Learning literacy strategies in authentic contexts

Children should learn literacy metacognitive and comprehension strategies in meaningful contexts. When we give our students the chance to refine their use of these strategies in authentic and relevant contexts, they'll more deeply understand why they're using them and the will more likely use them independently, out of the context they were originally learned.

In the Primary Years Programme, we are obligated to contextualize our students' learning by organizing all our curriculum into six transdisciplinary units of inquiry. How lucky we are that the PYP framework requires us to teach in a way that has been proven to be best practice. What is more, when PYP educators teach literacy strategies in the context of the Unit of Inquiry, they're able to cut through an overcrowded curriculum.

For more information on transdisciplinary learning and learning literacy strategies in relevant contexts see:

• Developing a transdisciplinary programme of inquiry, IBO 2012
• The Primary Years Programme as a model for transdisciplinary learning, IBO 2010
• Lanning, Designing a Concept-Based Curriculum for English Language Arts: Meeting the Common Core with intellectual integrity, K-12
• Erickson & Lanning, Transitioning to Concept-based Curriculum and Instruction: How to bring content and process together

In second grade, students are busily investigating how people influence the world. During this unit, students inquire into the knowledge concepts of hero, making a difference, and personal strengths. During this unit, they are also learning the literacy strategy of summarizing. 

To help students explore both of the big ideas of hero (a knowledge concept) and summarizing (a process concept), the teacher met with guided reading groups to work with texts that were best suited for the students' developmental reading level.

To start, the students in different guided reading groups read a book about a particular hero. To support the students through one of their first times summarizing, the teacher just had the students write one important detail from the text on a post-it note. She then copied those details on the left-inside page of a folded piece of paper. Then, making sure to include all those details, the students told the teacher a summary of the book, while the teacher notated the students' thinking on the opposite-inside page.

Below are two examples.

Next, students were ready to write their own summaries. Below are two examples: 

The back cover of Carlos's summary book offers the reader a teaser to what the book will be about.

This student decided to highlight important vocabulary on the front cover of her summary book.

This student's summary took the form of a listicle of influences, accomplishments, and personality traits (next picture).

After reading about how this teacher taught a literacy strategy in the context of learning concepts from the unit of inquiry, how could you or have you taught students literacy strategies in meaningful, authentic, and relevant contexts?

Using Thinking Routines at Student-led Conferences

On February 7, 2015, I posted Making Professional Thinking Visible, where I wrote about how our pedagogical leadership team used See-Think-Wonder (a thinking routine from Making Thinking Visible by Ritchhart, Morrison, & Church). I received some great feedback from colleagues around the world, detailing how they have used thinking routines in professional settings too.

One educator (Philippa Morgan from the MEF International School in Istanbul, Turkey) mentioned another context she has used See-Think-Wonder (S-T-W). She said she has used S-T-W "as a format for 3-way conferences with my [first grade] students and parents. The familiarity of the routine gave the students confidence as they shared portfolio pieces and the parents were able to follow lead and see a routine in action."

Inspired by Philippa, I shared her idea with a couple of teachers with whom I work. One second grade teacher decided to use S-T-W with her students as a way to prepare for their student-led conferences. Here is her story:

Throughout the last several months, students have been writing poetry and have been collecting their pieces in their poetry binders. To prepare for their conferences, students were asked to look through their binders and reflect on the learning they had done by documenting the things they saw, what they thought, and what they wondered. Some students decided to additionally write a goal for the future based on what they saw in their poetry binders.

Below are seven examples of what students created.

Student #1:

Student #2:

Student #3:

Student #4:

Student #5:

Student #6:

Student #7:

After reading about how one teacher used See-Think-Wonder to prepare her students for the conferences that they'll end up leading, how could you use thinking routines to prepare for or to structure their student-led conferences?

Teaching Conceptually using Tug-of-War

Currently, our G4 students, with the help of their teachers, are trying to understand that maintaining health requires knowledge of body systems and the diseases that affect them. They are trying to understand this big idea through the conceptual lenses of causation and responsibility as they inquire into one’s personal responsibility for health.

