student teaching week eight

Pretty busy week at my place, getting ready to have another busy one, because next week is book fair all day! We've had a lot of lessons to teach this week (Carole has them on a rotation with language arts and reading classes to make sure every kid gets in there at least once every two weeks), and how we've been doing it is basically that Carole will do it a few times while I watch, and then I'll start taking over it. I haven't done any original lessons here, but I'm okay with that; I had a lot of opportunities at Central to plan my own thing and just run with it, but because they were so good about pushing opportunities my way, I actually ended up with not as much chance to observe the experts at work there. So I like watching Carole and learning from all the things she does. Plus, since these kids are all coming in on a steady rotation, it's important to me to watch what she does and then try to do the same thing, rather than just making up something and doing that, because I want to make sure all the kids are on an even footing.

Our sixth graders have been learning about Dewey and how a classification system works, and their lessons this week were to give them practice in the concept of books fitting together in a certain order. Carole had index cards prepared with three NF call numbers written on each of them. Each kid got a card, and they were to go to the shelves and pull one book from each call number. At their tables, they then had to put their three books in numerical order, and then they had to work together to put all the books at their tables together in order. Then, one table at a time, they had to interfile their books with everybody else's on a book truck, so that they ended up with one big "number line" for the whole class. That gave them some good practice, and it also made it a lot easier when it came time for us to re-shelve the books after each class. :)

The next lesson for these kids, which follows up on this one, is a relay race. She thinks I'm going to get to see it before I leave, but I haven't checked the date yet. She told me about it, so I'll go ahead and share it so we can all steal these things. Anyway. So for the relay race, she has more index cards, but these just have one title on each instead of three call numbers. Each kid gets a card, and the class is divided into three lines. For the race, they have to go to the catalog, do a title search, write down the call number, and go to the shelves and pull the book before they can go back to their team for the next person to go. Everybody gets a prize, but the team that finishes first gets the best prizes because they get to pick first.

As you may have noticed, the success of both these lessons depends on the specified books being exactly where they should be, which brought up an interesting point: expressly for these lessons, she keeps a number of books on her shelves that will never ever circulate again, instead of weeding them. She let me go pick some more titles that looked like they'd never circulate again to add to the stack of options (I checked in Spectrum to make sure they hadn't been checked out). I thought that was an interesting counter to the need for weeding, to make sure that you could count on at least a few books being in place when you needed them, and I'm probably going to borrow that when I get my own place. I don't think I'll do it exactly the way she does it, though, keeping them in the collection on the shelves all the time for that one lesson; if it needs to be weeded, I don't really want it cluttering up my stacks the rest of the year, so what I'll probably try to do is go on and discard them and then keep a box in the back somewhere that I can put on the shelves just for the lesson, then take them back up.

I don't think I've shared Carole's take on AR here yet. I think it gets abused in most places, and I think when it is abused like that it really ends up hurting more readers than it helps, but Carole uses it heavily and seems to have a positive program with it. She thinks it's one of the best tools they have to make sure students are practicing reading--not building critical thinking skills, mind you, but practicing reading. As she says, you don't have to read a whole book to write an alternate ending to it, or film a book trailer for it, or make a brochure for it, or any of the other projects we like to have kids do for book studies, but you DO have to read the whole book to do well on the AR quiz. So they use it to encourage kids to practice reading, and they do all the usual kinds of incentives, but they don't do anything like turn it into the kids' reading class grades. They have the STAR reading management system, which is an additional component of the AR system, and the STAR allows them to give the kids a diagnostic test at the beginning of every nine weeks to see what their reading level/zone of proximal development is. That allows them to a) make sure they're helping kids find books at an appropriate level so that they can actually enjoy them (every student has to carry an agenda everywhere they go that has the ZPD written in it, so you can ask to see it when you do reader advisory), b) set individualized point goals for each student based on a goal of 30 min reading practice every day at their reading level, c) check in on how each student's progress is going by comparing the numbers, and d) have something concrete to show students when they have to have conferences about some students' failure to practice reading regularly. Y'all know I have found AR very distasteful, but that all made good sense to me, and so I may consider converting. However, I think the success of Carole's program really hinges on using the reading diagnostics responsibly, individualizing the point goals and book recommendations, and having the principal's support that all this is for reading practice and not for the reading grade. It also helps that GMS owns a quiz for almost every single fiction book in the library, and many non-fiction titles, so they're not really limiting reading choice.