dave and "Extra Credit?" for sharing their responses!

Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at lferlazzo@epe.org.When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it's selected or if you'd prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

Anyone whose question is selected for this weekly column can choose one free book from a selection of twelve published by Eye On Education.

I'll be posting the next "question of the week" on Friday.

Posted by Larry Ferlazzo at 8:48 AM | | Leave a comment | Recommend

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