To guide students through this inquiry, a G4 teacher recently used the Tug-of-War thinking routine from Making Thinking Visible by Ritchhart, Church, & Morrison (p. 199). After working through this routine with her students, the teacher invited others on her team to analyze, discuss, and reflect on her students’ thinking. Here’s her story:

1. Start with a concept.

For this particular learning engagement, the teacher wanted the students to understand that choices individuals make not only affect the individual, but others around them too.

2. Pick a specific, concrete example of a person, place, situation, or thing that illustrates that concept.

This teacher decided to guide her students through an exploration of the recent measles outbreak in the United States. Investigating the facts around this concrete situation would allow her students to construct understanding of the big idea that choices individuals make (particularly about their health) not only affect the individual, but others around them too.

3. Create an opportunity for students to explore that concrete example.

First, students read and viewed a diverse variety of complex texts.

• LA Times: Disneyland measles outbreak: Infected woman took 2 flights before diagnosis
• The Guardian: Measles outbreak spreads in US after unvaccinated woman visits Disneyland
• Public Radio: Disneyland measles tally rises, unvaccinated OC high school students kept home
• National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC): Vaccine Laws

The students went through the texts as a whole group, a format appropriate for reading such complex texts. To understand more about how to support students as they read complex texts, learn from the experts: Fisher & Frey’s article “Close Reading in Elementary Schools”.

After learning more about the facts around this recent outbreak, the teacher drew a tug-of-war rope across the middle of the whiteboard. The class identified and framed the two opposing sides of the dilemma that they were exploring. They labeled one end of the tug-of-war rope “Yes, all people should have to get a vaccine” and on the other end of the rope they wrote “No, people should be allowed to file an exemption.”

Students then generated “tugs” or reasons that “pull you toward,” that is, support each side of the dilemma. The students wrote their ideas on individual sticky notes. Because this was the first time the teacher had led the students through this thinking routine, she required each of them to write a tug for each of the opposing sides.

After, as a class, the students determined the strength of each tug and placed it on the tug-of-war rope, placing the strongest tugs at the farthest end of the rope and the weaker tugs more toward the center.

4. Check for understanding by having them write a concept statement.

The teacher did not have her students write out a concept statement at the end to check for conceptual understanding. She did say that having the students make their thinking visible on the sticky notes and listening to the ensuing discussion was one way to check for conceptual understanding. However, to be assured that she knew what all of her students understood about the concepts of decisions, their consequences, responsibility, and causation, the teacher decided that next time as a follow-up, she would want the students to draft some statement at the end to check for their understanding of these timeless, abstract, universal, and transferable concepts.

5. Reflect on their thinking and decide next steps.

During the reflection meeting, other important points came up:

• The students were very engaged during this thinking routine.
• The thinking routine “I Used to Think …, Now I Think …” could have also been used in combination with Tug-of-War to be able to show students how their own thinking about this topic had changed.
• Right now, students are learning about determining what is fact and what is opinion during their focused literacy lessons. As students were determining the strength of each tug, they naturally started classifying tugs with facts as stronger and those that had opinions as weaker. The teacher noticed that students were applying their understanding of fact and opinion in a real-life context, thus solidifying their understanding of this literacy concept.

After reading about how this teacher used the thinking routine “Tug-of-War” with her students to examine perspectives, reason, identify complexities of a current event and construct a deep understanding of concepts, how could you or have you used this thinking routine with your own students?

Making Professional Thinking Visible

Effective professional learning is engaging, relevant, connected to long-term goals, and involves participants in interactively constructing understanding. Because thinking routines (especially like those described in Making Thinking Visible by Ritchhart, Church, and Morrison) are tools, structures, and patterns of behavior that are used to initiate, explore, discuss, document, and manage thinking, they can be used by educators during professional development to help actively become engaged in constructing understanding. Furthermore, since they're experienced themselves, those educators are more likely to use those thinking routines with their students, a vital part of creating a culture of thinking in their own classrooms.

Therefore, at a recent pedagogical leadership team meeting, when one of the leaders asked other teams how they guided their students through solving mathematical word problems, I knew that using a thinking routine would help guide us through that exploration.

Here is that story:

Start with a concept.
We started with the timeless, abstract, universal, and transferable idea that solving problems independently is made easier by following a set protocol.

Pick a specific, concrete example of a person, place, situation, or thing that illustrates that concept.
In order to gain an understanding of that abstract idea, we explored different protocols used by teachers throughout our building to help their students solve mathematical problems independently.

