As I prepare to work with our region's librarians on supporting our multilingual learners, I wanted to create a playlist of resources and corresponding tenets that we can build on.  See what I have begun to gather below, and join us at Dutchess County BOCES on August 13th for community, collaboration, and learning around this special population.

• The use of our home language is a crucial aspect of who we are as humans.  (From Sharroky Hollie's Culturally & Linguistically Responsive Teaching and Learning)

• Multilingual and literacy development are promoted by an emphasis on ensuring that there are positive representations of diversity in children's materials.  (From Ruth Culham's Dream Wakers: Mentor Texts That Celebrate Latino Culture)

• Sensitivity and patience are key: English is a particularly challenging language to master.  (From Pamela Paul & Maria Russo's How to Raise a Reader)

• We have more power when we develop not just our English language skills but our skills across languages, and allow our students to discover that power as a community of multilinguists.  (From Caroline Sweet's adaptation of Jeff Anderson & Whitney LaRocca's Patterns of Power en espanol: Inviting Bilingual Writers into the Conventions of Spanish Grs. 1-5)

• To really teach vocabulary well, we need to focus on its meaning, sounds and spelling, and the context in which it is used (i.e. bat is a flying animal and something used to hit a ball).  From Wiley Blevins' Phonics From A to Z: A Practical Guide.

So, our job is to capture the interest of middle schoolers, just like this one.  This is my own daughter who is in 8th grade.  One day she woke up and said, “I feel like reading today.”  That was super exciting.  Our house is full of books.  She never actually read a book that day, but the proclamation was a step forward.  Be kind to middle school teachers - we’re working with a challenge.  

"My students find topics interesting, but they can’t read at the levels the texts are written." 

There are so many strategies for this! The power of the read aloud (yes, time is an issue, so let's read just a chapter aloud.) Hearing a component of the text aloud will help students enter it independently.

Graphic novels and good informational picture books are so visual - they help our brains do the comprehension work!  I was fortunate to be talking with a coworker in another job I have in another industry (talk to people outside of school about your students' reading struggles - everyone has thoughts, ideas and perspectives on this!) He had recovered from a stroke several years ago and had alway loved to read - grew up in a house with lots of books, but after his stroke, reading became so frustrating for him He can't hold on to what he has read in his mind.  This is a very similar struggle that our students with ADHD may experience.  Have students read within short chunks of time (10-15 minutes).  Use audiobooks.    Find others who have read the book and chat with them about their thoughts about it - chatting with others will help readers think more and differently about what they have read.  

Choice solves so many problems.  We've all seen students persevere through a difficult text that they really want to read (think little ones with a nonfiction dinosaur book!)  Engage your school librarian in helping you create a book ladder or flight for your content area topics (books across the text levels on one topic).

Connect with author’s social media channels.  Their posts help create visuals and short meaningful bits that help students understand more complex text.  Check out Jacqueline Woodson's Instagram or Jason Reynold's Twitter.

Management strategies for the middle school spirit

The same things we used in elementary school, do not work the same way in middle school!  If you've been as fortunate as I have been to be a K-12 reading teacher, you know this.  The inspirational posters, the stickers, are not doing it.  What does still work is designated time, choice, and clear expectations.  

Allow off topic reading.  Middle schoolers push so hard for independence - give it to them where you can, and still get across the bigger message of what is important.  Reading.

Build culture in your content area classroom for reading.  Do daily book talks.  Check out this quick video on my YouTube channel.

Give options for note-taking - use post-its, have them jot in a notebook when they come across something that hits them, something they want to remember. Try to avoid a reading log, yet.... incorporate writing.  

Management takes retooling. We will talk more in the upcoming course about conferring and meeting with students to give feedback.  Empowering the Middle School Student: Strategies for Supporting Reading in Social Studies is coming soon to The Educators Link.  

So, I recently found myself in the position of a high school special education teacher for a day.  When I originally accepted the assignment, I didn't really think about what content area the assignment was tied to, so I had a flush of insecurity when I arrived in the classroom and realized I would be coteaching math!  While I found myself assisting students who are striving to learn high school level concepts in geometry, I quickly realized what's important about teaching high school level math, especially when it is far from your background:

1.  Prompt the kids to ask you good questions.  A student was stuck on a problem where he had to translate an image across a coordinate plane and he couldn't really form a question surrounding his thinking to know what to ask for help with!  I prompted him to say more, and as he did, he started to say things like, "I think I should...."  The more he could say about his process, the better we could pinpoint what he needed to ask to get him the help he needed with the problem.

2. It's all about logical thinking.  When a student was looking at an original image and how it was transposed, he asked me if I could tell him if it was rotated 180 degrees.  He knew what a 180 rotation should look like, so a quick prompt got him thinking if this image made sense when held with what he knew.

3. Look for patterns - math is predictable.  If it went one way with one problem, it will go a similar way with the next.  Kind of.

Let's talk real quick here about discussing lessons.  I enjoy so much sharing a lesson with teachers as a group.  I enjoy it best when we are there to enjoy it, take it in, think, and not worry about note-taking or answering specific questions.  The point in bringing colleagues together to experience a lesson is to have an impact on what they do when they return to their own classrooms, not to pick apart a single lesson for dry analysis.  This is where it is so valuable to have a discussion format in mind during this type of experience.  While the book pictured at the left does a very inspiring job of a very fruitful experience for a learning community to engage in, and does list step-by-step a more detailed procedure on p. 60, I want to talk in more general terms here.  The best facilitators of adult learning know how to keep them engaged and flowing in thought and conversation without reliance on note-takers.  Your first thought after the lesson is have the instructor reflect with the group.  Teachers are humble creatures; keep this focused on actionable comments by having the instructor list the goal for the lesson, some surprises or difficulties encountered, and 1-2 things they learned/takeaways from the lesson.  The instructor is only sharing for about 5 minutes.  The people responsible for designing the lesson (i.e. Curriculum Director, PLC) spend several minutes explaining why they designed the lesson, why it sits in the curriculum, and what they have learned from this experience.  Try to pull 3 pieces of "data" or student work samples from the lesson (if you can do this from a striving student, on level student and an excelling student, that is helpful).  Match what you see in the student work to the goal of the lesson.  Spend about 10 minutes in a free discussion about thoughts popping up from the group about the lesson, alongside the student work samples.  Now, here is where the facilitator needs to be as responsive as we want these teachers to be when in front of their own students.  The facilitator will have one point they can make to this group of teachers based on what she knows they are ready to learn.  I noticed yesterday in one of our neighboring counties that it was the placement of materials that I could comment on and give the group something to think about.  The paper/notebooks were organized by table groups, yet if they were organized by pairings of students whom they wish to be writing partners, it would be another way to get these writers together.  Always end your time together gratefully - everyone puts a lot of time and resources into getting together like this.  And, let me know if you want to talk more about writing partnerships!