Recalled to Life: The Gift of the CRLS Ninth Grade History Teacher Team

So already, "This is no country for old men," William Butler Yeats said in "Sailing to Byzantium." And nobody likes a crone.  Even though I'm probably too young for technical crone status, and it's more institutions than individuals that marginalize crones (and sometimes downright banish them from places of respect and influence), I couldn't resist that last declaration.  The minute that anyone declares that s/he is retiring by virtue of having been an educator long enough to qualify for the maximum pension, s/he begins to be perceived as "departing elder" rather than as "veteran teacher and colleague." 

So first of all, a warning:  this blog post is going to ramble.  It will begin with reflections of the experience of edging toward retirement, vent a bit, offer some thoughts about reading instruction, and and then offer thanks to a group of my colleagues -- very appropriate during the Thanksgiving weekend -- who may not know that they did me a great kindness recently.  The above image -- I've taken a screenshot of an image on the "Birthing the Crone" Home Page -- represents my understanding that an illuminating blog post could be a croning achievement. So let's hope, and here goes.

Since announcing officially my intention to retire from Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, I have felt institutional invisibility encroaching:  no more invitations to workshops and trainings, far fewer administrator solicitations of my opinions about potential policies, programs, or resources.  Even my Learning Community R mailbox has been positioned so that when I leave in January, the alphabetized flow of my colleagues' mailboxes will not be disrupted by an empty gap in the "S" area.  I think I often feel the way Eurydice might have after Orpheus turned around and looked at her, and she found herself slipping gently backward into the underworld -- and into the permanent status of "shade," as so many translations of The Odyssey refer to the underworld's inhabitants.

While I continue to feel valued by so many individual colleagues, from an institutional perspective, I have already passed on.  Interestingly, James Joyce also uses the word "shade" to refer to those who have come and gone in "The Dead," the culminating story of his collection entitled Dubliners.  This story, which will be the last piece of literature that my AP Literature & Composition students and I will explore as a class text -- I'm timing it so that our discussion of the story will take place on January 6, the same date that the characters in the story are celebrating Epiphany -- is so much about who matters for how long and to whom, and about all the petty vanities and misconceptions that accompany our alternatively prized and despised conceptions of ourselves.

I love "The Dead" more than I can tell you -- the book; the movie; the heart-wrenching details of place, food, and thought; the dialogue that sometimes becomes heartfelt communication; the attempts and failures to "only connect" musically and personally over the course of a sometimes excruciatingly long dinner; the last paragraph (I'm hardly alone in loving that paragraph). One of my favorite moments in the book occurs when, amidst the general praise of Aunt Julia's singing, Aunt Kate interjects her angry opinion about the Pope's not-recent decision to replace Aunt Julia and other female singers in the church choirs with boys:  ". . . I think it's not at all honourable for the pope to turn out the women out of the choirs that have slaved there all their lives and put little whipper-snappers of boys over their heads."

I mention this line and Aunt Kate's anger because I often feel that education, especially the business and policy of education, is often dominated by "little whipper-snappers of boys" and girls who bring energy, skill, commitment, confidence, and business cards to the endeavor of improving learning and schools, but whose limited experience in actual schools -- and that means with students, parents, teachers, and administrators -- is more significant than they believe.  That they are so often in the company of others with similarly limited experience may be what prevents them from recognizing how their own lack of experience undercuts their efforts to be persuasive not of business-people and policy-makers, but of people who actually work with children on a daily basis.  I suspect that the marked professional certainty that a number of them exude is in part a reflection of their characters and needs -- most specifically, the need to be influential and important and the need to be successful, even though no teacher always succeeds.

This is my way of saying that I don't take kindly to being treated like a shade by twenty-eight-year-olds, whether they are on the payrolls of the Cambridge Public Schools, the College Board, or any big educational foundation, who indulge me by pretending to listen to my counter-experience or counter-suggestion while thinking that I "once" must have been a good teacher. Luckily, we have few of those people at CRLS since, as people who work in an actual school, most of us are daily humbled by our classroom experiences. 

