Exciting News! I will be presenting with my principal Jane Shartzer at the NESA Fall Leadership Conference in Katmandu, Nepal Oct. 21-23. Check out info about our presentation below.

At the institute there was of course talk about Lucy’s new Reading Units of Study books for grades 3-5. I’ve just purchased a set of the units for my school. To start off, I don’t think we will be using these books on a day-to-day basis as we’ve done with the writing, but rather, I see us using this set as a tool to help grow our current units.

One of my jobs as a coach is to help teachers see that we are never finished with our workshops or our planning. Part of being a workshop teacher is being reflective and responsive. Year to year, we will need to alter our teaching to meet the needs of the students in our classrooms. I’m not talking about large scale changes to our units or curriculum each year, but rather small, targeted changes to minilessons, teacher demonstrations, celebrations, small group work and conferences. The changes need to be based on bringing each child one step further along. The changes are quite simply, differentiation.

Lucy talks about the importance of reading workshop on a video on the Heineman website. If you are new to workshop, Teachers College ideas, or just need a little inspiration, check it out. (Top right-hand corner.)

For many years now, I’ve been part of a debate about why, when, and how we should use Lucy Calkin’s series The Units of Study for Teaching Writing. I encounter misunderstandings surrounding these books everywhere I go. While at the Writing Institute this summer, I listened intently to what Lucy herself had to say about using these books. (Happily, she said basically what she wrote in the introduction to both the primary and the intermediate series.)

1. The books are teaching tools. They teach students a unit of study (how to write inside a genre) while teaching teachers how to instruct within the basic outline and frame of a writing workshop.
2. The K-2 and 3-5 series are solid curriculum for setting up and digging into writing workshop as both narrative and expository writing is taught.
3. The units are transcripts of actual lessons taught in real classrooms. (At no point does Lucy expect teachers to use her exact words. However, she has heard from many teachers who have used her exact words to help them teach this way. (I myself belonged to this group years ago when I first got my hands on these texts)
4. The boldface text in the books is the most important part to follow (if you are following it at all) as it outlines the key teaching points of the minilesson: connection, teaching, active involvement, and link.
5. The goal is to outgrow these books and to author your own units of study in and across grades.

For my part, this information was a relief as I’ve been pushing teachers at my school to use the books to help them become workshop teachers. I want us to refer to them, to use them like training wheels until we are ready to ride off down the road on our own. That said, I think the most important use of these books is to help a school develop a strong spiral across multiple grades. As my small group session leader put it, “Writing is a skill developed through use.” Giving students a chance to USE the skills and strategies we teach, multiple times throughout a unit and again and again across grades means they are more likely to walk away with real learning. Learning they can access and use at another time, on another day, independently.

Thanks Lucy.

This institute has been full on. I’ve not had a chance to blog about it, because I’m too busy doing my own writing each evening. This morning, before James Howe’s Keynote address he showed the following YouTube Video. I’m inserting it below, to share my excitement about being here at the conference and about being in NYC in general. Breakdowns of the sessions I’ve attended will be posted following the 4th of July. Enjoy!

Today I attended TCRWP Writing Institute for the first time. I am participating in the Principals Cohort as a Literacy Coach. (Which is interesting because in the literacy coach training I’ve had, there is a clear line between coaching and supervision.) Today I attended the Keynote address by Lucy Calkins, the large group session for grades 3-5 teachers, also led by Lucy, and finally, the first small group session for “supervisors” (principals and coaches) led by Cory Gillette, coauthor of the unit, Breathing Life Into Essays.

The final session was in many ways the most informative. Here is a brief synopsis of some of the topics we covered today:

• How to use explicit training to create a professional community and to help teachers overcome their own writing baggage with explicit training.
• Identifying and reminding teachers of the purpose behind all we do in workshop teaching: Teach the writer not the writing. Keep minilessons short so you can maximize the bulk of the writing period for conferring and differentiated instruction. Success looks like progress, not mastery.
• When observing teachers, principals and coaches can keep in mind the following characteristics of effective workshops:

1. TONE- The teacher sets a tone in the classroom which allows for risk taking and values students as writers.
2. ENGAGEMENT- The teacher uses appropriate, funny, dramatic stories during the demonstration.
3. EXPLICITNESS- The teacher uses clear language throughout the lesson. This is easy to confirm if, after watching the lesson, students and observers can answer How do I do the strategy? When do I do the strategy? Why do I do the strategy?
4. THE LESSON IS MEMORABLE- The teacher provides a lesson students can recall, remember and access. (Teaching tracks like charts are used.)
5. ACCOUNTABILITY- There is a clear expectation that what has been taught will be approximated by students, especially if it was taught during conferring or small group work.

Look for another update tomorrow.

NY, NY! I’m so happy to be in the Big Apple! Giving ourselves a day to just BE in NYC, my husband, our daughter and I caught the new hit musical Memphis yesterday. It was so much fun! We walked a thousand (according to a 9-year old) blocks to get there from our hotel, pushed through people to get to the cheap(er) ticket queue, then killed 3 hours before the matinee shopping in Macy’s on 7th Ave. A wonderful Sunday afternoon in the big city!

