Online Education Blog – LetsGoLearn.com

Implementing Response to Intervention (RtI) at Urban School Districts webinar

2010-03-12T00:19:56Z

This 2 part webinar was presented to district administrators in the North-East of the U.S. It first quickly covers the typical district landscape and then moves to discuss how response to intervention can be implemented efficiently. It covers the role of universal screeners, diagnostic assessments, as well as how modern online diagnostic assessments such as those produced by Let's Go Learn can play an critical role in improving RtI deployments. The CEO and founder of Let's Go Learn is the presenter in this candid presentation of RtI.

Part 1:

Part 2:

“West Oakland elementary school uses technology to help kids read”

2010-01-13T16:45:12Z

Check out this recent article written for the Oakland Tribune by Katy Murphy:

Article excerpt:
"Scott, who has taught Prescott Elementary School children for nearly 40 years, now has an extra tool: Let's Go Learn, a Web-based, graphic-intensive literacy and mathematics program brought to the school by Oakland Technology Exchange-West, a West Oakland-based nonprofit. With donations and grants from area businesses, OTX-West distributes thousands of free, refurbished computers to homes, schools and community centers each year. It also helps middle school and high school families across the city acquire Internet service for free or cheaply"

http://www.insidebayarea.com/oaklandtribune/localnews/ci_14082456

Lessons from a Jar

2009-11-18T18:26:23Z

by Paolo Martin

According to the article "Why Do We Forget Things?" by Parade Magazine author Martha Weinman Lear, there are many reasons why we become more forgetful as we get older. She writes, "We actually may be wired to forget. Consider: If everything stuck to that mental flypaper, we would be in big trouble. We’d be overwhelmed by trivia. The longer we live, the more memories we stuff into our brains, and the harder it may become to locate any particular one…. After all, how important is it (how does it help you survive in the world) to remember the name of that restaurant you ate at last night? What is important to remember is what ‘eating’ means and how to eat."

O.K. I get it. What I’ve been considering a growing debilitation in my advancing years might really be a survival tactic engineered by nature. I guess this could be useful. Besides, how do we expect to be fully present and in touch with what the future may bring if we are living in the past? But, on the other hand, didn’t some wise person or other once say, "Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it?" I guess the significance of how and what we remember as time marches forward may be even more complicated than what philosophers try to capture in catchy phrases or what scientists discover about the human mind.

What I’m really interested in is the phenomenon of how vitally important things in life get lost or forgotten only to reappear many generations later-in one case, a full continent away—by people far removed from each other. This is what happened when a group of teenagers from a small rural high school in Uniontown, Kansas unearthed the story of a humble elderly lady from Warsaw, Poland. Irena Sendler was her name; a social worker during World War II, she organized a risky plot to save thousands of children from being exterminated during the final liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto by the Nazis in 1943. She orchestrated their change of names and safe placement into foster families, orphanages, hospitals, and convents. In hopes of reuniting these children with their biological families one day, Irena wrote the real names of all the children she had rescued on a piece of paper, placed it in a jar, and buried it under a tree far away. When the Nazis later captured Irena and repeatedly tortured her, she refused to reveal either the names of the people who had helped her in her mission or the names of the children she had saved from extermination. She was given the death sentence. However, on the morning of the day she was to be killed, her German executioners set her free, falsely proclaiming her dead after having been bribed by friends of Irena’s rescue workers. For the rest of the war, Irena had to live in hiding while she plotted to reunite the thousands of rescued children with their families when the war ended. Tragically, most were never reunited with their families because so many had been killed in the Holocaust. Over time, Irena’s name and the names of her underground rescue workers faded away.

In 1999, Irena’s legacy was discovered by a group of high school students when a teacher encouraged them to work on a year-long National History Day project. Before they re-discovered, through extensive research, the heroism of Irena Sendler, her story had been unsung for decades, buried by 45 years of communism in Poland. As a matter of fact, when the students sought Irena’s final place of rest, they discovered that she was still alive. Through their work, especially a play they wrote together, the students were able to spread Irena’s story throughout the world and bring her the recognition she deserved before she passed away with dignity and honor this past May. Their website, Life in a Jar: The Irena Sendler Project, describes their mission.

