Mining For Hidden Gems

I use poetry and songs every day as a way to build reading fluency in my students. It takes no more than 5 minutes to read a poem or sing a song two or three times.Through poems and songs I also fill their heads with beautiful language; beautiful language that later shows up in their talk and in their writing. Because words also get stuck in their heads, I try to use selections that carry a positive messages, affirmations that can hide in some corner of their brain and raise their voices when most needed. Last Spring, I came across a performance by Andy Grammer and the PS22 choir of his song: "Don't Give Up On Me". I showed the video to my class as an example of feeling the words you sing or recite. I also told them that if a song was going to get stuck in their head, I'd rather it be one that said: I will fight I will fight for you I always do until my heart Is black and blue . . . I'm not givin' up I'm not givin' up, givin' up No, not me...

There are ten minutes in my teaching day that I will not give up or exchange for some other activity no matter what. When fire drills, assemblies and assessments interrupt my regular schedule, I still try to find ten minutes to read aloud to my students. These are the most joyful moments of my day but I also know that there is a high rate of return on this little investment. Last year, we read nine books together. When I ask my students to write book recommendations, they often choose one of the ones I have read aloud to them. When I run into them years after they have left my classroom, what they remember are the books I read to them. Here are some of the reasons I safeguard my read aloud time: The voice of the fluent reader becomes imprinted on the text - I have been listening to Malcolm Gladwell's podcast Revisionist History. When I picked up his new book Talking to Strangers  I realized I was hearing his voice as I read the text and it flowed easily and rapidly. Right after f...

Yair arrived on the first day of school from rural México and left to go back to his village on Friday. He was my student for 54 days. He had the sweetest smile and an enthusiastic spirit. He was eager to participate in whatever conversations we were having, always raising his hand to say something. What did he learn in our classroom that he can take with him into his future? It happens from time to time,  more in some schools than others. Children enter our classrooms, are with us for a few weeks, few months and then life takes them away to the next school, next town or even the next country. The realization that there are kids who may not come back to class tomorrow gives me the urgency to focus on teaching skills that will serve them for life. What do I hope Yair learned in the eleven weeks he was here? I hope he learned that reading is the most powerful tool he can possess, that his stories, his thoughts and opinions matter, that it is important to learn to express those though...

Often at the end of the writing workshop I invite my students to reflect on how they got themselves started writing that day. What was hard? What came easy? This year when I said: Writers, will you join me on the carpet for a little bit of reflection, one student asked: “Why? Are we in trouble?” I was taken aback but I realized that for many kids, reflection is something they do when they’ve messed up. When I was an instructional coach, sometimes I would invite teachers to reflect on student performance data. I would ask: “What do you think contributed to your students’ mastery of this particular skill?”, “Why do you think they are still striving to learn that concept?” More often than not, the answer would be something outside of the teacher’s control. “They came knowing that,” or “They came in pretty ‘high’”, “Well, those are my ‘low’ babies, so I wasn’t surprised by their performance.” I think as teachers we also become defensive when asked to reflect, especially when it’s around ...