This morning I woke up fully thinking about the real reason I’m here: Teachers College Reading and Writing Project Summer Writing Institute, which starts tomorrow at Columbia University. I’m part of the Literacy Coach/Principal group throughout the conference. I will be able to sit in on sessions for K-2 and 3-5 teachers at different points during each day, but my focus will be on the role of the coach. (I’ll be honest, I have some mixed feelings about this. I’m a teacher first, and I feel like I might be missing out being in this “other” group. We’ll see…)

Thinking ahead, these are some questions I have now, which I hope will be answered this week. (Of course, I’m probably going to answer questions I don’t even know I have yet. I’ll add those as they come up.)

1. How can “smaller” schools (I’m thinking about independent schools like International schools and those without the benefit of district-style planing and professional development) build a sustainable workshop model? (Beyond the obvious- hire people who know how to do it. How often does that actually work out?)
2. What would a plan for developing teacher capacity across multiple years look like?
3. How can you move a staff forward, while still planning for teacher turn-over?
4. How can parents be given information/training about workshop which will make them confident in the model?
5. How can teachers who are more comfortable with top-down rather than side-by-side models of instruction be transitioned into this kind of teaching?

Rereading these questions, I realize one BIG idea I’ve been thinking a lot about lately: connecting international schools.

As a member of this community, one who will move from school to school and country to country throughout my career, I want to STOP recreating the wheel. There are going to be teachers at this conference from my schools- international schools- from all over the world. With the internet, with regional conferences (NESA, EARCOS, ECIS) and international conferences like TCRWP, we CAN come together like never before. Why don’t we?

In preparation for our DRA Data meeting tomorrow, the Curriculum Director at my school took our DRA information (from the Class Profile and the Class Focus for Instruction pages) and plugged them into first, an Excel spreadsheet and then into a Tinker Plot. Here is an example:

(This is of course just a sample plot and not a picture of real data.)

Although I’m really new at this tool, I think the possibilities are endless. During the meeting on Wednesday we will only be looking at Spring DRA2 text level data. However, based on the information collected, we could ask the Tinker to show us gender distribution on levels and group students based on when they enrolled at our school (to help lend credibility to statements like: boys don’t like/aren’t good at reading and our new screening process isn’t working.) Plus we can correlate our DRA data and Tinkers to our MAP standardized test data and classroom based assessments. Over time we could even create Tinkers for individual and/or groups of students. WOW!

If you have experience with Tinker Plots and can offer advice, I’m listening.

Beginning next year our KG1 (PK4) classes will all be moving to a full-day program. This exciting move enabled us to consider different curriculum options for this grade level. This winter, our visiting consultant, Carrie Ekey, led the KG1 teachers through a series of workshops focused on best practice in early childhoood curriculums. The KG1 staff will begin using the project-based approach and specifically the studies and method outlined in the Creative Curriculum. To help us shift our teaching to this model, Carrie suggested I order several materials with strong video components for professional development work with KG1-G1 next year. The two items below just arrived. (When I get a minute I’ll post more about our future/intended use with these books.)

Speaking and Listening for Preschool Through Third Grade by Lauren B. Resnick (with over 2 hours of DVD footage of children in grades PK4-3).

Literate Days: Reading and Writing withPreschool and Primary Children by Gretchen Owocki (This is a series of “minilessons” grounded in EC reading and writing work. As with the above resource, there is a solid emphasis through DVD footage in oral language development.)

This summer my school is sending 5 elementary teachers and 4 middle school teachers to New York City for the Summer Writing Institute at Columbia University with Lucy Calkins. It is an unbelievable opportunity! Not only do we have a representative from every grade (except 5th) attending, we also have a chance to build our collaborative culture before, during and after we return.

Looking forward to PD next year I’m trying to make sure that these teacher-leaders are given ample time and support to bring their learning back to the rest of the staff. There is always the intention (or mandate) to share what you learned after a conference, but this seems more urgent.

So far these are some ideas I’m tossing around to help us plan and execute our collaboration:

• Ask teachers to volunteer to submit a quick daily “blurb” from their grade-level breakout sessions which I will post on my blog so our colleagues from ACS can have up-to-date information about how it is going.
• At the end or near the end of the institute, we will meet as a group to quickly put together a Keynote about the conference (before we head out around the world and forget what we learned).
• When we return in August, sit down to plan for different PD opportunities teachers (and I) can  lead for the rest of the staff. Highlights from the institute which might be perfect topics for us to lead collaborative conversations around include: conferencing, using mentor texts, assessment-based instruction, and helping students write well about reading.

Do you have any other ideas? Please comment.

To honor the new United States National Day On Writing (Oct. 20) Lucy Calkins has a video post on Heinemann. I thought it was inspirational. It might inspire you. It might inspire your students. She talks about honoring writing… and writing powerfully.

Give it a look by clicking HERE.