There are many lessons to be learned from the story of the students from Uniontown, Kansas and Irena Sendler. As an educator, I am particularly struck by the power of granting student agency in schools—that is, taking students seriously and allowing them to explore the things that really matter to them, just as Mr. Conrad did with his class in Uniontown. Those students’ lives (and the lives of many around the world) were never the same because of it. Teachers, because of the heavy expectations on the classroom-on the sheer volume of information to be taught and on how it is to be taught—don’t you sometimes feel that children don’t walk away with much of deep value? I suspect that the more time our children spend exploring ideas authentic to them on their terms, the more deeply they’ll understand the world around them and the better able they’ll be to make a significant mark on the world.

Is Email a New Genre of Writing?

2009-06-25T16:09:25Z

by Richard Capone

If you are reading this article, then undoubtedly you are a person who is using the Internet on a regular basis to gain information for business and personal reasons. Furthermore, you probably use email continually for communications with friends, family, and colleagues. But did you ever stop to think that email may be a new genre of writing? If this is the case, then it probably deserves to be taught in secondary school as an essential writing category. Not doing so could put teenagers and young adults at a disadvantage.

Below are my recommendations for how I would teach an email-writing course. I would break it into three main categories, outlined below.

Area one is the obvious “netiquette,” which is the term for email etiquette. We have all seen those inappropriate emails when someone “replies to all” instead of just to the sender. Or how about those LONG emails that just won’t end? So this area would focus on some common sense logistics that need to be followed in order to avoid disasters and make your emails more effective.

Area two is clarifying the language rules of email writing. For example, email writing should not be confused with instant messaging or texting. While most adults are transitioning to email writing from business writing, most young people will be transitioning from instant messaging to email. When I see an email with “cus,” “ur,” or “u,” I cringe! So this area will cover the fact that regular grammar rules apply to business email communication, as well as a whole slew of other rules.

Area three is teaching email voice. In my business communications, I have been shocked to discover that some people read every email (at least from me) in a confrontational voice. For these people, whom I call “email angry” people, I add extra language to make them realize that I am not actually angry. Perhaps it is because they misinterpret my short, concise emails as being abrupt and rude? In a few extreme cases, I have consciously decided to refrain from email altogether; instead, I pick up the phone and call these people. My hope is that by teaching email voice, fewer people will misinterpret email tone and more people will write emails whose tone will likely be interpreted accurately.

On a final note—since I am, after all, the CEO of an assessment company—I think I am going to have to add a new assessment to our future product list: DOESA. It will stand for Diagnostic Online Email Skills Assessment. We would have three sub-tests: Netiquette, Language, and Voice. My personal favorite diagnosis will be what we can extract via miscue analysis from the “Voice” sub-test. Depending on the pattern of incorrect responses, I predict that we will be able to recommend anger management training, psychological evaluation, or a “good to go” diagnosis. LOL. That is IM vocabulary for “laughing out loud.” Oops—I’m crossing my genres!

P.S. In case my “voice” wasn’t coming across, I have very dry sense of humor! But I am serious about this new assessment!

Redefining the Fundamental Infrastructures of Schools to Reflect Today’s Technologies

2009-02-11T14:30:22Z

By Richard Capone, CEO, Let’s Go Learn

Today, the resources that support schools are very different from what they were even 20 years ago. It is probably safe to say that most schools have telephone systems, a computer-based library check-out system, computer labs, Internet access, and much more. Some have moved towards computer-based curriculum management tools and other internal and external web resources. But most of these focus on the logistics of schools and their operations. What we really need are systems to diagnose students in order to move towards the next stage of education: one to one instruction.

Imagining the medical model for a moment. At an advanced medical facility, individualized diagnostic and prescription information would all be stored in a computer system. If a doctor looked up a patient, he or she would see past data and past analyses written by various doctors. There is no reason why teachers and administrators at schools cannot do the same today. Yes, some districts do store state testing data online, but what about an integrated platform that actually allows different teachers working with a student the ability to collaborate in helping that student succeed?

