Custom Jobs and Doing it Right #SOL

It's hard to believe that March is finally over. It feels like it has been at least 129 days long. Today will be the day that many will wrap up how this month of writing has changed them, has created new friends and new habits, and has awakened a new writing spirit in them. This challenge does this for me as well, and I am always better for having participated.

Today, I linger on some words of one of my students from an email today. We began e-Learning this week, and students have questions. But this is one that I can't seem to let go.

"I'm worried about doing it right."

I reassured her that there is no right way to this. We are navigating new waters, and we are doing it together. For that matter, is there ever just one way to do anything?

When it comes to writing and becoming teacher-writers, many get so caught up in doing it right. When I first began blogging and slicing, I had this same fear - am I doing it right? Am I writing something people will want to read? I have always been hesitant at keeping a notebook for the same reason - fear of not doing it right.

Today, as I was listening to John Warner, the author of Why they Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities, on Penny Kittle and Kelly Gallagher's daily "talk show," John said, "Each piece of writing is a custom job." 

If it is a custom job, then it has to be right because it is what we, as writers, have made it.

These words are freeing. I will always struggle with doing it right, but participating in challenges like the March Slice of Life Challenge and the #100DaysofNotebooking and BEYOND help me to feel safe. Safe in creating my own custom job. Safe in knowing that whatever I write, it is right.

Thank Two Writing Teachers for creating this space for custom jobs!

Passionate Teachers ~ Celebrate 2017 (ten) #sol17

I believe being a writer is one of the biggest gifts you can give to your students. ~ Stacey Shubitz

This month I am participating in the Slice of Life Story Challenge.  Thanks to Two Writing Teachers for creating a space for me to share my corner of the world.

Today I am also combining my two worlds of writing by celebrating my week with Ruth Ayres. 

Remember what it was like when you were a child on Christmas Eve, so excited and couldn't sleep?  Or maybe it was the night before the first day of school and you are filled with anticipation of a new class of students and new ideas to implement?

That was me last night.  I came across a recorded 2016 webinar with Penny Kittle, who just happens to be one of my teacher idols.  It was one hour and 35 minutes long, but with all of the stops to write notes and "back 'em ups" to catch something brilliant she said that I missed the first time, it took me over two and a half hours to watch!  Finally at midnight (just after the Two Writing Teachers email came through) I decided I needed to go to bed.

But I couldn't sleep.  I could not turn my brain off because all these ideas and thoughts were swimming.  There is so much brilliance to share, but today I celebrate passionate teachers.

In the beginning of the webinar, she talks about passion, and this quote was one of her slides.

She explains how her passion, everything she has wanted to do, has come because somebody showed her their passion.  She affectionately tells about how her father instilled her passion of fishing though his own passion.

Of course, she then moves to her passion about reading and writing and this had me thinking.

Do I show my passion each and every day?  Do I share my passion to each and every student?  How can I do a better job of sharing my passion with my colleagues?

Who shares their passion with me?  

When I think about how my teaching has changed because of what other teachers have shared with me, I am overwhelmed and so, so grateful.  I am not talking about the teacher down the hall who shares a resource or an idea.  Although I am thankful for them, I celebrate teachers like Penny -- and so many others -- who share their passion with us through webinars, online courses, tweets, blog posts, books, and conferences so that we may become better teachers.  

To paraphrase Penny, everything I have wanted to do in my classroom and my career, is because somebody showed me and shared with me their passion.

This is the true celebration. 

Pillars

It is that time of year when inadequacy permeates my thoughts, and I feel as if I am under a microscope.  I do not like to dwell in the negativity of testing, but it is a part of our educational culture.  As teachers, testing and the data gleaned from it is something we all must deal with.

Last week I gave the STAR reading test to monitor how much my students grew as readers this year.  As I explained to my students, this "number" is just one snapshot of their reading growth.  But I was still discouraged by the results.

I have put much time and effort toward changing the reading culture in my classroom this year, and I really wanted my efforts to be visible in these tests results.  I do not have a lot of faith in the STAR test, but I know people in high places look at these scores and want to see improvement in reading levels.

Today I listened to Penny Kittle's podcast with Donalyn Miller about independent reading.  You can listen to all of the Book Love Foundation podcasts here.

In this interview, Penny talked about all the pillars which hold up our readers. One pillar is all the tools to help students find books in hopes of finding at least one which will keep them reading. Other pillars are a place to read, access to books, and time to read in school to accommodate their busy schedules.

Listening to this podcast, I realized that teachers are also a pillar, maybe the most important one.  I know I have made a difference in the reading lives of some of my students, although I may not have seen this in their scores last week.

A student recently wrote in a card that she has probably never read this many books in one year before.  I had another student tell me I had changed him into a reader.  I know I have not reached all of my students, but without these pillars, I have to wonder where they would be?

I don't need a test score, a level, or a number to be hold up my students.  I spent a year putting the pillars Penny talks about in place.  When they leave me in just a few short weeks, I know what a difference these pillars have made in their reading lives.  And I don't need a reading level to tell me any different.

Life Preservers and the Island of Isolation

Thank you Two Writing Teachers for creating this space for me to share my corner of the world.

I am in my ninth year of teaching, and I am amazed how much education has changed in that short amount of time.  Some of that change has been brought on by education reform, and some of that change has been my own reformation, which has not always been easy and many times quite lonely.

My first year of teaching, I taught 5th grade reading.  I used a basal series and all that accompanied it.  I hated it, and so did my students.  The following year I moved to 4th and my quest for change began.

That summer I read The Book Whisperer by Donalyn Miller.  This book was my life

preserver, and I clung tightly to every word she wrote.  We are an Accelerated Reader district, and I knew better ways to motivate and create readers were out there; I just had to find them.  The Book Whisperer validated my beliefs while I tried to survive on that isolated island where we teachers sometimes inadvertently find ourselves.  This book was the catalyst in changing the way I taught reading.  

I began to:

• give kids more choice
• improve my classroom library with books kids wanted to read
• unlevel my classroom library
• decrease the use of worksheets
• increase the talking about books

It was slow, but it was a start.  Each year I implemented more and more of her ideas. My classroom was changing in ways I could not even imagine.  Now I read The Book Whisperer every summer to reaffirm my beliefs.

My eighth year of teaching I moved to middle school and felt like a first year teacher all over again.  I knew I could carry over many of the ideas and methods I used in my elementary classroom, but I also knew I needed to change some of the ways I approached independent reading.

My next life preserver was Book Love by Penny Kittle.  I read Book Love for the first time last summer and it completely changed how independent reading looks in my classroom this year.  Again, I held on tight and became brave enough to make some changes that I knew I needed to make.

I began to:

• include independent reading every day during my 48 minute periods
• establish reading rates and keep track of pages read
• have students keep track of books read using an online reading record
• have students rank the difficulty of their reading though reading ladders
• have students reflect on their reading
• conference with my 100+ students on a regular basis
• eliminate Accelerated Reader

I know that I am a much better teacher because of the influence of these two women and the books they have written.  The reading culture in my classroom is magical. And that is not an easy task to attain with middle school readers.  Turning students into readers has become my passion and my primary existence in the teaching world.  

Change is not easy, but when we have mentors like Donalyn and Penny who throw us life preservers, we musy grab them and not let go.  We must be brave enough to make the tough decisions.  And brave enough to swim off that island.