And all of the above is why I am so grateful to the whipper-snapper-free CRLS Ninth Grade History Team, the teachers who meet every Friday during first period to figure out how to better serve our school's ninth-grade history students, and their very competent and thoughtful dean of curriculum for asking me to come to work with them on helping ninth graders become proficient readers of primary source documents and other texts. With their invitation, the ninth grade teachers pulled me out of the pre-retirement shadows -- and gave me the opportunity to synthesize a lot of the thinking I'd been doing about the companion processes of reading, writing, speaking, and listening since I returned to the classroom as a teacher of AP English and recognized how much my high-achieving juniors and seniors struggled to make sense of long, syntactically complex sentences.  And if they were struggling, didn't it stand to reason that other CRLS students were also struggling?

My most intensive literacy-related learning experiences occurred  ten-to-fifteen years ago when, as a CRLS teacher, I had multiple opportunities to work closely with staff of WestEd's Strategic Literacy Initiative/Reading Apprenticeship Program.  When I was the literacy specialist at English High School in Boston during the 2001-2002 school year, my Reading-Apprenticeship-related know-how grew in leaps and bounds through extensive training and collegial learning opportunities, usually under the always thoughtful and always responsive guidance of either Randy Bomer or Margaret Ciardi. The district focus on implementing the reading and writing workshop model in all Boston classrooms meant that we spent many Saturdays in trainings in which we learned as both teachers of students and teachers of other teachers.

The challenge of helping others to read better is that all reading is essentially on some level an individual and invisible meaning-making process, even when we scaffold it, coach it, and externalize the thinking processes associated with it.  Fortunately, in the years between my specifically cross-disciplinary literacy-centered work at both EHS and CRLS, and the development of the Common Core with its emphasis on various kinds of literacy, other important professional learning experiences presented themselves and contributed to my and my colleagues' efforts to improve student reading.  Project Zero's Making Learning Visible project provided many ideas for how and when to capture students' thinking processes so that students themselves could see and hear, and therefore examine their own thought processes while reading, and then develop their own theories of and action plans for how they personally could read more strategically and successfully. My colleague Jennifer Hogue's "Slugs and Cherries" documentation gave many of us tools, guidelines, and hope -- a prototype that we could replicate in our own classrooms and embed in reflective discussion allowing students to guide themselves.

The Making Learning Visible work, which is based on the insights and practices developed in the Reggio Emilia pre-schools and infant-toddler centers, contributed another important approach to my reading arsenal.  Long ago, I learned from Project Zero MLV researchers that Reggio teachers almost never asked students to draw something, describe something, or extract the properties of something without placing it next to something else that it could be seen in relation to: in other words, I would have a much better shot at describing an apple if I could think about how it was and wasn't like the orange next to it. So didn't it make sense that I would be able to make more sense of a text if I could compare and contrast it with another different yet related one? When my students were struggling to make sense of both "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," responding to true-and-false questions that required them to compare and contrast the two poems helped them to understand both poems better. When they were struggling to make sense of Marge Piercy's "A Work of Artifice" and Billy Collins' "Bonsai," they helped further their collective understanding of both poems by crafting true-and-false questions in small groups and then asking them of one another.

The Question Formulation Technique, courtesy of the Right Question Institute, became another important knife in the reading comprehension drawer -- one that challenged some of what I'd been taught by our WestEd trainers. Like a number of reading comprehension approaches, the QFT stresses the importance of developing students' capacities and confidence not only to raise questions, but to recognize their questions' relative usefulness for a given purpose, be it reading or something else. WestEd provides a number of tools and resources for helping students to generate questions in various categories as a way to penetrate a text.  In contrast, the QFT specifically forbids the judging and classifying of student questions during the question-generating process, whether it is focusing on a text passage or another kind of QFocus, out of concern that doing so will predispose some students both to remain quiet (for fear of "doing it wrong") and to look to their teachers rather than to themselves for the validation of their thinking and questioning efforts.  The good news:  once the QFT process is complete, a teacher can choose to have students return to the questions they generated during the actual multi-step QFT process and categorize them according to any number of frameworks aimed at supporting and promoting critical reading and thinking. Such an activity, and such a sequence of activities, properly framed, should remind students of the worth of all of the questions they generated during the QFT process because of the authentic nature of all of those questions.  