You may think this system sounds too far in the future, but it exists today in various forms. Informally, it means the core classroom teacher talking to the intervention teacher weekly or monthly about her students and figuring out a plan for each of them. With technology, it is the storing of diagnostic assessment data in one central repository so that any tests the classroom teacher administers are available to the intervention teacher, or vice versa. Today most data management systems focus on summative data that is required by the state. For instance, they store state test scores, attendance records, medical needs, etc. Access is usually restricted to the administrator, or less usefully, to the teachers in limited form.

What we are describing is a Web-based Diagnostic Platform (WDP). This is something new, and if schools don’t take advantage of this new capability, they risk failing the neediest portion of our students. A WDP allows for easy, diagnostic student assessment; storage of data for long-term growth studies, as well as for rapid progress monitoring; and student placement into a number of instructional programs in order to ensure that each student is getting precisely the instruction he or she needs. Think of a WDP as your school’s instructional hub, threading together all your textbook series, supplemental instructional programs, special education programs, ELL solutions, and after-school programs into one cohesive educational plan. Any teacher, tutor, counselor, or administrator can go to the WDP and find useful information that not only shows past performance but also can guide future instruction. This, of course, is the key. How can we help this student today and tomorrow?

All districts must have a WDP if they want to take full advantage of the potential that will inevitably be within reach: true differentiated instruction. With the correct tools, teachers will plan their days by teaching a combination of group lessons and small group or individual instruction. The WDP will allow everyone to work together towards the common goal of helping each individual student. The key here is the dissemination of diagnostic information at the teacher level. There is no reason each teacher needs to continue to work independently.

Now, this may not come easily. There may be some resistance. But debate and professional development will help teachers and administrators focus on using tools that actually allow for true differentiated instruction. Schools and districts must realize that times have changed; e-learning, individualized instruction, and much more is possible. So why not build your school on a WDP that is ready to accommodate all of those possibilities?

The Gold Standard of RtI Implementation

2008-09-19T15:53:00Z

Discovering the best way to implement RtI in your school or district

by Richard Capone, CEO Let’s Go Learn

Considering all the amazing changes that are occurring today with regard to the Internet, communication, and society in general, the way we teach our students is rapidly evolving. One of the newest models that schools are adopting to help ensure achievement for all students is Response to Intervention (RtI). Buzzwords like "universal screening" and "progress monitoring" are used constantly, particularly as districts search for products to help them implement RtI effectively. But there is a major piece of the RtI puzzle that is missing: diagnosis. As districts examine the accepted model of RtI, they find themselves looking for products to screen and monitor those students who need intervention. But how are schools determining which interventions are right for which students? How do schools ascertain the exact needs of each individual student? The diagnostic piece of the puzzle is often left behind because the models being adopted haven’t kept up with the rapid pace of change.

Let me give you an example: universal screening. There is an implication that universal screening is a light-weight test given to all students in order to separate them into groups: those who need additional help and those who do not. However, with computer-based assessments, particularly those with adaptive technology like Let’s Go Learn’s DORA and DOMA, we can do far more than a light-weight screening. We can perform a full diagnostic in the time that it would usually take to do only a screening measure. So we need a new term: Universal Diagnostic. Because of these buzzwords, however, administrators are still seeking "universal screeners," and companies are producing "universal screening" products. In this case, schools must complete an extra step - adding further diagnostic assessment to determine the placement or course of action for their intervention students. Or worse, as we have seen with many districts’ RtI implementations, diagnosis is completed left out.

Let me give you another example. Currently, many RtI implementations are based on aggressive progress monitoring. The idea is to watch students closely and if they fall behind, apply medium to aggressive remediation. This was adequate in the past because diagnostic assessment was time-consuming and very difficult to do. Thus, schools focused on what was easier to do. As a result of this line of reasoning, many schools are deploying AIMSweb or similar products, which focus on aggressive progress monitoring and the storing of data online. But this is not the end game. How do you help these students now that schools are, in theory, more efficiently sorting them into Tier 1, 2, or 3? It comes back to the diagnosis. This is the failure point of many interventions. Students are given the wrong instruction and thus no gains are seen. Ironically, with a proper diagnosis and thus the correct intervention, progress monitoring can be applied less often because teachers will be confident that they are applying the correct remediation. Once again, with next-generation diagnostic products like DORA and DOMA, diagnostic assessments can be applied online and in a lab to entire schools. So in theory, Tier 1 to Tier 3 students can all be diagnostically assessed. Or in secondary schools, one might apply DORA/DOMA just to the Tier 2 and 3 students.

