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JANINE WALKER CAFFREY - EDUCATION INNOVATION
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last bell

6/4/2016

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We are at that wonderful time of the “last bell” of the year. If you’re a parent or teacher, your world is shifting from a regimented routine to a more relaxed time. The days are longer, the air is warmer and there is no shortage of good times ahead. Anything feels possible right now. But don’t get too comfortable...we know from experience, summer is fleeting and we’ll soon be back to the grind. Anticipation of heading back to the classroom leads us toward education reflection. We think about what worked for our kids last year and what lies ahead for the next. For young elementary kids, our educational focus is usually on reading. Are they where they need to be? Will they pass state tests? Do they love to read? These questions run through your brain all summer as kids are reading for fun (fingers crossed) and completing (maybe) the dreaded summer packets. Here’s an overview of some common classroom practices to ponder as you ease into summer.

Leveled Libraries

These coded book collections (using letters, colors or numbers) are all the rage in many schools. The idea is for kids to find “just right” levels of books to read, based on an assessment from the teacher. For independent reading, we want kids to be able to read almost all the words without struggle. We usually push them one level higher during small group instruction when the teacher can support and assist. Some teachers do this in their individual classrooms and some schools have entire school libraries set up this way. If your reading program includes this approach, you may want to rethink it. There are question marks about this approach which may indicate it is actually holding our kids back. Perhaps we should instead focus on helping kids find books that are worth reading in their minds. Interest in a subject is a powerful thing. If you have ever seen kids fighting to read Harry Potter books, which could be way above their “just right” levels, you know what I mean. Maybe next year we might focus on helping our kids get excited about a book - any book - regardless of the level.

Explicit Phonics Instruction

The evidence has been clear for a long time on this topic. We need to include systematic, explicit phonics instruction in our K-2 classrooms. Older kids in need of remediation, special ed students and English language learners can benefit from phonics instruction during latter elementary school years and beyond. But here’s the problem. Many teachers only rely on the phonics built into a basal reader or simply have a “word study” or “working with words” center in their classrooms. If you have a basal series, you likely ignore much of the phonics instruction that is built into the lessons. AND, in many basal series, phonics instruction is spread out across all of the elementary years. Students don’t get the explicit instruction when they need it; during the critical time when they are just beginning to read. If you are using a “balanced literacy” approach you likely have a center in your room dedicated to phonics. But, you are not likely to provide systematic, explicit instruction in phonics. In all cases, you have probably not taught a critical phonics skill; syllabication. The omission of this skill in most phonics programs and approaches is startling. We have to teach kids how to break a newly encountered word into its parts because we can only decode one syllable at at time. This skill must be taught well if we want kids to get beyond a 2nd grade reading level.

Read Aloud
If we want kids to become great readers, we need to expose them to content they cannot yet read. For young elementary students, this means we have to incorporate listening into our curriculum. Think about read aloud time in your classroom. Are you strategic in your selections? Do you use this time to increase exposure to topics in science and social studies? Do you read complex text to students - more complex than they can read themselves? As teachers and parents, we often think about reading aloud to our kids as a fun activity. And it should be. But we should also use this precious time to share information about the world that will spark their imaginations, engage them in meaningful conversations, and introduce them to words and texts they would not otherwise know.

Reading Workshop

Reading workshops can be a great part of literacy instruction. Kids love this time when they discuss literature with their peers. Teachers love this time when kids can work independently so they can focus on small groups. But...if this is the only time kids are grappling with comprehension issues, it can lead to a suppression of text complexity. In order for students to stretch in their understanding of more and more complex texts, they need support from someone who can help them make sense of it. The biggest growth in comprehension comes when kids are supported in reading texts that are MUCH more complex than they could read independently. We have to make sure we are sharing texts with our kids that are worth reading and support them to engage successfully with the texts. This is how they become better readers.

