One of my favorite parts of the Dublin conference is the students that kick off and introduce each of the keynote speakers. Take a look at this video:
How could you not love an introduction by Kindergarteners?
Soon after the kids left the stage, Chris Lehman took the floor. If you're not familiar with Chris, you should acquaint yourself! He is co-author of Falling in Love with Close Reading (along with Kate Roberts), as well as multiple other books for educators. He also founded The Educator Collaborative (check it out by clicking on the link). Chris centered his keynote around the idea of close reading and how we should be doing it versus how it is being done in many classrooms. Most importantly (and near and dear to my educational philosophy) is the idea that we MUST provide students with CHOICE in reading. If we don't give them CHOICE, there is no impetus for them to do the hard work of comprehending (and caring about) a text. Common texts work wonderfully as mentors, but we must allow students to find reading material that is important, and speaks, to them. Once we teach students the fundamentals of dissecting a text and gaining a deeper level of thinking, therefore meaning, we should be able to send our students off to dissect their own texts. Our job as educators is to teach the various structures our students need to understand, teach them how to identify patterns and create habits of looking through the lens of closer reading, and then have them perform these tasks independently.
How can this be accomplished? First we must start with something FUN! It's no fun for anyone to commence a difficult task (such as close reading) with something that is nearly impossible to figure out. Instead, we should begin with something accessible to all...like, say, a Katy Perry song...and work from there. By listening and looking at the lyrics, we can figure out what the song is really getting at. What a great way to introduce the idea of close reading, and to get kids to care about looking a little deeper at language.
Once things have been noticed, and patterns have been found, students can then develop new thinking about a topic. For example, imagine any song you like. Think about why you like that song. Find the lyrics online and read them. What did you notice? What patterns do you see in the lyrics (both literally and figuratively)? How does this change your thinking about the song and the message in the song? What do you think the songwriter was really trying to tell you about the world? Pretty cool, huh? What a meaningful way to get kids hooked on taking a closer look at the world around them, too.
Perhaps my favorite thing about Chris and Kate's book (and Chris's keynote) is the idea that close reading isn't just for books. It's for our lives. We should be close reading our lives. Observe what is going on around you, listen to what people are saying to you and what you are saying to others, make lists of things you notice. Understand what is going on in your world. If you find something that you don't like, alter it. If you need to make more time for people, do so. After all, isn't this the essence of living? Shouldn't we want to close read our lives and make adjustments as necessary. I certainly hope so!
Next up? Author Lisa Graff
Lisa is the author of A Tangle of Knots, Absolutely Almost (one of my personal favorites!), Lost in the Sun, and many other books for intermediate grade children. She led us through a writing workshop she often uses during school visits, in which she guides children through the writing process. It was even complete with handouts! It was an interactive session where the audience built a story based on contributions from each other. It was really fun to see how many different directions a story with a common character, setting, and problem could take. We got pretty creative!
Lisa also did the second keynote address after lunch. It was hilarious to hear her speak about how she got her start and what she loves about writing. My students were excited to hear that I met her, as Absolutely Almost was our first read aloud of the year.
Next up? My presentation with Holly! We presented "The Top 10 Ways to Turn Your Classroom Into a Hotbed of Enthusiastic Readers". What a mouthful! Click here to check out our Prezi. Our presentation was based off a Nerdy Book Club post we cowrote a couple of years ago. You can take a look here. We had so much fun presenting together! Holly and I have been working together for years. If you want to learn more about us, check out Holly's blog post about our incredible professional relationship. We truly are professional soul mates! We had a great turnout and were able to stay after and talk individually with several people that attended our session. This is why we love presenting--we get to share our passion about teaching reading and writing, and we get to meet so many great teachers who believe in the same thing!
After presenting, it was lunch time and we had the good fortune to meet Mr. Schu! We've long stalked him online via his blog Watch. Connect. Read. Here's our picture with him:
The final session of the day was back to Chris Lehman to learn about digging into book groups in the classroom.
Book clubs are something that occurs regularly in my classroom and I loved what Chris said at the beginning of the session: "If we overprescribe how club are run, we take away kids ability to talk authentically." That is so true! Several years ago I tried literature circles, where each student in the group have a prescribed role. It was boring and certainly led to little or no real conversation about books. That's when I turned to common sense and thought about what I enjoy in my adult book club: talking with my friends about the book we all read independently! That is the heart of book clubs--talking about a common text and the interactions we all had with the same story.
Lehman suggested we explicitly teach three categories to our students in order for successful book groups to authentically take place in our classrooms. The first category is "good conversation." We have to teach our kids how to talk to each other in a group. Silly as it sounds, if you've spent any time in a classroom, you know this is true! They need help in taking turns and validating others' opinions. The second category to explicitly teach is "social interaction." This is all of the management junk that isn't fun to teach (because it seems like it should be intuitive, but it's not), but once you've established ground rules and expectations, you can follow them all year). The third category is "reading." Simply put, we have to teach kids how to read in more thoughtful ways (refer to the top of this post again for how to do that).
One of my favorite things addressed in this session was how to teach kids to look at books and think about what they have in common. As teachers, we should be able to identify what the books our kids read have in common, even if we haven't read them. For example, I teach 5th grade. An intermediate chapter book usually has the following things in it: dynamic character (a character that changes or transforms from the beginning to the end of the novel), secondary characters (characters that help the dynamic character transform), and a degree of plot complexity--usually in the form of two storylines that intertwine. If you teach intermediate grades, think about that for a moment. Just about any chapter book you pick, from Harry Potter to Hatchet to Wonder has all of these elements. Because we know this, it shouldn't be a secret kept from our students. We should explicitly teach these things so our students can be looking for them throughout their own books. Imagine! If our kids know before they start a book that there will be a character that makes a major change, there will be other characters that help or hinder that change, and there will be at least two storylines that will converge at some point. Won't they have a leg up at the beginning of the novel knowing this? I can't wait to do this at the start of our next round of book groups. I love learning easy tweaks that help my students become better, more appreciative readers.
I've been attending and presenting at the Dublin Literacy Conference for several years. It just gets better and better. I'm not sure what's in the water in Dublin, but I try to drink up while I'm there! What a great day of professional learning with colleagues that care about getting kids to enjoy learning. Can't wait for next year!
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