Now add to the mix a couple of articles I read in the last year that made a huge impression on me, most notably "The Writing Revolution" in the October 2012 issue of The Atlantic Monthly and a very brief article in an ASCD Education Update entitled "It's Complicated:  Common Core State Standards Focus on Text Complexity."

The Atlantic article reminded me of important work we did in the early 2000's in CRLS' Learning Community 4 in conjunction with our reading of parts of The Thinking Classroom by Tishman, Perkins, and Jay: through some initial classroom research, we learned that our students confused the language of some thought processes -- for example, they thought "to describe" meant "to explain," and vice versa; and frequently they had indefinite understandings of what oft-used connective language -- words like "although," "furthermore," and "despite" -- meant in reading contexts. Generally, they lacked the language to express the thoughts and ideas they were having -- which is just what the teachers at New Dorp High School also discovered. New Dorp teachers, the article reports, explicitly taught this language of relationship among facts and ideas, and had students express their understanding of content by using it:  for example, a science teacher had students write discrete sentences beginning with "although," "if," and "unless" to describe the properties of and relationship between hydrogen and oxygen. When I read this, I immediately had thoughts about how such an approach would help my AP students, who tended to present all of their thinking in compound sentences that structurally made ideas within the sentence equally important, to write sentences that both subordinated lesser ideas and spelled out the precise relationships between the main and subordinate ideas.  I also began to wonder if my students' relatively infrequent use of subordinating conjunctions and common transitional phrases might signal their difficulties using these to aid their reading comprehension.


"It's Complicated" told me something I have known for several years as a result of listening to my students describe what they were thinking as they tried to make sense of long sentences, especially ones written before 1900:  most of my students do not have the language of syntax at all available to them as something they can use to talk to themselves or to one another.* The article also told me something that flew in the face of what I had been taught about bridging students and texts -- and that actually made total sense on the basis of my classroom experience: "text-to-self" questions, and other techniques that ask students to initiate their exploration of a complex text by making a personal connection to it should be avoided for reasons of "Instructional time," "Equity," and "Rigor" (7).** Reading this article brought me back to a number of classroom experiences during which students had identified strongly with less-than-major facets of texts and had been so emotionally caught up in their own related stories that they were unable to refocus on the texts that elicited them.  "Text-to-self" was not a bad thing:  it just needed not to be the first thing.

So where did all of this lead me?  To a series of "what if" questions that changed my practice around reading?

• What if I taught syntax more deliberately?  And what if I came up with strategies for constructing and deconstructing long sentences that would work for students who know the terminology associated with grammar and syntax -- and for those who do not?
• What if I had students do more writing about the texts that we read -- much briefer writing about the texts, perhaps even single-sentence writing about a given text -- but writing that needs to employ certain words or exhibit prescribed grammatical structures? 
• What if I sequenced documentation-supported reading instructional activities, including the QFT, so that students could play a leading role in generating questions and identifying those that best promote textual understanding? And what if we used our QFT-initiated work to help students themselves to understand better what kinds of questions increase their reading comprehension, as well as when and how their personal connections to the content of a text at hand help and hinder their efforts to understand it?