Reflect, Reflect, Reflect

Is it working? How do we know? There seems to be way too much data that may or may not lead to improvement. How can we easily understand if kids are making good progress? Too many assessments sometimes complicate our understanding and rob us of instructional time. All we need to know is how much our kids are reading and what they are choosing to read. If they are choosing more complex texts (assuming we don’t confine them to levels) and enjoying them, they are making good progress. That is really all we need to know. We may want to consider focusing on reading logs and reading conferences more than other assessments to get at the heart of reading. This will help us understand if kids are becoming more confident and joyful readers.

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Teachers know best

11/21/2015

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It was great to finally read a story about someone who is offering a solution to our student assessment mess. We all lament about how broken the system is, about how much instructional time is being lost and about the damage we are causing to our students. However, there are seldom officials who offer a potential solution. Steve Luikart, Chairman of the Pasco County Board of Education in Florida wrote a position paper, providing suggestions. He says we should use teacher feedback on student performance to track student progress toward learning standards. How refreshing to hear that we should respect teachers enough to allow them to assess their own students. Steve should know. He was an educator for many years before serving on the Board of Education.


Steve suggests we utilize technology to monitor student progress; specifically, a tablet-based program that teachers could use for ease of documentation. I couldn’t agree more. In fact, I have been working to create just such a system, called Classhopper. Our first app is now available in the iTunes App Store, and will expand to other platforms soon. This new app, called Bookmark by Classhopper allows teachers to evaluate student proficiency on reading comprehension standards (aligned for every state) based on students’ independent reading. Next, we will be developing software for in-class tracking of phonics and comprehension skills. This type of software can be utilized for all subject areas. The end result will be that we once again respect the expertise of our teachers, while making their jobs just a little easier. Most importantly, we will be eliminating the ridiculous testing practices that have overwhelmed our public schools and impeded learning. It is time to recognize that school time should be used for learning and that teachers really do know best.
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My Thoughts on Assessment

3/15/2015

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As March Madness continues, here are my thoughts on student assessment:
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In Kindergarten, Comprehension Comes First

2/18/2015

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If you have been following the national conversation about the Common Core, you have probably heard how teachers of kindergarten students worry that too much is being expected of our youngest elementary kids. I DO agree that we need to allow kindergarten kids to move more and have a learning environment that more closely resembles an early childhood classroom. I just shudder when I walk into a classroom for five-year-olds that includes little desks and chairs. These kids should have activity centers full of great learning opportunities. They shouldn't be asked to face the front of the room as they sit in individual desks and hear a teacher lecture. They ABSOLUTELY should not be exposed to multiple choice tests.

However, when it comes to reading, I don't think the Common Core is asking too much. I have spent a great deal of time understanding the standards for reading, and believe they are appropriate and will provide students with a solid foundation for greater learning in the years to come. If anyone disagrees, I would love to better understand the issues of concern. If you wish to help me understand your concern(s) with the standards (not PARCC or teacher evaluation - that is a completely different issue), please cite the kindergarten reading standard, what you believe is inappropriate about it and why, in the comment box below. I hate that I have to say this, but PLEASE refrain from reducing our conversation to name-calling, irrational rants, or other non-productive practices.


The Common Core provides expectations of reading comprehension before students really learn to read. Although it may seem counter-intuitive, it actually makes perfect sense. I don't think anyone would argue that we should be reading to our kids from the time they are babies. We know from experience and from research that this practice improves oral language skills and, later, reading skills. In kindergarten, the teacher begins the year by reading stories TO students, with a strong focus on phonemic awareness and comprehension skills. Students can understand stories long before they can read them on their own, so she will spend most of her guided reading time helping children understand the story. During kindergarten, we are expecting students to transition to reading very simple stories independently. To illustrate what happens at the beginning of the kindergarten year, I am providing this video of our youngest students learning how to identify key ideas and details and character motivation. Please note the repeated use of the word "evidence" which lays the foundation for citing evidence in text as students develop greater competence. This lesson is less than 15 minutes long and is about the longest amount of time students of this age should be focused on this type of activity. The text and the learning objectives are consistent with Common Core expectations for this grade level.
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What is Assessment?