The RtI model is a strong one and is being implemented nationwide with vigor. But let us not forget that when implementing any intervention model, all the pieces must be addressed. Building a car but forgetting to install an engine means the project will fail. A screening alone won’t produce RtI. And progress monitoring alone is inefficient, if you’re just making a guess as to which intervention to use. The component of diagnostic assessment is the one that completes the RtI puzzle.

Let’s Go Learn featured in Scholastic Administrator

2008-07-24T16:51:51Z

Let's Go Learn is featured in Scholastic Administrator June 2008.

Read the published article in PDF format -> here

Out of Control

2008-07-23T20:53:00Z

by Paolo Martin

When the sun sets at the end of the day, my alter ego comes out. Sometimes it’s the former scientist who revels in mixing and measuring ingredients, experimenting with different flavors in an attempt to make dinner; sometimes it’s the amateur athlete, trying to stay fit; but often it’s the artist, the musician, practicing violin sonatas for recitals or Cuban salsa tunes for his band. For all of these things, I understand that there’s practice involved - for cooking (or science), it’s practice learning about the nature of the ingredients (or materials) one is working with; for running, it’s regular timed runs, exercises and drills around the track; and for music, it’s playing scales and rehearsing fingering and bowing techniques over and over again. All of these drills have given me a certain level of flexibility and control in different aspects of each discipline.

So when I think about learning how to read, I can see the potential benefits of direct instruction and practice in areas like phonemic awareness, phonics, high frequency words, etc. For example, it’s not hard to believe that if a child learns to effectively memorize the sounds of various English letters and letter patterns within words, a certain amount of cognitive energy will be freed up to make the process of reading and understanding text easier. For example, it’s not hard to imagine a student who practices reading a dramatic script over and over again gaining enough fluency to personally own the text, making it possible to portray the character in a way that is true to the story but imbued with the student’s own personal interpretation.

However, I think that many government education institutions’ advocacy of "explicit instruction" and drills in reading has gotten out of control in many classrooms. It may have even gone so far as to become a way some teachers justify a deficit perspective on students (i.e., that students come into the classroom as empty heads waiting to be filled) and/or some subconscious need to control their environment. In his blog, Peter Campbell has quoted two teachers as saying: 1. "The most important thing, I think, is to make sure that they [students] know that I am in complete control of everything going on, that there’s not a step that I haven’t planned in advance." 2. "I assume they [students] just don’t know anything." Granted, these quotes are out of context, but I believe they represent a growing way of thinking in education today: that teaching is about getting kids to know what we know and get there by doing what we want them to do. Kind of like obedience school.

Yes. Obedience school. Is it really that far from reality? Perhaps not. While standards and standardized tests should be used to enhance the quality of education children receive and inform the practices of educators, instead they are being widely used to penalize schools, as children’s performances on these measures carry huge stakes. So reading instruction in this case is not about the enjoyment of reading or learning to take personal stances on what one reads, but about how high, how far, or how fast. Peter Campbell calls this "Stupid Pet Tricks," referencing some examples from the Association for Direction Instruction (ADI). Performance anxiety is so deeply felt by some students that they become physically ill and vomit over their test booklets. Susan Ohanian reports that Stanford 9 producers insist that those soiled tests be returned to the publisher. In defense of the children she writes, "No group stepped forward and demanded that schools discontinue practices that make kids vomit. Instead, a principal in San Diego insists that kindergartners must take pre-Stanford-9 tests, declaring ‘Unless students become familiar with the exam format, they cannot zero in on the academic skills….’"

It’s bad enough that children are increasingly losing control over their personal opinions and insights for the sake of making the right scores on high-stakes tests. It’s awful when they become ill over it—when it’s not about educating children as much as it is about controlling them.

The End of Print as We Know It?

