Engaging Literate Minds: It Takes Time #engaginglitminds
I am co-teaching a 4th grade summer school course online. We meet once a day on Zoom to read aloud a picture book, discuss how the people in the story demonstrate perseverance or flexible thinking (our central concept is "growth mindset"), and then relate these ideas to a personal learning project each student has selected.
Discussions are sometimes slow. We will pose a guiding question, such as "How was Martin Luther King, Jr.'s approach unique for causing change?" while reading aloud Martin's Big Words by Doreen Rappaport and Bryan Collier. Often, our conversations are dependent on who shows up to our Zoom chats. One student has only attended class twice. Our dialogue is not resembling what I am reading in Engaging Literate Minds.
It can be easy to become disheartened while changing our instruction for the better. We want to see results now; time is a limited resource, especially when teaching and learning is mediated through the Internet. To stick with a more authentic and meaningful curriculum, one that creates space for students to be a part of it, requires a growth mindset on the part of the teachers as much as the students.
I've tried to follow our own advice and look for authentic indicators of success, more specifically of our students becoming readers, writers, thinkers. During a recent Zoom chat, one student changed their profile name:
"Mya the Gardener"
This student had selected gardening as her personal learning project. "Hey," one of us noted, "Mya is self-identifying as a gardener!" Taking her lead, we all decided to change our profile names to reflect the identities associated with the projects in which we were engaged.
Grant the swimmer
Ellie the musician
Matt the fence builder
This result would likely not show up on a reading assessment. But shouldn't it? What is the point of becoming a reader if not to serve some higher purpose in one's life?
I keep coming back to a section from Engaging Literate Minds, in which one of the authors, Andrea, created a community that supports learning within all aspects of life, beyond literacy as an isolated discipline.
Because they were able to be competent participants in a learning community, they had both a sense of competence and a sense of belonging. Because they had meaningful choice in their learning projects, they had a sense of autonomy. Furthermore, they were fully engaged in meaningful collaborative and individual work. In other words, their basic needs were being met.
- p. 183
This is the goal. Not to reach a grade level benchmark, or to score proficient on a test, or to read "x" number of pages for the school year. These data points might be indicators of a successful reader, but they should not define success alone.
We want quick wins and easy measures because we want to know if we are doing a good job. Yet we have to remember what our job is: to foster a love for learning while developing collaboratively independent and capable individuals. And what are indicators of that? What we observe during instruction: how our students engage with text and with each other; how they support themselves and their peers; how they contribute individual ideas to a community. Hard to measure and even harder to stay with over time, and yet nothing is more important.
Thank you to all the contributors and to you for another successful book study! All posts in response to Engaging Literate Minds are available here. We plan to continue to revisit these ideas on the newsletter; sign up below.