Create an opportunity for participants to explore that concrete example.
During this phase of the conversation, we agreed to dialogue and suspend judgement. For more information about dialogue, discussion, and how both can be used to transform conversations we have in schools into meaningful communication, see "Teacher Talk That Makes a Difference" by Robert Garmston and Bruce Wellman.

To guide our dialogue, we followed the thinking routine See-Think-Wonder from Making Thinking Visible by Ritchhart, Church, and Morrison (p. 55).

See: What do we see?

During this phase of the dialogue, team members shared the protocols they use with their students to solve mathematical word problems. Comments and crosstalk were discouraged.

1st protocol shared:

1. What are you trying to find?
2. What numbers will you use?
3. Open number sentence - using a variable for the unknown
4. Decide what to do with a remainder

2nd protocol shared: (students don’t have to follow these in order)

1. Make a prediction
2. Answer
3. Number sentence
4. Strategy
5. Show your thinking

3rd protocol shared: U.P.S. Check

1. Understand: look at the problem and understand what it is asking us to do. What are we trying to find out?
2. Plan: What do we need in the number story to solve the problem? Circle the important points.
3. Solve, using different strategies.
4. Check: Solve it a different way, using another strategy to see if you get the same result.

4th protocol shared: (for behavior problem-solving)

1. What are you doing that I can’t allow?
2. Why can’t I allow you to do that?
3. What will you do instead, next time? 

5th protocol shared: ORID

1. Objective: What do we know about this?
2. Reflective: How do we feel about this?
3. Interpretive: What does this mean for us?
4. Decisional: What are we going to do? 

6th protocol shared: For solving 2-step word problems

1. Equation
2. Representation (including acting it out), to check for understanding
3. 1st step
4. Next step
5. Answer with a label 

7th protocol shared:

1. What do you want to find out?
2. What do you know?
3. What will you do? 

8th protocol shared: Cognitively Guided Instruction (CGI)

1. Read the problem.
2. What do I know?
3. What is the question?
4. What strategy will I use?
5. Organize my thinking so others can understand what I did.
6. Answer the question in a complete thought. 

9th protocol shared: from George Pólya's four key principles to "problem solving" first published the book “How to Solve It” (1945):

1. Understand the problem
2. Devise a plan
3. Carry out the plan
4. Look back

Think: What do we think?

Next, leaders were invited to comment on what they had just heard, noting any "big ideas" that surfaced during the sharing period.

• There is more than one way to solve problems.
• There are a lot of similarities, but in different language.
• Protocols range from a lot of steps to a few steps.
• Lots of visual aids, graphic organizers 
• Acting out and using manipulatives helps.

Wonder: What does this make us wonder?

• Do we all have to be doing the same thing?
• Would this be a site-based decision or district-wide?
• Using the various protocols, what’s the level of independent use?
• Can students name the strategy they’re using?
• Do the protocols we’re using lead to innate problem-solving (are students internalizing the steps)?
• Can kids explain why they’re using a particular strategy?
• Does the district math coordinator have any insight?
• What do math experts have to say?
• What language constructs need to be supported?
• How much of this is a vocabulary issue and not a math issue?
• Could the vocab piece be consistent throughout the grades?
• Does our curriculum use the same language as the standardized tests that our students take?
• Should protocols be teacher-given or student-created?
• If protocols are student-created, how can teachers support students? Is this the right way to go?
• Can we use prompts like “show me your thinking” and “did anyone solve this in a different way?” along with these protocols?

Check for understanding by having them write a concept statement.
After our discussion, leaders were asked to respond to this question: "What can you tell me about how we can make solving problems independently easier for our students?"































Reflect on their thinking and decide next steps.
After analyzing and reflecting on the responses above, here are the big ideas I see surfacing. What do you see?

A protocol for solving problems in math should:

• require students to make their thinking visible (or verbal).
• require students to show different strategies to solve the problem.
• help students identify vocabulary that is essential to understand the problem.
• help students visualize the problem.
• have few steps so students can use it independently.
• be universal so it can be used at all ability levels.
• be transferable to all settings where problems need to be solved.
• be student-created (at least partially).
• help students develop PYP attitudes like creativity, commitment (persistence/grit), independence.