Teaching Signposts with Patricia Polacco

Several years ago, along with friends and colleagues, I learned about "signposts" by reading the book Notice and Note: Strategies for Close Reading by Kylene Beers and Robert E Probst.

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Close Reading

Close reading is a process that typically involves re-reading a text to progressively dig deeper. The initial pass allows the reader to understand what the text says, which correlates with the first three Common Core Reading Standards: key ideas and details. The second read compromises an analysis of the author's craft and the text's structure (CCSS standards 4-6). Last, students are invited to revisit the text for a third time to integrate knowledge and ideas (CCSS standards 7-9).

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In their book, Beers and Probst argue that whereas these three reads help students examine texts more closely, the process is often teacher-driven and doesn't provide a gradual release of responsibility so that students eventually apply these reading behaviors independently.

Instead, they suggest readers look for six signposts that "alert readers to significant moments in a work of literature and encourages them to read closely."

To introduce these signposts to my fourth graders in the middle of our author study on Patricia Polacco, we read Pink and Say, a book where all six signposts were present.

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Introduce the Signposts

First, I divided the class into six groups and assigned them each a signpost. They were responsible for defining their signpost to the class, along with sharing the question readers are to ask themselves once they've identified a particular signposts.

• Contrasts and Contradictions: Sharp contrasts between what we expect and what we observe characters doing or feeling.
• Why is the character doing that?
• Aha Moments: Characters’ realizations that shift their actions, understanding or thinking.
• How might this change things?
• Tough Questions: The characters ask questions that reveal their inner struggles.
• What does this question make me wonder about?
• Words of the Wiser: Advice or insights wiser characters, usually older, offer about life to the main character.
• What’s the life lesson, and how might it affect the character?
• Again and Again: Events, images, or particular words that repeat over and over again.
• Why does this show up again and again?
• Memory Moment: Recollections by a character that interrupt the forward progress of the story.
• Why might this memory be important?

Identify the Signposts

Next, I hung up six pages from the book around the room. These were selections from Pink and Say that represented each of the six signposts. I asked the groups to find the page where their signpost was and be ready to justify their selection to the group.

Once every team was stationed at a page, we went around the room to see if the students had correctly identified the signposts.

Invitation to Independence

To finish the mini-lesson, I gave students a signposts bookmark (printed on cardstock) and encouraged them to look for these signposts in the texts they read and those that are read to them.

Since that initial lesson, we continue to look for signposts in the books I read aloud to them (first Front Desk by Kelly Yang and now Gregor the Overlander by Suzanne Collins), along with books we read in book clubs. The conversations we have, spurred by the signpost questions, are some of the deepest, most student-driven conversations that I have had in my 16-year educational career.

Learning about key concepts during guided reading

In the Primary Years Program (PYP), like in all elementary schools, much importance is placed on learning how to read and write. Learning these essential skills, along with other literacy skills of speaking, listening, viewing, presenting, and non-verbally communicating, is absolutely necessary. However, sometimes we forget why students must learn about, with, from, and through literacy.

Preparing our students for high-stakes, mandatory, standardized testing sometimes distracts us from providing students with literacy learning that is engaging, relevant, challenging, and significant. In reality though, the best literacy "test-prep" we can provide our students is meaningful literacy instruction that is learned in the context of life's biggest ideas; in the PYP, we call these big ideas key and related concepts.

Recently, in fifth grade, students were reading the guided reading book "Clean Up City Park!" (a leveled text from Benchmark Literacy).

The text is written as a persuasive letter, written from the perspective of a child to the mayor, urging the mayor to get the city park cleaned up.

The fifth graders read through the text under the guidance of their teacher during guided reading, focusing on the development of particular comprehension and metacognitive reading strategies. Afterward, the teacher encouraged the students to enter into the PYP Action Cycle: reflect-choose-act.

As students reflected on their learning, they were able to make a connection to their own lives: they too had been around green spaces that needed to be cleaned up; in particular, the school grounds. Once they had chosen their action, the students identified key concepts that would help them organize their action plan. The teacher recorded the students' thinking about the key concepts as the students came up with them.

Using their collectively-identified key concepts as a guide, students began to independently plan their action. They used the key concepts of causation, connection, function and change as a framework to think about and plan their action.

 

The students enlisted the help of second graders, telling them about their plan which allowed the fifth graders to develop their literacy skills of presenting. Together the second graders and this small, guided-reading group of fifth graders plan on cleaning up the green space around their school. Most importantly though, working with the key concepts in a meaningful context allowed students to develop a better understanding of these big ideas.

Giving time and space for students to engage in relevant, challenging, and significant learning, is the best way to develop deep thinkers and thus raise reading test scores. Many reading researchers, including Knapp (1995), Taylor, Pearson, Peterson, & Rodriguez (2003; 2005), and Taylor & Peterson (2008) have found that when teachers encourage students to think about texts at a higher level more than other teachers, they see more growth in their students' reading scores (as cited in Peterson & Taylor, 2012, p. 297).

After reading about how 5th graders developed a better conceptual understanding about life's big ideas - the PYP key concepts - during meaningful literacy instruction, how could you or have you incorporated learning about key and related concepts into your literacy instruction?

Works cited: Peterson, D.S. & Taylor, B.M. (2012). Using higher order questioning to accelerate students' growth in reading. The Reading Teacher, 65(5), p. 295-304.

Flow maps

In an earnest attempt to teach more conceptually, teachers must give students tools with which they can make their conceptual thinking visible. For instance, students can use a circle map (a type of Thinking Map®) to investigate the concept of form while when working with the concept of connection, they can use a double bubble concept map (another type of Thinking Map®).

Making students’ conceptual thinking visible is beneficial for a number of reasons. Students benefit from having “a greater awareness of the significant role that thinking plays in cultivating their own understanding,” (Ritchhart, Church, and Morrison in Making Thinking Visible, p. 15). When students are more acutely aware of their own thinking skills and how they use those skills to construct understanding, they gain greater independence in the learning process. Furthermore, making students’ thinking visible is beneficial for the teacher because it “provides us with the information we as teachers need to plan opportunities that will take students’ learning to the next level and enable continued engagement with the ideas being explored,” (the Making Thinking Visible folks again, this time, p. 27).

The flow map (a type of Thinking Map®) is a tool that students can use to make their thinking visible when they’re working with the concept of causation. (Note: although Thinking Maps aren’t from the Making Thinking Visible text, they fit the definition of a thinking routine, as define by one of its authors here.) When teaching a lesson to fifth graders recently about the short- and long-term impacts of decisions, I decided to put that thinking routine to work with them.

I was teaching a lesson I had written for an economics class I took at the University of Minnesota. Our summative project is to write a lesson using children’s literature to teach an MN Economic Benchmark (2011). I selected this fifth grade benchmark to teach: Economic Reasoning Skills (5.2.1.1.1): Apply a decision-making process to identify an alternative choice that could have been made for a historical event; explain the probable impact of that choice. For example: Decision-making processes - a decision tree, PACED decision-making process (Problem, Alternative, Criteria, Evaluation, Decision). Instead of using a decision tree or the PACED decision-making process as the benchmark suggests, I elected to use a flow map, so that students could see the way that decisions caused subsequent impacts.

As I invited students into the inquiry, I asked them what they knew about Nelson Mandela and Apartheid in South Africa. Then, I showed a short video that gave students a (very) brief overview of what Apartheid was. Once students understood (very) generally the situation in South Africa during Nelson Mandela’s life, I read them the picture book Nelson Mandela by Kadir Nelson as a way to investigate the connection between decisions and their impacts. As I read, we worked together to create a flow map, showing how the decisions of his parents, and then later on his own decisions, impacted future decisions Mandela would make, which would ultimately impact South Africa, its history, and its people in dramatic ways.

This is the original flow map we created as a class. Please note that students used the abbreviation "N" for Nelson Mandela. Because we were running short on time, I skipped the part about how Mandela went into hiding and fled to Egypt. That is why that decision did not make the flow map that is shown above. Also, I realized after teaching the lesson that we should have added the ultimate impact to the flow map: that Apartheid ended, although that was a major part of our discussion.