2008-03-14T17:16:00Z

by Paolo Martin

For a number of reasons, I started spring cleaning early this year. In the process of rummaging through my things and figuring out what stays and what goes to a fundraiser garage sale, I came across a number of old files with journals I had written, and a few other items like lesson plans, student reports, and so forth. Unlike other instances in which I have been struck by the person I was years ago or by the creativity that seems to have evolved (and in some cases, dulled) over the years, this time I was struck by my penmanship. Yes, penmanship! I barely recognized it. It was clean, legible, effortless. Nowadays, certain muscles in my hand tremble just trying to write a personal greeting on a birthday card!

All of this, I believe, is because I’m spending less time writing things down by hand and more time typing things out on my laptop. As far as reading goes, while I still read books, I now spend copious amounts of time reading material on the Internet - much more than I do reading from the pages of reference books or magazines. It’s amazing to me that in fewer than a dozen years of my life, my experience of text has changed so drastically that now much of it happens electronically.

I don’t know how my personality or my learning experience would have been different had my grade school been completely digital when I grew up, but we can be the first to watch some of our children develop in a completely digital environment, as many classes are now offered online. In the city of Makkah (sometimes Mecca), Saudi Arabia, a school without paper and pens—completely electronic-based—opened recently. According to an article from Arab News, "...the main objective behind establishing the school was to develop and modernize the Kingdom’s education system and produce a new generation of Saudi students armed with knowledge, information and technology - the three essential factors for progress in the modern world…..All [the school’s] academic and administrative activities are based on electronics and students of the school will not use any books."

Is this just another sign that the end is nearing for print as we know it? I can’t say for sure, but I honestly don’t think so. While Bill Gates has been quoted as saying "Reading is going to go completely online" in an advertising conference in Seattle, I think there’s something about the portability of a book and the ability to flip through the pages of a novel that will keep it from becoming extinct. However, I do agree with Washington Post columnist Howard Gardner, who recently wrote that the prevalence of electronic media jeopardizes two aspects of the traditional book: 1) "...the author’s capacity to lay out a complex argument, which requires the reader to study and reread…." and 2) the "hallowed" status of books and their ability to draw people into their own world for hours at a time, as online networking communities compel people to stay connected with each other 24/7. But these are only possibilities. One never knows what life brings. In the meantime, the book is here to stay - to stand alongside the Internet, hand-held devices, video, graphic arts, and the many other forms of literacy developing and evolving today. Howard Gardner put it nicely: "If we’re going to make sense of what’s happening with literacy in our culture, we need to be able to triangulate: to bear in mind our needs and desires, the media as they once were and currently are, and the media as they’re continually transforming."

Let’s Go Learn Co-Founder Featured in District Administration Article

2008-03-07T21:24:00Z

District Administration has released an article highlighting the need for diagnostic assessment in the classroom. Featured in their article is Dr. Richard McCallum, co-founder of Let’s Go Learn.

Click here to read the full article.

Resolution for the Year of the Rat

2008-02-16T03:35:00Z

When I first moved into my fixer-upper almost five years ago, I had a long-lasting stand-off with rodents. They were intruders, squatters who violated my space. Friends said they were "only" mice. Well, if they were only mice, then they would have fallen mindlessly for the humane plastic traps filled with crunchy peanut butter which gave their captor the option of banishing them into the wilderness. But these things were cunning; my roommate swears that he saw one jump on top of the plastic trap as the vermin threw him an obscene hand signal. So, by virtue of their behavior, I called them rats. But unlike the filthy, manipulative intruders I experienced in my home, according to tradition, the Rat appears in the Chinese Zodiac as an animal which bears prosperity, charm, and order. Some also say it brings with it death, war, and pestilence.

As thoughts from the Western New Year fade away and the lunar/Chinese New Year approaches (Feb. 7), ushering in the year of the Rat, I wonder whether this year will indeed bring prosperity and order to education, or pestilence instead. I really want to be optimistic and believe that all the hard work policy-makers and educators do in the interest of kids will make a significant difference this year. However, the way I see it, things are not looking all that rosy right now, especially in California, where hopes of a "Year of Education" have vaporized with the reality of California’s budget crisis as reported in the San Jose Mercury News. Also, many schools continue to languish in the bottom percentage by standards defined by NCLB with no clear changes expected to this legislation in the near future. Many teachers are even considering leaving the classroom as they feel less and less supported by educational environments that are less concerned with authentic learning and more focused on testing.