1/23/2015

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Assessment is Part of Instruction

1/20/2015

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Teachers do not need standardized tests to understand what their students know and still need to learn. Watch this guided reading lesson with first graders to see how the teacher weaves assessment throughout the lesson. In order to move our students toward proficiency on rigorous reading standards, we must support teachers in becoming skilled assessors throughout each lesson.
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Just Right Reading

10/24/2014

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For decades teachers has been trained to provide "just right" reading materials to their students. The conventional wisdom has been that students should operate within what has become known as the zone of proximal development or ZPD. A student should be assigned independent reading that has just a little bit of challenge so that learning occurs without frustration. As a result of this thinking, many school and classroom libraries have been organized around a leveling system. Students are aware of their reading levels and directed to read books that are at just the right level. I thought much of this was solid educational practice until my own son began to read.

Daniel was just finishing first grade when he discovered an illustrated version of Lord of the Rings on the book shelf in our home. He started asking about the book and my husband described the story to him. He said, "I am going to read this book." Keep in mind that Daniel was not even six years old at the time. He was just beginning to read very simple books by authors like Dr. Seuss. Although he was doing well, he was not exceeding first grade expectations. Books by an author like Tolkien would certainly not have been within his ZPD at the time. When he announced he would be reading this book, I just said, "OK," thinking that he would likely just look at the pictures, ask questions and allow us to read to the book to him. But that is not what happened. The summer between first and second grade was the summer that Daniel read Lord of the Rings. He asked for help of course...a lot in the beginning. As the summer progressed he asked for less and less assistance to read the words, but was increasingly interested in talking about the story. He wanted to understand character motivations and plot structure. He craved more information about the fictional world which the characters inhabited. Daniel's interest in the story propelled him far ahead of what he should have been able to read. He finished the book that summer and continued to be an exceptionally strong reader and writer. Daniel is all grown up now and writes for a living. He lives to tell stories and create exciting new worlds for readers and audiences. I shudder to think what may have happened if we had steered him away from the book that drove his obsession with story telling. 

By now you may be thinking that my son is the exception. It is a rare child who will read Tolkien before turning six. While that is true, I have seen this sort of scenario play out over and over again. Do you remember when Harry Potter was first published? If you had been around any elementary school kids at the time you would know that reading this book became sort of a right of passage. I personally witnessed many struggling readers begin to find reading independence through the Harry Potter series. It was suddenly very cool to be a reader and kids just craved these stories. Even if they weren't great readers yet, they would struggle and work and struggle some more so they could read Harry Potter. Children who had never before read a whole chapter book, were suddenly devouring a 312 page novel. 

Unfortunately, I also witnessed many kids completely shut down in the wake of the Harry Potter wave. The first book in the series was published just as many school libraries were being "leveled." Some teachers and librarians, in their quest to get kids reading "just right" books, denied kids access to Harry; instead directing them to books that were shorter and easier to read. Children were told they weren't good enough at reading yet to read Harry Potter. The adults missed a golden opportunity to create lifelong, enthusiastic readers, that would likely never happen again.

There is research to help us understand the role that interest plays in reading. This article by Denise Johnson and Anne Blair provides a good overview about the role of self-determination and reading success. What we know is that students who are allowed to read what is interesting to them will read more and will naturally choose things with varying levels of difficulty. If we want to help children become lifelong readers, we must help them find joy in reading. Books that are truly "just right" are the ones the kids really want to read.
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The Code

7/7/2014

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There are some students you just can't forget. One of my students, Marisol, came to me at age 16. By this time she had been tossed out of two schools. She had taken to throwing things at her teachers and was a very angry person when I met her. I conducted a reading assessment and quickly learned that Marisol did not even know the sounds that all of the letters make. I showed her the test results, which of course were no surprise to her, and promised her that she would learn to read. Marisol became very motivated just by learning that she could acquire these skills. Within about six months, she was reading very fluently. After a year she began accelerating her course work so she could catch up on the high school credits she was lacking. By the time she was 18, Marisol was taking courses at the local community college and was on her way to a promising future. This was all because she finally learned the code.

