Choosing+a+Literacy+Program

This is a spot where I hope to chronicle our selection of a new literacy program for the LE division.

Our first meeting as a division was at the beginning of the school year. Here is the thinking that went into, and came out of, that meeting:

I was tasked with helping to select a reading program to replace the one we are currently using in grades 1-3 However, I acknowledge now that I did things slightly backwards, and want to try something today that will both attempt to remedy that as well as do something which I’m really excited about, which is to give us a shared purpose as a new division – present you with a meaningful task & the time & space to reach a goal together.
 * Progress here & there – saw some good programs, some bad
 * Agreed on some things, disagreed on others
 * Moments when we came together as a division (when we weren’t even really a division yet) were great – good conversations, developing understanding of what we need
 * I synthesized as we went, getting your ideas & feedback because of course, you are the experts
 * My job really was not to pick a program but to facilitate the process of choosing it

Often times, when it comes to making decisions as teachers, or as administrators, or as a school as a whole, what can happen is that a program is chosen, and then what the program has us practice as teachers is supposed to become, somehow, what we believe. I don’t think that’s how it does or should work though, and certainly not with something as important as reading. My goal today is to begin to flip that on its head, starting with our selection of a literacy program. Our beliefs should drive our practices which help us select our resources, and not the other way around. When we have a shared vision for all students, it will inform our choices about the practices we engage in as teachers and the resources we use.

What I want to try today is something new (to me) for this meeting, which is to work together, first individually, then in grade level groups, and then finally as a whole division. My hope is that the process will allow us to see and appreciate the whole spectrum of the division from beginning to end. We have a language arts curriculum all written out for each grade level with specific skills all organized and of course, the program that we choose has to ensure that kids can continue to acquire those skills. But what I think we are lacking that I want us to create today is a literacy vision statement. I can’t say for sure without going through the process with you, but because I know we like guidelines I would describe it as: A statement of two to five sentences that clearly describes the vision we have for our literacy program as a K-3 division. I am not talking about nitty gritty specifics of instruction, or even about the transitions that kids go through as they move through our literacy instruction in this division. It is really a statement of belief, and I believe that it is kind of the missing link in this whole selection process, and one that will hopefully make our choice not only easier but more cohesive and representative of our beliefs.

So what will inform this vision statement? A few things: One is the Center’s Mission Statement. Anything we come up with has to reflect, complement, align with the mission of the whole school. Another is examples of other literacy vision/philosophy statements. When we get to the phase of choosing language etc those will be a good resource. Also a good place to find stuff we don’t want to include. We also have access to kind of a treasure, and some of you may have been part of creating this – I have no idea. It was in Nancy’s files and it’s kind of a press release about the selection of the HM California Reading Series. We will use it as a tool in the process as well. My role is to guide you through this process, which I really see as a synthesis of the pieces I just mentioned, tied together with a discussion of a guiding question. I don’t want to lay out much more structure than that as we begin, because I feel like this conversation will take the direction it needs to take. Does this idea make even a little bit of sense?

I love guiding questions, essential questions, whatever you want to call them. I think if we ask ourselves a really big question, like what do we want our readers in LE to be doing, our answer should be found in our reading program.

So I want to start with a big question for all of you – and it’s a question that is part self-reflection, which I think has to be part of big conversations and processes with purpose like I hope this one is. I want you to think of someone you know that you think of as a good reader. It can be yourself, a friend, someone in your book club, whatever. Why did you think of them? ** What makes a good reader? ** //People had amazing responses to this, which they freely shared. Things like: good readers talk about what they're reading, good readers visualize, good readers are excited about different kinds of texts, good readers take time to read every day.//

Now I’d like you to discuss with your grade level and come up with an answer to that question for your grade level. In other words, **what makes a good reader in 2nd grade?** etc. Please take about 5 minutes to discuss this, have someone write down the 3 **most important** characteristics of a good reader at your grade level, and we’re going to share those in the same way we did your own good reader traits. //I am super hopeful that some kind person has notes on this. I somehow don't )://

Given what you see here – take a moment to read the piece about the selection of the series back in 2002. As you read, please think about & be ready to discuss 2 points – what is in this document that still holds true? And what either in the document, in our school, or in our individual classes perhaps, has changed?