And then I remember my work with kids in South Central LA 13 years ago when I first started out in education: kids like Richard, scrawny, often hungry and unkempt, wheezing through the halls because as he shared an inhaler with his brother. And there was Yolanda, a sixth grader barely reading at a first grade level because she had spent most of her young life moving from town to town, living in a car while her classmate Monique fought to survive physical abuse at home. Yet somehow, these same kids had the ability to start and end a school day with a contagious smile. They remind me that for many school kids - especially in the poorest areas of the U.S., be it the Appalachians or Watts—there is so much more going on than what tests or grade level expectations can explain.

So as we continue to evaluate the direction our lives are taking early this year as they are affected by our personal decisions, political events, government policies, and so forth, I say that we not let The Rat dictate the outcome of this year. Instead, let us hold on to our promises to kids - for California, to really make this the "Year of Education," for the U.K. to encourage others to make this the "National Year of Reading" - and stop for a moment and make a resolution to see education as something beyond the books, classroom lessons, and homework assignments - to see the face of real children whose lives affect us and are affected by us. Let’s make this year, perhaps this era, one for the prosperity of our children and youth.

Response to Intervention: What You Need to Know

2008-02-15T22:01:17Z

by Richard D. McCallum, Ph.D.

Whatever your political leanings may be, you can probably see the argument that NCLB has in many ways been good for low-achieving students. Titles 1 & 3, among others, have channeled funds directly toward students who need help, whether during the day or after school. An outgrowth of the focus on low-achieving kids has been a movement to systematize and structure the types of interventions schools offer for such students. This process has been codified in what is termed "Response to Intervention," or RtI.

RtI sets out a structure for the range and types of interventions schools might provide, from targeted small group work to Special Education placement. RtI outlines "tiers" or levels of interventions that schools may offer. These tiers vary by the size of the cohort of students addressed and by the nature and type of instruction provided.

Perhaps more important than the tiers themselves are the process measures that are required for identification and delivery of services. RtI is a data-driven process by which teachers and administrators collect diagnostic data on students and use that data to place students in interventions and monitor their progress over time. Both the initial screening and the ongoing monitoring of student growth are essential elements of RtI.

Having such a data-driven process that is structured and organized to address specific student needs makes sense. The current situation in schools is that many different types of intervention, offered by different groups and organizations, are not coordinated or structured to provide the maximum benefits. What we often find in schools is that well-meaning individuals are not pulling on the intervention rope in the same direction. Such a situation is expensive and fails to coordinate our precious resources or meet the needs of individual students.

There is another important issue involved in RtI and that is beginning the process of linking general education with special education. For a long time SPED has been the ONLY intervention game in town, and because of that, the ranks of those identified as SPED have soared. A key aspect of RtI is creating a series of interventions that don’t begin with SPED designation, but rather build toward such a designation. The idea is that schools provide Tier I, II, and III level interventions BEFORE a student might be considered for SPED. The goal is to get students the right level of intervention for their needs. Children with special needs will still be identified and served, but RtI should help ensure that the truly needy receive the intensive services of SPED.

Given the above factors, how do DORA and DOMA and the range of LGL’s products fit into structure of RtI? First, DORA and DOMA are designed to provide exactly the type of diagnostic information that teachers and specialists need to screen students for intervention services. The literacy profile in DORA, for example, provides teachers and other interested parties a way to visually examine the relationship amongst sub-tests and identify where discrepancies exist. Using the classroom profiles allows teachers to group students for targeted intervention. Further, using the measures over time allows teachers to track student growth and adjust instruction. The same reasoning applies in other LGL products such as Unique Reader, in which students’ performance on DORA is used to place them in the program and their performance is charted over time to gauge their growth.

Our philosophy at LGL has always been that the best intervention is targeted specifically to student needs and short in duration. Once students show that they have the necessary skills, intervention should end and kids should return to their regular classrooms. This belief is consistent with practices in RtI in that the process assumes that many of the needs of struggling students can be met without having students designated as SPED, and that once their needs are met, kids can return to regular classrooms.