The English language is based on a simple code. It has 26 letters which make 42 sounds. That's it...just 26 letters that make 42 sounds. You can determine which sound is which by applying 5 simple decoding rules to each syllable. You can determine where a word is broken into syllables by applying just 2 simple rules. Yes, there are a few exceptions, but really just a few. I have personally taught this code to countless children, teens and adults. I have never met a student who couldn't learn the code. This includes people on the autism spectrum, people with cognitive differences, and those with severe dyslexia and ADHD. 

Yet, if you hear some people explain our language, you would think it is impossible to learn. It is not uncommon to hear teachers tell students that it is the hardest language on Earth to learn, or that our letters make hundreds of sounds, or that there are more exceptions than rules. The truth is that it is highly predictable and can be taught in a relatively short period of time. We now live in a country where over two thirds of children do not have the reading skills they need by the time they enter fourth grade. It is time we embraced the code and ensured that every child learns it. The future of every "Marisol" out there depends on it.

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The Great Distraction

6/28/2014

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There are many arguments in the United States about education. School choice, teacher tenure, school funding, testing , Common Core, school hours, school calendars, LIFO rules (last in, first out) are some of the things that educators, politicians, pundits and celebrities discuss. There is rarely middle ground or logic to these discussions. We get caught up in the rhetoric and our own perspectives, based on personal ideals of democracy and the true purpose of education. The result of all of this are schools that are not meeting the needs of most children and educators getting caught in the crossfire. I admit to being someone who has willingly participated in these arguments in a very public way. But I am done. I am done worrying about whether or not an individual teacher gets tenure or what standards each state chooses. I am done thinking about if and how school choice works. I am done demanding funding for underfunded schools and screaming about how funding doesn't equate to results. 

These arguments have become a distraction to the real issue. We are failing America's kids in a very big way. There are a few facts that are not argued very often, because most of us understand they are simply facts. About 80% of the kids who make it to high school will graduate from high school in four years. This is a well researched fact. We don't have to know why or think about the political implications. We can accept this as a fact. Yes, it is better than it has been in the past. We are definitely graduating more kids on time, thanks to the efforts of many individuals and organizations. But, I think that losing one out of every five kids is a disaster in a country like ours with so many resources. If you disagree, please read on. We also know that about 42% of high school graduates will be in college sometime between the ages of 18-24. Again, this is really not disputable. It is well researched and based on actual enrollments at real colleges and universities. Whether you think this is an appropriate percentage can be debated. We can argue that college is not right for every student, but we can't argue about how many people attend college. So, if you do the math you will see that just over a third of our high school students actually complete high school and go on to college. I will leave it up to you to decide if that is a good number. Finally, we know that about 60% of the students who go to college will require at least one remedial course once they get there. It is higher and lower in some places, but overall we know that more than half of our kids who make it to college are not prepared. If you do the math one more time, you will discover that just over 20% will graduate high school and go to college with adequate preparation. So there you have it. Only one in five of the kids who start high school in the United States will be end up fully prepared for college. You may say that is okay. You may believe that college is really only for an elite group of 20% of our kids. If so, you don't need to worry about the American educational system. It is working just fine. But if you believe like I do, that education should provide all kids with a solid foundation so they can do whatever they want with their lives, you will want to help find a way to improve it.

From this point forward I will be focusing on solutions for the real teachers in real classrooms who are engaged daily in the mighty struggle to educate our kids. I don't care to fight any more about school choice or teacher tenure or funding or calendars or anything else. I accept that others will continue to engage in conflict about these things, but I believe at this point they have become a distraction from the real issue. There is widespread agreement that our problem begins in the early elementary years. If children are not reading proficiently by the end of third grade, they are very likely to have big problems later on. That is because our system makes a huge shift at the beginning of fourth grade. Each student is expected to move from learning to read, to reading to learn. Once they are in fourth grade, we expect they will be able to read well enough to learn from the printed word. Even kids who do not have access to a formal education can learn beautifully if they can read and have access to information. There are correlations to reading success in third grade and almost every other indicator. When you look at the statistics on third grade reading, all of the other problems come into focus. More than two thirds of our third graders will NOT get the reading skills they need for success later in life. That means only one out of every three kids will be reading well enough by the end of grade three.

It is surprising that we are not focusing more on this issue. I believe it is because most people who know the truth don't think we can do anything about it. We talk a lot about poverty, which plays a huge role in this problem. There are many people who believe that you can't teach kids to read unless you fix the poverty. I believe that we won't fix poverty until we teach kids to read...ALL kids. So from this point forward I will be focusing on solutions to our great American reading crisis and leave the distractions to others.

Check back here in the coming weeks to learn more...

Sources:
http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2014/2014391.pdf
http://www.highereducation.org/reports/college_readiness/gap.shtmlhttp://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372
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Our Roles in Education

4/16/2014

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At some point in American education we have gotten the roles reversed. Schools are expected to feed children and parents are expected to teach them academic skills. I completely understand and support school nutrition programs. If the school system can help to alleviate hunger for kids whose parents don't have the financial means to adequately feed them, this is a good thing. I also believe that the meals provided to poor children should be good food - not institutional mush. But I think we have really crossed the line. Community members will get absolutely crazed about the selection available in a school cafeteria. In some places, students are now demanding late afternoon snacks if they stay after school. ALL children are expected to be fed multiple meals each day - not just those with a real need. 

Meanwhile, educators continue to expect parents to be involved in the educational process. Well meaning teachers and school leaders provide lots of activities to get the parents into the schools, believing this is somehow the key to success. I have personally watched many of my colleagues telling parents what they should be working on at home with their children. Many parents believe that if the child gets things wrong on homework, it will somehow be a reflection on their parenting skills. This leads them to be much too involved in the homework process, and negates most of the benefit the child would have gained by doing the work independently. All of this has stemmed from ongoing belief that parental involvement is a predictor of school success. Unfortunately, this belief is erroneous. From some recent research by Keith Robinson and Angela Harris of the University of Texas and Duke respectively, we learn there are only a few things that parents do that truly result in increased achievement. These included having educational aspirations for their children, talking to their children about what is happening in school, and requesting a particular teacher.

After watching kids and their parents in and around schools for nearly three decades, I would like to add to the list of things parents can do to help their kids achieve. These observations are by no means the result of empirical research, so take them as my experience and nothing more. 

1. Have a predictable, structured schedule in the home. This should include routines for what happens after school through bedtime, along with what happens each morning when you get ready for school.
2. Prepare everything that needs to go to school the night before and place everything by the door where you leave each morning.
3. Feed your children actual meals of good, nutritious food. This means the kids should not arrive at school struggling to chomp down a breakfast burrito while hurrying to class. Be sure your child has lunch, or the money to purchase a school meal. It also means sitting down to dinner together as much as possible - and talking about events of the day (see findings from the Robinson/Harris research).
4. Be sure your child gets to school with plenty of time to transition into the day. This means you may have to get up just a little bit earlier.
5. If you drop your child off in the carpool lane, be sure s/he is ready to jump out quickly. If your child doesn't have things organized before getting into the car, there will be trouble getting out of the car. In my experience, this difficulty of getting out of the car and into the building, is almost always a predictor of deeper issues. When I was supervising the carpool line, I called it the 5 second rule. Any kid who took more than 5 seconds to get out of the car, was a kid who had achievement issues. 
6. Be sure your child can leave school on time, or at the appropriate time after all after-school activities are completed. Don't let your kid be the last one picked up.

So, in a nutshell, parents should feed their children, ensure a daily routine, talk to their children, and get them in and out of school on time. Teachers should teach children, help them understand their homework, and supervise the learning process in school-based academics. Schools, families and communities should work together to ensure that all children have high educational aspirations (more to come on this topic). All children would benefit from a better understanding of the roles and responsibilities of each group. Respecting appropriate roles and expecting everyone to play only their part would go a long way toward improving our educational system.
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    Janine Walker Caffrey writes about reading, education and a few other topics related to happiness and life in general.

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