Then, in accordance with the economic benchmark and to further investigate the connection between decisions and subsequent impacts, I instructed students to creatively and critically think of an alternative choice that Mandela could have picked at any point during his life, instead of one of the decisions he did make. Students then needed to use the flow map structure to show the probable impacts of that alternative choice (with a clean sheet of paper laying OVER the original flow map). Below are examples of the students’ thinking.

This student decided to change the third decision made in Mandela's life (according to the text). Notice that with this alternative choice, Mandela never became involved in the anti-Apartheid movement, nor did he marry Winnie as was detailed in the book. This student clearly understands how different Mandela's life would have been had he made a different decision early on in his life. 

This student decided to change the fifth decision made in Mandela's life (according to the text). Notice this student understood the impact his decision to give up protesting Apartheid would have had on that set of laws, the history of South Africa, and its people ("Apartheid continued to go on"). 

This student also decided to change the fifth decision made in Mandela's life (according to the text). It is interesting how this student recognized Mandela as a leader because when he decided to give up the anti-Apartheid protests as an "alternative choice" this student recognizes that others would have given up as well. 

Finally, as a way to give students the chance to demonstrate their conceptual understanding of the connection between decisions and their short- and long-term impacts, I asked the students if they could decide to take a break from reading over their 9-day spring break. Students were given the option of showing their thinking in paragraph form or in a flow map. I was checking to see if they understood that the decisions they make today have impacts that will last long into the future.

This student, who decided to demonstrate her conceptual understanding in paragraph form, was able to identify both a short-term impact ("if you don't read you might not be as fast as you could before") and a long-term impact ("I decide to read because it is good for you and later on in my life I will be a good reader") of a decision. 

This student used a flow map to show her conceptual understanding of decisions and their impacts. She too writes about short-term impacts of her decision to keep reading ("I won't get behind in reading") and long-term impacts of the same decision ("I decide to go to college after high school"). 

After reading about how fifth graders used a "flow map" as a thinking routine to construct conceptual understanding, how could you use or have you used "flow maps" in your instructional practice?

Teaching comprehension strategies to students using engaging and challenging texts

One morning, an elementary teacher casually asked the students if they had heard about an event currently in the news: the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 that had gone missing. The students started to share the bits and pieces of information that they had heard from various sources and instinctively, the teacher started to make the students’ thinking visible by writing down on the board what the students were saying, under the heading: “What we think we know”. Sensing that some of the information on their list was faulty, the teacher instructed the students to do a little research on their Chromebooks to either confirm or debunk the ‘facts’ that they had amassed.

The students took to the internet, searching for news stories and articles that would give them the information they needed. Students also wrote down questions that came up as they read further about the current event. Moving around the room of engaged students, the teacher realized that what had started as a ‘mini-inquiry’ (Daniels, H. & Harvey, S. (2009).Comprehension and Collaboration: Inquiry Circles in Action, Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.) could easily be turned into a whole-group mini reading lesson.

Following the scope and sequence of the reading curriculum, students had been learning the comprehension strategy of comparing. Learning this particular strategy allowed students to meet the Minnesota ELA Reading Benchmark: “Compare and contrast texts in different forms ... in terms of their approaches to similar themes and topics.” Over a break, the teacher designed a learning experience for the students that would allow them to apply the comprehension strategy of comparing, while still motivating them with their interest in the missing plane.

To support the students’ learning, the teacher identified three different articles about the missing plane: one from CNN, one from Al Jazeera, and one from Fox News. (NOTE: the texts were complex, but the students were capable of reading and understanding the articles selected with appropriate support. To find a general reading level of texts online try these resources: http://read-able.com or https://readability-score.com). The students were to compare the texts, noting important similarities and differences. Through the structure of this purposeful inquiry, the students were able to extract meaning from the texts they read and come to the conceptual understanding that news articles are written from the unique perspective of the journalist (and the journalist’s organization) and it is the responsibility of readers to synthesize what they read and make judgements for themselves.

After reading about teaching comprehension strategies to students using engaging, relevant, challenging, and significant texts, what is:

• An instructional practice you’ll continue to use because of the story.
• An instructional practice you currently use that you’ll reexamine in light of the story.
• An instructional practice you don’t currently use, but will try because of what you read in the story.