The challenge for teachers and school administrators is to organize and align their current intervention services in such a way that, for once, we are all pulling in the same direction. A key to doing this is to understand the nature and type of assessment information that teachers collect about students. Individualized diagnostic assessment can act as a common thread to connect classroom instruction with the work of reading specialists, community-based programs, after-school programs, and summer school. At LGL, this is how we’ve designed our products and worked with schools to implement the tools we’ve developed. Whether liberal or conservative, we can all agree that we need to do a better job of meeting the needs of low-achieving students.

Alternate Materials: Engaging the Reluctant Reader

2008-02-14T03:32:00Z

by Anne-Evan Williams, LGL Director of Educational Development

A teacher recently said to me, "The boys in my classroom just don’t like to read." This is a complaint that I’ve heard from many teachers, especially in the upper elementary grades. But it’s not just boys who are more and more interested in other activities, leaving reading behind. With so many other activities engaging our children, can we as educators and parents make reading something all kids can enjoy?

Recently, the Library of Congress announced the first National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. Jon Scieszka, author of The Stinky Cheese Man, is excited about his responsibility to "get kids jazzed about reading." His goal is to reach the reluctant readers and offer suggestions to get those kids engaged in reading.

Among his suggestions, Scieszka advises allowing students to pick their own materials and not strictly limiting those materials to fiction. This suggestion is one that I have often found to be a door opener for reluctant readers. In my own middle-school reading classroom, I allowed students to read a wide variety of materials, including magazines. Magazines tended to be a great equalizer in the world of reading classrooms. Even the most reluctant reader could find a topic to interest him. My hard core skateboarders, my athletes, even my computer nerds could find a topic to read about.

Another reason I allowed reading magazines was that magazines offered support to my reluctant readers that novels didn’t. Once kids start reading chapter books, visual cues disappear. Pictures aren’t available to assist struggling readers. In magazines, however, there are plenty of visual cues to help a struggling reader.

Another frustration I found with my middle schoolers was the constant need to compare the number of pages they could read in a sitting. Struggling readers who were working on a novel could easily see how quickly they were falling behind, which often led them to give up more easily. With magazines, students stopped comparing their reading speed.

When it comes down to it, whether our kids are reading "the classics" or Sports Illustrated for Kids shouldn’t be our greatest concern. Really, the question is whether they are reading at all. And if we can find materials to engage them, they will!

Freedom Writers

2008-02-04T19:57:00Z

by Paolo Martin

At a very popular Indian restaurant near my house, a tall, friendly waiter with a full beard and a turban approaches my table. He gently presses his hands together and gives a slight bow. "Hello, my friend…. What can I get for you today?" he asks in a slight Hindi accent. "I don’t know what I want for a main course yet, but let’s start with a veggie samosa," I say. "A mimosa?" he chides. As it is brunch, I take him seriously, so I respond, "No. A samosa!" He continues to kid with me: "O.K. Two mimosas coming up." He winks before he turns toward the kitchen.

Ravinder, or "Ravi" as his friends called him, and his brother, Paramjit, were living the immigrant’s dream in America (something I can appreciate, being an immigrant myself). Penniless, they immigrated to the U.S. from India in 1997. Once they had saved up enough money doing construction work, they successfully bought and sold real estate and eventually opened up Sahib Indian restaurant. Tragically, their story was also an immigrant’s nightmare. Two days after Christmas, as they were closing up their restaurant, they were shot to death by two gunmen. The community was shocked and the police baffled, as no robbery had occurred and the two brothers were well liked by their community. The FBI has recently been called in to investigate the killings as a hate a crime.

A hate crime? In my neighborhood? In the San Francisco Bay Area? Just when I have been basking in the comfortable sensation that my neighbors (both far and near) of various ethnic, social, and economic backgrounds all get along with each other, I’m thrown into the cold reality that hate towards people who are different still thrives near our homes. This is especially salient because yesterday, the nation remembered and celebrated the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr. and his dream of a more tolerant and peaceful nation. In a small town in Indiana, a local high school teacher named Connie Heeman engages students in reading and writing activities as well as encouraging them to explore race issues by implementing the Freedom Writers’ program. The Freedom Writers’ program is based on a program which successfully turned around the lives of over 150 inner city high school students in Long Beach, CA by getting them to examine personal race and urban issues through journaling and comparing their observations with experiences of other figures like Anne Frank, who wrote about the Holocaust. Yet, according to an article in the Indianapolis Star, Connie Heeman could potentially lose her job, as she has been accused of teaching a book which had not been approved by the district. Heeman contends that she adequately sought permission from her principal and from the parents of her high school students.