//Not much has changed, save a greater emphasis on technology and 21st century skills.//

The goal now is to synthesize our understanding of what a good reader is, along with where we’re heading in relation to where we’re coming from, into a statement that we can use across grades to both justify our teaching practices as well as help us make this important decision about our resources. Now would be a good time to look at some of the examples, and to perhaps choose the one or two things you feel it is most important to include in the statement. There are almost 20 of you, and we’re aiming for 2-5 sentences, so I know this will be challenging, but I also hope that the processes leading up to this will make it so that the statement can be cohesive and concise while including everyone’s voice. And speaking of voices, an important distinction to make at this point is to decide about the voice of the statement. Are we talking about a vision for our students or for our teaching? Will it say things like “our students will” or “instruction will” or “teachers will”? it doesn’t matter to me, but it’s important to choose before we begin. (We chose "Students will")

=
In the Lower Elementary Division at The Center for Early Education, our vision is to develop students who are self-motivated to read and write for both pleasure and understanding. Students learn best w hen presented with developmentally appropriate opportunities. Students’ love for reading and writing will come with support from home as well as from school. Students experience a balanced and authentic approach to literacy not only in Language Arts but in all curricular areas. ======

Now that we have this, the next step will be to support the vision statement with a handful of specific objectives, in order to further hone in on the appropriate program & approach for us. I envision that taking an additional few meetings, and I have similar examples & guiding questions to help us through that process If you feel like today went well & want to continue to be involved at this level, great & whoever wants to can come to these 1-2 meetings. I also am completely open to the idea of a smaller literacy committee being created right here & now, consisting of 1 representative per grade level. I know that many bigger schools have a structure like this for lots of things, and I don’t know if there’s a historical reason why that wouldn’t work here; I would defer to people who know that history to share about that if for some reason it just doesn’t. The issue with both of these options, I realize, is time. With accreditation coming up, there are so few Monday faculty meetings that will be available to our division, not to mention that we need to make this decision fairly soon – certainly by the end of the calendar year. My proposal would be to really try and have these meetings from 8-8:30, when as we’ve discussed you need to be here anyway…but I am open to other suggestions.

Once that decision is made- I have one more idea that ties into this but also into so many other needs that I know you have that I really really want to try to help you meet. I feel like the things I needed 5 seconds ago when I was a teacher were: a voice and a role, common beliefs and practices, a deep sense of purpose, and time and support to do everything that was asked of me. Being on the asking end now, I think that the best thing I can do is kill as many of those birds as I can with one stone. Today I tried to give everyone a voice in coming up with a statement that expresses our common beliefs, thereby giving a deep sense of purpose to our time together. Ta-da! Much as I would love to, I cannot ask you to come together like this as often as I think we’d all like to. We are forever saying that we need more collaboration, more ways to share ideas, more time for talk about teaching and not about kids, more opportunities to see and appreciate things going on in each other’s classrooms. Doing any of these things means shifting things around on plates, or asking you to have no personal life and I am really quite fond of you all having personal lives, for many many reasons. But I want there to be some way to get to some of those things, some of the time. On your own time, really.

What I want to see if we can do is have access from our faculty/staff (that means pw protected) to a lower elementary blog (turns out a wiki was preferable!). This will be a place for conversations to start or possibly continue (like after meetings when you want to follow up and keep an idea alive). It will be a place for people to collaborate and plan cross-grade level activities, to share tech ideas, to post links to articles (I will use it for this and kill way fewer trees, I hope!) and to express what you’re excited about in terms of professional development. I thought right away of my experience with my online classes last spring and how there was information about that that I wanted to share with others. I thought of being at the reading conference with Betsy & Lorne & how fun it would have been to blog from Chicago – what a meaningful sharing of professional development that would have been. So there’s that – and then, importantly, it will give us an archive of processes like this that we don’t currently have – so that in 7 or 10 years when we’re ready to make a switch from the program we’re about to adopt, we won’t have to rely on a random piece of paper someone found in a file somewhere to explain why we picked it in the first place. I really love this idea of this professional conversation – not in real time – so that it can work for you when you need it. What do people think?