Academic Awards for Kindergarten and First Grade: Another Reason High-Poverty Classrooms Become High-Achieving Classrooms

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Education, emphasize literacy in K-1, First Grade, Glendora California, high performing high poverty schools, Kindergarten, teach reading and writing in Kindergarten and first grade

I visited La Fetra Elementary School in Glendora, California and was privileged to watch the awards assembly–an academic awards assembly for Kindergarten and First Grade. These were not awards for good coloring or block-building. These were not awards for playing well with others–that goes without saying. These were awards for great reading, tantalizing  stories, amazing writing, scintillating math work, superb spelling, and smart sounding out.  Get the drift?

And the cafetorium was full of parents and extended family members–like our Lydia’s Papi and Nani–who heard the message loud and clear: school is about learning to read, write, and do math and have a grand time doing it. The bar is high, families. Very high.

I am convinced that schools get way off when they downsize Kindergarten. When schools water down literacy instruction in the early years because of some misconception that kids somehow aren’t ready to learn to read and write and work the numbers, the achievement gap widens.

La Fetra will not let this happen. I love what I see here. It’s a Chapter I school that knows the value of beginning with a bang–getting the kids and their families to buy into literacy from the get go. They’ve won awards for their high standards. (It is among the few public elementary schools in California to receive a distinguished GreatSchools Rating of 9 out of 10.)

I wrote about my own 1950′s Kindergarten experience in “Where Do The Children Play? Not In Kindergarten,” Says the Reporter; but I Say, “Wrong Turn!Recalculate!” My Kindergarten teacher called us her little readers and writers. I wrote about learning to read in Kindergarten in response to the tsk-tsking by some educators about the lack of play in school.

Our perception of ourselves influences what we can do. At high-achieving La Fetra, the students are called readers and writers and doers of math from Day One. And they live up to the label.

Patty (the Nani); 11/3/11

How Many Books Does It Take to Make High-Poverty Classrooms Into High-Achieving Classrooms: Tons of Them. Or Else. A Cautionary Tale.

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Education, Five True Dog Stories, high-poverty and high-achieving classrooms: their stories, high-poverty schools, kids need good books, put riveting book in hands of kids: it's the key, what's the secret to high-performing, Where the Red Fern Grows

It’s gonna be years before they let me read the kind of books I like to listen to. Doug was in first grade and his beginning reading instruction was proceeding at a glacial pace. Glacial, controlled, and deadly. Doug continues: I was looking in the bookshelf behind the teacher’s desk? I find a book about dogs.

Dog stories. Your favorite topic!

Yup. I see there’s this story by Albert P. Terhune.

The guy who wrote Lad: A Dog and Lad of Sunnybank?

Doug nods. So I tell the teacher. “Miss Lane, Albert P. Terhune wrote one of these stories.”

What did she say?

She said, “That shelf’s for readers. Put it back.”

Father Jack swings into action.  Doug, he says, what’s your favorite book?

Where the Red Fern Grows.

What part?

Where he gets the puppies.

So Jack enlarges this one, best-loved paragraph, makes several copies, and begins reading it over and over with Doug, who sits glued to his side and tracks left to right and back again to the left, one line down, eyes squinched and glued to the page. In a few days he reads it solo. He knows the words both in and out of context.  And, armed with a basic sight vocabulary, he starts devouring books.

The teacher calls to say that Doug is responding well to her methods and he is now in the highest reading group. We don’t tell her it’s in spite of her methods.

What we did with Doug is a lot like what the teachers do in these high-achieving, high-poverty classrooms I’m watching.

I see a ton of books. Real books. Not dummied down, controlled vocabulary books, parceled out one-slow-book-at-a-time. Paperback books in multiple copy sets–fiction and non-fiction: Some in bins with the titles neatly showing, some on the shelves, some in kids’ desks, some for small groups, some for the whole class to follow along while the teacher reads aloud.

These kids read the kinds of books they love to listen to while they learn to read better. The reading menu is packed and the serving sizes huge, so the kids get to gulp big mouthfuls of great words in every bite. Sometimes the book is a stretch—like with Doug and Where the Red Fern Grows–but there’s always the support of the teacher’s voice and friends. Students read in small groups. They zoom in on favorite parts and turn them into Reader’s Theater. With Reader’s Theater, students read their parts over and over to get it perfect, just as Jack and Doug read that one paragraph over and over.

High-achieving, high-poverty classrooms need to speed up the rate of progress. This means students need to read an enormous amount, and they need to read three times longer than is usual.

Not possible if the literature isn’t rich and riveting.

Not possible if there’s a restricted shelf behind the teacher’s desk.

In these classrooms I’m watching, all the shelves are for readers; and they’re all readers.

Patty 10/22/11

Get It Inside You Or How To Avoid Magical Thinking: It’s No Secret

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Arne Duncan, clear language, Education, Educators, gradual release, guide, high-poverty and high-achieving classrooms: their stories, K through 12, Magical thinking, Methods and Theories, model, principles of apprenticeship, redundant language, relevant, relevant language, Student, teacher, teaching for strategies and transfer

These are your orders. Top secret. Get them inside you.

The Navy duty officer hands a slip of paper to the young lieutenant, my father-in-law, and as Pop starts to read, the officer continues,

And once you’ve got it memorized, shred and swallow. Here’s some water.

Secrecy was that important in those early days of WWII.

Well for this high-achieving, high-poverty school I’m watching, the secret’s out: What’s important is Getting it Inside You.

Mrs P is teaching the strategy of estimating before adding and subtracting decimals to her fifth-graders.

Okay Millie, where do we start? (It’s the second day for this topic. Mrs P wastes no time waiting for volunteers. The kids are SLANT-ing as in Sitting up, Leaning forward, Attending, Nodding, and Tracking the teacher (or whomever has the floor).  Yes, exactly. And Wilem, what comes next? Remember the rounding rules? Tell me how it goes. Use the strategy that works best for you.  Armen? Yes, the number line works for you. Go with it. Let’s do one more together and then you try it. (So far, in these first 10 minutes, Mrs P’s done one problem and told the students: Watch me while I do this. Then she and the students did one, with Mrs P eliciting from the students the next step.)

During next phase, the Try-It, she grazes the room and coaches, with no pencil in her hand for demonstrating because at this point in the lesson the students are expected to do more of the math work.

Show me what you’re doing. Where are you using the strategy we just did on the board? What’s your strategy for this one? Tell me what you’re doing. Say it out loud. What will you do next? Tell me the words you’re using to guide yourself: yes, find the chunk; yes look at the smaller number; does it make sense. Good. You’ve got it.

And over and over she says: Use my words. Get them inside you. Then you’ll have a guide inside.

Her words are clear, relevant, and, yes, redundant. They have to be.

Mrs P doesn’t engage in any magical thinking; she knows that this hand-over step is as crucial as the initial first teaching. She’s teaching for transfer. Making the students responsibile for using what’s been taught.

If you’re saying to yourself, but of course that’s how it works in schools, you’re wrong. Teachers teach and students learn, but that doesn’t mean that the students are learning what it is the teacher is teaching.

Teachers need to deliberately teach for strategies first and then, just as deliberately, teach for transfer of those strategies. And the kids need to know that by next Tuesday- the 4^th they are expected—on their own—to do the thing the teacher is teaching.

Get it inside you.

It’s that important.

And, unlike that poor young Navy officer who had to get the orders inside him by downing them with water?

It’s no secret.

Patty 10/1/11