I don’t want to get too heavily into the topic of text content and the authority to censor classroom materials. However, I do wish for us to think for just a moment about how we weigh the nuances (i.e., language use) of content of classroom materials over the potential benefits that kids could experience. When students do engage in a piece of literature, as in Ms. Heeman’s classroom, and when districts pull these books out of the students’ hands, as in the case of Ms. Heeman’s classroom, what kind of alternative is given to engage those students who refuse to hand over their books? As I see it, when kids truly want to learn something - especially from curricula that encourage them to deal with real life issues like race and violence, while helping them develop strong enough literacy skills to make it to college - we do them more of a disservice by not allowing them to explore those materials. Kudos to the 150 original Freedom Writer students who were allowed to explore and write about salient issues important to youth and make a commitment to create communities "where people feel safe, accepted, and understood." Check out their website, http://www.freedomwritersfoundation.org/, for more about their hopes for other young teens. Problems like illiteracy and hate crime unfortunately still exist - and children encounter them daily. It behooves us to help them deal with such obstacles and provide everyone with a better world where they can grow up free and strong.

Should Reading Be So Hard?

2008-01-25T17:25:00Z

by Paolo Martin

Like most people, I believed in a lot of things as a kid. Yes, Santa Claus - up until I was in seventh grade (don’t you judge me)! Vampires, werewolves, that stepping on a crack would break the devil’s back, that I’d die if I didn’t hold my breath as I was passing through a cemetery. But it didn’t stop there. I believed that if I concentrated hard enough, I could make things move with my mind, transport myself to another time in space, or even make telepathic contact with people and cause them to do whatever I wanted. When the Angels beat the Giants in the 2002 World Series, I could easily have been convinced that I had personally willed the miraculous comeback. Augusten Burroughs calls this Magical Thinking: "A schizotypal personality disorder attributing to one’s own actions something that had nothing to do with him or her and thus assuming that one has a greater influence over events than is actually the case."

Well, I have to admit that I’ve come down from the clouds since my youth. But I think that as a teacher, I’ve occasionally (O.K., maybe more than occasionally) fallen prey to "magical thinking." I fall prey to it when I let myself believe it is through the sheer strength of my will that my students remember to say "please" and "thank you" or that a force within me led a student to write a stellar personal statement which gained him admission to an Ivy League school. Have any of you experienced "magical thinking," too? Or have you been in a space where you seriously thought you could "will" your love of literature and reading onto your kids? I’ve been doing a lot of soul-searching lately and have realized a few things: 1) I have great intentions for my kids when I try to do what I can to get them to love reading. Whether or not they really love reading, I know that I can only do my best to get them to that place lest I inadvertently cause them to hate it because of the torturous process of getting them to see it my way! 2) Reading shouldn’t be so hard for kids. Reading isn’t like telepathically moving things with the mind or blinking one’s way into another time. It shouldn’t be so hard that we see the veins throbbing in our children’s temples as they are asked repeatedly to sound out the words they’re not familiar with. They should save the magical thinking for things that really matter - like floating in air and the tooth fairy.

According to a commentary entitled "Reading Shouldn’t Be Such Hard Work" by Alison Thompson, children don’t have the patience or love for reading books anymore. She writes, "[C]hildren leave school unable to read and a quarter of the young haven’t read a book in the past year. For many hard-pressed families and schools, reading has become too much like hard work." With the drudgery of some reading programs which employ rote tasks that aren’t applicable to authentic and meaningful textual experiences, I fear that we make reading much harder for kids than it should be - much harder than "magical thinking." If I were in their shoes, I’d prefer to spend my mental energy trying to telepathically set the books on fire rather than on working through the tedium of those reading lessons. Wouldn’t you?