The result was the Friday morning session I had with the Ninth Grade History Team on November 22. Because at least one of the group was the veteran of some of my old literacy-support professional development efforts, I framed my major points in terms of how they represented changes in my own reading-related instructional practice as a reflection of current reading best practice and research, and my own classroom experimentation.  We spent a good chunk of our time together talking about how we might help our students -- who might not know that Kate Middleton is the Duchess of Cambridge, and who might be unfamiliar with the words "togs," "vestments," and "perambulator" -- to make sense of the following two sentences:

        Because she was at school, of course, being that it was a Monday, 

        Marian missed the opportunity that Regina had to see Kate 

        Middleton’s newest togs, provided by the House of Alexander 

        McQueen, which had also designed and created the Duchess 

        of Cambridge’s much-admired wedding gown.  Audibly gasped 

        and oohed the crowd as they beheld the exquisite vestments that 

        so became their future queen;  obliviously napped Prince George 

        in the nearby perambulator.

I shared with the teacher group that the last literary place I could remember a perambulator's having figured prominently was The Importance of Being Earnest, so it was likely our students wouldn't know that word.  We discussed the messages of colons and semi-colons; we rewrote sentences that were in inverted order; we talked about breaking the sentence into many short, factual sentences and then recombining them in conjunction with a classroom discussion of the "connecting language" the original provided. There was hope; there was laughter.  I promised to come to at least one teacher's classroom to model the deconstruction/reconstruction process, perhaps based on some of the sample Accuplacer Exam questions we also looked at together.  As a classroom teacher, I often feel that I do right by my students. But as our session concluded on that Friday morning, I felt I had DONE something right by my colleagues.

And they had absolutely done something right by me.  In truth, the CRLS Ninth Grade History Team, like so many other working teacher groups at CRLS, is marked by their commitment to do the best they can for their students, by their desire and willingness to keep learning professionally, by their assumption of one another's good intentions, and by their affection for one another. A number of them have helped me out when I've needed teachers who would willingly be observed, or even videotaped so that other individual teachers and co-teaching pairs could benefit from their instructional skill and commitment, as well as their exemplary collegial relationships. A few weeks before our session together, they had welcomed me to "listen in" and had happily taken the time to answer my questions about the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) and the stimulus-based questions they were designing as their common end-of-the-term exam. They were confident that I would come up with something that would meet their needs.

Truthfully, I had a wonderful time pulling together the resources I shared with this group.  It was a privilege to HAVE to crystallize all the purposeful yet somewhat random thinking I had been doing about linking reading, writing, inquiring, and discussing to support reading comprehension in the content areas.  And so two literary references came to mind for me.  The first was the famous line from "Ithaka"*** by C.P. Cavafy:  "Ithaka gave you the splendid journey"; and truthfully, working the Ninth Grade Teacher Team felt like both a journey and a homecoming. The second is the one that gives this blog post the first part of its title:  "Recalled to Life" is the the first book of Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, which I taught many, many times between 1981 and 2001, and which refers to the status of Dr. Manette once he is discovered in an attic in Paris and "returned" to his home and family, at least to some degree and for a while. The Ninth Grade History Teacher Team recalled to life my inner literacy specialist and invited me to share what I learned in the process.

So many people I know view November as a month of short days and shades of gray, but I have always loved November as the month of golds -- and I wasn't disappointed on Thanksgiving morning when I took a walk along the Black's Creek salt marsh and watched the rising sun transform it from gray to gold.  While anticipating retirement is often joyful, there are hours of the school day when my increasing invisibility, even though it signals a certain liberation from responsibility for the future, weighs on me like a slight.  And so I thank the Ninth Grade History Teacher Team for providing me with a golden moment -- for making me very visible to myself and for reminding me that I still have much to share.

[I've changed the settings on my blog, so I hope those of you who want to post a comment will be able to do so without difficulty.  You will now find that you can scroll down on the "Comment as" menu to "Anonymous" and elect that option if you don't have an existing online identity that this blog-host site will recognize.  Your post will be ascribed to "Anonymous" unless you sign your actual post in some way that identifies you as the person commenting.]

* The article also points out that a lack of vocabulary is the other major source of trouble with reading complicated texts.  

** "It's Complicated: Common Core State Standards on Text Complexity." Education Update:It's Complicated:It's Complicated. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Nov. 2013.
*** Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard